8 pillars of an effective manufacturing marketing strategy

As buying cycles drag and your sales teams struggle to meet monthly targets, fixing marketing strategy can be the last thing on your mind. However, a lack of long-term strategic thinking can be precisely what’s piling on the sales pressure in the first place. Here's how to lay the foundations for a more productive future.

When sales, marketing, and operations teams work in silos, they often lose sight of the big picture. Without the right data to jointly analyse past success and the digital tools to coordinate new marketing tactics, building a sustainable pipeline is tough. Teams can struggle to bring in fresh leads, close bigger deals, and upsell effectively together.

Breaking a vicious cycle

It's a vicious cycle of marketing underperformance and underinvestment that continues to attack the bottom line of many contract manufacturing companies:

• Losing visibility in the marketplace
• Slower lead generation
• Sales resources focused on short-term revenue fixes
• Revenue becomes lumpy and non-recurring
• Re-investment in marketing is limited
• More sales opportunities are lost

Now is the time to think strategically

If this resonates with your business, now is the time to step back and think strategically - because it's not going to get any easier. 

The winds of change continue to blow across the digital marketing landscape. It's harder than ever to cut through via 'outbound’ interruptive marketing, but even established inbound, content-led strategies are now failing B2B brands.

According to the Content Marketing Institute's research:

• 58% of B2B inbound marketers rate their content strategy as only "moderately effective"
• Nearly half cite a lack of clear goals as the reason for their marketing strategy's ineffectiveness

In the age of AI, your marketing must become more precise, personalised, and value-driven than ever before if you're going to find and convert more of your ideal customers in an undifferentiated marketplace.

With this in mind, here are the 8 pillars of an effective marketing strategy that can reset your approach and help you target, win, and retain more right-fit customers in a noisy marketplace.

1 Build your ideal customer profile

Using internal data and external market sizing information, you should build a picture of where the growth opportunities in the marketplace really are. There are many tools (such as the intent data in Zoominfo)  available to help answer these questions faster so that you can isolate your commercial sweet spot as you build out an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile):

• What kind of deals are the most profitable and sustainable for you?
• What type of business will bring these deals to you?
• What size is that company likely to be?
• What sector will they operate in? 
• Where will they be located?
• What are their main operational and commercial challenges?

2. Establish clear brand positioning

What is your USP in the market you’ve identified as full of potential? Where do your skills and capabilities exactly match these ideal customers’ unmet needs and your competitor's weaknesses?

The winning zone is the clear ‘blue ocean’ where the competition can’t obscure your offering and your message, and your value to your customers can be properly articulated.

3. Create your buyer personas

Once you understand your ideal customers and ideal market position, you need to understand exactly who you are speaking to within the companies you are targeting.

These are the buyer personas - the description of the people in the specific job roles that you will need to convince.

Sales and marketing together use their experience with similar companies to build a composite picture of the people they typically sell to in these organisations:

• How old are they?
• Are they male or female?
• What’s their educational background
• What are their professional pain points?
• What are their professional aspirations, hopes and fears?
• What will professional success look like to them?

The 'personas’ you create should be the bible for establishing the content types, messaging and tone of the marketing materials you will produce.  

4. Content creation 

Map out your buyers’ journeys and understand how your prospects and customers navigate this process from beginning to end.

Working together with your sales, marketing and operations teams, build a picture of the kind of content they need to support them from initial awareness to final decision-making and beyond. 

You can use tools like SparkToro to determine which media and platforms they like to use and ideate content in those formats.  

"In today's noisy digital world, B2B marketers need to focus on creating truly valuable, differentiated content that speaks directly to their audience's needs. It's no longer about producing more content, but about producing the right content that cuts through the clutter."

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs

4. Website build and optimisation

Your website is the only digital real estate you ‘own’ outright, so make sure it's working for you.

For those prospects and customers who arrive on your site, it’s the only place where your message can be expressed unfiltered by search engines, social media or AI platforms - so it’s a big opportunity to impress.  

Your site's design and navigation should help right-fit prospects and customers instantly understand what you do for them and why your company exists. Your website should be the perfect distillation of brand and customer experience.

For example, the contract manufacturer Benchmark leads with a strong message of intent.

From the ‘hero message’ at the top of the home page, you should be optimising navigation - to get visitors to the information they need and answer their questions - fast. 

In the process, you should express your brand values visually and with a human touch, incorporating video introductions, links to content, testimonials, and case studies,  demonstrating how you understand and serve your customers' needs.

Your website should be the repository of content for every stage of your buyer’s journey, but it's important to note that this content will live in various forms beyond the boundaries of your site, including email marketing, social media, and even AI platforms. The art of modern marketing is orchestrating these experiences seamlessly so your brand is seen wherever your customers are most active and engaged.  

