{"id":12501,"date":"2016-02-22T17:23:08","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T22:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/?p=12501"},"modified":"2016-07-01T13:09:46","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T17:09:46","slug":"marketing-plans-for-manufacturing-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/marketing-plans-for-manufacturing-companies\/","title":{"rendered":"What Manufacturers Absolutely Should Not Leave Out of Their Marketing Plans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marketing<\/a><\/p>\n

Marketing Plans can take many forms \u2013 it usually depends on who’s writing them. If you have an experienced Marketing Director or an ad agency<\/a> putting one together for you, it’s likely a very strategic, soup-to-nuts document. If a Sales Director is in charge, it might be more focused on getting the sales team what they need. A Communications Director might just build a glorified media plan. Regardless of who is at the helm, there are certain things that are often overlooked.<\/p>\n

You can get a leg up on the competition by making sure you have these key ingredients in your plan:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Thorough<\/em> Competitive Assessment.<\/strong> This seems like a no-brainer. You work for an established manufacturing company \u2013 you know who all of your competitors are. Or do you? There are many ways to evaluate your competitors. It’s not just the people you see at trade shows every year. It’s who shows up online when people search for your products. Perhaps that’s a components distributor who has your key competitor listed first on their landing page. Maybe it’s a place you’ve never heard of that manufacturers over in China but advertises as a U.S. company.\u00a0Either way, you’ll need to know every single competitor you’re up against, what their positioning is, what their market share is, and where you fit into the competitive set.<\/p>\n

Buyer Personas.<\/strong>\u00a0Every marketer knows the importance of a target audience. But not everyone knows the importance of buyer personas<\/a>. A\u00a0buyer persona is not simply a demographic description of your current buyers.\u00a0A buyer persona tells us about your ideal customer \u2013 what their concerns are at work and at home, what helps them thrive, and what their greatest challenges are \u2013 just to name a few. Buyer personas help with the development of paid search campaigns, creative ad campaigns, and most importantly the approach of your sales team. Here’s an example of a simplified buyer persona for a manufacturing company:<\/p>\n

\n

Meet <\/span>Mike<\/b>, a\u00a048-year-old Senior Systems\u00a0Engineer at\u00a0a large aerospace\u00a0and defense company just outside of Washington D.C.\u00a0<\/span>He\u2019s married with two kids in high school. He is preoccupied with making sure every aspect of his projects is as accurate as possible. No mistakes can be made \u2013 both his job and the safety of thousands depend on it. Costs are a factor in his decision-making process, of course, but never above performance or safety. Mike\u00a0has a giant, built-in BS detector, and\u00a0when a company brings him a useful product or service, he takes it into careful consideration. His personal goals are to spend as much time with his family as possible without interfering with his job performance and to make sure he can afford to send his kids to the colleges they get into.\u00a0When he can, he likes to read trade magazines to keep up-to-date on the latest solutions in aerospace and defense and often watches product demos on company websites or on YouTube. Anything to help him do his job well and achieve the goals that he and his team have set forth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Trade Show Presence.\u00a0<\/strong>As digital marketing continues to grow at an alarming rate, there is a tendency to cut trade show presence. Which may be the appropriate course of action for your company. However, don’t be too quick to write Trade Shows out of your Marketing Plan completely. Digital media actually presents new, sometimes even more effective ways to capture leads at trade shows. And as long as you’re at the right ones,<\/a> Trade Shows can be beneficial to growing your brand and adding new faces into the sales funnel.<\/p>\n

There are many important items to include in your marketing plan, but these three are must-haves for any manufacturing company. Interested in more advice on strategic marketing? Drop us a line.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marketing Plans can take many forms \u2013 it usually depends on who’s writing them. If you have an experienced Marketing Director or an ad agency putting one together for you, it’s likely a very strategic, soup-to-nuts document. If a Sales Director is in charge, it might be more focused on getting the sales team what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[249,103],"tags":[448,315,449,445,446,447],"class_list":["post-12501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insights-for-manufacturers","category-marketing-strategy-2","tag-b2b-buyer-personas","tag-b2b-strategy","tag-competitive-marketing-assessment","tag-marketing-plans-for-manufacturing-companies","tag-strategic-marketing","tag-trade-show-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12501"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13098,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12501\/revisions\/13098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mgb2b.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}