The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing for Manufacturers & Industrial Companies

Written by Kathy Kassera MrozekAug 21, 2024

B2B manufacturers and OEMs tend to be late adopters when it comes to implementing modern digital marketing strategies. Traditionally, sales has driven revenue in these industries, and marketing has existed to support sales.

Table of Contents

Do manufacturers need internet marketing or digital marketing?
Why should manufacturers use digital marketing?
Key principles of B2B industrial digital marketing:
What are the types of digital marketing that matter most for manufacturers?
How digital marketing complements the industrial manufacturing buying cycle:
What kind of digital marketing program is right for an industrial or manufacturing company?
How to create a successful manufacturing digital marketing strategy:
The best digital marketing tactics for manufacturers:
Who should manage a manufacturing company’s digital marketing programs?
How much should manufacturers spend on digital marketing?
How to get started with a digital marketing program:
Recommended further reading:

Marketers are typically responsible for creating proposals, presentations, and trade show collateral. However, during the past decade, and especially the past few years, manufacturing companies that have invested in modernizing their marketing, if only incrementally, have seen measurable results. In this article, we’ll unpack the many facets of a manufacturing digital marketing program, including the who, what, where, why, when, and how.

Do manufacturers need internet marketing or digital marketing?

First, let’s clear up one thing. We hear the terms “internet marketing” and “digital marketing” being used interchangeably, and that’s okay. Technically, manufacturing digital marketing is any marketing for manufacturers that is, well, digital in format, which could include things like television, digital billboards, or social media. (However, a typical TV audience is far too broad to be relevant to B2B manufacturing or industrial marketing.)

Manufacturing internet marketing refers specifically to activities related to the internet and web, which would include social media, but not TV or digital billboards. For our purposes, we’ll consider digital marketing and internet marketing, in the context of manufacturing, to be the same.

Why should manufacturers use digital marketing?

While traditional sales and marketing tactics (trade shows, networking, word of mouth) are still a piece of the puzzle, the growing segment is online. As younger engineers and technical buyers grow into positions of greater influence and responsibility, these manufacturing customers are increasingly looking for information online. Most of them prefer to find a website to answer their technical questions rather than call a vendor rep that they’ve never talked to before.

Manufacturing digital marketing is the practice of making sure that when your best prospective customers are searching the internet for vendors with answers, information, and solutions, your company is showing up with relevant answers, information, and solutions.

Key principles of B2B industrial digital marketing:

At Windmill Strategy, we advise our clients to base their marketing on the following foundational B2B digital marketing concepts and guidelines:

Define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and high-level personas, so that you focus the majority of your efforts on marketing to those most likely to buy and most closely fitting your ideal targets.
Focus efforts on very specific keywords that show high transactional intent, even if they are lower volume than less targeted or specific terms.
Set remarketing to a long duration (90 days+) to reflect the long sales cycle for industrial and manufacturing companies.
Narrow audiences and targeting wherever possible by geography, demographics, industry, interests, time of day, and so on.
Focus on quality over quantity; lower traffic is fine if it’s more qualified traffic (resulting in improved business outcomes).
Fix the website first, and then get SEO rolling while augmenting with PPC, before delving into other channels.

What are the types of digital marketing that matter most for manufacturers?

Marketing, in general, can be broken down into two big buckets: inbound and outbound.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is generally focused on pushing your marketing message out to those who might be a match for your target customer profile. Outbound marketing tactics can include:

Cold email campaigns
Digital display ad campaigns
Account-based marketing (ABM)
Radio / TV / Broadcast
Print ads
Direct mail
Telemarketing / Cold calling
Outdoor advertising / Billboards
Event & sponsorships
Other awareness campaigns & activities

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is generally focused on showing up for people who are searching for what you offer. Inbound marketing tactics can include:

Website content & articles
Educational and/or gated content
Search engine optimization
Video content
Webinars
Social media content & campaigns
Search / PPC ads
Email nurture campaigns

While nearly every tactic in the inbound marketing list above can apply to manufacturers, several on the outbound list are tough to justify. Unless you can find a radio station, for instance, that is so perfectly targeted that the majority of the people listening to it are the specific type of engineer who can use your product, you’ll be wasting precious marketing dollars on reaching too wide an audience. Focusing outbound attention on a high-value prospect in the form of an ABM campaign, on the other hand, might be a good tactic.

Inbound vs. outbound digital marketing for manufacturers

As mentioned above, inbound marketing often does the heavy lifting when it comes to digital marketing for the B2B manufacturing industry. With inbound marketing, you can create website content that’s uniquely tailored to your best prospective customers’ needs, challenges, and pain points, drawing them into your website while they’re searching for a solution. Whether they find you early in the research stage or later in the buying cycle, when they’re ready to connect with a vendor, if you’re engaging them throughout their process, you’re creating the foundation for a future sale with a good-fit prospect.