But don’t forget the CTAs!

With the advent of AI and zero-click search - the traffic that does come to your site is likely to be further down the consideration path than before.

Potential customers need to know they've come to the right place - and how they take the 'next step' with you. Many companies forget to optimise their pages for CTAs - creating 'dead ends' in their prospects' digital journeys.

5. SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)

SEO (search engine optimisation) is rapidly evolving into GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). As you build your website content, you should consider how it will be restructured and shared in AI-powered search returns and dedicated AI platforms. 

If SEO was all about optimising for keywords then GEO is about:

• Ensuring content is clear, well-structured, and easily parsed by AI
   
• Incorporating original research and expert analysis with respected partners
• Optimising for both human readers and AI comprehension
   
• Focusing on content fluency and natural language
   
• Is supported with multi-media content (such as video and infographics)
• Leveraging E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
   

Gen AI is adept at looking for original thought and gauging authority, while filtering out repetition and plagiarism. To make your brand part of this new world, you need to focus on building your content's unique insight and authority - and you can't do that by producing something generic with AI. 

As Andy Crestodina points out:

"Our goal is NOT to use one algorithm to trick another algorithm into sending us traffic!"

6. Bossing social

Social media is where your brand’s voice, values, and expertise can reach new audiences and re-engage existing ones in real time. Unlike your website, social platforms are spaces for dynamic interaction between brands and customers.  Here, brand experiences are framed and filtered by the content and comments surrounding it, so everything your brand can do to differentiate as your customers scroll is vital.  

Slice, dice, and repurpose your existing content. Use video to share your messages and stop your customers scrolling at the right moment. Consider buying LinkedIn advertising to target prospects even more accurately with your content offerings.

Of course, social media should be a two-way street. Engage followers by encouraging feedback, responding to comments, and participating in conversations that matter to your industry. Share updates, insights, and content in a way that invites engagement rather than just broadcast announcements. 

Incorporating user-generated content, customer testimonials, and case studies into your social media mix can reinforce your credibility and trustworthiness across digital channels.

7. Orchestration Across Platforms

Orchestration is the art of connecting all your digital channels to deliver a personalised account-based experience at every step of the buyer’s journey. This requires alignment across your website, social media, email marketing, CRM, and even AI-driven personalisation tools. When orchestrated well, each channel should reinforce the others, creating a unified narrative that guides prospects from awareness to decision-making without friction.

Lever chatbots, personalised email, social media messaging, blogging, and further content offerings (audio, video, whitepapers) to establish trust and guide next steps. Automate customer service, data collection, lead scoring and prospect nurturing to help prospects access the content they need when they need it. Use smart content to tailor buyers' views based on previous visits and interactions. Ensure CTAs (calls to action) progress leads through the sales cycle in a 'human' way on different platforms.

Giving your teams the digital tools they need to plan and orchestrate campaigns is vital.

8. Data driven improvement

Continuous improvement in marketing requires a solid foundation in data and analytics. Your digital channels generate vast amounts of data, but it’s only valuable if you can use it to refine your strategy, understand customer behaviour, and optimise each stage of the buyer’s journey. Analytics help pinpoint where prospects are engaging most, identify content that drives conversions, and reveal gaps where additional support is needed.

Start by setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) for each channel and touchpoint, tracking metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and time spent on pages. Use tools like Google Analytics and CRM systems like HubSpot to pull insights from across your entire digital landscape. Regularly review this data to adjust your content, optimise targeting, and ensure a consistent message across all channels.

Beyond basic metrics, you can use predictive analytics and AI-driven insights to anticipate buyer needs and personalise experiences at scale. AI can help identify patterns in buyer journeys, allowing you to proactively meet needs and even predict which content will be most relevant based on past behaviours. By transforming raw data into actionable insights, you empower your team to make informed decisions that enhance engagement, reduce churn, and drive more sustainable growth.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that marketing is being disrupted.  Many contract manufacturers have been historically behind the curve in their adoption of 'martech', But they are now even more risk of losing their voice and visibility in their sectors as a new era of AI takes hold.  

Using AI to support and scale hyper-targeted content production and distribution is a huge opportunity for manufacturers. But anxious marketers need to ensure their unique identity and messaging are not lost in a headlong flight into AI production. 

The new research tools that your prospects and customers are using to discover and analyse their buying options will favour the most authentic insights generated by the most authoritative brands in their sectors. To play in this new world, your brand will need to control your messaging and orchestrate your customer's experiences across the digital landscape with a new kind of confidence.