For many executives in traditional manufacturing or heavy industry, marketing has often seemed like an unnecessary luxury. These companies have long relied on personal relationships, word-of-mouth, or a loyal, repeat customer base to drive sales. However, the modern marketplace is evolving, and even businesses in so-called “boring” sectors can benefit from marketing strategies that align with their sales goals.
With a targeted, strategic approach, a small investment in marketing can have a significant impact, helping companies stand out in industries where innovation in marketing is still uncommon.
Here’s how your business can make a big impact with a smart marketing investment.
Align Marketing with Sales Goals
The most important first step is to ensure that your marketing efforts are tightly aligned with your sales objectives. Marketing shouldn’t be viewed as a separate function, but as a tool to support and enhance your sales team’s efforts. You can create highly targeted marketing campaigns that reach the right audience by identifying your best customers and focusing on replicating their profiles with new prospects. In an “old school” industry, this approach helps you stand out from competitors who may not be using marketing to its full potential.
Gravity Marketing serves as the Virtual Marketing Officer (VMO) for multiple U.S.-based manufacturing companies. Located offsite, our marketing team works as one with our clients’ executive and sales teams. We join weekly sales calls, are active in strategic planning sessions, and participate in board meetings. Together, we develop and execute a strategy to grow each business in key markets.
When marketing and sales are aligned, growth is a given. Creating a strategy utilizing organic social media, customer-focused case studies and timely industry-related original content, consistent and value-driven communication, and regular lead generation efforts help keep the sales and marketing teams moving towards the same growth goals and building a solid foundation of predictability and sustainability for the business.
Profile Your Customers
A key tactic to successful B2B marketing is profiling your existing customers. Who are they? What industries are they in? What specific challenges do your products or services solve for them? By answering these questions, you can create detailed profiles that guide your marketing efforts. Once you understand the industries, job titles, and applications your customers are involved in, you can build marketing campaigns designed to appeal directly to similar prospects.
This was true for one of Gravity Marketing’s long-time clients, a technology development and manufacturing company, looking to expand business in a specific Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) sector. Understanding the job titles, sales process, and pain points of this industry niche allowed us to hyper-focus our organic and paid marketing efforts to zoom in on that prospect type and grow their leads for this specific type of work. It also helped us position the client in the market to naturally attract leads from this sector.
Email Marketing to Similar Targets
One of the most cost-effective marketing tactics is email marketing, particularly when it’s focused on lists of targets that resemble your best customers. Crafting messages that address the specific needs of those industries or applications can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. Personalized emails based on customer profiles are far more likely to resonate with prospective clients than generic, one-size-fits-all messaging.
Now-a-days with the technology and the software advancements, creating workflows targeting specific prospects and their engagement behavior can give you a leg up on your competitors who are not utilizing digital marketing, CRMs, or even email marketing.
It is safe to say that every client Gravity Marketing works with has benefited from implementing an email marketing strategy. This high-yield effort, when backed by a sound strategy, has the power to cultivate community among your customer base, nurture leads, and spark new sales opportunities from existing and new customers, without seeming desperate, longwinded, or out of touch.
Strengthen SEO with Industry-Specific Content
In today’s digital-first world, having a strong online presence is non-negotiable. Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines (SEO) is critical to being found by new customers. However, it’s not just about generic SEO – it’s about targeting your specific industry and the keywords your prospects are searching for. By creating content that addresses the pain points, needs, and solutions for the industries you serve, you’ll rank higher in search results and attract the right audience.
Gravity Marketing’s website development expertise can help pinpoint technical updates and overall user experience and aesthetic issues to improve the health of your website. Investing in your website is crucial for building the foundation of a healthy digital marketing strategy.
Still Skeptical?
Even if your business has traditionally been a marketing skeptic, these tactics, when aligned with your sales goals, can deliver measurable results. In an industry that doesn’t typically prioritize marketing, a small investment could be the key to standing out and growing your business.
Gravity Marketing has spent the last 15 years growing our business alongside others, developing tried and true strategies that actually drive results. We’ve served and continue to serve a number of “boring” businesses and have found that once sales and marketing are aligned and a strategy is in place, they are not so boring after all!
If you’re even a little bit interested and want to put your skepticism to the test, book a free discovery call with Gravity Marketing’s Leadership Team.
Collectively, Gravity Marketing’s Team has over +75 years of industry experience and leverages a wide variety of skills, knowledge, applications, and expertise to deliver high-caliber results for our clients.
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