Why Industrial Marketers Need to Build a New Consensus

Anyone who takes marketing seriously can tell you: it’s hard work. And perhaps nowhere is marketing harder than in industrial sectors, where sales cycles are long, technical buyers are highly knowledgeable, and intense competition keeps everyone’s guard up. Many companies aren’t trying to close ten sales a day—they’re trying to close ten sales a year. And many of their best sales prospects are other departments within the multicorporate organizations they already do business with.

In this context, many marketing best practices leave industrial marketers feeling bewildered. In our position as a web design and digital marketing agency within the manufacturing space, we’ve heard over and over again from frustrated marketing directors and business owners who are trying to crack some of these hard problems, and who are left with the sense that everyone else must know something they don’t.

We don’t think that’s true. We believe that we’re all in the same boat. Only that boat is being pulled off-course by the strong currents of traditional B2B marketing, and that our industry needs to raise sail in order to steer us in the right direction. Let us unpack that premise for you before we offer a solution.

Generic marketing advice (even for B2B!) is failing those in manufacturing and manufacturing tech.

The accepted wisdom for digital marketing across the B2B world goes like this:

·       There is an infinitely scalable world of business prospects online.

·       These prospects are purchase ready with budget approval and spending authority.

·       Digital marketing channels offer unprecedented access to these prospects,

·       Automated tools make it easy to nurture prospects along the marketing pipeline, allowing you to build an ever-wider funnel with minimal risk.

·       Every step of this process is traceable, allowing for perfect attribution, which will in turn make marketing spend easy to justify.

·       If you aren’t experiencing a bountiful marketing landscape where dozens of qualified leads are clamoring to talk to your sales representatives, purchase orders in hand, then some part of your marketing funnel is broken and you just have to repair the leak.

Here’s the reality industrial marketers face:

·       Qualified prospects are niche, and finding them takes effort.

·       The people most eager for your solution will have to wage an internal campaign on your behalf to get budgetary approval. This will take time.

·       Yes, digital channels will help you reach prospects more directly… but the journey from “seeing a post on LinkedIn” to “signing a multi-million-dollar contract” it not so direct.

·       The ease of automation is overwhelming prospects long before they’re ready to buy.

·       Traditional KPIs, including traffic and MQLs generated through gated marketing content, are broken, leading to sales teams who are burnt out by low-quality leads.

To offer a concrete example: B2B wisdom dictates that case studies are the highest value closing content for businesses. The problem is that while everyone wants to see a case study before they make a purchasing decision, no one wants to be in the case study once the purchasing decision has been made.

This is a problem for everyone.

The misaligned marketing expectations set by these standards are causing significant pain.

Flawed assumptions lead to flawed decisions, and when it comes to marketing, the ripple effects can be felt throughout the business.

First off, manufacturers are misallocating budgets because they’re chasing bad strategy. In an industry that already offers marketing a meager portion of the budget, throwing what little they have after broad match Google Ads campaigns hurts the soul.

In many cases, strategy is determined not by what works, but by what can be measured. However, data privacy laws have drastically changed the analytics landscape, and consumers and technology alike have shifted practices to obscure information. Take gated content as an example: once an essential lead gen tool, many users now habitually use fake or throwaway emails to avoid giving away meaningful information. Apple is expediting this process by offering users the option to hide their email address when filling in forms by generating disposable email addresses.

And it’s worth pointing out: if an email has to be coerced out of a prospect, they aren’t truly sales qualified. So it’s no wonder sales is grumbling about how marketing only sends them garbage leads.

It’s a brutal cycle. Management, having finally been persuaded to put money toward marketing, wants to see their budget achieved something definable. Marketers, under pressure to prove ROI, chase unrealistic KPIs that alienate their colleagues in Sales. Sales wants to claim full credit for last touch attribution, and the resulting frustration feeds a cycle of starved marketing budgets and teams who are exhausted from the expectation to do more with less.

If the accepted truths prevalent in generic marketing advice don’t work for our industry, our industry has to lead the way to correct the record.

We know that asking marketers to prove attribution on an 18-month sales cycle is a lost cause, but that demonstrating influence is not. We know that traffic is a broken KPI, but that lead quality is not. And we know that while we can sometimes land a case study, there are other more consistent, reliable ways to build social proof.

We also know that a lot of this wisdom is overlooked when it comes from a lone marketer, the sole member of their team in a company of three-hundred employees, but that it would have more weight if more people out in the industry raised their hands and said “we see this, too.”

And we also know that a lot of the new wisdom is being built quietly by marketers within the manufacturing and manufacturing technology sector who are challenging the old ways and forging new pathways to success.

What we’d like to do is to bring more of this knowledge into the open.

To that end, we’re running a survey of marketing and business leaders within the industrial sector to learn more about their mindsets around marketing, how they make decisions, the strategies they’re following, and where they’ve found success.

The survey is a 30 minute call with me (hi), Laura Lynch, marketing director at build/create studios. If you would like to participate, you can schedule a call below. We’ll even buy you coffee.

https://meetings-na2.hubspot.com/laura4?utm_campaign=262720239-Coffee+Campaign

Come prepared with your spiciest AI hot takes. We’ll be sharing them as insider content with all who participate.