How To Create Quality Content For Industrial Companies To Engage B2B Buyers

Content marketing for manufacturing companies is a critical element to any lead generation strategy today. When done right, it builds your brand image and creates a stronger relationship between you and your customer. But the last thing you want to do is crank out blog posts, eBooks, or other resources that won't be effective — it will not only waste your time, but it'll turn your prospective customers away.

Creating effective, strong content and engaging prospects is so essential to businesses that there are numerous books, webinars and entire conferences dedicated to getting marketing and sales professionals from across the globe up to speed. To help produce content that drives buyers and engineers to learn more about your company's industrial products and services, make sure to follow the best practices below.

Beginner Lead Generation Tips For Manufacturers

Do any of these sound familiar to you:

• “My sales profits are down."
• “I don't have enough leads for my sales team.”
• “I'm not getting any RFQs online.”

We can all use a little bit of luck these days. Unfortunately, many manufacturers and industrial companies have these problems and seem to rely on luck (or word-of-mouth referrals) a little bit too much when it comes to generating leads.

When it comes to growing your company and lead generation efforts, you don’t want to leave your success to chance. In today's digital world, it's more important than ever to take the time — and exert the effort — necessary to put yourself in the best possible position to attract new buyers and grow your business proactively using digital marketing. 

Here’s how manufacturers can help solve basic lead generation problems or make your life a little easier and skip to a free digital health check where our marketing manufacturing strategists will let you know exactly what you need you to generate high-quality leads online.

For Manufacturers: What Is A Qualified Lead?

As an industrial marketer, your primary goal is to generate leads for your manufacturing business. However, not every person that fills out a form, downloads an eBook, or requests a call makes for a great prospect. In fact, many of these folks may not be a great match for your products or services.  

Unfortunately, however, not every manufacturing companies has a system to separate good leads from bad ones. This results in salespeople wasting a lot of time and effort chasing down less-than-ideal prospects while ignoring more serious opportunities. 

That's why you need a proven process for qualifying your leads. 

5 Proven Digital Marketing Ideas For Industrial Distributors

As major corporations reshore and bring manufacturing work back to the U.S., industrial distributors are moving to create more value by building on commercial and operational excellence and digitizing to create the online experiences customers are looking for. 

So with B2C expectations driving change in B2B, here are some digital marketing ideas industrial distributors can implement to foster customer loyalty and increase revenue growth.

Supplement Word-Of-Mouth Referrals With Inbound Marketing

According to HubSpot, a whopping 90% of people believe brand recommendations from friends, and 61% of consumers use search engines before they make a purchase. With the emergence of social media and the digital transformation of sales and marketing, traditional marketing and how referrals are shared have shifted. 

How Thomas WebTrax Differs From Google Analytics, The Thomas Network & More

More than 11,000 manufacturers use Thomas WebTrax to turn anonymous website traffic into real, actionable leads for their businesses.

However, we understand that you may still have questions about WebTrax, how it fits in with other Thomas solutions, and how it stacks up to other tools available in the marketplace. Hopefully, this post clears things up and helps you decide which solution works best for your industrial business.

Manufacturing Marketing Budget: How Much Should You Spend?

Even though the manufacturing industry has had a long dominance in the U.S. economy, it’s still relatively a newcomer when it comes to all things industrial marketing.

Instead of word-of-mouth referrals and newspaper advertisements, digital platforms have become the most effective way to drive new business with a more expansive reach and more effective ways to highlight a company’s value proposition. Marketers and business owners utilize pay-per-click, content creation, email blasts, and many other tactics to their advantage, but to some, these methods can feel overwhelming. With so much opportunity comes tough decisions on how to direct your time, energy, and money.

New Suppliers on Thomasnet.com for February 2021

At Thomas, we're on a mission to help industry grow through connecting buyers and sellers. In our quest we constantly scour North America to ensure we find every new B2B supplier we can, so we can help you on whatever mission your company is driven by. Here we're showcasing ten of our latest finds across the US and Canada, from luminous markings suppliers to secure data sharing service companies. 

New and Noteworthy Categories on Thomasnet.com for February 2021

The pursuit of perfection is an impossible task, but our team of intrepid taxonomy experts strives to make our collection of 75,000+ categories as close as possible to it year-round. Over the past month alone, they've added the most relevant new products and services they could find, searched for outdated terms to get rid of, and found new ways to interconnect all of these categories to make it easier to find what you need. We're exploring the fruits of their labor below, encapsulated in 11 new areas to source.