Outbound activities can be a good complement to inbound digital marketing in the manufacturing realm. For example, sponsorships, prominent trade show booths, and other awareness-generating activities can make your brand known, however peripherally, to those who might need your products in the future. Then, when they’re seeking a solution and your website comes up in search results, that “Hey, I’ve heard of them before” recognition could make them more likely to click on your website.

How inbound marketing works for manufacturers

Today’s industrial manufacturing and B2B buyers make the majority of the purchase decision before they’ve even talked to your sales department. Inbound marketing is all about making sure that your website is doing its job of showing up for your target audience when they search, engaging visitors, and encouraging them to reach out when they have a need. Your goals, as you build this hub of your marketing, are:

Clearly describe your company and your positioning — what you do, who it’s for, and why anyone should care.
Present comprehensive and detailed technical information about your products/services/solutions.
Generate trust-building and SEO-optimized content for specific applications and/or industries you serve.
Generate detailed case studies that are SEO-optimized, and that generate trust by showing visitors how you solve problems that are similar to what they might be facing.

In your blog, resources, or articles section, focus on quality information that helps your niche audience, not a sales pitch. Develop a content calendar, and work on creating content regularly. Using this growing body of content:

Ideally, post to the website every 1-2 weeks; email your list every 2 weeks. Start somewhere and work up to this cadence.
Every quarter, send a roundup white paper that goes deeper into topics covered and/or brings them all together.

Identify articles to send out via email outreach campaigns (see email marketing, below). How to Create Content That Keeps Engineers Coming Back offers advice on the kind of content that many industrial and manufacturing marketing personas are looking for.

With all of this great content attracting ideal prospects, you’ll want to create easy ways for website visitors to reach out when they’re ready to talk further. Throughout the pages of your website, include calls to action (CTAs) that are easy to spot. Include a “contact” button in the header, and include a contact form or link in the footer. Offer valuable content that sets the stage for MQL conversions – such as gated content and downloadables. Make it easy for users to engage, and don’t hide the entirety of your gated content behind a form.

How digital marketing complements the industrial manufacturing buying cycle:

In a typical industrial manufacturing buying cycle, the sales cycle is long, and there are multiple people involved in the buying process. The person doing the initial research and/or the person who’ll be specifying, responsible for, or using the product or service is rarely also the person signing the contract or writing the check. They might research several different known products or services, from vendors that they already know and/or that are on an approved vendor list, in addition to more general search queries.

After identifying a need and conducting online research, these prospects will likely narrow down the options to a shortlist or single recommendation that they’ll share internally with others on the buying team. An engineer can be influential in getting a new vendor onto an approved vendor list if they offer a solution that looks like a better fit than others.

This stage of research and shortlisting/recommendations is where inbound marketing can be very powerful for manufacturers. If your solutions appear prominently and your website provides clear, trustworthy information, you’ll likely make it onto shortlists. As the process continues, your salespeople will be communicating with the buying team and going through the steps involved in a consultative sales process. Higher-level decision-makers will also be involved, and your website will need to be able to provide comprehensive information, including certifications and company credibility. Ultimately, the buyer will make the purchase from the supplier that they see as the best fit, and this is heavily influenced by your technical sales team as well as any sales enablement materials—but if inbound marketing brought in the initial lead, both marketing and sales can take credit for the closed sale.

What kind of digital marketing program is right for an industrial or manufacturing company?

Rather than choosing from a pre-packaged digital marketing program, which is often what’s offered by digital marketing agencies or SEO agencies, the best solution is to determine what you need to achieve and then create a customized digital marketing program that’s tailored to get you there. Most of our B2B industrial manufacturing and OEM clients’ goals are to generate more qualified leads through their websites and digital marketing.

How to create a successful manufacturing digital marketing strategy:

Creating a high-performing digital marketing strategy for a B2B manufacturing or industrial company means starting with your overall marketing plan and goals. If you haven’t yet clearly defined your goals, start there, by making them specific, measurable, and attainable.

Get clear on who you’re marketing to. Have a clearly identified ICP (ideal customer profile, the companies that are a good match for your offerings) and high-level personas (the individuals on the buying teams within these companies). Our article on keeping this process simple will help you get started.

