Strategy, Product & Competitive
Industrial marketing sculpts corporate strategy priorities into actionable plans that are built around buyers' priorities and objectives. Product marketing helps to optimize for fit and pricing while competitive intelligence informs decisions and shapes sales tactics.
These both precede any marketing tactics but also are continuous industrial marketing functions that require collaboration across departments.
Branding, Content & PR
Sometimes lumped into marketing communications, these functions drive digital lead generation. They focus on crafting the message and image that the company projects. They are copywriting, image and video-intensive and require consistency, precision, and detailed planning.
Every output should explicitly support strategy by design and planning to achieve SEO and lead generation objectives and contribute to lead generation and sales enablement. Contemporary public relations is a content distribution play, Manufacturing Journalism™ guides powerful content, and content marketing answers the questions buyers ask themselves.
Technology & Data
Industrial marketing is built around technology and upon data. Marketing technology including marketing automation, conversational marketing, video, email optimization, SEO, and content management systems must be integrated with sales technology including CRM and sales force automation.
Prospect and customer databases represent valuable corporate assets to be carefully maintained and enriched. Third-party data sources, including intent data, provide contacts and insights to fuel outbound sales.
Marketing Operations & Sales Enablement
All of this takes a lot of work! That in turn takes special skills, outsource resources, and a team of folks whose job is to keep it all properly organized and updated - we call that Marketing Operations.
And a huge part of their job is to help the sales team find more prospects, create more projects and drive more revenue. That's achieved through sales enablement.
Analytics
Forget the old saying about not knowing which half of your marketing dollars are wasted. Properly configured technology enables real-time reporting. Strong business acumen helps to craft dashboards, reports, and alerts that keep each management level of corporate, sales, and marketing teams aligned and informed for proactive action.
Closed-loop reporting attributes every dollar of revenue to associated marketing investments.
Trade Shows & Trade Journal Advertising
Yes! Of course, these are still part of your marketing plan. But they're a smaller part, and they're built on the same pillars of technology and strategy as the rest of your industrial marketing.
While integrated industrial marketing will drive results, and you'll likely reallocate resources from sales and traditional spend like trade shows, you'll optimize these around your tracking to measure the return and effectiveness of each show, campaign and publisher.
Partnerships
Technology companies have found that partnerships help them access audiences and markets with referral authority and low cost. Brandscaping content programs, industry knowledge graph collaboration, and event coordination with adjacent technology vendors can yield big results, but take specialized coordination.
