7 Go-To Marketing Tools for Manufacturing & Engineering Companies

Marketing is different when it comes to advanced manufacturing and engineering firms.

You don’t just need to spread the word about your products and services. You must explain how they work and highlight their true value to potential customers.

This calls for some specialist tools. If you’re wondering about the best marketing strategies for engineering companies, this article will give you plenty of good ideas to reduce your workload, engage your audience, and generate more sales in the long run.

1. Starting with search engines

We’ll start with search engines because – let’s face it – that’s where so many customers start too. If your brand doesn’t show up on relevant searches, you’ve fallen at the first hurdle of marketing for engineering companies.

With this in mind, SEO tools are a vital part of your marketing arsenal. Short for search engine optimization, SEO is the practice of making your site work with search engine criteria and targeting specific phrases that your audience is searching for.

SEMrush is renowned for making SEO easier. It provides all the tools you need to improve your search engine rankings, in one place, including:

• Keyword research
• Site audits
• Competitor analysis
• Rank tracking
• Local SEO
• Link building
• Content marketing

2. Don’t forget social media marketing

Social media marketing is another important area for any engineering company. According to GWI, social media has overtaken search engines for brand discovery amongst internet users aged 16-64.

There’s a wide range of platforms, each with its own niche – and you shouldn’t dismiss any of them without considering their value to your engineering firm.

LinkedIn may seem the most suitable for B2B engineering companies. However, the likes of YouTube, Instagram and even TikTok prioritize video content, which can be invaluable when explaining the intricacies of your products and their features.

Buffer is one of the best-known social media management tools – for good reason too. It allows you to create and schedule posts on multiple platforms, making it much easier to manage an omnichannel presence for your brand. Other useful features include:

• AI content writing and post idea generation
• Suggesting optimal times to post based on your audience
• Tracking post and campaign performance
• Monitoring interactions and brand mentions

3. Content marketing for engineering firms

That brings us nicely to content management, which is a key part of SEO and social media. But it’s also one of the best marketing strategies for engineering companies more broadly. Content covers all the copy, images, videos, and everything else that your brand creates and uses to showcase products, demonstrate how they’re used, and pitch them to clients.

HubSpot is a useful platform for content creation and management, thanks to the following features:

• Content ideas with SEO recommendations
• AI content writer to create blog posts and other copy quickly
• A Content Hub, providing a single source of truth for all content
• Analytics like A/B testing to see which content performs best
• Video tools for recording, editing, and embedding

4. Stand out with interactive touchscreens

Not all marketing is done remotely, of course! Trade shows are a great source of business for engineering firms. One of the biggest challenges is standing out from the competition and attracting people to your stand.

An interactive touchscreen is a unique marketing tool that ticks both of these boxes. Using POP, you can make immersive digital experiences that work on large-format touchscreens or even multi-screen video walls.

This is an excellent way to make the most of the content you’ve created, with the option to integrate existing images, videos and text into an interactive narrative. It makes it easier for your team to explain your products or services to buyers – or you can use touchscreens as a self-service tool, where customers learn about your brand themselves.

5. Customer relationship management (CRM)

The manufacturing and engineering industries are renowned for a long sales cycle. Buyers don’t make quick decisions about what to purchase. They need to research the solutions, compare the different options, gain stakeholder consensus, then validate their decisions.

It can be months or even years from a lead being generated and initial contact being made to a purchase finally going through. In that time, engineering companies need to continually be responsive, build rapport, and instill trust in potential customers.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce helps you do this by storing everything about each customer in a single place. That includes every question they ask, every one of their preferences and every single interaction – whether it’s a phone call, email, meeting or pitch.

You can add notes to different interactions, schedule follow-up calls and track progress throughout the sales cycle.

6. Nurture leads with email marketing

We’ve already mentioned how engineering companies face a particularly long sales cycle. This makes email marketing especially useful to maintain contact and nurture leads.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing methods for engineering companies, as it doesn’t cost anything to send emails – and costs very little to produce them. That’s especially true if you use content you already have, such as blog posts and videos, to add value for your audience.

Mailchimp is a go-to option for email marketing, offering a range of features:

• Customer journey builder to automate key parts of the sales cycle
• Email builder with pre-made templates
• AI tools to generate copy and assist with subject lines
• Audience management tools to create personalized campaigns

7. Go beyond sales with buyer enablement

Marketing is often seen as a sidecar to sales – drawing in customers for the sales team to convert. However, this doesn’t recognize the huge role of the buyer for engineering firms.

With more complex products, buyers have lots more to do before reaching a purchasing decision. They need to spend time understanding the different options available to them and coming to some sort of consensus with key stakeholders. This can sometimes take several weeks, months, or even longer.

The question is – how can you help them along this journey? With POP’s buyer enablement platform, you can craft interactive experiences that simplify complex ideas. This includes:

• Interactive Sales Presentations: Deliver immersive 3D product demos that guide buyers through your products’ features and benefits.
• Personalized Pitches: Empower buyers to steer the conversation, addressing their specific needs and questions.
• Visual Storytelling: Utilize visual content to create engaging narratives that help buyers envision the impact of your brand.
• Advanced Analytics: Gain data-driven insights into buyer interests, enabling the creation of more informed and targeted marketing materials.

If you’re new to buyer enablement, embrace the movement today. Learn the basics in our latest buyer enablement guide or call us on 0117 329 1712, email hello@popcomms.com or arrange a demo.