Clarify your positioning and most important keywords. Evaluate your website and ensure that it loads quickly, has a good content strategy and user experience, and will generate trust in the eyes of those who visit it. Identify tactics and channels that you believe will bring your target prospects to your educational and marketing content and encourage them to engage or otherwise take the next step. Build all of the above into a three-month implementation plan that covers the most important, highest-priority updates first, while making incremental traction on larger efforts.

The best digital marketing tactics for manufacturers:

There is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every manufacturer. However, we’ve worked with many B2B industrial manufacturing companies, and certain patterns are common.

In most cases, the more targeted you can be in finding your audience and in the keywords you use, the better off you’ll be. Your customers are typically niche audiences, with very specific needs, and you won’t benefit from casting a wide net.

Assuming that you’ve covered the basics and have a good understanding of who your audience is and a sound positioning for the company, your manufacturing digital marketing program will find success by incorporating several key overlapping tactics:

Your website

Your website is the hub of your digital marketing program. If the website is in poor shape, spend the time to fix it before you do anything else. Your website should clearly state your positioning on the homepage, and provide easy access to information about your products or services, relevant information about your key industries/verticals, case studies if applicable, and information about the company, as well as easy ways to reach out for more information or to talk to sales. is the hub of your digital marketing program. If the website is in poor shape, spend the time to fix it before you do anything else. Your website should clearly state your positioning on the homepage, and provide easy access to information about your products or services, relevant information about your key industries/verticals, case studies if applicable, and information about the company, as well as easy ways to reach out for more information or to talk to sales.

Content marketing

Content is the information contained on the pages of your website explaining your products, services, and critical business information, but content marketing is an added layer beyond that. This is the content that serves to educate, inform, and inspire your best customers, and it’s also often the content that is most eligible to show up in search engine results. You can read more about the importance of content marketing for industrial marketing teams.

HubSpot/Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is unquestionably powerful for B2B industrial and manufacturing marketing. First, you need an ICP, a high-quality website, a content marketing program, and a marketing automation tool such as HubSpot, which we like for its ease of use. You can learn more by reading Getting Started with B2B Marketing Automation + 10 Tips You Can Use Today. Some important marketing automation terms, techniques, and tactics include:

Exit Intent: One of the top techniques is the exit intent pop-up. These appear when a user is about to exit a page (which various tools are able to determine by where the user moves the cursor and other factors). Set them to appear on every page or only on certain pages, depending on your objectives. Rather than having the visitor leave your site empty-handed, offer a high-value white paper or article as a download. On a blog article or product page, offer a branded white paper or datasheet. In exchange, you get the visitor’s email address to deliver ongoing helpful marketing content.
Lead Flows (presenting options for gated content downloads): These pop-ups are proven to help generate leads.
Email Marketing: This is fundamental to manufacturing and industrial marketing, and tools like HubSpot help you manage it effectively.
Social Posting: HubSpot has social media management tools to not only post content but to monitor keywords for you.
Lead Scoring: Powerful platforms such as HubSpot can calculate and score each prospect based on engagement signals that suggest strong intent—predicting when they’re highly interested and when it’s a good time for your sales team to contact them.
Deal Quality & Source Reporting: HubSpot’s Sources Report gives you an in-depth look at where traffic on your website is coming from. Combining this with insights from your sales team results in a deal quality score. Over time, you can improve lead quality.
CRM and Sales Notes: The ability for salespeople to make notes in the CRM about each interaction with a customer or prospect adds important context and improves collaboration between sales and marketing.
Funnel and Pipeline Tracking: These reports keep track of your sales and marketing process and how many leads are moving from one stage to the next.

Search engine optimization

Organic search engine optimization refers to making the content on your website align with the keywords that your prospects use to research online. Focus on long-tail queries specific to your niche and on general + industry-specific terms (combination of your niche and the industries you serve, i.e. instead of “web design” target “industrial web design”). This could also be geography-based, in some instances. Here are a few examples:

Rubber molding > custom rubber molding, or medical rubber molding
Web design > industrial web design
Air filtration > custom air filtration systems

Incorporate SEO into your overall content strategy. Research trending topics related to your industry and create keyword-optimized blog posts or other content to help drive organic traffic to your website. If you’re writing an article on a very nuanced and specific topic, chances are that it will capture the attention of a very intrepid and specific searcher, but in order to show up for the most competitive terms, you’ll need to focus some efforts on optimization.

Email Marketing

In your email marketing to industrial and manufacturing audiences, focus on sharing helpful articles from your website, not pushing a hard sell. Sometimes this can include new product information and releases, as this can be valuable to your niche audience, but avoid making an overt sales pitch.

Email nurture campaigns are a great way to stay top of mind for those prospects who are already on your marketing list, either because they are previous customers or because they’ve engaged with your marketing content and converted as MQLs.

