Should manufacturers care about marketing? Making the most of Dynamics 365 Marketing in the manufacturing industry

Although characterized by heavy machinery and bustling shop floors, the manufacturing industry isn’t exempt from embracing digital advancements in business management – and marketing activities are more important than ever for manufacturers that want to stay on top of industry trends and stay ahead of competition. Adding a CRM solution to your tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order.

Promoting your business and offerings increases brand awareness, laying the groundwork for big benefits like more lead conversions, better qualification rates, more opportunity in the funnel, and better ROI on existing advertising – and acting on data insights gives you a better idea of where and how to find your next customer with targeted and planned content campaigns.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

Reaching your target audience

Understanding who you’re selling to and what they need is the evergreen question all marketing teams set out to answer. The good news is, your audience is already out there, so the next step is to build a strategy to find them. By creating content that addresses their needs and showcases your business’ ability to meet those needs, you’re establishing yourself as a trusted service provider that knows how to capture demand, and knowing where to promote yourself helps cover all your bases.

So, how do you go about finding new ways to reach your target audience? Dynamics 365 Marketing lets you create, manage, and promote content and fine-tune the ways that you put your content out into the world. Customer journeys are designed to move customers and prospects along in the sales process by increasing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts, no matter if they’ve just visited your website for the first time or if they’re closing in on a new service provider. Segmenting your prospects has never been easier, and savvy automation tools quickly deliver tailored content to your audience.

Marketing your own native content can help set your expertise apart from the rest and establish your business as an industry leader, but in a highly industrial field like manufacturing, eye-catching graphics and a savvy social media presence may not be familiar territory – luckily for you, we have a free whitepaper on B2B social media marketing tactics that can help you maximize your reach on social media platforms and effectively utilize a cross-platform presence.

Creating unique content

Your website is your biggest marketing asset because it gives you the opportunity to showcase your business, your offerings, your expertise, and how prospects benefit from you over your competition. You have ample space to create pages and content that addresses the needs of your target audience while emphasizing the unique business value of your offerings, go into detail about your products and services, offer competitor comparisons, and create and uphold your brand perception.

And on the topic of your website, creating landing pages is a great way to grow your contact list while garnering interest in your offerings. Do you have a demo video, whitepaper, or industry report that potential customers could find helpful? You can offer your resource to them in exchange for their contact information – interested prospects will gladly give you their information in exchange for your marketing materials that help them address a business problem they might be facing, which allows you to build a relationship with a prospect who has already learned to trust you and your expertise – landing pages help facilitate a mutually beneficial exchange between you and an interested web visitor.

Dynamics 365 Marketing also has a comprehensive email builder with a drag-and-drop interface, easy-to-change code to customize contact information, AI-powered content generation, campaign automation, and best of all, emails drop easily right into your customer journeys so they can target key segments at carefully chosen times, giving you visibility and control at every stage of the sales cycle.

Making sense of it all

Now that your marketing strategy is falling into place, it’s time to take a look at the numbers behind it all. Dynamics 365 Marketing’s built-in reporting and analytics reporting tools make it easy to make data-informed decisions about how, when, and where you meet your customers and prospects. Track metrics for email campaigns, social media posts, embedded web form interactions, landing pages – knowing the numbers behind your marketing efforts helps draw conclusions about what’s working, what isn’t, what could be improved, and what can be scrapped entirely.

When analyzing data, you could realize that you have a plethora of website visitors, but hardly any of them make it past your homepage – meaning your content doesn’t pull them in enough to care about your brand. Or, maybe you have a sudden influx of leads but they all fail to close a deal in the end – which means it’s time to focus on quality leads over the quantity. Once you’re able to make sense of the data you collect, you can fine-tune your marketing strategy and content campaigns accordingly. This means less time and energy spent on marketing so you can focus on planning for the future of your business growth.

Revamp your manufacturing marketing strategy

If your manufacturing software toolbelt is missing a CRM application, we can help you fix that. Click the button below and our team of expert consultants will be in touch to help you find a best-fit marketing solution with Dynamics 365 Marketing.