Manufacturers, like most companies, use advertising to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and engage with customers. And while the manufacturing industry is traditionally known for its relationship-based approach to sales, advertising can make a huge impact on its revenue efforts.
Unfortunately, simply running campaigns without the right strategy, tools, and optimization of resources won’t lead to increased leads or revenue. Your business needs to be efficient when launching campaigns, otherwise you’ll miss out on potential sales and waste money advertising in the wrong places — and to the wrong people.
Manufacturers spend most of their budgets on things other than marketing: product development, sales, operations, and logistics. In fact, on average, manufacturers spend less than 7% of their budget on marketing.
That means marketing spend is hard to come by for manufacturers, and the precious dollars allocated to campaigns need to be deployed effectively to make a real impact.
Let’s take a look at the challenges manufacturers experience with advertising, and how you can improve your campaigns to see better results.
Advertising Is Important, but Comes with Challenges
Advertising is a tried-and-true method for building awareness of your business, and hopefully making an impact on your potential buyers.
According to Hubspot, 68% of marketers deem paid advertising as “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy. However, manufacturers must overcome critical advertising-related obstacles such as:
- Overall cost: Advertising can get expensive and requires a set budget.
- Identifying the audience: Are you speaking to the right buying personas?
- Finding the right channel: Ads must actually show up where your ideal buyers spend their time.
- Nailing the message: Is the ad your buyers are seeing actually resonating with them?
The secret to effective — and efficient — advertising for manufacturers is to be laser-accurate with your campaigns. We’d all like to think we’re like Mad Men’s Don Draper and can effortlessly sell anything to anyone, but you need more information to launch a killer ad campaign these days.
Know Your Buyers — and Speak Their Language
Creating resonant advertising campaigns requires knowing who your buyers are and what messages they want to see. The days of indiscriminately placing ads on industry websites and publications are out. Uncovering who your buyers are and what they deeply care about is in.
Determining with precise accuracy what buyers care about is harder that it sounds, though. That’s because most of the online research your buyers conduct takes place anonymously — and far from your marketing and sales teams’ eyes — on third-party websites such as industry publications, social networks, blogs, message boards, and more.
Put another way: Since buyers aren’t filling out your “contact us” website forms, you probably don’t know exactly what challenges they’re facing, which products or services they’re interested in, or how to best communicate with them.
But world-class AI-powered account engagement platforms flip the script on this historical challenge. They can illuminate this anonymous buyer activity and map it to specific accounts and buyers, uncovering:
- The topics your buyers are researching
- The products they’re most interested in
- The competitive solutions your buyers are researching
Suddenly, your revenue team is armed with a complete picture of your ideal buyer and what they’re actually interested in. Now you can start crafting the perfect advertising messages and creative to resonate with them. And after that, it’s time to deploy those campaigns.
Serve Ads In the Right Place, At the Right Time
One of the difficulties in running ads is not knowing if you’ll reach your buyer at the right time. Even if you know exactly who you’re targeting, they might not be in a buying cycle.
But the good news is that you can also uncover which of your target accounts and buyers are actually in-market for your products or services. You can use the intent data we discussed earlier, as well as historical data about your deals, to generate a clear picture of what your buyers look like when they’re getting ready to buy.
With this data, you now:
- Know who your buyers are
- What interests them
- Which of them are actually looking to buy, and
- How engaged your key personas are with your brand
All that’s left is to distribute your ads through the right channels to reach them where they are.
An AI-powered platform like 6sense helps you create and distribute efficient advertising campaigns by giving you the power to:
- Create dynamic segments of your target audience to serve display and retargeting ads
- Serve ads to target accounts with banner, HTML 5, dynamic, video, or native ads
- Easily create cost-effective dynamic ad campaigns in LinkedIn and Facebook that are optimized for engagement
When you use a platform designed to discover your ideal buyer, reveal their buying intent, alert you when they’re showing interest, and make it easy to create advertising campaigns, you start to feel like you have a big advertising agency on your side.
Get Real Results with an Efficient and Effective Advertising Strategy
To understand the results your organization could see by following this approach with your advertising, take a look at the results manufacturing company Faro Technologies Inc. generated when its revenue team leveraged 6sense:
At the end of June 2021, [the team] started using 6sense to transform their digital advertising strategy. With 6sense’s intent data and predictions, [Faro Technologies Inc.] was able to more accurately target key accounts that were identified as in-market with the right messaging at the right time. This new, targeted approach netted big results: in the first month, engagement soared to 5.32x what it had previously been.
When you can hyper-target your advertising, it becomes incredibly effective and reduces the overall costs you have to devote to your efforts.
You don’t need to plaster your brand all over Times Square and hope your ideal buyer is walking by anymore. Now you can know exactly who they are, what they care about when they want to buy, and serve them the perfect ad at the right time.
