Creating a marketing strategy is a daunting task for any highly technical company that already has to juggle marketing with managing their production staff and assets. Marketing a manufacturing company is even more complex, adding diverse distribution channels and long, varied sales cycles with multiple stakeholders.
In this guide, we explain how manufacturing companies should approach marketing strategy, starting with audience identification and crafting their messaging. Then, we’ll compare manufacturing marketing channels, before discussing how to build a strategy that aligns with sales and how to set KPIs that measure success.
Identifying and Understanding Your Audience
The first step in crafting a marketing campaign is to identify who you’re marketing to. Typically, this involves creating a couple of customer personas to put a face to the concept and make it easier to craft marketing content for them. The manufacturing industry complicates things because multiple stakeholders are generally involved in closing deals. Hence, while manufacturers must target their marketing primarily toward the party most likely to be the first point of contact, they must also convince other stakeholders who are likely to be involved in purchasing decisions.
Narrow Down Who You’re Marketing To
For most manufacturers, your target audience won’t be C-suite executives but direct reports tasked with researching potential manufacturers. When working with mid-size or enterprise businesses, you may even market to purchasing agents.
Use experience from your past sales conversations to better understand your ideal client’s chain of command and who along that chain of command is most likely to seek out or take action on new manufacturing opportunities. You want to gear your marketing language toward these employees so that the people with the bandwidth to jump into your funnel are the ones your message is speaking to the clearest.
Create Personas of Your Audience
Once you understand the person within your ideal client’s chain of command most likely to seek out your manufactured goods within a given industry, create customer personas that describe them. Personas help identify your customers’ pain points and long-term goals, making them instrumental tools for crafting an effective marketing approach.
We describe the process in more detail in our article on conversion rate optimization, but in brief, customer personas are detailed descriptions of an archetypal customer that include:
- Their official work title and responsibilities
- Obstacles to their work that make it more difficult
- The characteristics of their employment that make them feel valuable
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) used by their bosses to evaluate their work
The more precise and complete the character profile, the easier it will be to tailor your strategy to your target market.
Crafting Your Message
After determining your audience, the next step is to craft your actual message. Doing so relies on three core principles:
- Identifying your unique value proposition (UVP)
- Addressing your clients’ most common concerns
- Emphasizing your UVP while proactively addressing those concerns.
Many companies will have their messaging well established but if your company is newer or trying to break into a new market, you may need to create your message from scratch. In such cases, your team’s understanding of your ideal clients’ most common concerns will be significantly less nuanced. As a result, trying too hard to predict and address them is a suboptimal use of marketing resources, and instead you should focus on your UVP and build a message around your company’s strengths. This will serve as the core of your marketing voice.
Start by clearly articulating what sets your services apart—for example, your lower prices, superior quality, faster turnaround times, customization capabilities, or more advanced technology. This is your UVP. Phrase it as concisely as possible, and ideally in a way that both technical and non-technical audiences will understand. Anchor your message in proven capabilities and quantifiable results—like production volumes, lead time reductions, or cost savings—that resonate across the industries you work with. Finally, tailor your message to further emphasize the advantages that speak best to your target audience’s most pressing needs.
Once you’ve crafted your message, the next step is to choose your marketing chanenls.
Choose the Marketing Channels You Want to Invest In
After crafting your general marketing message, the next step is to choose the marketing channels you’ll invest in. The first step is determining which channels your target audience can be found on, at a time when they’re receptive to learning about manufacturing companies they can work with. For example, while a high percentage of your audience might interact with Facebook or Instagram, they are far less likely to be interested in your message while on those platforms.
