11 Emerging manufacturing marketing trends to follow in 2024!

A survey reveals the steady increase in marketing budget in the manufacturing business from 6% in 2021 to 9.2% in 2022.

This is because of the current business trend of the increased role of marketing in driving sales for manufacturing.  

Moreover, about 52.4% of customers in the manufacturing industry prefer a seller-free buyer’s journey. 

Moving with the marketing trends is crucial for manufacturers to build an effective strategy and allocate the correct budget. 

First, let’s dive into the importance of rolling with the trends and then explore the top 11 trends in manufacturing marketing.

Why follow the manufacturing marketing trends? 

You must keep up with the right trends at the right time to surpass your competitors. The importance of keeping up with manufacturing marketing trends are: 

1. It helps in understanding changing customer needs 

Knowing your customer’s wants can help you modify your product features, quality, and pricing. 

For example, if you see a trend that promotes eco-friendly products, you can think of using sustainable and organic materials in manufacturing. 

2. It helps in identifying new opportunities 

Analyzing marketing trends and demands in terms of technologies, potential clients’ preferences, challenges, etc., can help you strategize new product categories and re-enter new markets with the same. 

For instance, if you notice a trend that manufacturing companies are offering virtual tours of the product’s features and functioning, you can also try to see if it works for you. 

3. It helps in improving customer engagement 

Trends highlight customers’ preferences and behavior, which can help you optimize your marketing campaigns.

For example, if most of your audiences search for the product on social media platforms, you must invest time boosting your social media presence to multiply marketing results. 

Following manufacturing industry marketing trends helps businesses connect with potential customers, strengthen relationships, and drive sales.

11 Useful manufacturing marketing trends that you must adopt! 

Keeping up with the new marketing techniques is one of the key challenges for manufacturing marketers. However, following these trends, you can overcome all your challenges and surpass your competition. 

Trend 1: Demand for better customer experience 

The manufacturing buying journey has changed extensively. Here is the image of an evolving buyer’s journey. 

Earlier, the marketing role was restricted and had little impact on driving sales.  

But now, as you can see, the role of marketing is stretched from consideration to evaluation in the modern buying funnel. 

Nowadays, your customers do a lot of research and compare well before even speaking with your sales reps.  

So, it is high time to give the best customer experience that supports them in the initial stage of the buyer’s journey.

You can improve your customer experiences to boost your marketing results. 

• Optimize your website 

Websites have become a primary source for brands to connect with their potential audience, generate leads and showcase their products/services highlighting the USPs.  

The 2021 Industrial Buyer’s Search Habits survey reveals that 40% of industrial buyers make decisions based on the quality of your site. So, you must have a website that displays your product.  

Plus, it should offer an exceptional user experience with a site loading speed of under 2 seconds.  

• Add ways to connect  

Present RFQs (requests for quotations) or Web Forms to your services pages so your web visitors can easily connect.  

Moreover, you can introduce a Live Chat system/Chatbot to your site to answer our web visitors’ queries and enhance web engagement.  

• Make your website mobile friendly 

Over 90% of internet users globally use their mobile phones to go online, so make sure your customers can easily access your site on their phones.  

Moreover, this trend of giving better customer experience will help manufacturing companies step toward direct-to-customer sales and increase profit margins.   

Trend 2: Personalization 

Gartner predicts that by 2024, companies that provide total experience will outshine competitors across key satisfaction metrics by 25%.  

This is reasonably achievable for businesses offering a personalized buyer’s journey approach. Moreover, as 63% of marketers observed, personalization increases conversion rates.  

Nowadays, customers seek brands that offer personalized products aligning with their preferences.

Therefore, manufacturing firms can make implement personalized in various manners like… 

• Personalize your marketing campaigns: Segment your client and target with personalized content specific to your segmented audience, as we do in account-based marketing to drive potential conversion. 
• Presenting tailored products to their customers: With the support of the right tools like CRM and Google Analytics to harness data to discover your prospect’s challenges, needs, and preferences to customize your products and boost your customer satisfaction.  

Personalization is a must-follow trend for marketers in manufacturing companies, as personalizing communication and experiences make your prospects feel listened to and valued.

Trend 3: Inbound marketing boom 

Inbound marketing aligns with the current B2B buyer’s behavior, as 57% of purchasing decisions are made before a customer contacts the supplier.   

Also, a stat reveals that 98% of manufacturers have devoted landing pages to converting visitors into leads.  

Strategies such as website/landing page building, content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, and data analysis fall under inbound marketing.  

There are tremendous reasons why inbound marketing is in the trend, as it allows manufacturing companies to…   

• Drive high-quality web traffic and hot leads with digital marketing lead-generation tactics.  
• Boost their online presence and establish trust and credibility among their target audience by sharing high-quality content.  
• Improve marketing results because actions are data-driven.  
• Establish thought leadership and position your brand as an industry leader to drive the right opportunity.  

In all, inbound marketing is purely taking a customer-centric approach to attract leads that can convert into deals for the business.   

Trend 4: Making use of content marketing to the fullest 

Content marketing has gotten into trend post-covid and has immensely helped manufacturers. 

66% of manufacturer marketers have implemented a content strategy to generate more leads and build credibility and trust.  

Posting blogs, case studies, white papers, and other resources help companies to leverage their brand as a thought leader. 

You can create audio (podcasts) and video content, along with textual content, as these are also in the trends. 

