40 Stats That Prove the Value of Marketing For Manufacturers

We don’t traditionally view manufacturing as a space synonymous with marketing. In fact, HBR once asked if manufacturing and marketing could even coexist. But that was 1977. In the 21st century, it’s impossible to understate the potential value of marketing for manufacturers. 

Manufacturer Marketing Matters! — Proof in 10 Stats

McKinsey reported back in the aftermath of the Great Recession that the traditional view of manufacturing—as entirely separate from services like advertising and marketing—had already grown outdated. The stats in their research backed up this assertion: 

“In the United States, every dollar of manufacturing output requires 19 cents of services. And in some manufacturing industries, more than half of all employees work in service roles.”

It’s true that manufacturing companies—especially tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers—are historically accustomed to operating mostly behind the scenes while the consumer-facing end of the supply chain focuses on messaging. However, the nurturing of critical business-to-business (B2B) relationships also requires a certain degree of brand awareness, product differentiation, and a well-articulated value offer. This is truer than ever in a digital age in which:

• 67% of the buyer’s journey now takes place online (largely through buyer-controlled internet research).
• 84% of people use the internet first when they need new information. Your manufacturing partners are likely to use search engines for finding suppliers, components, and services.
• U.S. digital ad spending surpassed all traditional advertising combined in 2019.
• B2B buyers average 12 Google searches before engaging with a brand’s website.

The domination of digital customer research and internet-based B2B sales will only continue to grow throughout the 2020s. This is only one of many reasons that the value of marketing for manufacturers is ascending to unprecedented heights.

However, top industrial sites are only converting 3% of traffic with RFQs and contact forms, vs. target conversion rates of 10% or more. One potential cause could be that the majority (57%) of manufacturers have a small (or single person) marketing team serving the entire organization, per CMI’s 2017 Manufacturing study. Just 19% of manufacturing marketers considered their marketing efforts to be at a “sophisticated” or “mature” level that year, compared to 28% of B2B marketers as a whole.

Successful marketing for manufacturers will take a more serious approach to the evolving sales funnel. We’ve collected the following additional stats to lay out the case!