How to Develop an Industrial Marketing Strategy

Now that the fourth quarter has rolled in, your company is probably planning ahead for 2020. But with all the possibilities out there, starting fresh to develop a digital marketing strategy for the new year can be pretty daunting. Where do you even start?

1. GIVE YOURSELF A MARKETING AUDIT

Take a look at what you’re already doing. More specifically, measure what your marketing tactics have been doing in the past year(s). Remember: you can’t fit what you don’t measure.

What metrics do you use? What’s your monthly traffic like? How much of that is organic, versus direct? How much of it is from referrals, versus paid ads? What’s your engagement like?

There’s a lot to measure– so take a look at what your averages are in each area. Establish a baseline for yourself with those numbers, so you and your cohorts have a solid idea of “what’s normal.”

2. TAKE THE MONEYBALL APPROACH WITH YOUR FUTURE PLANS

Believe it or not, the next step isn’t so much creative as it is mathematical. Let’s use a very basic example (keep in mind the numbers may differ drastically from your actual metrics– but the principle is the same).

How much revenue do you bring in from a single new customer? Thirty thousand?

Based on your current numbers, how many qualified leads from your website become customers? Is it one in every hundred or so?

How many visitors have to come to your website before you get a lead? Do you get roughly one new lead for every thousand visitors?

1,000 Site Visits = 100 Leads = 1 New Customer = $30,000

By how much do you want to increase your marketing revenue this year? One hundred thousand dollars? Well then:

$90,000 = 3 New Customers = 300 Leads = 3,000 Site Visits

The next question is: how do you triple your website traffic to bring in more qualified leads?

3. SET S.M.A.R.T. GOALS

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Timely

If your over-all marketing goal is to “have more social media engagement,” then it’s little wonder you might be struggling. You need to dig a lot deeper than that when you develop an industrial marketing strategy.

Why do companies seek social media engagement in the first place? Brand-building, for one– but web traffic as well. Especially if, as we learned above, you know how much web traffic you need to generate in order to increase revenue.

So, by how much are you hoping to increase your web traffic? Is that even a plausible goal? By when do you want to have achieved it? And will achieving that goal actually contribute to your bottom line?

4. BUILD PERSONAS FOR BOTH INFLUENCERS AND DECISION-MAKERS

You may have mapped out a lot of buyer personas for yourself based on age and gender, but don’t ignore the multiple job titles that might have a hand in the buying process of your product.

Even if a CEO doesn’t sign on the dotted line for the purchase, they may still have a say in whether their engineer or their CFO or their distributor buys your offering.

Make sure you have a rich content library that answers common questions or concerns on the mind of every individual who might be involved in that buying process.

And if you haven’t started building buyer personas for your industrial company, you’d better do that first– before you even think about starting on your content! You can’t develop an industrial marketing strategy without having a target market.

5. WHAT CONTENT WILL ANSWER YOUR PROSPECTS’ COMMON QUESTIONS?

Nowadays, most leads don’t reach out to sales teams until they’re already 80% down the buyer’s funnel. Prospects prefer to educate themselves– so are they doing so with your content, or someone else’s?

Once you have your buyer personas in mind, plan out digital content to give them the answers they’re looking for. Some people may argue that content could risk “giving away trade secrets,” but look at it this way: if they don’t learn those ‘secrets’ from you, they’ll keep searching until they find them anyway.

Being transparent in your content can help you to establish a valuable relationship with leads, as a thought leader in your field.

Best of all, digital content, like blogs and videos, are especially valuable because they’re “evergreen.” That means they don’t expire: they stack on top of each other exponentially. They stay relevant for years and years.

You can even ‘refurbish,’ old, popular content by reworking it! Got a popular blog? Turn it into a video. Got a popular webinar? Break it down into shorter, bite-sized, more specialized segments.

As far as how much content you need to make in order to attract leads…well, there are two ways to go about that.

A paid strategy will get you more traffic, faster– but it will all die the moment you turn off your ads. A robust blog strategy is more gradual, but also more permanent.

Most companies try to balance both– using ads to drive spikes in traffic, but holding fast to evergreen content as a foundation of assets to keep people coming back again and again.

So as you prepare to develop an industrial marketing strategy for next year, don’t forget to ask yourself (and your coworkers): are you in this for fleeting success, or are you in it for the long haul?

 

 

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