When manufacturing and engineering companies should ignore the most important rule of marketing
Marketing comes with many so-called ‘rules’ which are often spoken about like they are laws of nature. If you don’t follow them, you will fail and your company will burn, and so on and so forth.
There is one which manufacturing and engineering companies can afford to ignore – and indeed, that they probably should ignore. That rule is:
Make everything as simple as possible
The logic goes that you need to ensure your message gets across to as many customers as possible, so you should try and simplify everything to ensure nobody misses out.
However, if you are doing product marketing or content marketing for manufacturing companies or engineering firms, I don’t believe this applies. A few reasons for this:
- You are in a complex field
- You can assume a level of technical/complex knowledge from your likely buyers
- Your most likely buyers will be reassured by technical competence
- They want to know the key details, not have everything dumbed down
- Dumbing things down might inspire some doubt about your institutional competence
With all that in mind, any good manufacturing marketing strategy or engineering content strategy should not shy away from being technical.
What are good marketing tools for manufacturing and engineering firms?
I would advise marketing for manufacturing and engineering businesses focusses on the following website pages:
- Accreditations and certifications – Make these clear, easy to find on the site and simple to download.
- Case studies – Choose projects which show off your greatest strengths. For example, if your business can make something which is more durable or versatile than the competition; or where your internal processes cut months off a work programme. Also, get good imagery.
- Blog – A good blog should show off what you do, how you do it and why you’re the best at it. This is best done regularly, and developed in concert with the sales and operations team. Get their opinions, learn the main selling points and objections, turn them all into useful content.
- Product pages – This sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at how many manufacturing companies don’t have good product pages. You need a good description, imagery, any relevant technical standards and a specification at minimum.
- FAQs – Not one big page of them, or god forbid an old fashioned glossary! But try and incorporate some good, relevant FAQs on service, product and blog pages. Try to think what questions someone might actually want answering if they are on that page. What would you want to know in your customers’ shoes? It will help keep website visitors engaged, and will also be a good pointer for search engines looking for the most relevantcontent.
I would also recommend doing the following:
- White papers – If you are the expert in something, get it written up as an educational downloadable. Assert your strengths and knowledge actively to define yourself as the market leader.
- Brochure – A good company brochure will go a long way. Most manufacturing and engineering companies have rubbish ones, and it makes them look amateur.
- Case studies – Turn those case studies into well designed PDF downloads for your sales team to send out via email. This works very, very well.
What is the right target audience for a manufacturing or engineering company marketing strategy?
Obviously this depends on your specific customer base (and potential customer base), but on the whole, try to be specific in your phrasing.
You’re not trying to appeal to everyone on earth, you’re trying to capture people who know their stuff, know what they want and want to be able to find that exact thing. Five good enquiries for a specific product or service (“private power network design and build for supermarket”) will always be better than 100 vague enquiries drawn in by a common search term (“electric network design”).
You don’t need to rank for the most basic terms. Try and make sure you rank for the specifics of what you do, where you do it.
It’s not rocket science, even if there is a whole industry dedicated to persuading you that it is (and then charging you extortionate fees).
…but it does need constant work
While each individual part may not be complicated, when everything is taken together it does need constant work to do it right. The most important quality when it comes to a manufacturing or engineering marketing strategy is persistence.
Also, providing an actually good product or service, but marketing can’t affect that.
You need dedicated marketing support and a commitment to pursuing your marketing in the long term. The main thing that sinks marketing is loss of enthusiasm. Keep going, invest in your website and other collateral, invest in the right people, get your whole team invested in helping the marketing work as well as it can do.
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