How manufacturers market during a pandemic

Videos and video chats can be tremendous marketing tools, but they’re just tools. Targeted content, fed by market intelligence, is still king. For sales and marketing professionals in metal fabrication, therein lies opportunity. Getty Images

The business development team at a Midwest metal fabricator had been trying to arrange a plant visit for a major prospect. Scheduling challenges are a fact of life in the sales and marketing world, so it was no surprise the team had trouble nailing down a good time for everyone. Then the pandemic hit. Now what?

The sales and marketing manager called the prospect and asked about the potential of video, a kind of “virtual visit.” The prospect was entirely onboard. The sales manager had been working with this prospect for nearly a year, and now—with nearly everyone’s travel severely curtailed and a pandemic lowering a veil of uncertainty over the global economy—the potential of finally landing this contract seemed greater than ever.

Still, video is just a platform. It’s the content that matters. This applies not only to videos, but to everything within a fabricator’s sales and marketing program. What should this content be, exactly, and how should a fabricator’s marketing program change to align itself with the new COVID-19 reality? To find out, The FABRICATOR spoke to Daniel Konstantinovsky, strategy director at RH Blake in Cleveland, and Chip Burnham, co-owner of Fairmont Concepts, an industrial marketing firm based in Maple Valley, Wash. Burnham is also the author of MarketMD Your Manufacturing Business.

Their message: Connect with prospects not through slick video productions but with tailored content that shows deep market knowledge. Stresses brought about by the pandemic and economic uncertainty have made good, useful content more important than ever. Prospects don’t have the time for anything else.

New Marketing Paths

“Because of everything that has happened, the buying journey has changed,” Konstantinovsky said. “If you market the same way you did a year ago, you probably won’t have the same results, and your results probably aren’t going to be positive.”

Many managers, buyers, engineers, and virtually everyone else in the office who can do their jobs on a computer now are extraordinarily familiar with the Zoom meeting. For fabricators, that familiarity might open doors for new platforms in marketing.

That said, content still matters. A website video might look polished, but it serves no purpose if it doesn’t convey a message tailored to meet the needs of a targeted audience.

Unbeatable quality. Broad fabrication expertise. Stellar on-time delivery. Plenty of custom fabricators make these claims, of course. “These days high-quality and on-time delivery just get you to the table,” Konstantinovsky said. “It’s a given.”

Sure, reality is more complicated. Stellar on-time-delivery performance isn’t a given, but that doesn’t stop everyone from making the claim. If every fabricator makes the same or similar claim, no prospect really listens.

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

Customer voices during the pandemic are more varied than ever. Some are still busy but concerned about supply chain visibility and reliability, especially if they’re in niches that have seen a boost in activity, like warehousing, logistics, defense work, health care, and anything connected with e-commerce. Many others are just hoping to keep the lights on and their skilled people employed.

Connect with prospects not through slick video productions but with tailored content that shows deep market knowledge. Stresses brought about by the pandemic and economic uncertainty have made good, useful content more important than ever. Prospects don’t have the time for anything else.

When the pandemic first hit, shop managers spent a lot of time on the phone. “They asked core customers where they were from a business standpoint,” Burnham said. “Were they working or not working? Were they reducing volume or staying at full volume? They needed to assess what their true market condition was, and the purest market condition comes from your existing customer base.”

Conversations now focus not just on customer expectations, but also conditions at the next step in the supply chain, the customers’ customers. Many fab shops earlier this year were ready to ship, yet customers had no need for those parts because other components were stuck elsewhere in the supply chain. Now some companies are dealing with shocks on the demand side. To say these are challenging times is an understatement.

In good marketing, market intelligence—that is, real information from customers and customers’ customers—comes first. As Konstantinovsky put it, “What transformations are they facing, and what does the customer’s world look like today? [Finding this out] is really marketing’s role, and it’s been elevated because the buying journey has been impacted by everything that’s going on.”

Market intelligence guides the marketing message and helps determine what to do next. “You want to make it as easy as possible for existing customers to stay with you,” Burnham explained.

Finding New Work

Before developing any marketing material, be it a brochure or online video, it’s always been best practice to identify the target audience, be it a specific prospect or industry. In challenging times, though, which industry should be the target? The answer will depend on a fabricator’s situation, of course, and the markets it serves.

What if a fabricator’s core customers are struggling, and the shop needs to fill capacity quickly? “If that is the case, I’m telling shops, ‘Clone your current customers,’” Burnham said.

That sounds a tad counterintuitive. After all, if the shop’s bread-and-butter sector is on life support, why should a fabricator go after more business in such a struggling market? Shouldn’t a fabricator go after sectors that are busy?

