Marketing automation for manufacturing companies to boost ROI

Manufacturing businesses so far have relied on traditional ways of marketing with little or no technology exposure. 

COVID-19 has pushed them toward digital transformation for marketing and sales. 

Manufacturing businesses have not fully utilized technology for marketing. However, those implementing marketing automation see a 40% increase in deal size and a 20% higher attainment rate. 

This blog can answer your most desirable questions: 

• Is marketing automation for manufacturers necessary? 
• What marketing actions can be automated? 

Much more insight awaits, so let’s begin with the benefits of marketing automation.

Benefits of marketing automation for manufacturing companies 

You can boost productivity and revenue by automating your marketing efforts. 

Here are the key benefits of manufacturing marketing automation: 

1. Boosted lead generation 

Manufacturing businesses struggling to get more leads should consider marketing automation capabilities to boost lead generation. 

You can generate a steady flow of hot leads for your sales team by using automated lead web forms, chatbots, personalized emails, lead data enrichment, and more. 

Explore our lead generation CRM that can help your solution generate more leads and facilitate further targeting with automation capability for 2X results. 

2. Enhanced marketing personalization 

Personalization is a powerful element of any marketing strategy. 

In fact, as per McKinsey’s research, companies with the right personalization generated 40% more revenue. 

Marketing automation enables you to segment lead data and deliver personalized marketing experiences automatically. 

For instance, you can send personal recovery emails/texts for abandoned carts. 

It offers lead auto-profile enrichment to build tailored marketing campaigns that increase customer engagement and conversion rates. 

3. Time savings 

By automating repetitive marketing tasks like email outreach, lead scoring, nurturing, follow-ups, etc., you can focus more on research and strategic planning and improving creativity. 

Automated processes enable timely responses to your prospects, enhancing customer engagement.  

As your business grows, automation allows you to implement scalable marketing strategies with minimal time investment relative to your expansion. 

4. Improved sales and marketing alignment 

As per Forrester’s study, 43% of CEOs in B2B businesses believe that misalignment between sales and marketing costs them sales. 

Moreover, a robust sales and marketing alignment promotes a unified approach, resulting in better strategy development and increased revenue. 

You can enhance your sales and marketing alignment using a smart marketing automation tool.

Ensure the tool you invest in is equipped with lead generation, contact management, scoring, nurturing, and tracking capabilities.   

5. Increased efficiency and marketing ROI 

Marketing automation simplifies your efforts by automating campaigns, integrating personalization, and providing insights into lead data. 

Moreover, 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they use personalization in their campaigns. 

Also, the marketing automation tool assists in mapping out your customer journeys, checking lead sources, and analyzing your marketing campaign. 

You can view the live progress of a customer’s journey, gain insights on various metrics, and plan your activities accordingly. 

Marketing automation for manufacturing: What can you automate?

After learning the need for automation, here are things that you can automate using marketing automation for manufacturing: 

1. Lead generation 

You can automate most of the lead-generation efforts using a powerful marketing automation solution that comes with built-in lead-generation tools. 

For instance: 

• Web Forms allows you to capture and store the details in CRM automatically. 
• Another tool, such as a Live Chat system, lets you engage with visitors to capture leads and contribute to delivering a good brand experience. 

All this eases your lead generation activities. 

Implement the following tactics to improve your lead generation for manufacturing business: 

• Building a high-quality website with the right landing page 
• Creating enticing offers to persuade leads at different buying stages 
• Create gated resources related to your industry to attract the right audience 
• Leverage account-based marketing to target high-value accounts 
• Master social media to generate high-quality leads 
• Leverage the power of newsjacking 

Explore in detail: Lead generation for manufacturers: 9 Best tactics!

2. Email outreach efforts 

Another task you can automate is email outreach. Marketing automation tool eases your emailing activity. 

As a manufacturer, emails play a vital role in communications. You need not send manual emails separately; you can do all this with just one click. 

