Ready to Ramp Up Your Sales and Marketing Machine?

Whether you’re looking to better compete in your market, are looking to hit a specific revenue target, or want to increase revenue ahead of a potential acquisition, it’s important to leverage multiple strategies to achieve your end goal. Unfortunately, the traditional methods for revenue growth often used in manufacturing have lost their effectiveness over the past few years.

Today, a variety of lead generation strategies for manufacturing companies must be leveraged in order to get in front of prospects, win their attention, and ultimately secure them as a new account. Why not just grow with existing customers? Account expansion and customer retention are critical to success, yes, but it’s important to not let a dominant share of your revenue come from one or a few customers. This is a common problem in manufacturing and puts your business at risk.

Additionally, new business development allows you to place greater focus on specific products, processes, and services that best fit your wheelhouse. By doing what you do best and doing it for customers that want it (versus doing whatever is necessary to win an account), your efforts contribute to faster revenue growth.

So what lead generation strategies for manufacturing companies should you consider? An easy way to look at this is to remember the three Ps: push, pull, and pay. Let’s explore what these mean and how they work together.

The Push: Outbound Marketing and Sales

Outbound sales and marketing are crucial to a successful new business development effort. While the rest of the strategies mentioned here deal more with strategically positioning your business to be seen when prospects are actively seeking solutions, outbound proactively identifies opportunities and pursues them consistently — getting in front of prospects to share your capabilities and value. This makes your business top-of-mind, whether the prospect needs your services now or in the future.

  • Common outbound tactics: Outreach emails, cold calling, direct mail, trade shows, 1:1 communications, organic social, paid media, print advertising, letters, and more.

The Pull: Inbound Marketing and SEO

As mentioned above, inbound marketing is the inverse of outbound marketing and sales. Here, you’re positioning your business where prospects are already looking for solutions, particularly online. Additionally, inbound marketing focuses on nurturing potential opportunities to a conversion — the point when sales takes the lead from marketing.

The key to success with inbound is educating and delighting the audience. Inbound marketing works best when it seeks to answer questions your audience has or to provide helpful insights and solutions. Along the way, you present yourself as the expert and as a business that can be trusted when the prospect is ready to move forward.

  • Common inbound tactics: Search engine optimization (SEO), website development, conversion rate optimization (CRO), landing pages, targeted social, email nurturing, lead scoring, content marketing, and more.

The Pay: Pay-per-Click and Social Advertising

It can be argued that pay-per-click (PPC) is part of inbound marketing since it’s an element of search engine marketing (SEM), but a great deal of inbound marketing can be executed without investing in PPC. That said, PPC is often a synergistic addition to inbound marketing in that you’re paying to rank for searches related to what you do and offer. Combined with organic content marketing, your business can earn more spots on search engine results pages (SERPs) and increase lead volume.

PPC is often used early on in a marketing effort to kickstart lead flow while organic content creation builds out a library of digital assets. Over time and as organic efforts produce more results, PPC spends can be reinvested elsewhere. It’s important to note that PPC is not a guaranteed strategy. Often, its effectiveness depends on industry and search volume. A thorough analysis must be done upfront followed by several months of testing.

These Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies Should Be Part of a Holistic Program

By combining these lead generation strategies for manufacturing companies, you get the best of all the worlds. You proactively stay in front of your target prospects with outbound, you strategically position your business to address customer interests with inbound, and you invest in valuable search positions that accelerate lead flow with PPC.

Using all three together creates a truly holistic program that delivers not only more leads to help you achieve your growth goals but also better quality leads that are interested in exactly what you have to offer.

Want to learn more or discover how an integrated outbound–inbound program can grow your business? Get in touch with us today.