Marketing for contract manufacturing: Build your brand in 2024!

Contract manufacturing is projected to rise 6.6% yearly to fulfill demand and support businesses to scale.   

As you have seen during Covid, the instant scalability of In-Vitro Diagnostics kits and vaccines results from contract manufacturing support.   

However, increased competition will make survival challenging. And to get saved from the horrifying situation of the stagnant pipeline, you need to adopt the modern marketing approach.

As per the Gartner study, by 2025, 80% of B2B interaction between you and buyers will occur via digital channels. 

Many contract manufacturers do traditional marketing but are failing, as reported, 50% of contract manufacturers.   

So, the winning solution lies in adopting modern marketing strategies focusing on a customer-centric approach.   

So, nowadays, your prospects browse your websites, research competitions, and look for online reviews before even raising their hand.      

If you are among the potential contract manufacturers aiming to take your business to the next level, this blog covers actionable modern marketing strategies for you with best practices! 

Benefits of implementing modern marketing for contract manufacturing business  

Modern marketing for contract manufacturers proved to be profitable, and here are the reasons why manufacturers started with digital marketing and never went back:  

1. Increases brand awareness  

Contract manufacturers can establish a brand among their target market and thus increase their business opportunities by utilizing digital channels like social media, websites, and search engines. 

Practices like hosting webinars and participating in online events let you present how your contract manufacturing business helps the other company to manage their supply chain disruption better, achieving targets and scalability.  

2. Position yourself as a thought leader  

With 85% of manufacturers using content marketing makes it one of the most efficient ways to increase your brand awareness.  

Moreover, channels like dedicated contact manufacturing business websites, social media, and emails are a great way to showcase your expertise, creativity, and value to potential customers.   

3. Attract new business  

Digital marketing practices will let contract manufacturers reach a more comprehensive range of audiences and generate more leads.  

4. Close more deals    

77% of manufacturer marketers experience a higher conversion rate due to successful digital marketing campaigns.  

Moreover, you can track and analyze your campaign performance to gain valuable insights. Also, it ensures that you always drive the campaigns in the best direction.  

5. Increase customer loyalty   

Digital marketing, being a data-driven strategy, allows you to track your customer behavior, preferences, and buying intent, enabling you to deliver a personalized experience.    

This enhances customer satisfaction and increases loyalty over time. 

5 Steps to craft a comprehensive marketing strategy for contract manufacturers  

Step 1. Identify your ideal target market and define ICP 

As a contract manufacturing marketer, you aim to generate leads or increase brand awareness.   

In any case, the primary step is to have a clear understanding of your ideal target market and ideal customer profile (ICP).  

Your ideal target market will simply comprise people interested in becoming your buyer or wanting your products. 

Answering the following questions can help you determine your ideal target market and ICP. 

• What do these people look like? (Age, gender, geographic location, etc.) 
• What are their eminent interests and preferences? 
• How can they be a good fit for my products? 

This lets you identify their unique needs, pain points, and preferences. Further, you can use it to build your buyer persona and offer personalized experiences through your marketing efforts. 

Step 2: Discover your market positioning, value propositions, and USPs 

The next step is to evaluate where your business stands in the market and discover your value propositions and USPs to strategies your marketing plan and craft a meaningful brand message.  

You can do this by practicing the following steps:   

• Perform a SWOT analysis to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses.  
• Conduct thorough research to evaluate your market landscape, such as market size, customer demands, and trends.  
• Conduct customer surveys for your customer feedback to determine the areas of improvement plus your strengths.  
• Do a competitive analysis to determine your competitor’s weaknesses and turn them into your USPs.  
• Define your value propositions based on how you can be a problem solver to your target prospects.  

Based on the above information, refine your buyer persona and craft an impressive brand message to communicate, gain their trust, and build credibility.   

Step 3: Conduct market research to discover an effective marketing approach 

You need to be updated on where your target audience is searching for products like you and their buying behavior to determine the right marketing approach.  

For instance, 84% of industrial marketers have increased their digital marketing budget considering the boom of data-driven marketing.

This also indicates the rise of inbound and digital marketing tactics. Moreover, it is beneficial as 98% of manufacturers generate sales-qualified leads with digital marketing.   

