I grew up, and still live in, the Dayton/Cincinnati area of Ohio. We're very proud of our manufacturing heritage. However, the last decade has been a challenge. I've watched manufacturers shut-down, move out of state, and sometimes off-shore. I've seen towns go dark and watched as friends moved away to follow jobs or pursue new ones. But I've also seen how both the local, and national, economies flourish when the manufacturing industry is healthy.
2 months ago at this year’s Smart Manufacturing Summit I spoke with the CFO of a scrap metal recycler and broker. He shared a story about his company’s long strategy meetings where sitting through them becomes a test of endurance. He chuckled when he said the HR Director always taps out first.
“What about marketing?” I asked.
“Well, they’re not at the meetings”
“Are they invited?”
“No.”
Marketing is not invited to these strategy sessions! This company is having important strategy sessions, important enough for the HR Director to attend, and the marketing director is not invited.
It’s Time to Get Smart
As technology and data access grow, manufacturers are recognizing the opportunity found in Smart Manufacturing. Smart Manufacturing relies on integrating channels within your supply chain and using the data output to make decisions on execution and set priorities. But smart manufacturing practices must extend beyond the supply chain. This is especially true when drivers behind the smart manufacturing trend include a strong customer focus, decisions supported by data, and efficient execution.
But how many manufacturers extend these smart manufacturing practices beyond operations? How many manufacturers evaluate their marketing analytics and place focus on alignment across marketing, sales, product management, and beyond?
You Must Develop a Strong Customer Focus
For a long time marketers were responsible for demand generation. You generate a lead and you pass it on. But in Manufacturing there is an increased pressure to focus on relationship selling. And the emphasis on relationships extends beyond the sale and into the customer and partner journey. According to Marketing Sherpa only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated. This makes lead nurturing essential for capitalizing on the other 73%.
Marketers must engage throughout the journey. You must leverage your communication channels and seize every opportunity to engage. Work with your channel partners to leverage product registration. Introduce advocacy programs to identify existing channel and end-user advocates, enhance relationships, obtain feedback on products and services, and identify future opportunities.
Be More Than a Supplier
NXP Semiconductors wanted to be more than a supplier to their customers. They wanted to be proactive with their customers and provide them with the information they needed beyond the purchasing process. Not only would this allow NXP to better service their customers, but they would be able to better respond to changes in the marketplace. By better developing strong educational content, integrating systems and capturing more relevant customer data, NXP can now provide clearer guidance on resource allocation, resulting in maximum ROI for their marketing objectives.
They recognized a 40% cost savings in fulfillment process, and a 90% reduction in fulfillment lead time.
Create Targeted, Engaging, and Educational Content
Eaton saw an opportunity to engage with their audience using a creative content program leveraged across several channels. IT pros know they’re the smartest, most powerful people in their companies—but they rarely get the recognition they deserve. Perhaps a harsh persona stereotype, but Eaton set out to leverage that with an interactive game to select the world’s greatest IT pro: the Eaton IT Grand Master.
They created a twist on the classic arcade-style game, the online version of the Claw O-Matic. IT pros could register for the game and win Eaton desktop toys and prizes. Aside from reliving their adolescent years they also engaged with educational content and learned about Eaton UPS products and services.
To promote IT Grand Master and the Claw O-Matic, they knew they needed to increased traffic to the campaign site using outbound email campaigns. But they also wanted to identify new contacts and that required a strong inbound focus. Eaton utilized banner ads, social media, and their blog The Plug. The Plug connects IT pros to news that matters. Designed as Eaton’s thought leadership blog, The Plug includes weekly articles, case studies, an Ask the Expert section and the highly effective weekly IT wrap-up. It also commands a high rate of recurring traffic.
This resulted in $80K in identified sales opportunity but potential pipeline growth was outstanding. They gained 42,000 subscribers to The Plug’, that blog with excellent recurring traffic. They started a relationship with 42,000 individuals.
Know Where to Start With Multichannel Marketing
Multichannel marketing, like we've seen with Eaton, is an objective of many companies. Everyone's preaching its benefits.
Multichannel, Omnichannel, Cross-channel …. Call it what you want but it all means the same thing. Challenge. An unrealistic expectation of perfection. Communication channels are multiplying. You are tasked with communicating a consistent value message across email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, print and digital ads, social media, websites, blogs, events, press releases, partner portals, and on and on and on.
And with that comes the multiplication of audiences. You have customers, partners, employees, and policy makers. And each of those has a sphere of influence that’s hard to identify.
So where do you start?
