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How to build an industrial marketing program in metal fabrication

Marketing is about more than websites, press releases, and brochures

Your new marketing manager shows up for his first day ready to share ideas—but finds a long to-do list from sales waiting to be tackled: materials needed for an upcoming tradeshow, multiple requests for proposals, and brochures that must be updated.

Before you know it, two months have passed and your marketing manager has yet to address any of the core marketing issues that you were set on tackling when you hired him. An endless list of support functions fills his days.

Despite this, by the end of his first 90 days, he manages to reshape the website, post regularly on the company’s abandoned social media profiles, and update brochures. He also manages to pull together some cohesive messaging that you hope will resonate with the company’s audience, but that’s all it is—a hope.

Without the time and resources needed to research the industry, along with competitors and customers’ perceptions of the company, your marketing manager is working off a hunch. Perhaps it’s your hunch or your sales team’s hunch, but it’s still only a hunch. In fact, no one at the company can say with any degree of certainty how you are viewed in the marketplace, what your key messaging is, or what your customers’ biggest pain points are.

While you had high hopes for your new marketing manager to make a significant difference, you know that fundamentally nothing has really changed with how marketing is being managed. It’s defaulted to being a support system, reactive to sales requests.

Marketing’s Importance

Sound familiar? This story has been going on in many companies for years. A company hires marketing professionals who spend their days writing brochure copy, preparing exhibits, and the like. It’s purely a support function, not a strategic one.

If a company is going to fuel its future growth, its leaders need to change how they perceive the marketing role. Marketers aren’t sales assistants who happen to know a little about writing and design. They help connect a fabricator with markets that will sustain and help grow the business.

Say a custom fabricator has high revenue concentration; it grew on the backs of a handful of large customers in the farm equipment business. So the CEO holds a strategic planning meeting. How can the shop diversify? Which markets make sense for the company’s strengths? These strengths include plate fabrication, heavy weldments, and large and complicated assemblies.

Could these core strengths apply to other markets—say, an infrastructure-related business, or a specific sector in power generation? How predictable is demand in these markets? How volatile are they? Does the business hold steady, or will the shop endure a roller coaster business cycle of boom and busts? Can the shop handle these demand patterns, and do its strengths help or hinder the situation?

Where and how do companies in these sectors connect with new suppliers? What certifications are necessary to get a seat at the table? How quickly do new customers in these fields turn into major accounts?

Most importantly, what do these markets value? Are they commodity-driven markets in which price rules? Or do these markets value flexibility and quick response? If the company has worked for years to shorten its lead times, why tackle markets that value price above all else, even if a competing supplier (stateside or overseas) would take longer to respond?

Marketing professionals should take an active part in this conversation. They shouldn’t be technicians, awaiting instructions from top management or sales to put together this brochure or that tradeshow booth. They also shouldn’t be technical novices but instead should know how a fabrication technology can serve a market need.

For instance, an engineer or company executive may be impressed by how fast and cleanly a high-powered laser cuts structural tube. After enough research, a marketing professional should know which markets will appreciate that technology enough and, ultimately, help make the shop grow and become more profitable.

Marketing Versus Sales

Marketing and sales are separate entities that need to work together and understand each other. They should be working toward the same goals: to acquire new customers, keep existing customers happy, and ultimately make the company profitable. But each has very different approaches for achieving these goals—a big reason why marketing should not be subordinate to sales.

Marketing strategies are long-term. They are based on research that helps a fabricator understand a specific market, its current and ideal customers, and what problems they need help solving. It’s about understanding customers’ current perception of your business and what they think of your competition. It’s about understanding their specific needs and addressing them in your company messaging. Marketing should ensure your company has a cohesive brand.

Salespeople typically aren’t as invested in how many people are brought through the door, either literally or figuratively; they are more focused on achieving performance targets.

Sales and marketing employees may well feel some animosity toward each other. Each may think the other doesn’t understand what they do or appreciate their value. Yet as competition increases and industrial customers become more challenging to reach, sales and marketing need each other more than ever. It’s essential to make sure both entities are aligned in regard to their roles, how they qualify leads, how those leads are nurtured and tracked, and their overall goals.

Marketing should make sales’ job easier, but supporting sales shouldn’t be the main focus. Rather, marketing’s focus should be helping to ensure growth in a market that is constantly evolving.

Marketing Can Make or Break Your Company

Many industrial and manufacturing companies still view marketing as a support function to sales. They also tend to rely on word-of-mouth marketing. But the customer’s buying journey is much different than what it used to be, so old-school, casual marketing is no longer going to be enough to keep these businesses profitable.

While salespeople used to bring the message to prospects, potential customers now can quickly and easily vet companies online. And with so many manufacturing and industrial companies offering similar products and services, a strong marketing program can help differentiate your business from others.

