Industrial marketing:
the definitive guide

It should be no secret to you that the buying process of business-to-business industrial sector buyers is very different than that of consumers. And because industrial buyers behave in such a different manner, the marketing approach must absolutely follow suit. Below, we look at five reasons industrial marketing needs to be approached differently than consumer marketing.

1. Industrial buyers are looking for something (very) specific

Your buyer might be looking for steel pipe. But more likely, they are looking for carbon steel pipe. And even more likely, they are looking for A 106 carbon steel pipe. The point? Mass marketing doesn’t work when each buyer has such specific (and technical) needs and requirements. A successful industrial marketing strategy requires a much more targeted, niche-specific approach.

2. Heavy research often precedes the purchase

Long sales cycles tend to accompany big industrial B2B purchases. Lots of money is involved. Often many people are involved. And sometimes quite a bit of office politics are involved. As a result, this kind of big purchasing decision is typically accompanied by a significant amount of research by the buyer.

You might argue that many consumer purchases also involve a good deal of research. A new home. Expensive furniture. A car. A computer. But rarely do even these biggest of consumer purchases take the good majority of a year (or multiple years). That leads into the next point…

3. Purchases mean partnerships

When the sales cycle does take months, or a year or more, staying top of mind, earning trust and qualifying your business are all critical steps in the buying process. Successfully catering to these steps is what we call “lead nurturing.” The industrial buyer needs to feel confident in you and know that they are being taken care of.

Often a B2B purchase means that a relationship is about to form. Your buyer may have to work closely with you for months or even years to come. They don’t want to start over again next year. They want to make the right decision, right now. So the relationship matters.

4. The researcher often isn’t the decision maker

The person who discovers you is not always the person writing the check. More often than not, an engineer, plant manager or procurement staff member is the one looking for answers to questions, solutions to problems, partners and vendors. Your tasks as an industrial marketer are to be sure your company is discovered by that person and to qualify your business in front of him or her first. Their trust must be earned before they recommend you up the chain to their C-level decision maker.

5. Contact information is the currency of industrial marketing

Before your sales team can close a new sales-qualified lead as a customer, your marketing team needs to put that lead on the table.

Consumer marketing focuses heavily on the end game of driving direct sales. But B2B industrial marketing is often more complex. The focus of industrial marketing lies in generating awareness among a qualified niche audience, educating them, validating your business in front of them, keeping them engaged and converting them from anonymous prospects into hard leads with names, phone numbers and email addresses. In short, industrial marketing exists to feed the sales engine, where real conversations with leads begin and sales are eventually closed.

In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at three distinct stages of the industrial buyer’s purchasing process and how your marketing approach needs to align with each.

As in many B2B verticals, the industrial buying process consists of phases. As we looked at earlier in our comparison of consumer and industrial marketing, the latter typically involves a more in-depth process. Following a buyer’s realization that he or she has a need that must be filled, three distinct phases of the buying process ensue, as outlined in the following table.

The three stages of the industrial buying process

How to align your industrial marketing strategy accordingly

Because the mindset of a buyer — your potential customer — is very different during each of these three distinct phases of the buying process, we need to carefully consider how we can fulfill his needs and solve his problems during each.

1. Identify your buyer

Who is involved in the buying process within your target audience’s company? Engineers seeking specs? Purchasing departments seeking low bids? Business owners seeking long-term partnerships?

2. Identify the buyer’s need

What problems are they trying to solve? What challenges are they trying to overcome? What solutions do they think they need? What solutions do they actually need?

3. Learn where they go to seek out answers to their questions and solutions to their problems

Where do they gather information online? Search engines like Google and Bing? Industry directories and trade journals? Industrial sector resources like ThomasNet or GlobalSpec?

4. Learn what specifically they’re trying to learn

What keywords do you suspect they’re using in their searches? Are they searching by product? By service? By problem? By solution? Real data can be gathered through sources like Google AdWords Keyword Planner to validate or negate what you suspect to be true.

5. Answer their questions

There’s no better place than your own website to answer common questions and provide the beginnings of solutions to those problems through written, visual or watchable content. Educational content actually helps your buyer and begins to establish trust in a way that promotional marketing language very rarely will.

6. Compel your website visitor to take a lead-generation action

Right now your website visitor is an anonymous person. No face. No name. No phone number. No email address. You need to ensure you prompt a real conversation before that anonymous visitor leaves and never comes back. Gating educational content behind a form allows you to trade something of value for your prospect’s contact information. And this in turn allows you to take control of the sales conversation.

When there are marketing results to be produced, you may be tempted to jump straight to tactics—a website overhaul, an AdWords pay-per-click campaign, an email marketing push. But we need start at the other end of the equation. Remember, the reason we’re doing any of this in the first place is to grow your business. And that means we need to focus on driving revenue before anything else.

Ask yourself this question alone: One year from now, what is the revenue number I need to tie back to online marketing? Start there and work backward.

1. Revenue target

Whether a revenue target was given to you by your boss or you’ve created your own goal, you should begin with a tangible number in mind. For the sake of an example, let’s say your target is $3MM in revenue growth over the next year.