That seems logical, Burnham said, but it’s also problematic. The fabricator’s sales team has few if any longstanding relationships with prospects in untapped markets, and developing these relationships takes time. “When your business drops in a crisis, you need business now.”

The sales team might not have time to learn the intricacies of the new market—the relationships, the business structures, and the technical jargon. Burnham called this “learning the new market’s language.

“In this quarantine environment, people are stressed. In the pursuit of new business, you have a better chance at alienating and aggravating new prospects than actually generating new business,” Burnham continued. “If you solicit the wrong way or too hard, you will permanently annoy someone who now will never purchase from you.”

This is less about sales technique and more about time constraints. When salespeople target customers in the same or similar markets, the sales team has established relationships and can speak the market language. The result: A fabricator can ramp up a targeted sales and marketing program very quickly.

Burnham added that cloning customers is just one part of a broader strategy. “Marketing isn’t usually an all-or-nothing thing. When looking for new business, cloning your current customers is the first thing you do, but it’s not the only thing.

“A fabricator can start with its existing customers, seek more business if possible, then move to cloning your existing customers to find new business. That’s all part of a shop’s immediate response to a business crisis. After this, a shop can spend time contacting busy markets as a secondary effort. Compared with cloning current customers, it’s just more difficult to identify these hot markets, find prospects within them, and then communicate effectively.”

Konstantinovsky added that sometimes certain customers even in different markets might be receptive to a fabricator’s offerings—again, depending on the nature of the target market and the fabricator’s capabilities. “We’ve found with many manufacturers that if they have experience in a demanding or challenging application, they can leverage that experience toward a less demanding application, even though it’s not within the company’s core market.

“For example, if you are well-suited to execute in the aerospace industry, and you need to find new business, you can leverage that expertise and history of success to another sector that’s less challenging.”

Regardless of the approach, time is of the essence in a crisis. Whatever the strategy, the marketing message must be meaningful and hit a chord with the target audience—quickly.

The Road to a Virtual Visit

As sources described, video creation goes something like this: You know the voice of the customer, and you might even have a specific company in mind. You know your operation can meet their needs and then some. You know the pain points. On your computer you have several dozen video segments showing specific operations you know the prospect cares about.

The video could be shot professionally, but the authenticity of simple phone videos works as well. (To find local videographers, Burnham recommended visiting sites like upwork.com.) Professionalism matters to a point; a good intro with the company logo can help.

Still, this isn’t Hollywood. The exact look matters less than the content. A slick production doesn’t accomplish what it should without good content. The video could cover broad themes, such as supply chain simplification (the one-stop-shop story), as well as technical details, like a quick shot of the fabricator’s material intake and inspection process that ensures the raw stock is flat and laser-ready.

The verbiage should reflect real-life conversations that a salesperson has with a prospect. It’s to the point, authentic, relatable, and free of marketing buzzwords. It might have a story about a customer’s plant manager being able to leave at the end of the workday knowing that quality parts are being designed, delivered, and presented in just the right way to fit easily into an assembly.

The video might briefly cover, say, forming capabilities of certain press brakes, but not in a generic fashion. The forming tolerances on this part made of a specific high-strength plate helps meet certain specifications that people in the target audience need—and it all helps make their work lives easier.

You could also interview operators. If, say, the underlying message involves simplifying a supply chain (again, the one-stop-shop story), “an operator or technician might talk about how they enjoy having a higher level of control on the end product, and the confidence they feel in having many different fabrication processes under one roof,” Konstantinovsky said.

You cut together a minute-and-a-half video, nothing longer, then send it to the prospect. You might even cut together a 20-second teaser video that could be attached to an email blast to a targeted audience, those “clones” that resemble the prospect the video was made for. Because you know the market, you know the pain points. And since those initial calls after the coronavirus outbreak, you’ve dug even deeper, and your targeted marketing reflects this.

In normal times you might plan for a prospect to visit the plant, but these aren’t normal times. So you set up a virtual visit. Here again, content matters more than slick production values, at least to a point. The video shouldn’t be riddled with poor lighting, rough editing, or other technical issues severe enough to distract viewers from the content.

But you don’t need a fancy camera. As long as a shop has sufficient internet or cellphone data coverage, video sharing with a smartphone should do the trick. You show the shop’s best attributes, but the entire experience remains personal and real.

Technical issues might force alternative approaches, like a web video chat with pre-recorded videos. Regardless, content is still king. A refined but still authentic message connects with a targeted customer and, most importantly, moves the sales relationship forward.

Online communication tools have been around for years, and the pandemic has forced everyone to get used to them in a hurry. For sales and marketing professionals in metal fabrication, therein lies opportunity.