Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers Blog

You attend trade shows to obtain valuable leads for your company. But do you have a plan in place for what to do once you’re back in the office from the trade show so you can move those leads closer to a purchase?

You’ve worked with the folks at Customer Y and Customer X for 25 years each, and they still provide a nice chunk of revenue.

Your business has been in the B2B/industrial game for 50-100 years, and the brand is already “well known” (somewhere, at least).

Trade shows and sales visits to the prospect’s facility are what your sales team knows and is good at. (Though that pesky pandemic sure made it hard.)

So, why invest in digital marketing?

What’s the most common cause of failure for a B2B digital marketing campaign? Most often, it’s either poor understanding of how inbound marketing works, or lack of commitment to a plan.

“Did you hear that the longer your content is, the better it performs in SEO?”

“Rack up as many backlinks as possible, no matter where they come from.” 

“You don’t need a CRM. Your business is too small.”

“SEO is dead.”

Have you heard these words before? You probably have if you’ve been around online marketing long enough.

COVID-19. There -- we got that out of the way.

In all seriousness, it’s impossible to talk about the future of B2B sales without touching on the coronavirus -- as sick as we all are of discussing it.

Talk with any successful digital marketer, and the #1 thing they’ll tell you is the foundation of any lead-generating, sales-converting, customer-delighting strategy is content. 

How often do you default to saying “Google” when you’re talking about search engines in general? (For example: “When’s that new horror flick coming out? Let me Google it.”)

Since you’re reading a “101” article, we’d guess you’re terrified of writing the metas, H1s, and other SEO website mumbo-jumbo you wish someone else would handle. 

Using SEO keywords remains one of the top B2B digital marketing strategies in 2022. Optimizing those keywords is the secret to ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Today's challenges in industrial marketing are a bit baffling to outsiders. Why? There's really no reason they should still be a thing in 2022.

Especially during COVID, most industries became aware of not just the necessity, but also the power of owning a strong brand presence online.