Volume 20 | Issue 1
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And of course, that’s because what you sell is complex too.
In fact, if you’re anything like most of our manufacturing clients, you’re just as much a consultant and educator of your customers and leads as you are a president, marketing director or salesperson. Your job involves listening, learning and understanding the problems your buyer needs to solve before the conversation about buying even begins.
You don’t sell widgets, but smart solutions to tough problems that require building relationships and cultivating trust. And the process of buying that kind of thing is nothing short of complex.
In this article, we’ll first look at three characteristics of the industrial buying process that foster complexity:
Next, I’ll introduce a powerful solution that will help you face the complex industrial buying process head on – content marketing. We’ll look both at the role content marketing plays in the industrial buying process and how content should align with the different stages of your buyer’s journey.
Finally, I’ll send you on your way with two assignments to help you kickstart a content marketing strategy for your business, and I’ll point you toward a few great resources to help you along the way.
Let’s get started!
The best salespeople understand how that long buying process works. And if you have a few of those salespeople working with you (or if you happen to be one yourself ), I’m sure they’ve catered their selling process accordingly. But for some mysterious reason, this long-buying-process mindset rarely carries over to the marketing strategies these same companies deploy.
In fact, I’m willing to bet that more than 90% of the company websites of manufacturing professionals who read this article have one single call-to-action on their website. And it either looks like this:
Or like this:
Stop to think about that for a second. The sales cycle takes weeks or months or years. But the only call-to-action on the website asks a visitor to buy something right now.
Seems a little bit backwards, doesn’t it?
At the time I’m writing this article, it’s 2017, but I drive a 2003 Camry. Yes, it’s true.
There she is in my driveway. A beaut, wouldn’t you say?
I know that one of these mornings, I’ll rush out the door for an important meeting and Ol’ Reliable won’t start. And because I’m a fairly rational guy, I’ve been in the car-buying mindset for a few years. So, do you think my first move after I first started contemplating my trusty Camry’s mortality was to walk into a car dealership and say, “I’m here! Start selling to me!”?
No sir.
But here’s what I have been doing for quite a while:
If I do the car thing the same way this next time around, I’ll be driving that SUV until at least 2031. So I’m damn well not reading the CliffsNotes before I make this purchase! Instead, I’m putting in the time to educate myself and learn. Then, I’ll go talk to the car salesman, informed and ready to tell him what I want and how much I know it’s worth. Watch out, car salesman.
Here’s the thing. Your buyers are no different. I don’t care if they’re Engineers or Procurement Managers or CEOs. Like we discussed earlier, they’re all humans. And because they’re probably smart humans, they’re doing their homework too.
IEEE Engineering 360’s 2016 Industrial Buy Cycle Study found that the length of the typical industrial buying cycle stages are as follows:
The reality is that your prospective customers don’t want get on the phone and listen to your sales pitch until they’re ready to get on the phone and listen to your sales pitch. Until that time comes, they’re steering clear of your website’s Request a Quote button. And they’re glancing right over your $5000 “Hey we’re amazing and you should definitely hire us” trade journal ad you’ve been running every month for the last ten years.
The bottom line is that decisions involving real people, multiple people and long timelines are usually associated with significant financial investments and important consequences that naturally require extensive research, comparison and evaluation.
Manufacturers need to embrace this reality and think about their marketing communications differently, or any kind of marketing investment they make will amount to nothing short of a waste of their time and money.
Enter content marketing.
This long, complex, consultative industrial sales process you know so well happens to have a marketing counterpart. It’s called content marketing. And the rest of this article serves as an introduction, paired with action steps for you to put this practice in motion for your organization.
As defined by marketing thought leader Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute,
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is about teaching your prospective customers and helping them take a step forward in their buying processes. It’s about answering their common questions, helping them solve problems and illustrating potential solutions. Content marketing exists not to replace the consultative sales process, but to support it. Great content will attract more-qualified prospects in greater volumes, begin to earn their attention and trust and prompt real sales conversations that you would not have otherwise been afforded.
No marketing approach makes more sense for an industrial company selling complex solutions to multiple people over an extended period of time.
Here’s a simplified representation of the complex industrial buyer’s journey:
And here’s how (and where) most manufacturers deploy marketing communications to their prospective customers along that journey:
But here’s how (and where) manufacturers should be deploying those marketing communications:
And really, a separate timeline like this should exist for each of your buyer personas, to match the differing needs of each along their respective buying journeys.
As you see above, content can exist in many forms. A few examples include the following:
Educational articles or blog posts (like the one you’re reading right now) help your prospective customers discover you in search engines, trade journals, social media networks or other online publishing platforms. These articles help educate your visitors, familiarize them with your organization and prompt them to say, “Huh – these guys are pretty smart. And they really seem to understand my challenges.” Here are a few examples of educational articles by industrial companies:
More comprehensive, premium white papers and guides that require the submission of contact information in exchange for the content allow you to generate real leads from your website visitors. These premium types of content offer enough value to your prospective customers that they’re willing to trade you their names, email addresses and phone numbers. This exchange forms the foundation of an inbound lead pipeline for your sales team. Here are few examples of downloadable, form-gated content by industrial companies:
Putting a real face on camera adds a human element to your content. Remember – your buyers are real people. They want to know that you’re one too.
Case studies demonstrate that you walk the walk. They serve to qualify your business as a potential solution for your prospective customers once they’ve done the preliminary research in their respective buying processes.
If you’ve made it this far, hopefully some of what you’ve read has resonated and that you’re beginning to formulate a vision for how content marketing could work for your business. Here’s are the first two steps I recommend to get started.
Thankfully, so much great free content can be found online about about, well, creating content. This guide by Moz is a good place to start: The Beginners Guide to Content Marketing.
I also strongly recommend the following three books, and in this order.
Start with They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan because you won’t be able to put it down. Marcus demonstrates the power of content marketing through real-life case studies that have transformed businesses and the lives of the people who run them. If this one doesn’t inspire you, I formally give you permission to keep running those $5000/month print ads!
Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi will teach you how to build a targeted, engaged and qualified audience of prospective customers by becoming the greatest teacher in your space.
Everybody Writes by Anne Handley will coach you on how to be a writer when you’re not a writer so you’ll be less intimidated about getting started.
On that note, it’s time to go get started! Don’t wait until next week or next month. The sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll begin attracting the right buyers and booking more calls with sales-qualified leads.
If you want to investigate how buyer personas and content marketing fit specifically into the bigger industrial marketing picture, read our Industrial Marketing: The Definitive Guide. Or if you’d like to chat about how to bring all of this to life for your B2B industrial company, consider requesting a consultation with one our Industrial Marketing Strategists.
Thanks for reading and good luck getting up and running!
Joe Sullivan is a Co-Founder of Gorilla 76, an industrial marketing agency that helps manufacturers and industrial service providers grow their bottom lines by attracting qualified leads and producing real sales opportunities.
Tune in to hear from Chris Brown, Vice President of Sales at CADDi, a leading manufacturing solutions provider. We delve into Chris’ role of expanding the reach of CADDi Drawer which uses advanced AI to centralize and analyze essential production data to help manufacturers improve efficiency and quality.