You can automate email campaigns by creating the best email sequences. It allows you to create automated workflows. Add actions, events, and conditions to automate the process.  

Some of the common triggers that manufacturing businesses use are: 

• Welcome emails 
• Pageview or product view 
• Abandoned cart 
• Post-purchase 
• Subscription expiration 
• Upsell/Cross-sell 

3. Lead qualification

Only some of the leads you capture and collect in your system will become paying customers. 

Even if you’ve all your marketing engines intact and generating more and more leads, getting qualified leads is still a significant challenge.   

Also, about 68% of leading marketers consider lead scoring as a top revenue contributor. 

You can qualify leads based on various factors; below are the best lead qualification criteria for manufacturing businesses: 

Lead scoring helps to score leads on real-time engagement activities that help understand their buying intent. 

This saves you time by giving you the most interested leads for sales and thus boosts your sales reps’ work efficiency. 

With powerful lead scoring software, you can build tailored lead scoring models specific to your business needs to generate qualified leads for sales targeting. 

Interested read: 6 Best Lead Scoring Software You Must Consider in 2023! 

Boost sales with automated lead scoring!

Salesmate allows you to build custom lead scoring models for prioritizing leads for sales.

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4. Lead segmentation 

Automate customer segmentation based on behavior, purchase history, website activity, and engagement. Suggest products or services based on preferences and past interactions.

An advanced marketing automation tool lets you segment your leads based on criteria like behavior, location, or demographic information.

Effective segmentation enables you to target prospects with a more personalized approach that enhances business opportunities.  

Also, you can use marketing automation to segment your audience based on various criteria. 

When approaching potential customers, it is always suggested to personalize and customize the outreach. And this could only be done by segmenting your list. 

Marketing automation helps you to segment list on four basis: 

• Demographic basis 
• Behavioral basis 
• Customer journey basis 
• Geographic basis 

Here’s the image to help you have an insight into each of these segmentations: 

This benefits you in price optimization, effective acquisition and retention, and eliminates manual work. 

Read related: Account-based marketing for manufacturers: A complete guide 

5. Lead nurturing

Another task that marketing automation enhances is lead nurturing. You can improve your lead nurturing tasks with automation and scheduling the conversations. 

Automate your communication to ensure you always stay in touch with them. With the help of marketing automation, all this is possible. 

However, tracking and evaluating its efficiency is essential; hence, you must ensure that the tools are improving customer engagement. 

You can start by evaluating its click-through rates and email open rates. Measure the time leads take to progress through the funnel. 

Lastly, determine the outcomes. 

With proper use of features, you can customize and send automated targeted content to enhance the lead nurturing process.   

Drive more lead conversions with Salesmate!

Build personalized email campaigns, improving your nurturing to win more deals.

Explore Marketing Automation

6. Analytics and reporting

Automate marketing data collection and generate reports on key metrics like engagement, conversion rates, and ROI.

Visualize the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives with automated dashboards.

With a marketing automation tool, you can gain real-time insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

You can use pre-built detailed reports or customize them according to your requirements. These reports are auto-generated to help you strategize and execute marketing effectively. 

It helps you to gain visibility on various tasks during various funnel stages. For example, you can identify the channel that brings more leads in the bucket or which emails are getting more engagements. 

You can measure various metrics and enhance the process accordingly. 

These are major areas you can automate and save time with the implementation of a marketing automation tool. 

Best practices for implementing marketing automation in manufacturing 

Here are some best practices to help you implement the manufacturing marketing automation effectively: 

1. Setting clear objectives and goals 

Before you implement the marketing automation tool, it’s vital to define your objectives and goals. By understanding your marketing needs and wants, you can create clear goals. 

Define specific targets for lead generation, customer acquisitions, website traffic, etc. Clear objectives work as a roadmap for executing targeted efforts. 

In addition, marketing automation helps you to measure the improvements of these strategies and track the progress of goal achievement. 

For example, having a strategy for campaign development, content creation, or lead nurturing can all be developed post discovering your goal for marketing automation.  