To protect the integrity of your main domain and make handling replies more convenient, use a separate domain name (.co instead of .com, for example, or adding a prefix to your company name) for outbound outreach to people who don’t yet know about you and aren’t yet actively searching. Your goal in this outreach: generate awareness, encourage them to visit your site and/or enroll in your email marketing, or, if they’re ready to talk to sales, to set up a meeting. Growbots or Lead Cookie will support your outbound email marketing.

Lead Intelligence Tools

Lead Intelligence tools such as ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, or LeadForensics can be used as an additional source of email addresses for outbound email marketing, as well as a source of emails and company URLs to use in targeting online advertising.

Social media

Distinct from ads or sponsored posts, this is what you’re organically posting for free to accounts on social media. Valuable actions include:

Posting thought leadership articles from your blog (post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X).
Re-publishing articles within LinkedIn’s platform (having salespeople do so on their profiles).
Posting job openings and company event updates.

Social media for manufacturing digital marketing is more effective on some channels than others. YouTube can be great for hosting and distributing video content such as product demonstrations or how-to videos; LinkedIn isn’t where too many engineers hang out often, but you can get the attention of others on the buying teams there; Facebook has a huge reach, although it’s often not the most effective platform for B2B industrial and manufacturing marketing. Social media can be a good way to distribute your content marketing.

This professional networking site reaches C-level individuals and salespeople effectively. Engineers are less likely to be found here. There are different ways to use LinkedIn’s marketing resources and networking capabilities to build awareness and generate leads. This LinkedIn article goes deeper, but here are a few tips:

Paid Display Advertising: Target to those who fit your ICP and personas, using LinkedIn’s built-in filtering, as well as the uploaded company URL and/or email lists from ZoomInfo and/or GrowBots.
Use LinkedIn lead-generation forms to increase conversion rate.
Upload your email list to the LinkedIn campaign manager and retarget via LinkedIn ads.
Remarket to your website visitors.
Have salespeople send out a white paper on a quarterly basis to all in-target connections—focus on sharing helpful information, no sales pitch.
Post articles from your website.
Recommended, but requires additional spend: Outreach (using a service like Lead Cookie) to build connections between your salespeople and prospects in your industry niche.

Facebook

As the dominant social media platform, Facebook has a huge reach, although it’s often not the most effective platform for B2B industrial and manufacturing marketing. If you want to be active on Facebook, we recommend doing this after you have a solid footing in LinkedIn, and following these practices:

Remarket to site visitors, people who have engaged with your Facebook page and/or posts, and your email list.
Post articles from your website.
Post culture and career-oriented content.

Business Listings & Review Sites

Be sure to claim your business and create business listings or pages on LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook. Update them as needed, so they don’t contain obsolete information. A Google Business Profile is especially helpful for attracting customers in your own geographic area.

Ask customers to create testimonials for you by writing reviews on Google or the B2B resource Clutch. These can be displayed on your website, as well.

PPC and online advertising

PPC is one of the least understood methods of digital marketing. Many marketers have been burned by how easy Google makes it to launch a very untargeted, broad campaign that generates way too many clicks from unqualified buyers and blazes through your budget with little to show for it. However, a very finely targeted and specific PPC campaign can be a great complement to your SEO efforts, essentially buying top placement for the high-priority keywords for which your website does not yet rank. Online advertising via display ads can also be an inexpensive way to create greater visibility and awareness within your target audiences.

Google PPC Ads

Nearly 70 percent of industrial marketing leaders are using pay-per-click (PPC) to attract new audiences. While every company benefits from the long-term investment that organic SEO requires, we also often recommend paid ads to supplement SEO efforts in instances where organic rankings lack. Paid campaigns can include text-based search ads as well as display, banner ads, shopping ads, and video ads. These campaigns are highly customizable and can be adapted to any budget. Here are our top tips for PPC ads:

Use tightly focused, high-intent keywords.
Use specific ad copy that weeds out people outside of the niche you serve while attracting those within the niche you do serve.
Target specific ad schedules that make sense for your business, whether that’s running 24/7, only during business hours, etc. Geo target with intent as well, looking at state, city, DMA, or country-wide options.

