How To Build Your Manufacturing Marketing Plan

When it comes to a marketing plan for a manufacturing company, you can never do too much preparation. Embarking on a marketing campaign armed with a full manufacturing marketing plan will give you the best chances for success. Many marketing activities can be costly. Without careful monitoring, marketing campaigns have a nasty habit of spiraling out of control. They can cost companies a lot of money and time, despite producing very little in return.

If you operate a B2B company, you need to get yourself a solid manufacturing marketing plan so that you can keep track of your spending, your success, and your ROI. Follow these seven crucial steps to find out how.

1- Give Yourself a SWOT Analysis

Before you formulate your marketing plan for a manufacturing company, you need to be clear about your business’s current operations and how you’re fairing compared to the rest of the market. Collecting and scrutinizing these details involves performing a SWOT analysis, which is an evaluation that sheds light on your company’s current standing and future potential. 

SWOT analyses evaluate your company’s

• Strengths: In which area or areas are you performing your greatest work?
• Weaknesses: In which area or areas are you struggling?
• Opportunities: Which unique opportunities do you have? How can you pursue them and achieve success at the same time? Can you use an opportunity to maintain your strengths and overcome your weaknesses?
• Threats: What sort of challenges are in your way? How can you avoid these threats?

This information will allow you to identify how you differ from your competitors (your strong points, areas where you can improve, risks you can mitigate, etc.). It is wise to understand which aspects of your company may not measure up to the current industry standard in addition to those that perform exceedingly well. Make a note of your opportunities to grow as a business and the threats that may prevent you from achieving your goals.

After conducting a thorough analysis, you will be better equipped to discover how your manufacturing marketing plan can and should fall in line with your business needs.

2- Ask Yourself What You’re Trying to Achieve

After exploring the results of your SWOT analysis, you then need to determine why you want to launch the campaign you’re working on. What are your goals and objectives? Are you trying to increase your sales? Are you releasing a new product? Do you need to build greater customer relations? Whatever the reason, they’ll generally fall into the following three categories:

• Informing: This category relates to a new product or service launch. These campaigns are about adding value and relating your products and services to your market.
  Ex: “This is what you can look forward to from our company. We’re releasing X product or Y service on Z date. Here’s what that means for you.”
• Persuading: This type of campaign focuses on illustrating why people should choose you over your competitors.
  Ex: “This is what Brand A has to offer over Brand B. We provide Value 1, Value 2, and Value 3 and no other brand in the industry does that.”
• Reminding: Here, you give the market a refresher on why your customers love your business and what makes them loyal to your brand.
  Ex: “Brand A customers experience an array of benefits when they work with us, including [INSERT BENEFITS]. We deliver outstanding customer service and guarantees on all of our products/services for X number of months.”

Having a clear set of goals will help you form the basis for your company’s overall manufacturing marketing plan.

3- Research the Current Market

Expanding upon who your customers are will improve your ability to target the right audience during your campaign. To design marketing content that speaks to your B2B customers or clients, you’ll need to collect and organize a few pieces of information.

Find out:

• Business Size: How big are the businesses that purchase products/services from your company?
• Industry: Which industry does your usual customer operate in?
• Typical Purchases: Which products or services do customers typically purchase from your company?
• Their Customers: Who are the customers of your B2B clients? What do they need? How do they interact with your business clients?
• Interactive Roles: What roles do the customers you interact with fill in their own businesses? Do you communicate with managers, supervisors, or owners?
• Buyer Personalities: What are the “types” of people you sell to?
• Direct Competitors: Who do you need to compete with? 
• Market Size: How vast is the market you operate in?

Try to be as comprehensive as possible in recording the information you collected for this step. By building an accurate picture of your target audience, as well as the landscape of the current market, you will be more capable of producing a refined marketing campaign that hits the mark.

4- Choose Your Media

You need a strategy for reaching your target audience. It’s no good to focus solely on TV ads, for example, if most of your customer base is found online.

We’re fortunate to be living in an age where there are many advertising media options available. While it can be tempting to try to run your campaign on all media types, this becomes incredibly expensive and difficult to track, in addition to diluting the impact of your campaign.

Select a couple of media channels to run your campaign. Consider which channels your target audience frequents most often. Base your decision on what you can do to achieve the most wide-reaching impact.

You may decide to use a combination of channels, but be sure to keep the variation easy to manage. If you want to advertise on your company’s social media accounts, you might also decide that your industry’s government regulatory website is also worth trying. Both channels see an impressive number of visits from your target audience and both might be able to generate a good ROI.

Develop a plan for each channel in terms of running your campaign. You want material that remains consistent throughout each form, but it’s also essential to tweak your marketing material so that it aligns with the way each platform operates. If you need some inspiration, check out our digital marketing for manufacturers page.

5- Create A Schedule

Make sure that one of the factors you consider carefully is how long you want to run your campaign. Have a start date, an end date, and plan out everything that needs to happen between Point A and Point B. Be specific by creating a detailed schedule for when you want each step of your campaign to take place.

Campaigns that meander lose traction and often end up boring your audience. On the other hand, campaigns that end too quickly don’t provide your audience with enough time to take notice of what you’re offering.

Here are some questions to ask yourself so that you can make sure your manufacturing marketing plan schedule is on point.

• When is the launch date?
• If you’re using multiple media channels, what dates are you launching on each channel?
• If you have a series of content, how will it run? For example, a series of social media posts explaining the benefits of a new product might have a new post published weekly.
• When will supporting media (such as emails, newsletters, and coupons) go out to your audience?
• What is the end date for the campaign?

6- Determine Your Budget

A manufacturing marketing plan without firm budget constraints won’t reward you with a decent ROI (return on investment). The amount of money you earn from the campaign needs to exceed the amount you’ve invested into it. Otherwise, the campaign isn’t worth running.

Decide on the percentage of your income you want to invest into marketing efforts. Try to be realistic when estimating what you can afford so that you can always ensure your budget is manageable and affordable. You don’t want to end up in the red because you spent too much of your sales revenue on a single marketing campaign. For reference, a standard marketing budget is between 2% and 5% of your sales revenue.

7- Track Everything

If you don’t track your performance, you won’t know when to celebrate or what areas need improvement. Identify your key performance indicators that will determine how successful your campaign has been. Also, look at which channels have gained the most traction and engagement vs. those that aren’t working as well as you’d have hoped.

Refer back to your goals and objectives and make a note of what you have and have not yet achieved. This is one of the most important parts of a marketing plan for a manufacturing company. If your business has not achieved its marketing objectives, analyze the data to work out what went wrong so that you can make adjustments and do better in the future. Even if the campaign was a success, you could use this information to improve things the next time you run a campaign.

A successful marketing plan for a manufacturing company needs to be well thought out and comprehensive. Like anything in business, there are risks and rewards associated with marketing campaigns. Good preparation is the key to ensuring you stay on track and reduce your chances of making mistakes, experiencing setbacks, or failing to achieve your goal entirely.

If you’re looking to run a campaign in 2023, gather your team, go through this guide, and get planning for your best marketing campaign yet. If you have any questions about digital marketing or website design for your company, call us at 973-317-8765 or just fill out this form here!