So, we can say that the inbound and digital marketing approach is promising for the contract manufacturing business.

Step 4: Implement the ideal marketing approach to drive potential leads.

As already discovered, inbound marketing is a potential way for you to drive leads and establish a brand.

It mainly focuses on developing educational content to help potential customers discover or know you better.  

Produce relevant content that adds meaning to your customer’s business. This mainly includes education and informative content resources.  

Moreover, you can establish trust with a good social media presence and engage with prospects to discover their pain points and challenges. Then, build content showcasing how your product is a problem solver to them.  

You must leverage this content through varied digital channels like landing pages, email marketing, social platforms, and more to generate leads for your business.  

There are other digital marketing and inbound strategies that we’ve covered in detail later in this blog, so stay tuned. 

Step 5: Optimize tasks and define marketing goals  

The best part about digital marketing is that you can analyze your efforts precisely.

So, leverage smart analytics and conversion tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and marketing automation software to measure your marketing responses.  

Based on these results, measure the ROI and determine the potential digital marketing channel for your contract manufacturing business.

Also, setting your marketing goals and objectives would be difficult when starting with marketing efforts. However, once you know your potential channels, you can easily define your SMART goals and measure success.

6 Best marketing strategies for contract manufacturing businesses 

Leverage these modern marketing tactics to increase your potential for creating a dedicated place in the industry and enhance your business opportunity scope. 

1. Building a dedicated contract manufacturing website and implementing SEO 

A dedicated website is effective in multiple ways, from getting an online presence to improving audience engagement, inbound lead generation, brand awareness, and more.

A dedicated website lets you showcase your expertise, USPs, and best work in one place. Websites are crucial for any business; they are the primary foundation of digital presence.  

Building a good website isn’t the end but rather the first step toward business growth.

For a boost in quality web traffic and lead generation, you need to make efforts in content and optimization of web landing pages for search engines.  

Here’s the checklist to optimize our contract manufacturing business website:  

• Web copy and lead-generating content: This will include the content of landing pages, eBooks, guides, videos, whitepapers, infographics, case studies, and everything that provides for your unique value propositions and draws your potential audience’s attention.  
• Testimonials & case studies: Your website should present social proof, such as successful case studies and happy customer testimonials that help you build trust among your potential customers.  
• Images quality: Your images should be of high resolution, so you don’t miss presenting your manufactured products and related information most amusingly. However, ensure this shouldn’t affect your website loading time.  
• Keywords, meta tags, and descriptions: Don’t miss out on the targeted keywords and HTML tags in your web content, as this will be helpful for SERPs to crawl and be indexed easily.  
• SEO-friendly URLs: Ensure your website URLs have relevant keywords. Make them concise and use hyphens to separate long words for readability and SEO.  
• Page speed: You should optimize your website loading time as this impact better user experience. You can do it better by managing your data loads (images, content, cache, and everything related).  
• Navigation: Organize your web content and other information properly so visitors can easily check your products, services, and every key detail.  
• CTAs: This will let you leverage your website to generate leads. Make sure to create compelling CTAs that get clicked and also place them strategically. For instance, placing multiple CTA on your high-traffic web page can enhance the chances of lead generation.  
• Mobile-friendly website: Considering over 80% smartphone penetration, optimizing your website for mobile phones is necessary.  
• SSL certificate and HTTPS encryption: These will secure your website and protect your user data. Moreover, this also establishes a sense of trust among your audience and positively impacts your ranking.  

Place your social media link to your website to grow your social profiles and present multiple customer support systems such as Live Chat, email, and phone for a better customer experience.  

2. Social media marketing 

Leveraging social media marketing ensures you build loyal followers and win their trust. Further, it fosters trust and credibility among your audience.   

Using potential social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., are a great way to stay close to your customers.   

PacMoore, a contract manufacturing company in the food industry, believes that even a contract manufacturing business should have a social media presence.

Here are the three main reasons why: 

• It is helpful to optimize your website for SERPs (search engine result pages.)  
• It lets you maintain a good relationship with your current and potential customers.  
• It helps to build and support a brand identity that can help you drive more business opportunities.  

