A marketing strategy for manufacturers: how to build one that survives a long sales cycle

Step one: decide which work you actually want

Manufacturers are often reluctant to narrow. When the machines need filling, all work looks like good work. But a strategy that tries to appeal to every possible buyer ends up appealing to none of them, and the ones you attract are usually the price-led ones.

Look at the last two years of orders honestly. Which jobs made money, ran smoothly, repeated, and came from customers you would happily take more of? That cluster is your strategy's starting point, not the theoretical market you would like to serve.

Step two: position against the firms you lose to

Positioning is not a strapline. It is the answer to a specific question: when a buyer chooses the other supplier, what did they believe about them that they did not believe about you?

Find that out properly. Ask customers who chose you why. Ask prospects who did not. The answers are usually uncomfortable and always more useful than a workshop.

A workable position needs to be:

• True, and provable with evidence a sceptical engineer would accept
• Different from what your three closest competitors say about themselves
• Relevant to something the buyer is actually worried about
• Simple enough that a procurement lead can repeat it internally without notes

If your positioning statement would still make sense with a competitor's logo on it, you do not have one yet.

Step three: accept how long the cycle is and plan around it

Industrial buying cycles run from several months to several years. Specification decisions get locked in long before anyone contacts a supplier, and much of the research happens without you knowing it is happening.

The strategic consequence is that your marketing has to be present and credible during the period when nobody is talking to you. That means content and visibility that work continuously, not campaigns that switch on when the order book looks thin.

It also means budget has to be steady. Stop-start marketing in a long-cycle business is close to worthless: you switch off during the eighteen months that were about to pay off.

Step four: choose few channels and commit to them

Most manufacturers would be better off doing three things properly than nine things occasionally. The right three depend on where your buyers actually are, which is usually a shorter list than the marketing world suggests.

For most UK manufacturers the core is:

• Search visibility: capability, application and comparison pages that get found at the specifying stage
• Technical content: guides and case studies that build credibility and get referenced internally
• LinkedIn: a steady, credible presence where your buyers and specifiers genuinely spend time
• One or two well-chosen trade events, treated as part of a system with proper follow up
• Existing customer marketing: the cheapest growth most manufacturers ignore entirely

That last one deserves more attention than it gets. Most manufacturers know a fraction of what their existing customers buy elsewhere, and almost none market to them deliberately.

Step five: sort out the two-audience problem

If you sell through distributors, specifiers or main contractors, your strategy has to name both audiences and say what each is for. Making yourself easy to sell is one job. Making the end user ask for you by name is a different one, with different material and a different measure of success.

Manufacturers that only market to the channel find their position erodes quietly over years, because nothing stops the channel switching to whoever offers a better margin next year.

Step six: make sales and marketing agree on what a good lead is

A large share of the friction between sales and marketing in industrial businesses comes down to an undefined term. Marketing counts enquiries. Sales counts viable opportunities. Nobody has written down the difference.

Agree, in writing, what qualifies: sector, volume, geography, application, budget indication. Then agree what marketing hands over and what sales does with it within what timeframe. This is unglamorous and it removes most of the argument.

Step seven: measure the things a long cycle allows you to measure

A manufacturer's marketing scorecard should include:

• Quality-weighted enquiries rather than raw enquiry counts
• Pipeline influenced by marketing, not just pipeline created
• Visibility for the terms specifiers actually search
• Whether you are being invited to quote earlier than you were
• Win rate against your named competitors, tracked over time
• Revenue from existing customers, which marketing should be moving too

Report these quarterly rather than monthly. A long-cycle business measured monthly will always look like it is failing, right up until it is cancelled.

What a finished strategy looks like on paper

It should be short. A manufacturing marketing strategy that runs to forty slides will not be read twice.

The useful version fits on a few pages and states:

• The customers and applications you are targeting, and the ones you are not
• The position: what you want those buyers to believe, and the proof
• The three or four channels you are committing to for the next twelve months
• What each channel is for, and who owns it
• The measures, and how often they get reviewed
• The budget, and what it does not cover

If it does not say what you are not doing, it is not a strategy yet. That is the part that survives the busy quarter.