What To Expect When Hiring An Industrial Marketing Agency

Andrew Hanno January 28, 2020

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving practice that requires a great deal of attention and expertise. Creating comprehensive strategies across multiple digital channels can seem like a daunting task when you take into consideration the other daily challenges you’re facing running a business, especially when industrial marketing isn't your expertise. To make sure they’re creating strong marketing campaigns that accomplish specific business goals, many companies turn to marketing agencies for assistance.

For some groups, fear of the unknown may hinder them from finding a team they can trust with their business. Others are concerned about whether hiring an industrial marketing agency is worth the time, money, or effort. To help alleviate those worries, let’s take a closer look at what you can and should expect when you search for the right industrial marketing agency for help with your marketing services.

Searching For The Right Industrial Marketing Agency

To make sure you’re finding the right team, it is important to take a look at their experience and expertise as it relates to your industry.

Does the agency have a proven track record in the industrial or manufacturing space?
Can they supply you with glowing testimonials from their current and former partners?
Do they have the right experts in place that speak the language of your audience?
How long have they been in business?
What marketing and sales technologies are they proficient in?

These are all important questions to ask your potential marketing agency and should help to weed out any groups who might be looking to use your company as a test dummy while they look to expand into new industry spaces.

Building A Strong Relationship With Your Industrial Marketing Agency

The best path to success when working with your selected agency partner is to focus on building a strong working relationship. A desire to learn and educate for both you and your marketing agency should be at the forefront of a strong relationship.

Treat your partner as an extension of your own team and help to immerse them in the ins and outs of your business to make certain they come away from each discussion with a deeper understanding of what makes you unique in your customers’ eyes.

Your agency partner will create and convey effective marketing plans — and sometimes it can get complicated. So if you need clarification on why a particular strategy might work best or if you’d like to see specific changes to tactics based on your understanding of your customers, don't be hesitant to bring it up. It is important to be straightforward with your partners to make sure you’re all on the same page.

Your agency partner should be working to make you a more effective digital marketer with more intelligent insights after each meeting. The better understanding you have of why and how things work, the more accurately and clearly you can explain each plan and tactic to your business partners, too.

Top Insight: Questions To Ask Your Digital Marketing Agency

Working Together to Build Strategic Campaigns For Your Business Goals

You should expect your agency partner to bring a sense of excitement and urgency to the table when it comes to immersing themselves in your business and learning about your customers. A strong marketing agency partner should:

Excel at taking the information you provide and working to translate it into an effective content marketing strategy that meets your business goals.
Offer a great deal of support with a team of experts that specialize in website design and development, search engine optimization, and content creation. While you may have one primary point of contact, the true value of an agency is in the team you’re working with.

Effective teams should be open and able to balance their recommendations with your intimate knowledge of your business and audience to create the most effective campaigns. You should expect that your main points of contact will constantly be exploring innovative ways to put you in front of your customers to establish you as a thought leader, valued resource, and a trusted supplier of products and services.

Creating Effective B2B Prospecting And Selling Processes

An experienced industrial marketing agency should be able to provide insight into the industrial buying process itself so that your marketing strategies align with your buyer’s journey. As industrial and manufacturing buyers begin to seek out suppliers and service providers, they go through unique purchase phases and challenges. Your marketing agency should build your content with these stages in mind so that you can get your brand in front of prospects early in their buying process and help guide them towards a solution.

The primary stages in the industrial buying process are:

Need
Research
Design
Evaluation
Shortlist
Purchase

Related Resource: How To Meet The Needs Of Your B2B Industrial Buyers

With a keen understanding of the manufacturing buyer’s journey, your agency partner will be able to help you identify how to effectively engage and nurture these potential customers. They should also provide guidelines on how and when to reach out to new leads that come through your website in order to engage prospects with meaningful discovery and effective sales conversations.

Thomas Marketing Services For B2B Businesses

The Thomas Marketing Services team is made up of leading experts in digital marketing and industrial supply that specialize in driving growth for B2B businesses. Thomas's 122-year background in engineering and industrial buying processes combined with a passion for marketing strategy gives a unique ability to create engaging campaigns that drive B2B leads.

As a Hubspot Diamond Partner and experienced Google Ads agency, Thomas' team of strategists and engineers are proficient in planning, executing, analyzing, and refining digital marketing strategies to drive growth for manufacturing and industrial distributor partners.

To learn more about what it is like to work with an established industrial marketing partner and how you can become the marketing champion for your business, reach out to us today!

Want to learn more about budgeting for a digital marketing program? Download our free eBook, 10 Ways Manufacturers Can Effectively Spend Their Marketing Budget or check out the additional resources below: