• All Services

    As a HubSpot Partner Agency, Market Veep is committed to helping our clients reach the right people at the right time through a wide range of digital marketing channels.

  • Onboarding

    Get a faster time-to-start with pro onboarding solutions from HubSpot Certified Trainers

  • Integrations

    From Salesforce to Zoho, expertly integrate your sales and marketing systems

  • Migrations

    Move off of Pardot, Pipedrive, and other systems into your shiny new HubSpot portal

  • Blog

    A collection of marketing, sales, and HubSpot knowledge - with a look inside of the culture here at Market Veep.

  • Ebooks

    Regardless of the industry that you’re in, we’ve got an ebook full of fresh and actionable marketing insights to help catapult your brand to continued success.

  • Events

    Join us for our upcoming events and webinars or download recordings of previous events, webinars, podcasts, and more.

  • Case Studies

    Browse our case studies to see the real results we've achieved for real clients, just like you.

  • Tools

Benefits of Marketing Automation for Manufacturers

Shape
Benefits of Marketing Automation for Manufacturers When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The digital era has left no industry untouched. Marketing automation tools offer firms powerful data insights, improved reach, better scalability, accelerated response times, and more control in the online-first, buyer’s world we now live in. Even in manufacturing — a traditionally sales-dominated space — marketing automation can no longer be ignored.

Manufacturer marketing campaigns have often flown under the radar in the public mindset. After all, it’s the business-to-consumer manufacturers — think fashion or lifestyle brands like automakers and sneaker companies — that tend to get the most marketing attention (and to see marketing as most critical to their growth).

B2B-focused manufacturing firms traditionally view lead generation as a core role of the sales department. The inside and outside sales professionals are the ones performing direct, account-based outreach with potential customers on the phone, at trade shows, and in the office, supplemented by tightly targeted advertising in niche, industry publications.

Yes, Manufacturers Need Marketing Automation

Why would a manufacturer in a historically sales-dominated B2B space benefit from a robust marketing automation platform? The truth is there’s just less time for labor-intensive strategies (trade shows, direct mail, physical collateral, or catalogs) that hold less sway over buyers than they used to.  We live in an increasingly digital, buyer-centric world. Most of the buyer’s journey now consists of independent (often internet-based) research on the part of the buyer themselves, without any input from a salesperson. This is where effective marketing does its best work.

Thomasnet laid out this excellent breakdown of the long and complex modern buying cycle for B2B manufacturers:

  • The buyer identifies their need for a product or service.
  • The buyer researches different solutions to collect more information.
  • If creating a new design, the buyer researches product data.
  • The buyer evaluates potential suppliers for their desired solution.
  • The buyer makes a shortlist of the best suppliers.
  • The buyer purchases from the supplier they deem the best fit.
Shape
Benefits of Marketing Automation for Manufacturers Featured Image Bottom Icon
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

image-3

Source: Thomasnet

It’s been widely reported that 67% of that journey is now done digitally. Furthermore, your buyers will have access to more quality information (without your help) than ever before, and the now-mid-30s Millennials are highly skeptical of sales reps, to begin with.  These manufacturing marketing trends make effective and strategic digital marketing for manufacturers even more critical.

Against this backdrop, marketing managers for many B2B manufacturers work solo or with small teams to handle the enormous task of engaging with Big Data and reaching your high-value target audience on the internet. Manufacturer marketing automation empowers a small team to achieve big results in every way.

Research from Aberdeen found that firms using marketing automation improved their performance across a wide range of metrics:

  • +107% lead conversion rate
  • +40% average deal size
  • +20% higher attainment quotas
  • +17% forecast accuracy

Today’s competitive environment demands not only that manufacturers invest more effort in the marketing side of things but in sophisticated marketing automation processes that streamline tasks, enhance insights, drastically improve the capacity of a small team, and accelerate real results.

Let’s take a deeper look at several key advantages of manufacturer marketing automation.

4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Manufacturers

1. Improved Resource Efficiency

A sales and marketing CRM, such as the completely-free-forever CRM offered by HubSpot, is the core of any marketing automation suite. When you trade manually-maintained spreadsheets for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, your resources suddenly stretch a lot further. The CRM will:

  • Free up time for your team to focus on higher-value activities than organizing direct mail and other mindless lists.
  • Simplify frustrating runarounds in search of accurate, current info.
  • Eliminate any redundant data entry “busy work.”
  • Offer full visibility into your marketing funnel and sales pipeline in real time.
  • Enable cross-team transparency (sales, service, marketing, leadership) in a shared, fully synced database of prospect and customer information. 
  • Integrate automatically with marketing campaigns and streamline manual processes.

It’s hard to overstate how many hours your team can save by using a robust CRM software to trigger events and marketing flows automatically while maintaining consistent, updated information on all of your contacts.

2. Smooth Supply Chain Relationships

The supply chain will operate more smoothly with the benefit of an automated tool that helps you manage complex channel partner relationships with minimal effort and maximum clarity.  Manufacturer marketing automation supports communication from multiple angles:

  • Track (and segment) many conversations easily, based on priority.
  • Improve responsiveness and prevent oversights with automated reminders or alerts that trigger on predefined conditions.
  • Automatically maintain profiles with current info on every partner.

It’s also easier to coordinate marketing efforts with upstream and downstream partners with the help of an automated marketing platform that leverages relevant information and resources from up and down the supply chain, all in one place.

