Offset High Customer Concentration Risks with a Holistic Marketing Strategy that Supports Business Development
As a manufacturer, bringing in new business is critical to achieving your revenue growth goals. While you can and should grow existing customer relationships to support that goal, new business will always be essential, and for good reason. Today, it’s far too common for manufacturers to allow specific customers to dominate their capacities. And while this does offer some advantages, they are vastly outweighed by the risks posed to the business.
To support new business development efforts, manufacturers must invest in a holistic marketing strategy that includes both inbound marketing and outbound marketing. We’ve already explored some key advantages and needs for the outbound side. Here, we’ll explain how inbound marketing helps manufacturers and why it’s so important to an effective strategy.
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3 Ways Inbound Marketing Helps Manufacturers
1. Inbound Marketing Supports Today’s Buying Preferences
Five years ago, it was more common for manufacturers to invest heavily in trade shows and other more traditional marketing channels and activities in order to generate more business. Post-pandemic, things are very different. Inbound marketing helps manufacturers in this area because it leverages tactics and strategies that are primarily digital and online — and this is exactly where most people begin their buyer journey.
2. Inbound Marketing is Passive
Of course, that does not mean that inbound marketing does not require upfront work to start running. Inbound marketing requires a great deal of research and setup to be effective. Once that research is done, however, and inbound marketing assets are in place, it will continue to capture interest in various channels over a long period of time. It is important to maintain these assets, though. Competitors and other online shifts can influence their performance. Thus, teams working on inbound marketing must continually revisit assets such as blogs, webpages, email campaigns, and more in order to ensure that they’re still working to support your goals.
Another advantage here is that once these assets are up and running, marketing and sales teams can continue to focus on other initiatives that may require more attention or have higher priority. All the while, inbound marketing assets, such as SEO content, automated campaigns, and targeted media, continue to deliver results and feed the sales engine.
3. Inbound Marketing Pays Dividends
Consider this: when you purchase an expensive trade show booth, it will likely perform very well for you at the shows where you intend to use it. But, once the show is over, it will sit in its packaging and not continue to work for you until next year‘s show. Inbound marketing helps manufacturers by always working. Every moment of every day, optimized content, targeted ads, and segmented email campaigns are running and available for searchers, prospects in the sales funnel, and other distinct audiences. Thus, it will always be visible and will engage users to drive them into your sales cycle.
A well-optimized blog post that touches on a problem common to your industry is likely to produce just as many leads as a trade show, and it will continue to do that every month for as long as you keep it optimized and performing well. And of course, the cost of producing that single blog post is nowhere close to the investment level of a trade show.
Get the Best of Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing in a Single Solution
As part of our structured front-end sales solution, Athena partners with manufacturers across multiple sectors to help them put a holistic marketing solution to work to grow their revenue. In addition to helping sales teams boost productivity and accountability and reduce non-revenue generating work, our outbound and inbound marketing strategies continually feed your pipeline with qualified prospects. We work alongside your sales team to further qualify and nurture those opportunities until they are ready to talk to sales. The result is a stronger cycle with more leads, shorter cycle times, and stronger revenue.
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