Marketing for Manufacturing: The Three Things You Need To Ask Yourself

You’re a manufacturer - you make things. Good things. While that should be enough to bring new customers to your door, unfortunately it is not. You see, all of your competitors are claiming they make a product that is just as good as yours. Perhaps they boast different features, higher outputs, or a lower price that makes their product more appealing - the possibilities are endless. The point is this; whether you operate in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B) environment, your competitors are shouting just as loudly as you, if not louder, to get the attention of your target audience. If you think just being a good manufacturer is enough, you need to think again.

Three Things You Need To Ask Yourself:

1. Am I an Engineering/Manufacturing or Sales/Marketing Driven Company? If the answer is engineering/manufacturing then you need to think about making some changes (and this list is that much more important). Engineering/manufacturing excellence are critical in the creation of high-quality products that customers will rave about and keep coming back for more, but without a sales/marketing focus your business is running blind and betting on whether your perfectly engineered product is a good fit for the market you are going after.
   
   
2. Do I have the Right People? Marketing is not Sales and Sales it not Marketing. You need strong, talented people in both roles. Sales is responsible for immediate, short-term revenue and helping provide feet-on-the street information on your customers. Marketing is responsible for developing medium and long term strategies to get your product in front of the right people and making sure your messaging represents your company properly and gives you a competitive advantage. A good marketing team should work in cooperation with Sales and have enough time in the field to understand the customer and market needs and incorporate that street information into their strategy development. I have never been a fan of “Ivory Tower” marketing and you shouldn’t either. Marketing people need field time and first-hand customer interaction to be effective. Think that kind of insight doesn’t matter in manufacturing? 
   
   A Quick Story: Earlier in my career, I was working for a manufacturing company that had run out of a specific product. Suddenly, we couldn’t keep that product on the shelves. The factory immediately made plans to source more materials, add a third-shift, and ramp up manufacturing to make sure we were swimming in that product in the next 60-90 days. I asked for a few days to look into the matter before we committed to essentially doubling our forecasted inventory for that product. A few discreet calls yielded that a key competitor had run out of a component to manufacture their product that competed with ours. We were getting their orders because they couldn’t fill them. They were making moves to correct the problem and were planning to be back on their production schedule in 60 days. Clearly, we had a short-term opportunity to realize sales and potentially to move some customers over to our product, but it was not the long term win that the plant thought we had. We adjusted the orders properly to make sure we could cover the short-term need without leaving us too deep in inventory and focused our sales efforts on getting to know more about some of these new customers and how we could win them over long-term.
   
   Marketing insight and Sales contacts were able to stop the factory from over-producing and leaving us in an undesirable inventory position.
   
   
3. Are you Budgeting Properly for Marketing? I am sometimes amazed at how many companies do not have a set budget for their marketing department. No budget demonstrates a lack of forethought and planning on what marketing activities are crucial for the coming year. No plan is perfect and no budget is perfect, but it is a place to start. If you are not sure what your crucial activities are, start with a task list. 
   
   What do you want to accomplish by the end of year? What activities will help yield that result? Again, this is a job for a seasoned marketing professional who understands how to look at short and long-term objectives and turn them into tactical deliverables with associated dollar values. If, by year end, you find the budget was greatly under-utilized then go back to your task list and determine if you accomplished everything you set out to do. If so, job well done and start planning for the next year. If not, find out what you need to do to tackle those objectives. If you go over budget before the year is out, then go back to that same task list and prioritize it - cut items, if needed. You also should do a review to find out where you under-estimated costs. As a percentage of sales, marketing budgets are anywhere between 1-20%. That is a lot of variance. 1-3% are your large corporations with revenues significant enough that 1-3% is still a lot of money. 15-20% are small independent companies with no sales force, such as a medical professional or a skilled craftsman where the only sales and customer acquisition related activities are accomplished via marketing. Depending on your size, your company is probably somewhere in the 4-14% range. That is still a lot of variance. Your head of marketing should be able to make a recommendation on the budget and support it. That is why you hired them.

“If You Build It, They Will Come.” was a wonderful sentiment from the movie Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, in manufacturing it is probably closer to “If you Build It, Build It Well, Market it Well, Follow-Up Promptly on Customer Requests, Provide First Rate Customer Service, Excellent Sales Support, and Make Sure You are Properly Differentiated in the Market and In-Front of Your Target Audience, They Will Come.” Not as romantic, I know.
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Are you a manufacturer challenged by how to market your products or with some good advice to share with others? Join the conversation.