2. Sales-qualified leads target

Next, we need to figure out how many sales-qualified leads we’ll need to generate in order to reach $3MM in revenue growth. Setting a qualified leads target requires us to answer a few questions first:

1. What’s the value of a new customer? $1,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?
2. What’s your sales team’s close rate among sales-qualified leads?

Let’s say we’ve answered these two questions as follows:

• Your average customer is worth $100,000
• Your sales team closes business with 50% of their sales-qualified leads

Doing the simple math, we now know that our marketing initiatives must contribute to the acquisition of 30 new customers (worth $100,000 each) over the next year to reach $3MM. And with a 50% close rate, doing so will require 60 sales-qualified leads (an average of five sales-qualified leads / month).

3. New contacts target

How incredible it would be if every form submission that came through your website produced a qualified lead. Unfortunately, those kinds of expectations are unrealistic.

When inbound marketing starts working as it should, you’ll get your fair share of qualified leads requesting quotes and downloading your content. But you’ll also get your fair share of form submitters that you’ll classify as spam, vendors trying to sell you something, students conducting research and competitors trying to figure you out.

For the sake of a round number, let’s say 1 in 10 contacts you generate through your website is a truly qualified lead. Since we’ve already determined that we need to produce five qualified leads / month to reach our $3MM new revenue target, and we’ve made the assumption that 1 in 10 contacts we generate will be qualified, we can conclude that we’ll need to produce 50 total new contacts / month.

4. Website traffic target

Finally, we can ask the question: How much website traffic do we need to generate in order to produce those 50 new contacts each month? Our experience shows that an industrial website that’s sufficiently equipped for lead generation should yield a 2 – 3% visitor-to-lead conversion rate. Using that percentage range as a benchmark, you’ll need to produce 1600 – 2500 visits / month to generate those 50 new monthly contacts.

Now we’re getting somewhere tangible. The example we’ve talked through here is illustrated in the table below:

So what next?

NOW, it’s finally time to get tactical. You’ve set your targets and your end goal. The next step, as we investigate in the section that follows, is to design the plan that will get you there.

Now that we’ve established the desired results, we can build a tactical plan. In the table from the last section, we established the following goals for our sample marketing initiative over the next year:

• $3MM in new revenue
• 5 sales – qualified leads / month
• 50 total contacts / month
• 1600 – 2500 website visits / month

Now only one question remains:

What is the absolute best combination of marketing activities I can implement to produce 1600 – 2500 visits / month at a 2 – 3% visitor-to-lead conversion rate?

The first table below outlines the tactics that can help you generate the traffic. The second table outlines the tactics that can help you generate the conversion rate.

Traffic-generating marketing tactics

Lead-generating marketing tactics

Because we could literally write books about each of the line items in the table above, we’ll avoid going into each in depth here. But we encourage you to download our Industrial Marketing Tactical Execution Guide explore some of these tactics in more detail:

Industrial marketing success will result from a sound strategy designed around the pain points and needs of your niche audience, complemented by smart execution. And all of this will require significant manpower. Below we break down three routes to executing your industrial marketing strategy:

1. Execute with your existing staff.
2. Hire an internal marketing employee.
3. Partner with an industrial marketing agency.

The table below outlines the pros and cons of each, as well as associated costs.

Each of these three routes can be viable. And as outlined above, there are pros and cons for each. Because every company is different – from business growth goals to marketing budgets to staff skill sets – the route you chose depends on your particular situation.

The tough news for most marketing professionals in this digital era is that they can no longer hide behind subjective results. Today’s marketing and business development ecosystems are data-driven and entirely measurable. The B2B marketer who tries to justify his price tag by helping you “build a stronger brand image” is just taking your money.

Today, marketing results must be tangible to be credible.

In the earlier section of this guide called “Planning for results before choosing tactics,” we looked at how to set goals for each of the following:

• Revenue
• Sales-qualified leads
• Total new contacts
• Visitor-to-lead conversation rate
• Website traffic

When you take that critical step of establishing tangible goals before you build your marketing plan, you naturally put benchmarks in place against which you can measure results. Have your reached each of these targets? And most importantly, have you met your revenue goal?

Tools for measuring marketing results

Thankfully, today a plethora of measurement tools exists for marketers (from free to very expensive) that serve a variety of purposes. The table below outlines a few of our favorite tools and what they help you measure.

Data is useless unless you take action

Tools that help you collect and interpret data make it easy for us to say, “Awesome, this worked” or “Dang, this didn’t work.” But that’s not enough. Data collection and analysis must ultimately be used to hold your marketer accountable and enable positive change. If something didn’t work, why? What went wrong? Can we correct our tactical approach or do we need to revisit our higher-level strategy? How about the things that are working? What did we do right? Where can we replicate those successful strategies and tactics?

An effective marketing plan is always in flux. The smartest marketers deploy their strategy, collect data, interpret the results and refine on a consistent basis. The tools above are designed to help you do just that.

