Selling manufacturing services in 2025 seems harder than ever. But marketers now have the chance to reach and engage with industrial prospects in ways their predecessors could never have predicted. Is your team ready for the challenge?
Marketers' role in the manufacturing industry has always been to help prospects discover their services, generating and nurturing leads to the point of closure.
But over the years, the way they've done this has changed. From outbound to inbound marketing, through the content revolution, the role of the industrial marketer has been in constant evolution.
And now, new AI and digital personalisation tools are making it possible to scale, automate and target marketing in ways that we've never seen before.
But AI has also made things harder.
It's harder to be found digitally as ChatGPT and Google AI answer our customers' questions and take traffic away from our websites.
And as AI is being used to generate more of our content and messaging in unstructured ways it's harder for brands to be distinctive and authentic in the way they communicate.
So, what is marketing's role in this heady mix of competition, media, tech, and AI?
Do we need marketers to be machine operators in the great martech factory in the cloud?
Or do we need them to spearhead creative brand building to break through a suffocating algorithm and the dreary sameness of B2B communications?
Well, the answer is both.
Ten years ago, our colleague Eric Swain wrote his blog "Why Marketing is Everything." In it, he argued that marketing encompasses every part of the customer experience in the age of social media.
And he was right.
But today, the discipline of marketing has assumed new importance in the business world.
It's helping us resolve our biggest commercial challenge.
In the age of AI, we need to be more human in our brand, sales and marketing relationships while being superhuman in our reach and impact.
Marketing isn't just everything anymore.
It's everything, everywhere, all at once.
Today's buyers build their shortlists before your sales team even knows they're in the market for a solution. Procurement teams make initial decisions based on deep internet research. Brand perceptions are formed through geeking out on influencer content, LinkedIn and now AI-generated recommendations - long before an RFP even hits your inbox.
But they're not looking at your website.
In this brave new world of AI agents, co-piloting and personalisation, you're not just trying to attract web traffic - you're trying to ensure your brand is seen, understood, and selected across new and complex digital journeys.
From social to Generative AI, you must appear in your prospects' chat windows and social scrolls. Your video case studies need to be on YouTube, and your hot takes need to be featured in influencers' timelines.
Marketing is how you strategise and orchestrate these content experiences across media. But it takes serious creative and technical talent to make it happen.
Google's shift to AI Overviews and Mode means fewer clicks to your website and more aggregated answers scraped from content online.
The net result is less unfiltered engagement between the customer, the content and your brand.
It is increasingly important to ensure that your brand is not just cited but mentioned in AI overviews and ChatGPT. You need your company's name and words to be mentioned.
Making sure your brand is referenced by others and across different media is the key to ramping up your GEO game - and ensuring you are always present in the right search and chat windows.
The average B2B marketing purchase now involves 11–20 stakeholders (Gartner, 2024). In manufacturing, this often includes engineers, procurement teams, finance, plant managers, and more.
Each of them needs something different from their manufacturing partner:
Marketing works out the buyer's journeys that each job role might take and ensures content is created and distributed in ways that answer specific needs at specific times in the sales cycle.
In many manufacturing companies, sales and operations have historically been stuck in a struggle of priorities for revenue growth. Sales want to close deals as fast and flexibly as possible. Operations want right-fit leads - the kind they can service effectively, given their resource and capabilities.
A landmark Harvard Business Review study, based on interviews with thousands of manufacturers, exposed these familiar fault lines:
In a world where pipelines stagnate, marketing is the answer to generating the ongoing demand that sales need and operations can effectively service.
Modern marketing teams can shape how your brand shows up in the sectors and niches where you can truly win. They can help manufacturers build sustainable strategic demand, not just chase quick wins.
Armed with CRM intelligence, campaign analytics, and automation tools, marketing is uniquely placed to connect sales, operations, and leadership, aligning everyone with smarter revenue decisions.
From initial interest to long-term cross-sell and upsell, marketing and martech now play a central role in delivering right-fit prospects, nurturing them, closing deals and growing relationships.
Marketing isn't just one piece of the puzzle - it's the mechanism that makes the whole system work.
In the manufacturing sector, you're not just trying to attract traffic - you're working to stay visible, credible, and front-of-mind across prolonged and complex buying journeys.
For manufacturers, these journeys can stretch for months
This is the challenge of the industrial marketer: building and maintaining a library of content that can keep hold of a permanently distracted audience.
They might be using AI tools to splice and dice the content, but if your marketers are not working closely with your team to continually tease out original stories, takes, and insights from your team, then they're going to struggle to keep potential customers' attention across long sales cycles.
A long-term marketing strategy ensures you're always in the room, whether the potential customer is ready to act today or just beginning to explore options.
In a world where contract manufacturing services are increasingly commoditised, value is no longer just about capability – it's about perception.
Many manufacturers assume their technical credentials will speak for themselves. But OEMs don't just buy on spec. They buy on confidence. On risk mitigation. On familiarity and trust.
Over-relying on AI to craft your message risks sounding just like everyone else - bland, generic, and forgettable.
Effective marketing teams help you shape distinct and credible brand awareness in a crowded market. These marketing efforts must be founded on deep research, data and expertise.
This kind of work can't be an afterthought - it's how you:
Effective branding reinforces your reputation and communicates your unique value proposition, supporting your position as a reliable and strategic partner.
While it complements your operational strengths, premium pricing is achieved through a combination of demonstrated capabilities, consistent performance, and the trust you've built with clients.
“Strong brands don’t have to fight on price. That’s their reward.” – Mark Ritson
AI tools can now generate thousands of words of basic "how-to" advice in seconds. But generic content isn't helping anyone, and it certainly won't help your business stand out.
The value lies in what only you know.
Your company's real advantage is the expertise locked inside your engineering, compliance and operations teams. Content marketing is the bridge that turns this into a bank of trusted knowledge assets.
Marketing's job is to unlock that knowledge and turn it into specific, consultative content that buyers trust - from in-depth case studies and technical guides to real-world commentary.
Thanks to AI, this content can now be repurposed and distributed across different marketing channels at break neck speed. But the content itself must be purposeful and bring something distinctive to the mix that other brands can't.
“If your content could’ve been written by a robot, it probably will be replaced by AI. But content with a pulse—i.e., brings something new — your experience, a strong opinion, customer insight, real data — is still valuable. That’s what people share, link to, and remember.”
The right manufacturing marketing strategy ensures your insights are visible, your perspective is heard, and your brand becomes a recognised authority, not just more digital noise.
Marketing automation platforms like 6sense and Demandbase now give manufacturers access to powerful intent data that reveals when accounts are researching, what content they're consuming, and where they are in the buying cycle.
When this data is shared and used across the business, it:
Marketing isn't just a communications function. It's the growth engine - and a powerful ally for sales and marketing teams alike.
It used to be that manufacturing marketers just produced collateral to support the sales team.
Not anymore.
Today, marketing is a driver of strategic growth in its own right.
An effective marketing team:
The manufacturing world has changed in the last 10 years. And the digital marketing world has undergone seismic shifts since the release of Gen AI into the wild.
Customers are now engaging with companies like yours in entirely different ways. They consume content and look for information critically and proactively. They use AI and lean on myriad influencers and networks to build their business strategy and find suppliers.
The question is—are you now part of your customers' critical information-gathering process? Have you staked your claim in their digital universe? Are you contributing to the conversations that will drive the right kind of leads to consume your content and keep you at the top of mind throughout their buyers' journeys?
Can your brand cut through in a noisy and undifferentiated marketplace?