In our last blog we looked at the business challenges that influence the type of marketing strategy you choose. This second blog focuses on challenges faced by your in-house team, covering a mix of business and marketing challenges. Let’s start with what you’re selling.
- Complex product offering
Companies selling into the manufacturing and engineering sectors often have very specialist products that they feel need a great deal of explanation to get the benefits across to their customers. B2B marketing agencies who have the experience and expertise of working in these sectors will know what information is needed and how to use it to respond to your end customer issues or challenges. Think of your marketing agency as a translator. To solve your prospects problem, whether it is increasing productivity, improving safety, reducing cost, becoming more sustainable or any other challenge, your specialist B2B marketing team will gather the relevant information from you that can be turned into amazing content to positively influence your audience.
- Too many marketing channels to choose from
You may think there are too many, but they all have their time and place. You don’t have to use all of them all of the time. Choosing which channels you market through depends on what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing, where the audiences you’re trying to influence like to find their information and at what stage of the buying process they are at – awareness, consideration, conversion or loyalty. This will determine the mix of online and offline channels you should consider and the type of content you will need.
- Lack of time or resource for creating content
By using a specialist manufacturing marketing agency you will save time and cost, getting a better return on investment for your content. Being experts in marketing is a given, but industrial B2B agencies also have valuable experience of marketing to engineering and manufacturing businesses and expertise in promoting a full range of products and services from raw materials and components to software solutions and consultancy.
Creating high quality, engaging content is a skill. Knowing how to develop ideas that will resonate with the right kind of audience for your business, technically minded or otherwise, is a skill. Creating a cohesive package of content in different formats such as long-form copy for white papers, guides and case studies, short-form content for social media, blogs and web-pages or visual content such as videos and social ads requires multiple skills. Optimising content for search is another skill.
Expertise, knowledge, versatility and time is required to create great content. B2B agencies will put the right team together for you and work quickly to understand and identify what sets you apart, who your target personas are and what your key messages should be to improve awareness, educate, create interest and drive action from your prospects and customers.
- Global marketing
Marketing teams in multinational companies can find cultural differences challenging when trying to market at scale. In addition to navigating differences such as business etiquette, languages and regional laws, central marketing teams need to manage different preferences in the type of content, channels and marketing technologies that are commonly adopted by different countries. To facilitate the right mix of targeted and mass marketing to global audiences, large corporations often seek out specialist agencies that can seamlessly slot into their teams. Examples of where agencies can add value include developing marketing communication strategies for new product introductions, launching and managing the SEO on your new website, creating quality English language content ready for translation or devising and running digital campaigns that will work in different markets
A good specialist B2B agency can take the burden off your in-house team, letting them focus on what they do best. With high quality marketing foundations, your central marketing team can tailor your marketing as little or as much as you need for your target markets.
- Measuring marketing success
Analysing and evaluating marketing results to determine what is and isn’t working has become much more scientific and data driven. In some respects, this makes measuring marketing success easier. What can cause challenges for B2B industrial marketing is the complex buying process and long sales cycle involved. This means that success metrics need to be included not just for lead generation and a sale but at different touch points that contribute throughout the sales and marketing process – at awareness, consideration and loyalty stages as well as conversion. A further challenge is that this can require data analytics tools and the skills and expertise to identify what the changes mean.
When choosing an agency to work with, it’s important to identify how you want success to be measured and whether your agency already has the tools to provide this. You may need to invest in different technology if you need a specific or bespoke solution.
- Budget constraints
Last but by no means least, the budget challenge. As we can see from this and our previous blog, marketing is not a one size fits all. Challenges with budgets are also not constrained to smaller businesses. Large businesses have to decide how to apportion the budget for the greatest chance of success – the best way to do this is to prioritise your audience and segment your data. Decide whether your most lucrative opportunities will need a highly targeted or even personalised approach or whether due to scale they can be mass marketed to.
For smaller companies who may have a limited in-house marketing team, but are under pressure from larger competitors, all is not lost. You can start by identifying the one or two marketing services that will make a difference in driving conversion of your short-term profitable opportunities. As you have success over time introduce other services that will create new opportunities or reach prospects at a different stage in the buying process.
Whatever your marketing challenges are you don’t need to suffer alone. Contact one of our team of expert marketers, we are specialist in marketing for manufacturing, engineering and logistics businesses.
