Is your marketing technology and automation advancing at the same pace as your products and processes?

Manufacturers often invest significant sums of money in technology that will improve the quality and design of their products and processes. Unfortunately, I find that the same investment is not made in industrial marketing technology, which has advanced just as much, if not more, than manufacturing technology.

Perhaps manufacturers are so caught up in improving their products and processes that they are simply unaware of all of the advances that have been made in industrial marketing. But ignorance is no excuse!

Just as production advances and efficiencies result in cost savings for manufacturers, so too do advances in marketing technology.

Marketing automation allows companies to accomplish more with less – less time, less manpower, less money. Sound familiar? It sounds a lot like automating a production process, doesn’t it?

Time-consuming days of piecing together data in a spreadsheet, and manual follow-through are going away. Marketing automation will seamlessly manage each of your marketing campaigns, capture your prospects’ behavior, provide personalized lead-nurturing responses as well as measure the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Marketing automation software has made it easier than ever to monitor marketing ROI by gathering and sharing more data than ever before. These programs serve as the link between marketing and sales teams, automatically arming sales teams with as much data as possible before a lead or prospect is ever contacted.

I’ve seen companies initiate marketing programs that they never had thought possible due to the efficiencies that marketing automation offers.

But it’s not just marketing automation that can benefit your company. As the world moves away from print and toward digital (print still has it’s place though), take stock of your materials and see what can be converted to a digital format for download from your site.

And speaking of your site, how does it measure up to your competition? Are you offering eCommerce? Do the text and graphics make it look like something an 8th grader made as a class project?

The bottom line is that in an industry where technology and R&D investments can give you a significant advantage over your competition, why aren’t you seeking the same advantage from a marketing standpoint? At a time when industrial marketing (or B2B) lags behind consumer marketing when it comes to adopting technology, the bar is so low that even the smallest of actions could propel you above your competition.

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