Every manufacturer wants a better return on investment, but how do you boost the ROI of your manufacturing business?
While there are many steps manufacturing companies can take, including the improvement of product quality, sales and marketing are the most crucial ways.
You need to plan a digital marketing strategy for your manufacturing plan once you have got Federal EIN Tax ID, SIS, and other IDs that run your business smoothly.
Manufacturing businesses need to utilize digital marketing to gain traction online and boost their ROI. It has now become a necessity, especially following the pandemic. In fact, most manufacturing companies have switched to digital marketing to reach more customers as evidenced by research too.
Image via Thomas
This article goes through the strategies you can adopt to help your manufacturing business acquire and retain customers for an increased ROI.
6 Ways to Boost ROI of a Manufacturing Business
Here are five ways to increase the ROI of your manufacturing business.
1. Lead Nurturing and Scoring
Lead nurturing refers to providing helpful information to potential customers to move them further down your sales funnel. It helps them make informed decisions about your products.
This includes marketing activities such as:
- Email marketing campaigns
- Informative blog posts
- Social media marketing campaigns
- Creating resources like case studies
With intense lead generation and nurturing efforts, a manufacturing business can filter through leads and identify the best ones.
This way, your sales teams won’t have to spend time engaging with prospects who won’t convert.
But how do you identify the ones that are more likely to convert?
You can use lead generation software to manage these leads and assign lead scores to each one. Based on this, you can pass on the most reliable ones to your sales team to convert them. You need to choose the right lead generation software for better results. Attrock prepares a list of the best lead generation software with a detail of each software. You can check each software feature and pricing plan and choose as per your requirements.
2. Increased Collaboration Between Departments
Your business ROI can be easily increased if you can improve your collaboration. For instance, the marketing department focuses on generating leads while their revenue depends on how many of these leads the sales department can convert.
In such a case, it’d help to have an open channel of communication between the two through which they can share insights about the prospects.
Additionally, aligning various departments can also help them work better together towards the same overall business goals.
There are various ways through which you can achieve this. These include:
- Goal alignment: Both departments can work better together when they have aligned goals. When the sales and marketing departments understand what they’re working towards, their efforts will be more channelized towards the goal.
- Transparency: Both teams should be transparent about the data that they have. This transparency in sharing data can come in handy as both teams would be better able to deal with the prospects with detailed insights on them.
3. Tracking Important Metrics
Marketing teams use certain key performance indicators as a baseline for tracking their progress in generating leads. By tracking these metrics, they can understand how much their campaigns, both digital and otherwise, affect revenue growth.
Additionally, monitoring your performance metrics can also help you identify weak points in your digital marketing campaigns and improve upon them to boost your ROI.
However, to get it right, it’s important that you track only relevant KPIs. Else, you’d be wasting your time running behind insights that don’t matter. For example, for BrushGalaxy, the best leads are those who download the best stamps for Procreate.
Some important key performance indicators manufacturing businesses should track include:
- Number of qualified leads
- Retention rates
- Lead to customer conversion rate
- Revenue generation
- Social media mentions
- Conversion rates
With these metrics, you can take actionable steps to improve your ROI.
Moreover, you could also hire an agency to help you improve your ROI and in formulating strategies.
4. Targeted Marketing Campaigns
Your marketing efforts should be targeted to specific audiences based on your manufacturing objectives. It’s only then that you’d be able to craft compelling and targeted sales and marketing messages for your audience.
To do this, you need to first start segmenting your audience by identifying the different buyer personas that you’re targeting. A thorough understanding of your customers and target audience can help you in this regard.
Each buyer persona will have a different pain point and need. You need to tailor your marketing campaigns to these specific customer needs for maximum impact.
For instance, a CEO would likely look at the utility of your products before choosing them. On the other hand, a CFO might choose to look at the financial feasibility first. You’d accordingly have to tailor your messaging for both to increase their chances of conversion and boost your ROI. For example, copper pipe supplier Lawton Tubes use a mix of SEO, social media and YouTube to tap into new audiences.
5. Integrating Digital with Traditional Marketing
While digital marketing strategies have gained traction, you should consider using a mix of both traditional and digital marketing for maximum impact.
Digital marketing is effective and it expands your reach. However, with manufacturing companies, especially B2B ones, activities such as trade shows, on-site inspections, industry magazines, and in-person consultations can be beneficial too.
In fact, you could leverage both marketing tactics to provide an omnichannel experience to your customers, which can further help improve your ROI.
6. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a great way to speed up your marketing processes while reducing the manual effort that would otherwise be spent doing repetitive tasks.
You can use tools for automating the lead prospecting processes and then engage with them to further move them down your funnel.
For instance, you can easily set up email marketing campaigns with drip email sequences and autoresponders based on certain triggers. These emails will keep your prospects engaged while you can concentrate your efforts on generating more leads.
The increase in leads combined with the automated instant responses would help improve your sales conversion rate and, in turn, boost your ROI.
Time to Improve Your Manufacturing ROI
From lead nurturing and scoring using lead gen platforms to tracking important KPIs to measure your campaign’s progress, there’s a host of marketing and sales strategies that you can implement to boost your manufacturing ROI.
However, irrespective of the path you choose, remember to always cater to the needs of your customers as this helps retain customers and boosts brand loyalty.
Have any questions about the strategies I discussed above? Ask them in the comments.