The following table compares the most common marketing channels used by manufacturers. We provide each channel’s average conversion rate, and also discuss the pros and cons for each:
Manufacturing Marketing Channels, Compared
| Channel | Average Conversion Rate | Pros | Cons |
| Organic Channels | |||
| Thought Leadership SEO | 2.6% | Exceptional ROI, long-term sustainability, improved industry authority | Longer timeframe for results (6-12 months) |
| Organic Social | 1.7% | Potential for high ROI when used effectively, improved industry authority, better customer engagement | Audience is limited (LinkedIn only), and lower conversion rates result in less consistent results |
| Email Marketing | 2.4% | Well-targeted, great for lead nurturing, high ROI | Requires contact information, doesn’t capture new leads |
| Webinars | 2.3% | Improved client engagement, good for building authority, high ROI | High-effort, requires its own marketing substructure |
| Public Speaking | 2.9% | Exceptional for building authority, improves visibility of leadership | High-effort, requires in-house speaking talent, travel can be costly |
| Video Marketing | 1.3% | Versatile, easily shareable, builds authority | Expensive, requires either hired or in-house talent, can take many tries to get right |
| Inorganic Channels | |||
| PPC/SEM | 1.5% | Only pay when you get clicks, high short-term impact, budget-agnostic | Not the most scalable, requires constant investment, lower-ROI |
| PR | .3% | The best industry reputation and authority channel | Not particularly effective for direct lead generation, requires years to become effective |
| Account-Based Marketing (ABM) | 3.8% | Highly targeted at only those customers that will result in very large sales | Expensive, requires more staff than most other channels making it costly to maintain |
| Direct Mail | .3% | Only way to capture certain leads that aren’t online, good for geotargeting | Expensive, less effective than most digital channels, and should only be used after investing heavily in other areas |
| Outdoor Advertising | .6% | Great geotargeting, good for building brand awareness | Expensive, requires a lot of money to maintain, low conversion rates |
| Paid Social | .9% | Can be highly-targeted, with good short-term results | Low ROI |
| Trade Shows | .7% | Excellent for both authority and brand awareness, highly industry-targeted, hands-on demos | Expensive, requires niche assistance for booth design and construction, limited by the number of relevant shows |
The key when selecting is to balance long-term high-ROI channels like thought leadership-based SEO and organic social with more potent short-term options like PPC advertising to ensure that you can both capture market share rapidly and set your company up for sustainable long-term growth.
Putting it All Together: Building Your Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve identified your audience, crafted your message, and chosen your channels, it’s time to combine everything into a unified marketing strategy by aligning your marketing with your sales and production teams, investing in marketing infrastructure, and determining which KPIs are relevant to your business.
Aligning Marketing with Sales and Production
Unlike in B2C environments, where sales cycles can be short and impulsive, manufacturing deals often involve weeks or months of engagement, multiple decision-makers, and tight integration with a company’s supply chain or internal processes. This makes it vital that your marketing strategy is tightly aligned with your sales team’s goals and timelines, as marketing’s job doesn’t end once a lead is generated. In manufacturing, where buyers seek validation at multiple stages, marketing should continue to support the sales process with:
- Case studies relevant to specific industries
- Engineering-focused content to address technical questions
- White papers that speak to purchasing agents and financial gatekeepers
Your marketing team should also work with your sales and operations teams to define what success looks like at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Use this shared understanding to design campaigns that generate qualified leads at the top of the funnel and nurture longer-term prospects through content, follow-ups, and account-based marketing.
You’ll also need to ensure your marketing strategy doesn’t over-promise in ways your production team can’t support. For example, if a campaign emphasizes fast lead times or custom manufacturing capabilities, those promises must align with actual production capacity and timelines.
Invest in Marketing Infrastructure
A successful manufacturing marketing strategy requires more than a message and knowing which channels you’ll invest in—it also needs supporting infrastructure. This includes:
- A CRM system such as Salesforce to track leads, monitor progress through the sales funnel, and enable personalized outreach
- Marketing automation tools, such as Hubspot to help nurture leads and maintain regular contact throughout long buying cycles
- Analytics dashboards to track KPIs such as per-channel performance, conversion rates, and ROI
These tools help reduce manual overhead and ensure your team can remain consistent and responsive, even as you scale your outreach.
Determining Your Marketing KPIs
Because manufacturing deals often take time to close, tracking progress is essential for evaluating your strategy. Leading indicators—such as conversion rates as judged by form submissions, demo requests, or quote inquiries—help show early marketing movement before revenue is generated. Your main measures of success, however, should be closed sales and overall ROI, or if those aren’t available, the number MQLs generated. The table below shares our preferred manufacturing marketing KPIs and example benchmarks for each:
| KPI | Benchmark |
| ROI | SEO – 785 Email Marketing – 184% LinkedIn Organic – 113% |
| Total # of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) | +40% YOY |
| Lead to MQL Conversion Rate | 26% |
| Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) | $723 |
| LTV-to-CAC Ratio | 3:1 |
| Cost Per Lead (CPL) | $553 |
| Total Website Visitors | +37% YoY |
| Website Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate | 3.0% |
Set benchmarks for each marketing channel and measure performance monthly or quarterly. Over time, iterate on the channels, messages, and formats that deliver results. A long sales cycle means feedback loops take time, so patience and persistence are critical.
Getting Help with Your Manufacturing Marketing Strategy
Using these steps, you can build an exceptional B2B Manufacturing marketing strategy that targets the right points of contact and builds your book of business. However, creating and executing an excellent manufacturing marketing strategy requires years of expertise and a dedicated team. As a result, most manufacturing companies lack the expertise to manage their marketing entirely in-house, and developing it can be highly costly and force leaders to turn their focus away from the massive variety of processes necessary to keep a manufacturing business running.
As a result, many companies consider contracting with external agencies that can handle B2B manufacturing marketing strategy (and even execution) for them. If you’d like to learn more about our manufacturing marketing services, contact us here.
