One of the biggest concerns we hear from manufacturing and engineering businesses is “What if the agency doesn’t understand our industry?” It’s a fair concern.
Because manufacturing is different. You are not selling fast fashion, protein shakes or the latest trendy consumer app.
You're often selling:
- Highly technical products
- Long sales cycle solutions
- Complex products or services
- Specialist processes
Your customers aren't making emotional impulse purchases at 11pm from their sofa. They're making considered commercial decisions that could affect production lines, downtime, quality control, profitability and customer relationships. That changes how marketing needs to work.
One of the big reasons we see with many agencies is that they struggle to effectively market these weighty B2B 'boring' businesses and so they apply consumer-style marketing approaches and to technical industries.
Buyers from the manufacturing world are usually looking for something different. Your ideal client typically wants to understand:
- Why something matters
- How it works
- What problem it solves for them
- What impact it has on them operationally
- Whether they can trust you to provide + deliver it
That requires a completely different type of communication.
Another issue we see is that some marketing agencies become scared of the technicalities and assume the subject matter is 'too complicated' for marketing - so they over-simplify everything into vague corporate messaging. The result is often content that sounds polished but says very little.
Manufacturing businesses end up with websites and social channels filled with phrases like 'innovative solutions', 'industry-leading technology' and 'quality-driven service' but what does that all mean, and is it explaining anything of any value to your customers, or potential customers? No.
Your buyers are intelligent. In the majority of cases, they are engineers, production managers, operations leaders or technical specialists themselves. Often you'll find the people who make the decisions or sign off the bills are of that industry, they're engineers, they're techy - they can spot generic marketing instantly.
In manufacturing, context really matters.
You can't create effective messaging if you don't understand the production pressures, downtime risks, lead times + operational bottlenecks, quality concerns and the impact of failure.
Because often, the product itself is only one part of the story and the real value is actually:
- Reducing waste
- Improving efficiency + running time
* Improving consistent output
- Reducing operator intervention
- Protecting output quality
That's the type of language buyers in the manufacturing space resonate with.
A lot of agencies approach clients with a mindset of how do we sell this? but the better question to ask would be why does this matter to the customer? - there is a simple, but big, difference.
When you get under the skin of manufacturing businesses and their customers properly, the messaging becomes more useful, more practical and far more commercially relevant and you start building trust through that language.
I'd say that's particularly important in this sector as buying decisions are slower and relationships matter heavily.
In 2022, I founded Clarify with a specific aim to help manufacturing and engineering businesses be consistently marketed, from my lived experiences.
I started my B2B marketing career many years ago as Marketing Manager at Edale, the UK based OEM - and since then (almost 15 years ago - time flies!) I've continued to work within the print manufacturing industry with a number of businesses at varying levels.
We have worked in-house with technical teams and we're familiar with their world; we've sat around tables and presented to engineers, production managers, technical specialists and operational teams - all of whom require substance over gimmicks. We understand that marketing in these industries is about making the complex feel understandable and commercially relevant.
Once businesses see that we 'get it', the conversations become easier, more collaborative and more focused - and that is often the difference between a generic marketing agency and a genuine strategic partner.