3. Stay Top of Mind in a Long Buying Cycle

Email marketing, in particular, is a critical component of manufacturer marketing.  The buying cycle can be long and include many layers of decision-makers. Customers are juggling their options, conducting internal discussions around priorities, managing their daily operations, and more. You must stay fresh in your audience’s mind.

Marketing automation for manufacturing will prevent slow-developing leads from falling through the cracks simply because one side lost track in the long series of touchpoints. Some of the tools you’ll have available include:

  • Email marketing newsletters that show up periodically in the inboxes of your captured leads to get them thinking about your product again.
  • Automated drip campaigns! Keep new leads warm after they’ve downloaded a whitepaper or provided their email address at a trade show with a carefully planned sequence of nurturing emails over several weeks or months.
  • Custom workflows and triggers based on predefined actions. For example, when a lead submits a contact form, downloads a spec sheet, or opens an RFQ response but fails to get back to you in a given period.
  • Automated email surveys to solicit customer feedback, follow up on a relationship or purchase, and reveal trends in customer needs. 

Email automation is all about getting the right message to the right people at the right time, all while simplifying the process of tracking every touchpoint. It’s a time-saver that improves consistency, accuracy, conversions, and even your response time for inbound leads. Check out some of these best practices for industrial emails from Thomasnet.

4. Powerful Data Insights

This may be the most impactful upgrade of switching traditional, small-scale, manual marketing processes over to AI-enhanced manufacturer marketing automation. An automation platform not only collects vast amounts of data from your contacts (and their digital behaviors) but empowers you to turn that data into something useful.

Use your marketing automation to:

  • Access real-time analytics with live, up-to-date figures (rather than waiting for quarterly reports).
  • Create custom reports that show you precisely what you want to know and nothing you don’t.
  • Prove ROI from trade show contacts lists, automated direct mail campaigns, digital search ads, email marketing, and more. 
  • Score leads based upon custom criteria that will automatically highlight time-sensitive opportunities and the most likely leads to convert.
  • Track prospects throughout the funnel to reveal gaps and exit patterns (so you can address them).
  • Identify the verticals and job roles that are producing the best leads so that you can create more nuanced and targeted buyer personas.

These insights will help you tweak your strategy, improve your bottom line, optimize the customer experience, and improve customer satisfaction — especially through digital channels.

Don’t Hesitate to Upgrade Your Manufacturer Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing has been taking off for years, but especially for manufacturers, and especially recently — even since the outbreak of COVID-19.  The 2020 Thomas Industrial Survey revealed a 12% increase in manufacturer and industrial website usage in just the months since the onset of the pandemic.

image (1)

The limitations on in-person sales interaction have only further accelerated digital marketing and the value of digital automation for manufacturing firms. Automation will help your sales department, too, by streamlining lead capture at trade shows, post-event follow-up, quote and bid communication, e-commerce actions, the baton pass of leads to the right direct sellers or channel partners, and more.

There are automation technologies out there that cater specifically to the needs of the manufacturing space, too. As a HubSpot partner (and huge fans of their comprehensive and unified product line), we recommend taking a few minutes to explore the features that HubSpot uses to help manufacturers while you’re evaluating your options.

Get The Latest From
Market Veep

rapidgrowth

Get Growing! 

Download our eBook and get advice from 8 CEOs of  Inc. 5000 companies in their own words.

team-member

GREAT MARKETING PARTNER

Market Veep is a great firm that handles all of our marketing efforts. This is the second time that I have used the firm. I highly recommend Market Veep!
team-member

Cres F.

team-member

EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCE

Market Veep's Onboarding Experts in Inbound Marketing are an absolute game-changer! From the get-go, their approach was top-notch. Market Veep's team has undoubtedly set the bar high for excellence in inbound marketing. Five stars aren't enough to commend their outstanding service!
team-member

Matthew W.

team-member

BEST PARTNER EVER!

As a growing business, setting up our first-ever HubSpot account was a crucial step towards enhancing our marketing and customer management strategies. From the moment we contacted MarketVeep, their team demonstrated professionalism, expertise, and a genuine desire to help us succeed. Overall, our experience with MarketVeep was exceptional, and we couldn't be happier with the results. Thanks to their guidance, we are now utilizing HubSpot to its fullest potential, streamlining our marketing efforts, and nurturing leads more effectively.
team-member

Jean M.

team-member

SET UP FOR SUCCESS!

We had an exceptional experience with Market Veep! Their team is professional, super organized, and friendly, and I truly enjoyed working with them. They executed on time and made the process super easy with their organization and documentation. In addition, they provided additional guidance and answered my many questions as I was new to HubSpot, and provided documentation resources for future use. We're now set up to leverage all that HubSpot marketing has to offer, and we couldn't have done it without Market Veep's expertise.
team-member

Bailey G.

team-member

OUTSTANDING WORK

There aren't enough words to describe the outstanding, professional work MarketVeep has provided to our company. From start to finish, the website design/development team at MarketVeep assigned to our project was extremely knowledgable, respectful, efficient and timely. The results went above and beyond our expectations and we could not be more thrilled with the improvements to the user experience on our website! Bravo MarketVeep, we'll absolutely be back with more projects!
team-member

Nadine B.

team-member

5 STARS FOR MARKET VEEP!

We had a fantastic experience with Market Veep! Their expert team seamlessly guided us through implementing HubSpot and provided comprehensive training across Sales, Service, and Marketing Hubs. Their knowledge and support significantly enhanced our workflow and overall efficiency. Highly recommend Market Veep for top-notch HubSpot solutions!
team-member

Anneke C.

ARE WE A FIT?