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What's the big deal with video marketing? Why should you add it to your content marketing strategy? Video content is here to stay and it’s not going anywhere. Content Marketing Institute found that 78% of B2B marketers are investing in video in 2023 - that's up from 69% in 2022. Wyzowl reports that 91% of all business types will use video as a marketing tool in 2023.

Equipment manufacturing companies have lagged in the use of digital marketing to generate sales leads, instead leaning heavily on trade shows and sales teams to build relationships with potential buyers. These are effective but without an effort to capture online leads, equipment manufacturers are losing countless revenue-generating opportunities. After many years as a senior strategy director of digital marketing for manufacturers, I wanted to share the most effective tactics we have found to enable manufacturers to leverage their websites to generate more business.

When it comes to marketing for manufacturing companies, there is no 'one size fits all' approach. Every manufacturing business is different, and digital marketing needs to be tailored to the specific target markets, and more specifically, the target personas within those markets.

Originally posted on September 4, 2020, this post was refreshed in April of 2022. Industrial companies like manufacturers are becoming more invested in digital advertising and content marketing to drive traffic to their website. Along with that focus on generating website traffic should come strategies for connecting with qualified traffic—capturing visitors' information so that you can start to build a relationship with them. By collecting details like your visitor’s name, email address, and the company they work for, you can input this information into your CRM, monitor their interactions, and follow up much more effectively.

ChatGPT is the fastest-growing and most quickly adopted technology. Ever. By far. After its release in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity and in February 2023 it reached over 1 BILLION page visits. At first, professional copywriters voiced concern that artificial intelligence (AI) was going to take over their jobs. But fear has become excitement after learning that unique (human-generated) content is still prioritized by search engines. AI can help tremendously with idea generation, content planning, editing, and research to save time and fuel the brainpower that goes into content marketing.

HubSpot is a powerful CRM solution with three main "hubs" - Sales, Marketing, and Service. While these hubs work together seamlessly, they can also be integrated with other tools. For manufacturing businesses, HubSpot's Marketing Hub is an excellent marketing automation tool that can be easily integrated with other leading sales CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

As a B2B manufacturing company are your marketing, sales, and service functions integrated and automated? An effective CRM increases sales revenue because it:

Does your manufacturing company rely on sales team activity to drive revenue? You’ve likely heard about HubSpot as a CRM but do you wonder if it can really add enough value to the sales process to justify the expense? You may already use Salesforce or another CRM so think there’s no need to use HubSpot as well.

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 marketing is not flashy because unlike B2C it is not about new trends and selling an irresistible product to people with disposable income. In B2B, there has to be a justifiable business need for someone to seek out products or services and since the investment is usually large, the buyer has no room for purchasing errors. That means the buyer needs a lot of clear, organized information that instills confidence that the product or service will work well in their process, integrate with the existing system, and solve their problem.