Signals from the Field

Ready or not, GA4 is replacing UA platform in Google Analytics on July 1, 2023.

When you spend money on marketing for your B2B manufacturing company, what kind of return on your investment should you expect? We’ll review how to calculate ROI and what ratio is considered the best for the manufacturing industry.

Equipment manufacturing companies have lagged in the use of digital marketing to generate sales leads, instead leaning heavily on trade shows and sales teams to build relationships with potential buyers. These are effective but without an effort to capture online leads, equipment manufacturers are losing countless revenue-generating opportunities. After many years as a senior strategy director of digital marketing for manufacturers, I wanted to share the most effective tactics we have found to enable manufacturers to leverage their websites to generate more business.

Originally posted on September 4, 2020, this post was refreshed in April of 2022.

Industrial companies like manufacturers are becoming more invested in digital advertising and content marketing to drive traffic to their website. Along with that focus on generating website traffic should come strategies for connecting with qualified traffic—capturing visitors' information so that you can start to build a relationship with them.

By collecting details like your visitor’s name, email address, and the company they work for, you can input this information into your CRM, monitor their interactions, and follow up much more effectively.

ChatGPT is the fastest-growing and most quickly adopted technology. Ever. By far. After its release in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity and in February 2023 it reached over 1 BILLION page visits. At first, professional copywriters voiced concern that artificial intelligence (AI) was going to take over their jobs. But fear has become excitement after learning that unique (human-generated) content is still prioritized by search engines. AI can help tremendously with idea generation, content planning, editing, and research to save time and fuel the brainpower that goes into content marketing.

HubSpot is a CRM with powerful marketing automation features that can be used with its own Sales Hub or integrated with another CRM. Salesforce is a popular CRM with manufacturers but when it comes to marketing automation to nurture the leads, HubSpot is the leading platform for usability and functionality - in any industry. It integrates easily with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and keeps data in a centralized location rather than maintaining data in two separate systems. HubSpot also integrates with ERP systems such as Odoo and Commercient giving one source of truth for data records.

HubSpot is a powerful CRM solution with three main "hubs" - Sales, Marketing, and Service. While these hubs work together seamlessly, they can also be integrated with other tools. For manufacturing businesses, HubSpot's Marketing Hub is an excellent marketing automation tool that can be easily integrated with other leading sales CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

I previously worked for a news agency with a large team of advertising salespeople of various tenures. The corporate office mandated the use of a customer relationship management tool (CRM) and not surprisingly, the seasoned members of the sales team resisted using it to track and measure their activity.

People with decades of experience were suddenly expected to enter their hard-earned leads into a system that any of their peers could access. They'd heard that management wanted to measure and evaluate their activities with these leads. The team members expressed feeling that their value was being diminished and turning over that information made them feel "no longer necessary". What they weren’t told (not convincingly, at least) was that the CRM was actually going to help them by making their jobs easier and converting more leads to sales. 

This is our first post-pandemic manufacturing survey and we are happy to see many aspects of marketing are returning to normal. As trade shows have re-emerged manufacturers are finding success in face-to-face connections and live demonstrations.