Moreover, you join online communities on these social media platforms to connect with your potential clients. For instance, there is a big community of 18K members for contract manufacturers, namely, “Private Label and Contract Manufacturing.”   

Stats reveal that 93% of manufacturing marketers use LinkedIn and believe it’s the most organic social media platform for B2B.  

Explore the PacMoore, a contract manufacturing company LinkedIn profile to get an idea for building yours next:

Hence, every contract manufacturing business should evaluate its brand, discover the ideal social platform where your target audience is massively present, and try to be there!

Moreover, it is vital to know your potential social platform’s algorithms, trends, and features to bring out the best results.

3. Content marketing  

Content marketing has the potential to uplift any business in terms of generating leads, brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, and gaining trust.  

This is why 66% of manufacturing marketers have implemented content strategies, and most contract manufacturers follow the same.  

Content manufacturing is all about creating and sharing persuading content. You can create blog posts, whitepapers, videos, case studies, and other content types to attract potential customers.   

Content that solves a prospect’s problems is informative and relatable and will drive more business opportunities to your table.  

Because such content showcases the company’s expertise, builds credibility, and increases customer engagement.  

4. Email marketing  

Email marketing is a cost-effective way to nurture leads and maintain relationships with prospects and existing clients.  

Build an email list of potential clients to send targeted and personalized emails highlighting your services, industry updates, success stories, and special offers to help you discover promising business opportunities.

Also, you can segment your email list based on categories like industries, specific product queries, product updates, and more.  

Then, you can set up a personalized campaign to target these accounts to get more business opportunities.  

Do you know how you can get better results with email marketing? Ever heard about targeting specific accounts, aka account-based marketing?  

Here you will identify your key target accounts from your contact management data and create customized marketing campaigns tailored to their needs.   

This approach allows you to focus your resources and efforts on high-value prospects, increasing the chances of conversion.  

Identify your high-value target account. Then, develop a personalized ABM campaign with tailored content, case studies, and targeted ads specific to their industry.

This way, getting ideal prospects for your business would become possible and easier.

5. Paid advertising 

Paid advertising is an online marketing approach where businesses pay to display their valued ads (promotional content) to reach their potential target audience.

This is an inorganic marketing strategy and is much faster to increase brand visibility and drive massive traffic.

There are mainly three kinds of paid advertising:

PPC (pay per click): You pay when your ads get a click.

PPI (pay per impression): You pay when you receive 1000 views (impressions) on your ads.

Display ads: These are banner ads; here, you can display a photo or visual as your ads, whereas PPC and PPI ads are text-based. The cost may vary per click, impressions, and lead acquisitions.

Paid advertising is a great strategy to build the first contact with your target audience when you’re new.

Stats reveal that a business earns $3 on every 1.60$ they spend on Google Ads.  

However, paid advertising can be called a cost-burning strategy if you don’t know how to execute it. So, hire a paid ad expert to move ahead with this channel. 

6. Video marketing 

Videos can effectively convey complex manufacturing concepts and leave a lasting impression on viewers.  

Create a captivating video showcasing your contract manufacturing capabilities. Include footage of your state-of-the-art machinery, skilled technicians, and quality control processes.   

Share these videos on your website, social media platforms, and video-sharing platforms like YouTube.    

Highlight your commitment to precision and on-time delivery through video testimonials. Share these social proof videos on your website’s homepage and social media channels to engage and inform potential clients. 

Conclusion: Drive business by growing digitally!

Marketing has impacted the manufacturing industry in numerous ways, particularly with the rise of digital marketing tactics.  

As per the research, 67% of the buyer’s journey is online, highlighting the importance of a digital presence.   

The digital marketing trend is on the boom and expected to continue, so contract manufacturers need to adopt the same.  

You must leverage channels like websites, social media, and email to drive brand awareness, generate leads, and increase sales.  

Moreover, digital marketing lets you collect valuable data and insights into your target audience, helping to improve your marketing campaigns and outreach activities.   

Plus, it will be helpful for contract manufacturing businesses to survive the rising competition.

To improve your marketing and customer relationship management, you can invest in smart technology like CRM and marketing automation.

Frequently asked questions