Today’s industrial buyers are less likely to respond to sales pitches and more likely to respond to a company that is trying to engage with them and add value. Your marketing efforts should align with customers’ wants and expectations.

How Industrial Marketing Is Changing

For quite a while, industrial marketing was defined as one-way communication. That has changed over the past decade and couldn’t be further from the truth today. Customers are no longer consuming information in the same way. They expect a two-way dialogue with businesses, and if you don’t provide it, they are happy to go elsewhere.

Marketing is no longer just about producing brochures, writing brand-focused copy, or sending out press release after press release. It involves research, data analysis, mapping the customer journey, competitive analysis, tracking leads, and assigning monetary value to conversions—that is, converting a prospect into a customer, or an occasional customer into a major account.

And while some in the manufacturing industry have downplayed an online presence, it is now a necessity for every business. Online is typically the first place customers look to research your brand, services, or products and overall reputation. This is often how people determine if a company can help solve their challenges. Leading organizations no longer solely rely on word-of-mouth marketing to drive business in a meaningful way.

Instead of being reactive, industrial marketing has grown to be strategic in terms of anticipating customers’ needs. New tools and technologies, coupled with a strong marketing plan, allow companies to reach their audiences more effectively than ever by understanding what they are looking for from a brand.

Marketing messages no longer need to be based on hunches. Marketing strategies and campaigns can be based on data and research. With these evolutions comes a change in marketing budgets and how those resources are allocated. On the rise is a need for websites, analytics, technology, content creation, and social advertising. Additionally, many companies struggle with being effective in their online marketing and how to track their results. This is where the need for strong industry marketing expertise comes into play.

Today’s Marketing Professional

If the company mentioned in the earlier example viewed marketing as an equal to sales, the marketing manager’s first 90 days on the job would have gone much differently.

Instead of reporting to sales, marketing professionals report to top leadership. They are involved in the overall business strategy and understand its finances, strategic partnerships, and operations. They have the time and resources needed to research the company, industry, target audiences, and competitors thoroughly. Support tasks take a backseat to evaluating the company’s current standing in the marketplace and building a marketing strategy to ensure its success in the future.

To get started, the marketing professional performs an assessment of where your company currently stands to see how that aligns with where it wants to go and where its customers are.

The assessment involves finding the answers to questions such as:

  • What is your company’s current brand message and value propositions? Have they changed over the years? When and why?
  • How is your company perceived by customers and potential customers?
  • Who is your ideal target customer? How does this ideal compare with your current customers?
  • What are your customers’ pain points?
  • Does your current brand messaging address your customers’ and prospects’ needs and pain points?
  • Where do your customers turn for information?
  • How are you tracking your current marketing efforts? Can you define and track the return on investment (ROI)?
  • Who are your top three competitors, and what are their brand messages?
  • What are your competitive advantages? Are you communicating them effectively?
  • What are you doing to retain customers? What is your current customer-retention rate?
  • What is marketing’s relationship with sales, and how does it need to change?

With these questions answered, you and your marketing manager have a solid understanding of your ideal customers and their needs. You can create buying personas for your target customers and map their customer journeys. You can identify any pain points and questions and develop brand messaging to address those needs.

You can create calls-to-actions to use in marketing campaigns to not only reach companies in your audience, but also track them as they move through the sales funnel. You now know how your audience converts to customers and where you lose potential customers. You also understand why current customers leave for the competition and have a plan to prevent this from happening.

All of this goes into your marketing plan. You outline what needs to be done and what training, tools, technology, and resources are needed to make it happen. You develop a budget to acquire both the technology and expertise, as well as your expected ROI. The sales team is involved in your efforts, and together you start to execute your plan, making sure that you agree upon how to track leads and outcomes.

This is what the first 90 days on the job look like for today’s marketing professionals. Their role has evolved, and they are essential to the success of your business. Your marketing professional or team will give your company strong brand recognition and can position you as a thought leader in the industry. Marketing is connected directly to a company’s profitability and needs to be included in the overall business plan. In essence, marketing ensures a product or service has a market, now and in the future.

The Future of Industrial Marketing

Marketing isn’t a cost center; it’s a profit center. And while marketing professionals now have more influence and equal footing with sales, they also have more responsibility to provide measurable results and track ROI. Every department in the organization must shift its mindset about the role of marketing. This must start with top leadership and include everyone, even those in the marketing department itself.

Marketing must work with sales to set goals and track revenue. In doing this, marketing objectives should be tied to specific business goals and, therefore, sales metrics. While traditional marketing metrics still have a place, metrics should now also have a financial focus.

This shift isn’t going to happen overnight, but it is the future of industrial marketing and essential to maintaining your market share. Transforming marketing into a profit center involves a solid marketing strategy and execution plan. But it is an investment that will keep your company profitable and growing well into the future.