Audit Your Channel
STEMCELL Technologies started with a digital audit. They wanted to know which channels were feeding into their marketing and sales programs. After conducting this comprehensive audit they learned they in fact only had 3 lead sources. But this audit identified gaps and channel opportunity.
STEMCELL Technologies recognized an opportunity when they realized there were communications channels, like live chat, not effectively tied to their marketing and sales programs. Through the use of digital tools they now evaluate 21 different communication channels. This has improved sales and marketing alignment, productivity, and conversion rates because they've increased the engagement opportunities. They also now have greater insight into marketing communication effectiveness. They understand which content is most effective across each channel.
And it’s through this orchestration of channels that you can begin to understand both customers and resellers. You can become more than just a supplier.
Identify the Bottlenecks in a Program
Dow receives thousands of requests for product samples per month. Sample management had historically not only been an interesting challenge for this complex company, but was also an important one which had a direct and potentially significant impact on sales and revenue growth. Rather than try to transform the sample management process, Dow decided to exploit this bottleneck by first streamlining the sample follow-up process.
When a sample is requested, it is shipped and an email campaign is triggered to follow up with the customer. The email campaign includes basic questions to check that the sample was received and enables Dow to gather additional information on the customer’s needs. Customers who responded to the sample follow-up campaign were then routed to the sales team. Their sample program now commands anywhere from a 40-50% response rate.
Gain Insight into the Needs of Your Resellers
In the beginning Intel’s regional channel managers were communicating directly with Intel’s audience (partner resellers) via numerous decentralized communication platforms. This meant that Intel had a limited understanding of interests of their partners other than volume of numbers.
Through the development and integration of systems, Intel began to collect information around the Digital Body Language of its resellers. They began to understand the motivations and behaviors of their resellers by providing the ability for resellers to pre-order products. This was a component that was built, similar to a shopping cart system using data cards as the database.
They added an email inbox into their communications so resellers could view emails that were previously sent to them using the web version url served from a data card set. They provided an event calendar so resellers could view when events were taking place and register their interest in joining them. They also provided a rating system for parts of the site with new products or features. This allowed resellers to vote for elements that were more relevant to them and drive the direction of the campaigns.
This provided Intel with a 360-degree view, a universal profile, of their resellers. Intel could now enable, and be more attentive to the needs of, their resellers. And this universal profile of your contacts can be obtained beyond traditional digital channels.
Find Opportunity Outside of Traditional Digital Communications
Balluff utilizes marketing communication channels like trade shows and events, digital and print advertising, and gated content. But they also recognized the opportunity to leverage another communication source, their technical support team. Customer support calls are logged into a database. The marketing team then segments that data and sends a follow-up email with a link to a survey form. That survey data is captured against the contact record. By capturing this information, Balluff can further segment and personalize communications to improve the customer experience.
Certainly customer intimacy, sales and reseller enablement, and communication effectiveness are all key benefits of digital marketing transformation, but revenue generation and cost savings are also objectives for many manufacturing organizations.
Enhance Channels Delivering a Return
EMC Isilon found that not only did they need to improve productivity, but they also needed to increase revenue. EMC Isilon enhanced a traditional marketing channel by orchestrating the assets into a more comprehensive MCM program. They pulled together email invites, confirmations, and reminders. All of these channels were tied to an event module where marketing could pull an event dashboard.
They recognized that their events were not one-off activities, they were longitudinal programs that involved engagement from their audience before, during, and after the event. They began to grow the universal profile of their attendees by capturing their engagement against these event communications. And they finally understood the marketing return on investment.
They transformed their field event schedule from a series of disperate one-off events to an integrated multi-city roadshow built around a common quarterly theme. In two quarters time, they successfully scaled from eight events to over 50 events delivered in one quarter across North America. Since program inception, they can attribute nearly 500 marketing-sourced opportunities and have delivered mid 8-figures in closed-won revenue.
Support Your Decisions With Data
Manufacturers can finally obtain that data insight to make smarter business decisions. By capturing and analyzing an individual’s Digital Body Language across all channels, companies cannot only develop that sought after universal profile but also understand things like cost of recruitment efforts, cost of acquiring new customers and partners, and effectiveness of their communication outreach across regions.
Companies can also begin to understand sales rep and partner revenue potential. You can see which reps and partners are not only driving the most revenue, but are also the most engaged. You can also begin to understand which reps and partners have the greatest potential to grow revenue and which are generating the greatest return on investment. In short, you can identify which reps and partners to invest in.
Through the development of strong content, unification of digital channels, and focus on data forensics manufacturers can grow their book of business, recruit, retain and enable resellers, and make strategic business decisions based on fact, not opinion.