You are currently viewing Industrial Marketing Basics: Are You Doing More with Less?

Industrial Marketing Basics: Are You Doing More with Less?

At a time when companies are reluctant to add payroll, industrial marketing automation helps manufacturers add capacity.

Advances in automation aren’t just for manufacturing anymore. Automation will soon become mainstream in the marketing arena, and can result in serious efficiency gains (think, cost savings) for companies.

I’m willing to make a bold statement and say that all industrial companies automate at least some part of their manufacturing process. Automation technology has become commonplace in different forms across various sectors of industry because it adds efficiency gains to many processes.

Automation drastically cuts back on costly production errors and allows manufacturers to do more with less. In many instances, the “less” is reduced labor cost.

With so many manufacturers focusing on improving their product and processes, many often fail to improve their marketing programs. This is an unfortunate truth, and I would pose the following question:

“Why would you spend significant sums of money to engineer and produce a cutting-edge product, only to use stale and outdated technology to sell it?”

Marketing automation programs serve as the link between marketing and sales teams. In many cases, gathered data automatically flows over to your CRM system automatically arming sales teams with as much data as possible before a lead or prospect is ever contacted directly.

Imagine the following situation:

You have 10,000 new prospects that you want to contact. How can you possibly reach them all? Even at an unrealistically-quick 1-minute per phone call pace, calling each prospect would take  21 work days. At a time when companies are reluctant to add additional labor expenses, would this make sense?

Obviously, it’s a bit of an extreme example. But imagine being able to reach those 10,000 prospects with a custom message tailored to each individual, based on previous interactions that the prospect has had with your company – in seconds.

When someone reads your newsletter, downloads a brochure or visits a pricing page they can automatically receive an email with a tailored message. It doesn’t get any better than that.

When it comes to industrial marketing, it’s physically impossible to “do it all.” Marketing automation is never going to fully replace people, but when you want to up your marketing game without adding a ton of expense, marketing automation is part of the answer. If you could increase penetration and reduce cost, why wouldn’t you?