Listening to potential customers and tracking their inquiries is beneficial to manufacturing marketing for many reasons. A primary benefit of documenting questions (by phone, form submission, email, and chatbot) is to gain ideas for future content but it also shows how the content that marketers created attracts new prospects or reveals opportunities to enhance (or pivot) the approach.

B2B Manufacturer Lead Tracking

Lead tracking enables a business to easily see where prospective customers enter the sales funnel by documenting inquiries from phone and internet contacts. Ideally, a CRM will track this information however we have many manufacturing clients that record leads in a shared spreadsheet which works well. 

Tracking leads yields many benefits for manufacturers and the better the information that is recorded, the more useful it is for marketing strategy in the future. In addition to the quantifiable results tracking leads demonstrates, it fuels content marketing with evidence of success when budgets are determined each year.

Fields to Include on a Lead Tracking Sheet

Lead Tracking Example

Marketing Channel Effectiveness

A lead tracking system shows what channels attract prospects so manufacturing marketers can easily see where the budget allocation is most effective. It also addresses opportunities to enhance channels with lower-than-expected results. So while content marketing is certainly possible without lead tracking, we find it to be a tremendous resource in planning content calendars for our manufacturing clients.