With the help of varied content, you can engage customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey to push them to move further in the marketing funnel. 

But unfortunately, only 36% of manufacturing marketers craft specific to each stage of their buyer’s journey. 

As per a 2021 report by Content Marketing Insititute, manufacturing marketers shared their strong opinion on their documented content marketing strategy for their organization.

Have a close look at that.  

Provide valuable content to keep the audience aware of industry insights, new products, innovations, dos and don’ts, etc., making you the knowledge hub of the industry.

Related read: 7 Ways to leverage content marketing for generating high-quality leads!

Trend 5: SEO and SEM strategy to drive potential website traffic 

Must adopt SEO and SEM trends for your manufacturing business marketing as it is the primary way to improve instead boost your online visibility and drive more traffic to get more business opportunities. 

SEO (search engine optimization) lets you optimize your website with industry and product-specific keywords, meta tags, and high-quality content. 

It also involves optimization on the technical front, like checking your website loading speed, user experience, and mobile responsiveness, enhancing your customer experience. 

Moreover, SEO improves lead generation.  

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) involves paid methods to reach the target audience through paid advertising campaigns. 

Pay-per-click (an SEM tactic) lets you display your ads to potential clients by bidding on relevant keywords. However, you must be good with budget availability for implementing a paid advertising strategy. 

The best part about these digital marketing tactics is that you can evaluate and discover the loopholes to optimize for better results.

Trend 6: Account-based marketing 

Account-based marketing is on trend because it includes all the elements that can get you a conversion: personalization and specific targeting. Plus allows campaign tracking to identify every roadblock.

There are numerous channels across which you can implement an account-based marketing strategy: 

• Email marketing to target key decision-makers with personalized campaigns  
• Crafting tailored content that resonates with your high-value target accounts 
• Connecting with decision makers via social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter. 
• Conducting personalized webinars that address the challenges of your high-value accounts. 

Apart from the above, the ABM strategy can improve paid advertising, direct emailing, and event marketing.

Trend 7: Augmented reality (AR) & virtual reality (VR) 

Marketers can use these technologies to enhance their customer experiences by presenting the product values more understandably. 

For instance, with virtual reality, Adidas made it possible for their customers to see how shoes look on their feet! 

There are innumerable ways augmented reality and virtual reality is helping marketers to let their customer visualize the products and understand the values better. 

Mind it that improving customer experience will help to get better conversion.

Trend 8: Leveraging the Power of social media marketing 

Social media is one of the best inbound marketing strategies that is on trend.

According to a Thomasnet survey, manufacturers increased lead generation by improving their social media search by 14%. 

Creating and sharing engaging content on social media platforms can build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. 

Strategizing social media posts and forms of content is something you must practice—marketers who used paid platforms found LinkedIn and Facebook the best among all the available platforms.  

In all, utilizing various social media tactics fully will help you achieve your business goals and generate new leads.

Trend 9: Sustainable marketing 

Product promotional practices mentioning social and environmental well-being fall under sustainable marketing. 

Must have heard many clothing brands using tags like “cruelty-free”. This is a sustainability marketing strategy. 

Adopting this trend helps win potential customers’ attention by showcasing yourself as an environment-friendly brand. 

You will drive all the potential eco-conscious customers; moreover, it boosts brand reputation and credibility. 

Additionally, it favors innovation and will help you attract socially active manufacturing partners and investors for your business growth. 

Trend 10: Marketing automation to boost productivity 

Marketing automation has the potential to multiply your outcomes; about 84% of marketers have achieved their top marketing goals using this tool.  

But manufacturing marketers are yet to adopt this trend as a study reveals that only 30% of manufacturing companies are leveraging the Marketing Automation platform. 

This tool lets you automate tedious activities such as lead capturing, lead qualification, meeting scheduling, etc. Moreover, you can automate your email campaigns to boost results. 

To uncover how marketing automation boosts ROI, see our focused guide on marketing automation for manufacturers.

Trend 11: Data-driven marketing to upgrade strategy 

Data-driven marketing is leveraging customer data to understand their preferences, challenges, behavior, and motivation to plan your strategy.

It has potential to boost your marketing result, but unfortunately, data is one of the most under-utilized assets, as per 87% of marketers. 

However, businesses using data-driven strategies drive 5-8 times better ROI than those who don’t. 

This is why 40% of businesses plan to invest more of their budget in data-driven marketing. 

Data-driven marketing is promising, and you must adopt this trend to fuel your marketing game and discover almost everything about your customer’s buying intent and influencing factors. 

Moreover, you can leverage data to boost your campaign effectiveness with personalization. 

You must consider the above 11 manufacturing marketing trends while building a strategic marketing plan or optimizing the active one to bring some game-changing results! 

Conclusion: Adopt the ultimate trend of digital transformation! 

Along with the above, some other marketing trends that a manufacturing company should consider are video marketing, website responsive design, page speed, and email marketing.  

Also, most manufacturing marketing trends indicate the ultimate trend of digital transformation. 

Manufacturing businesses are investing in digital assets like CRM platforms, digital marketing tools, automation tools, and digital analytics software.     

These tools help you make informed decisions and align your marketing and sales team, boosting business growth.

For instance, investing in a smart CRM platform like Salesmate allows you to automate your lead generation, set drip campaigns, visualize opportunities with the sales pipeline, and make informed decisions with Sales Intelligence.