Businesses depend on lead generation to grow and stay afloat in a competitive market. With lead generation for manufacturers, the key is finding the right prospects and converting them into potential clients during the journey through the sales funnel.
Key Takeaways:
- Lead generation helps a business generate revenue, requiring a strategy specific to the manufacturing company to be successful.
- B2B lead generation is a lengthy, complex process that typically engages more people and facilitates higher-value deals.
- The three most effective lead-generation strategies for manufacturers include email marketing, paid ads, and SEO.
The Beginners Approach to Lead Generation for Manufacturers
The significance of generating leads can’t be overstated. Leads are prospective clients. Clients are foundational to your company’s existence. When your business is effective in generating leads, you can expect to make more money.
Cautions for Manufacturers
Leads in the manufacturing industry don’t come as easily as when working in a business-to-consumer market. You are marketing to a much smaller niche with more specific buyer criteria. This means you have a lot of work ahead if you want to be successful.
- Before investing your time and resources into B2B lead generation, take note of the following cautions.
- Make sure you have a properly functioning and readily available product.
- Don’t ignore the importance of quality data gathered according to a specific target market that aligns with your ideal buyer.
- Spend time researching your campaigns and optimizing them; establish clear performance metrics to analyze a campaign’s effectiveness.
If you ignore these cautions, you’ll waste time and resources on effective marketing efforts. Because of the risk of missing the mark, many companies choose to work with a strategic marketing partner for the lead generation manufacturing needs to be successful.
3 Easy Strategies for Lead Generation for Manufacturers
Though you could try any number of strategies to generate leads, you want to maximize your resources to produce the most qualified leads for your sales team. In the manufacturing and B2B sector, you can do this through email marketing, paid ads, and SEO.
1. Email Marketing
Cold calling may be your current comfort zone, but there is a growing sentiment that it’s an old-school practice without high-yield results. While cold calling isn’t dead, there are new strategies in lead generation manufacturers are turning to. Email marketing has three segments: email automation, email newsletters, and cold emailing.
Email Automation
Automating emails is a process that sends targeted email campaigns through a pre-built, self-operating system to a contact base. Email marketing tools allow you to customize the campaigns, selecting consumers along specific criteria to receive content depending on their location in the sales funnel.
Email Newsletters
Sending newsletters is an easy way to build brand identity and awareness in lead generation for manufacturers. These emails keep your business in the front of a potential customer’s mind, hopefully creating opportunities to think of your products or services when they have a problem to solve.
Awareness is the top goal of the sales funnel. Without maintaining awareness after finalizing the sale, customers turn into strangers. Newsletters are effective for creating connections with potential and current customers.
Source: Style Factory on YouTube
Cold Emailing
Successfully using cold emailing follows two specific steps. The first is finding good prospects and the other is using great content.
Having a clearly defined audience is the key to generating good prospects. You also need to focus on quality rather than quantity. If you are buying prospects and information from a data provider, you want a reputable partner that has plenty of accurate data on your prospects. This way, you can create more relevant content that captures their attention.
Segmenting your prospects lets you customize content and create a more personalized experience. Keep the message concise, highlighting your proposition values for a higher conversion rate.
2. Paid Ads
Paid ads are another common strategy in lead generation for manufacturers. One of the benefits of paid ads is the fast response time, but it comes at a cost. Many small and mid-sized businesses are struggling with the rising costs of paid ads. However, if there is room in the budget, ads across Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook often prove effective for B2B industries.
For paid ads to be an asset, you must be sure of your return on investment. Use a signup form to target certain groups on selective criteria in your paid ads. It’s a low-risk, short-term strategy that you can terminate or pause at any time if your ROI isn’t great.
3. SEO
SEO follows a series of strategies to increase search engine ranking and attract more visitors to your website. For a lot of manufacturing companies, SEO is still a mystery. It’s true that the best practices always seem to be changing, but understanding the basics can still give you an upper hand with lead generation.
SEO isn’t anything new to lead generation, but it follows a complex process. There is a lot of value in the organic traffic it brings, and you can definitely create a market advantage with qualified leads.
Your SEO strategy needs the following to bring noticeable results:
- Usability: The user experience, regardless of the device they are using, is an important part of SEO. The website must be easy to navigate and make it simple for users to find information or connect with your business.
- Content: Any published information from your business should contain relevant keywords that relate to your services or products. Site copy, product descriptions, e-books, images, and company information make up a wide selection of relevant, engaging B2B content.
- Page Authority: Your website needs to demonstrate authority in the industry, and with SEO, you are creating a website that is directly relevant to what your company offers. Page authority compares your website to those of your competitors.
- Backlinks: You create brand authority and awareness when other website pages make referrals back to your site. These connections are backlinks, and you can use them on social media pages, industry resources, newsletters, and third-party blogs.
SEO often brings stable traffic, and you can convert those into leads with a lead magnet. Offering a free download, useful checklist, or other resource in exchange for some contact information gives you an email list that you can then use for email marketing.
The Complete Process for Lead Generation for Manufacturers
Though these three steps may seem in-depth, they are just a small part of your marketing options for generating leads. While these are highly successful for manufacturers, they aren’t the only things you can do to grow your business.
If you’re finding yourself overwhelmed by everything you need to do, know that you don’t need to go it alone. At Shanahan Strategy, our focus is marketing strategies for industrial companies. Lead generation for manufacturers is a part of our expertise, and we can create a custom package for your business. Contact us today for a complete overview of what a successful marketing strategy for your business will look like.