Landing pages with full navigation that allow users to browse the site and learn more are best for complex sales or situations in which the prospect can’t make a decision based solely on what’s on the landing page. If the landing page is aimed solely toward driving downloads of a white paper or another quick transaction, it’s okay to hide navigation on the landing page, but do still offer ways to access deeper information. Make sure that calls to action (CTAs) are prominent as soon as the user lands on the page, prompting them to convert.
If you’re currently not ranking on your brand name, consider a Brand Campaign that includes your company name, product names, and even members of the team (for lawyers and doctors). Also include common misspellings.This campaign type will display your ads to users when they search for the company names of your competitors.
Ensure you always specify what Google calls “negative” keywords, to prevent your ad from being served for searches on your brand name or any other keyword that could potentially cannibalize your budget, including terms that sound like they are related to your business, but aren’t. If your company engineers custom industrial filtration systems, for example, you don’t want to be found by people searching for residential furnace filters or air filters.
Continue to optimize the account by identifying, through consistent audits, what is not working; take spend away from that and move it toward things that are working.

Google Display Ads

Google display ads have a strong visual component and are served to people when they’re viewing content, not when they’re actively typing in search terms. These ads can be narrowly targeted, and you can build a very specific custom audience. We recommend using these ads to remarket to visitors to your website, and to target those who visit competitor URLs, especially service and/or case study pages.

Have An Ongoing Conversion Rate Optimization Website Strategy

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is an ongoing process. We recommend these activities:

Track conversions, as well as lead quality, soft conversions, bounce rate, and engagement metrics—overall and by channel.
Create deal quality reports. Get feedback from your sales team weekly on the quality of conversions, to deliver better leads more efficiently over time.
Review sales performance and increase activities that are working. Build-in experiments, and reduce activities that aren’t working
Conduct a monthly analytics review and a quarterly deep dive and re-prioritization.

Tools that we use for analytics and other tasks include:

Google Analytics
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
SEO auditing tools—Moz, Siteimprove
Keyword tools—SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Buzzsumo
Who should manage a manufacturing company’s digital marketing programs?

Who should manage a manufacturing company’s digital marketing programs?

Great question. I’m writing this from the point of view of the owner of a marketing agency that specializes in digital marketing and websites for B2B industrial and technical companies, so you might expect me to say that it should always be us. But that’s not the case.

We’ve found that the companies with the most successful marketing outcomes and the most impactful relationships with agencies like Windmill have someone on the internal team that “owns” marketing. There really needs to be a person inside the manufacturing company who intimately understands the products and services, the business plan, the subject matter experts, and the trajectory of the company. However, it’s rare for us to work with a client that has a well-staffed, robust marketing team in-house.

That’s where we come in.

Your marketing team knows what you want to accomplish, but you might lack the resources or technical expertise to create and implement a strategic and prioritized plan. You also don’t have the luxury of seeing how digital marketing programs can play out for a wide variety of other manufacturing companies whose goals, needs, and challenges are similar in many ways, though the specific industries are different. Since we do have this panoramic view of how manufacturing digital marketing programs work for other companies like yours, we can act as an expert guide, helping to craft a targeted strategy and tactics that can be implemented by our team, your team, or a combination, depending on the resources and bandwidth that you have available.

How much should manufacturers spend on digital marketing?

Another great question! There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here, either.

A program with a lot of paid ads/PPC will of course cost more due to ad spend, and the more you can do in-house, the lower the cost. Digital marketing pricing will vary based on how many concurrent tactics and strategies are in play and how resources and activities are divided between your in-house team and the agency team, if you’re using an agency. Client engagements with Windmill Strategy tend to be neither the least expensive nor the most expensive. Our programs are uniquely designed for each client based on the makeup and resources of the client team, and the areas in which Windmill will be actively affecting performance (how much work we’ll do monthly, which correlates to the business size).

How to get started with a digital marketing program:

The most important part of getting started is taking action. While some agencies and in-house teams get bogged down with initial assessments and benchmarking that can take 6 months or more, we believe it’s better to get clear on where you want to go, even at a high level, and then start taking incremental steps to get there.

The key steps are to internally agree on what your most important goals are and what short- and long-term success looks like. Then determine whether you can do the work in-house or need to research an agency to partner with.

Our recommended first step for manufacturing marketing teams, whether they plan to implement the work in-house or with a partner, is to consult with an outside agency for a strategic plan and advice, to build a prioritized roadmap that can be executed by one or both parties.

At Windmill, we’ve developed an offering called the Digital Marketing Strategy Quick Start. This diagnostic approach helps you better understand your goals and unique situation to create a short-term digital strategy that will inform the recommended monthly engagement to follow. This engagement delivers:

Strategic recommendations focused on the highest near-term priorities and KPIs
A 3-month roadmap for execution by you, by us, or a combination
Tactics to improve your marketing without a costly website redesign
A holistic view that includes the website, SEO, PPC, social, email marketing, and more
Access to senior digital marketing and website specialists without a long-term commitment

Take the first step to improve your marketing: Learn more about our Digital Marketing Strategy Quick Start.