Windmill Strategy

The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide for Industrial Companies

Kathy Kassera Mrozek
The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide for Industrial & Manufacturing Companies

In the world of marketing, B2B marketing for industrial and manufacturing companies is a specialized niche.

Companies are gradually transitioning from traditional “old-school” sales tactics into utilizing the modern inbound and outbound digital marketing strategies and tactics that have come to dominate the space, but many companies are still catching up to this reality—and quite possibly missing both marketing and sales opportunities. This guide to marketing for industrial and manufacturing companies provides ideas and techniques for time-stretched marketers, whether stepping up a relatively sophisticated digital marketing presence or just beginning to build a digital marketing strategy. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Table of Contents

Key Principles of B2B Industrial Digital Marketing

At Windmill Strategy, we advise our clients to base their marketing on the following foundational B2B digital marketing concepts and guidelines:

Create a focused B2B Website and Content Marketing Strategy

Your website is the hub of your digital marketing—really, all your marketing. This is the marketing destination where people will go to find out more about your company, whether they first learn of it through a Google search, at a trade show, in an ad or article, or at a job fair.

Before launching into a website design (or most likely, redesign) process, be sure to define your ICPs and personas, if you haven’t already. Our article on keeping this process simple provides examples to help you define your own. This is important for all your marketing and sales decision-making. You will speak directly to these audiences on your homepage, which must have clear positioning front and center. Your homepage “hero” statement will state what you do, why it’s important, and who it’s for. This article, How to Create a Homepage that Turns Visitors into Leads, can help you with your homepage.

You’ll also keep your ICPs and personas in mind as you build content throughout the website. Your goals, as you build this hub of your marketing, are:

In your blog, or resources or articles section, focus on quality information that helps your niche audience, not a sales pitch. Develop a content calendar, and work on creating content regularly. Using this growing body of content:

How to Create Content That Keeps Engineers Coming Back offers advice on the kind of content that many industrial and manufacturing marketing personas are looking for.

With all of this great content attracting ideal prospects, you’ll want to create easy ways for website visitors to reach out when they’re ready to talk further. Throughout the pages of your website, include calls to action (CTAs) that are easy to spot. Include a “contact” button in the header, and include a contact form or link in the footer.

To engage those prospects who aren’t quite yet ready to talk to your sales team, offer valuable content that sets the stage for MQL conversions – such as gated content and downloadables. Make it easy for users to engage, and don’t hide the entirety of your gated content behind a form. Instead, provide a preview of the content or limited use of a tool (a calculator, for example) to generate trust before asking for their email address. We also recommend “exit intent” prompts that pop up to offer a white paper download or another helpful asset (and enroll users who provide their email into your email marketing).

And one more thing: Is your website mobile-friendly? If not, make mobile responsiveness a priority in your next redesign.

Organic SEO for Manufacturing & Industrial Companies

Organic search engine optimization refers to making the content on your website align with the keywords that your prospects use to research online. Focus on long-tail queries specific to your niche and on general + industry-specific terms (combination of your niche and the industries you serve, i.e. instead of “web design” target “industrial web design”). This could also be geography-based, in some instances. Here are a few examples:

Incorporate SEO into your overall content strategy. Research trending topics related to your industry and create keyword-optimized blog posts or other content to help drive organic traffic to your website.

Our article SEO for Industrial Companies: A 7-step guide to creating content that gets found by the right people takes a deep dive into how to define SEO topics, how to write content that will appeal to your prospects, how to modify and edit that content using industrial SEO best practices, the tools and technology you can use to help, and how to use every element on the page to support keywords, including image file names, alt tags, and captions. OEM manufacturers will find industry-specific digital marketing tips in the article and case study SEO and Digital Marketing Secrets of Successful OEM Manufacturers.

Google PPC Ads

Nearly 70 percent of industrial marketing leaders are using pay-per-click (PPC) to attract new audiences. While every company benefits from the long-term investment that organic SEO requires, we also often recommend PPC ads to supplement SEO efforts in instances where organic rankings lack. PPC campaigns can include text-based search ads as well as display or banner ads. These campaigns are highly customizable and can be adapted to any budget. Here are our top tips for PPC ads:

Google Display Ads

Google display ads have a strong visual component and are served to people when they’re viewing content, not when they’re actively typing in search terms. These ads can be narrowly targeted, and you can build a very specific custom audience. We recommend using these ads to remarket to visitors to your website, and to target those who visit competitor URLs, especially service and/or case study pages.

LinkedIn

This professional networking site reaches C-level individuals and salespeople effectively. Engineers are less likely to be found here. There are different ways to use LinkedIn’s marketing resources and networking capabilities to build awareness and generate leads. This article goes deeper, but here are a few tips:

Facebook

As the dominant social media platform, Facebook has a huge reach, although it’s often not the most effective platform for B2B industrial and manufacturing marketing. If you try Facebook, we recommend these practices:

Email Marketing (Growbots or Lead Cookie)

In your email marketing to industrial and manufacturing audiences, focus on sharing helpful articles from your website, not pushing a hard sell.

To protect the integrity of your main domain and make handling replies more convenient, use a separate domain name (.co instead of .com, for example, or adding a prefix to your company name) for outbound outreach to people who don’t yet know about you and aren’t yet actively searching. Your goal in this outreach: generate awareness, encourage them to visit your site and/or enroll in your email marketing, or, if they’re ready to talk to sales, to set up a meeting. Growbots or Lead Cookie will support your outbound email marketing.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo can be used as an additional source of email addresses for outbound Growbots email marketing, as well as a source of emails and company URLs to use in targeting online advertising.

HubSpot/Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is unquestionably powerful for B2B industrial and manufacturing marketing. First, you need an ICP, a high-quality website, a content marketing program, and a marketing automation tool such as HubSpot, which we like for its ease of use. You can learn more by reading Getting Started with B2B Marketing Automation + 10 Tips You Can Use Today. Some important marketing automation terms, techniques, and tactics include:

Organic Social

Distinct from ads or sponsored posts, this is what you’re organically posting for free to accounts on social media. Valuable actions include:

If you are equipped to make videos, these can be especially engaging for showing processes or products that are difficult to explain concisely through words alone. Create a YouTube channel to house your videos; it is easy to link to these or embed them in your website.

Business Listings & Review Sites

Be sure to claim your business and create business listings or pages on LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook. Update them as needed, so they don’t contain obsolete information. A Google Business Profile is especially helpful for attracting customers in your own geographic area.

Ask customers to create testimonials for you by writing reviews on Google or the B2B resource Clutch. These can be displayed on your website, as well.

Have An Ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an ongoing process. We recommend these activities:

Tools that we use for analytics and other tasks include:

Recommended Further Reading

In addition to the links provided throughout this guide, here are some additional educational resources tailored to the needs of industrial and manufacturing marketing professionals.

Pulling It All Together

There are many opportunities in Industrial and manufacturing marketing, but it’s not unusual to get derailed or overwhelmed, especially if you jump ahead in the process. The first and most important priority is to have a high-quality website to which you are regularly adding informative content that will appeal to your ICP and personas. All the while, be sure to maximize organic SEO and begin to integrate with a marketing automation platform. Then it’s time to move to put an email marketing program in place and experiment with paid advertising. Build your foundation, and then branch out.

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