Becoming customer-driven isn’t easy, especially in manufacturing. Marketing teams must define new processes. Learn new technology. Even rethink their roles.
While there are several challenges on the horizon, these are at the top of the list:
1. Develop personalized experiences.
You only have seconds to capture a customer’s attention. Personalization can do it, when it’s done right.
In the past, your sales team would have owned the purchase path. But today’s customers guide themselves – choosing what information they need, when they need it.
What It Means to You
- Strengthen your brand in target markets with consistent multi-channel marketing. For key customers, take an account-based marketing approach, creating content customized specifically for them.
- Double-down on crowdsourced content, B2B communities and advocate marketing to keep your brand messaging authentic and transparent.
- Empower your teams with agile processes to test different ideas – without lengthy approvals – to personalize at scale.
2. Convert leads into revenue.
With the right approach, you can get more high-quality leads. Attribute marketing spend to sales. And show how marketing is affecting the bottom line.
What It Means to You
- Focus on the customer’s buying journey to align marketing and sales.
- Improve lead quality, transparency and collaboration by taking a cooperative approach with your partners.
3. Prove and predict marketing performance.
As the drivers of customer experience and revenue, marketers will be expected to prove ROI and predict what to do next.
What It Means to You
- Be prepared to show your work. Be proactive, and quantify the mROI on the investments made by both marketing and sales.
- Your marketing activities will increase, but your budgets may not. Find ways to maximize your marketing budgets by doing more with less.
- Make decisions driven by data, not guesswork, to meet customer demands in real time.
4. Maximize your marketing technology investment.
If you’re like most manufacturers, you have a lot of technology at your fingertips.
It’s up to you to partner with your technology team to integrate it. Optimize it. And get the most value from it.
What It Means to You
- Work with IT to adopt, innovate and implement technology simultaneously. Your customers move fast. You need to, too.
- Align technology to fit your business strategy. It just might simplify and reduce costs at the same time.
- Make sure your stakeholders and partners have secure access to the tools and information they need anywhere – on any device.
- Automate and optimize marketing campaigns by integrating your existing technology.
Bottom Line: Let’s Focus on Yours.
The good news: when an organization becomes customer-driven, everyone focuses on the same goals. And when goals are clearer, so are the results. When you’re ready, let’s talk about yours.
To maintain your budget, you’ll need to deliver real outcomes for your business and show the value of your work in dollars and cents.