2. Aligning marketing automation with business strategy 

Aligning marketing automation with business strategy is a crucial practice to follow.

When you understand the overall goals and objectives of the business, implementing marketing automation becomes easy. 

For example, if the business aims to increase the customer base by spreading more awareness about the brand. In this case, marketing automation can be used to run automated campaigns, create workflows, and measure the achievement of goals. 

The alignment of marketing automation with business strategy results in goal-oriented efforts. Furthermore, it ensures better targeting, personalization, and lead nurturing. 

All this results in improving overall ROI for the manufacturing organization. 

3. Choosing the right marketing automation platform

This is a critical practice, as choosing the right marketing automation software can be daunting. 

However, here are the top features you can consider while selecting an adequate tool: 

These pointers ease your tool hunt process. However, evaluating these pointers with the number of tools available in the market isn’t practically possible. 

Hence, we have handpicked 20 industry best marketing automation platforms to ease your task. Click here to explore. 

Automate marketing to drive more opportunities!

Salesmate CRM allows you to automate outreach, nurturing, and follow-ups to generate more opportunities.

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4. Training staff on marketing automation tools and techniques 

After adopting an ideal marketing automation solution, training your reps to handle the tool efficiently is crucial.

By providing comprehensive training, you can impart the necessary skills to help the reps use tools to their full potential. 

You train them by giving demo sessions, providing pre-recorded training videos, or taking live sessions. This empowers your reps to create, execute, and optimize automated campaigns and leverage the tool effectively. 

A well-trained marketing team can effectively execute marketing activities and drive engagement and conversions. 

5. Integrating marketing automation with other business systems 

Another best practice is to integrate marketing automation with other business tools. 

By connecting marketing automation with ERP, CRM, and other systems, it ensures seamless collaboration between departments. 

This integration allows a comprehensive view of customer interactions and streamlines the process.

A CRM integration with marketing automation enhances overall business efficiency. 

It helps bring transparency in the process, improves personalized communication, leads management, and assists in making data-driven decisions. 

Explore our manufacturing CRM that comes with endless automation capabilities to empower your marketing, sales, and customer services.

6. Monitoring and optimizing marketing automation tool performance 

Evaluate your automation tool’s performance by tracking key metrics such as lead generation, conversion ratios, and customer engagement to improve your marketing ROI.

Measuring these helps you to identify areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions. You can get a live view of the entire customer journey and measure campaign performance. 

Regularly assessing the campaign ensures that resources are effectively utilized and the right audience is targeted. 

Continuous monitoring and optimization maximize the success rate of marketing automation for your manufacturing industry. 

These are the primary practices you can execute while implementing a marketing automation solution. 

How does Salesmate marketing automation align with your goal?

A quick recap of how manufacturers can save time and automate their marketing efforts with Marketing Automation by Salesmate… 

Salesmate is a one-stop solution for all your marketing, sales, and customer support needs. 

With Salesmate, you can automate lead generation using Chat Journeys and capture more details about leads using Web Forms and Live Chat. 

Prioritize your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) with automated lead scoring and move ahead with potential leads for sales targeting.  

You can assign, engage, and nurture leads within a few clicks and streamline your workflows. 

The innovative email campaign software lets you perform a highly personalized outreach and boost results with email automation. 

Salesmate lets you schedule your conversations and ensure no deal falls through the cracks. 

Overall, you can level up your marketing and sales with Salesmate’s powerful Automation Suite. 

Take a 15-day FREE trial and witness the growth.

Wrap up!

Marketing automation is one of the marketing challenges for manufacturers. But, with the support of an advanced CRM and automation platform, you can set your business on autopilot.

Marketing automation for manufacturing companies saves time and boosts your efforts by ensuring minimal human involvement and error. This increases your lead generation, qualification, and nurturing tasks. 

It enables you to capture and engage consistent leads with personalized content and nurture them through the sales funnel. 

Automating your marketing and sales will result in higher conversions and increased revenue. 

Frequently asked questions