Having worked with many industrial sector companies, our agency has observed one challenge that stands above all others: The integration of marketing and sales. Although the success of both departments will be measured by their impact on the growth of the business, marketing and sales so often fail to align their goals and strategies. We have four theories on why this disconnect is so frequent.

Why the great marketing – sales divide exists

1. Sales professionals like to do things their own way

It’s no secret that sales professionals are a unique breed. For many, when something starts working, that by default becomes his or her way of doing it forever. And frankly, we can’t blame a successful sales professional for not seeking out new methods or embracing change. Why fix what’s not broken?

2. Lack of real marketing data until recent years

There was a time, even in the B2B world, when marketing was about targeting the masses with “push” advertising. You hired creatives to execute direct mail campaigns, printed trade journal ads, die cut brochures and flashy ads with catchy headlines. Then you’d hope the phones started ringing.

Today it’s a different world. As we explored in the previous section (Measuring industrial marketing success), marketers can’t hide behind subjective results when so much real data exists. But many organizations simply don’t realize how much valuable data marketing can bring to the table, and the direct effect that information can have on generating qualified leads. The end result? No one takes the marketing team seriously.

3. The two departments don’t know (or care) what the other does

You have your job to do. And so does the person down the hall. When the pressure is on to produce results, the last thing you need to worry about is how they’re spending their time.

4. Lack of accountability and direction from above

As a marketing agency, we’ve had the opportunity to look in from the outside of many manufacturing and industrial sector organizations. And the lack of accountability from those overseeing marketing and sales is often very apparent. More often than not, no one enforces the necessary marketing – sales integration that will produce growth for the company. Unfortunately, when the boss doesn’t buy in, it’s unlikely that anyone else will either.

How to close the divide

1. Open up dialogue and align your goals

The first thing to do is simple: Start talking. Agree to a sit-down with all key players on the marketing and sales teams. If you’re one of the marketers, come prepared to brief sales on the objectives of your new marketing strategy. Help sales understand that you’re in their corner and are setting out to produce a consistent stream of sales-qualified inbound leads.

Then listen. What does sales want to accomplish? What are their revenue targets? How many deals will they need to close to achieve those targets? How many sales-qualified leads will they need on the table to close that many deals?

2. Define together what “sales-qualified lead” means

Lots of website traffic and resulting leads are meaningless if they’re not qualified. Marketing must be responsible for understanding who sales needs to attract. Begin by asking the right questions:

• What types of people are involved in the buying process?
• What are their job titles?
• What do those people care most about?
• What are their pain points?

With a clear understanding of your sales team’s target prospect, the marketing team can execute more effective and targeted lead generation work. And with a clear understanding of what the marketing team has set out to accomplish, the sales team will be much more inclined to play a role in assisting the marketing team.

3. Put the right tools in place

Strong data will go a long way. So get the right measurement tools in place now. We covered this topic in detail in the previous section titled “Measuring industrial marketing success.” Install Google Analytics for measuring website traffic, its sources and engagement with specific content on the website. Use an inbound marketing software like HubSpot to begin gathering intelligence on specific leads that visit your site. Agree upon a CRM (customer relationship management) software platform that will be used consistently throughout the company to track the status of leads in the pipeline and the stage of deals that are in the works.

Getting any of these systems in place can require significant time investments themselves, but are critical in gathering the information that must be shared between marketing and sales.

4. Establish a WRITTEN process for sharing data

Both structure and consistency will be key in aligning marketing and sales. That’s why a documented process for sharing information is critical. Here’s an example of how such a process could work:

• At the end of the month, the head of the sales team compiles a sales report spreadsheet documenting all business that closed that month. Separate columns are created for the name of the company, the name of the customer contact(s) at that company and the revenue generated.
• This sales report spreadsheet is provided to marketing, who backfills the revenue data into the marketing software database so revenue can be traced back to the origination of corresponding leads. Now we can learn which leads were generated through marketing activities.
• The head of the marketing team compiles a separate lead generation report spreadsheet, documenting all leads generated that month.
• This lead generation report spreadsheet is provided to sales, who marks each lead as unqualified, maybe qualified or sales qualified. Sales then sends that spreadsheet back to marketing, who backfills that lead qualification data into the corresponding lead profiles in the inbound marketing software database. Now we can learn how many qualified leads were generated and what marketing activities played a role.

5. Schedule recurring marketing – sales team meetings

On a quarterly basis (minimum), the marketing and sales teams should sit down together (or use a screen share software like GoToMeeting or join.me) to do two things:

1. Review a report from the marketing team. This report should document how many qualified leads were generated over the past quarter and who they were. And it should also document which marketing-generated leads closed as customers, how much revenue can be attributed to that pool of customers, how they originated and what marketing activities played a role in closing them.
2. Continue the open dialogue. The sales team should use this meeting as an opportunity to provide feedback to marketing on which new leads and customers were most ideal and why. Marketing should use this as an opportunity to share any plans for refinement of the marketing strategy.

When all (or at least most) the this begins to happen, two company departments that once existed in their own separate silos will begin to operate as a cohesive business development unit with one ultimate goal in front of them: business growth.