Industrial Marketing Archives – Industrial Marketing Today

3 FAQs About Manufacturing Content Marketing

June 15, 2021 by Achinta Mitra

I understand you may have more than three Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about manufacturing content marketing. This post will focus on the three questions that my manufacturing clients ask me most often. To validate my … Read more

Industrial Customer Journey and the Digital Experience

May 17, 2021 by Achinta Mitra

Understanding the industrial customer journey is essential to the success of digital marketing with content. Based on my conversations with manufacturers, I sometimes get the impression that it is just a marketing exercise to them … Read more

How to Make Industrial Email Marketing Work for You

March 4, 2021March 3, 2021 by Achinta Mitra

Industrial email marketing may not get the same attention and love as it used to because of social media. However, don’t abandon it because it is still highly effective when targeting engineers and technical professionals. … Read more

Industrial Marketing—You Want Coaching With That?

August 19, 2020 by Achinta Mitra

Industrial marketing coaching is something I’m asked about often, especially in the past 6 to 8 months. The headline of this post is my tongue in cheek attempt at the famous McDonald’s® age-old question, “You … Read more

Unique Challenges in Manufacturing Content Marketing

December 2, 2020August 4, 2020 by Achinta Mitra

Manufacturing content marketing has its own challenges and frustrations as many industrial marketers have experienced. I touched on some of them in my last post about writing technical blog posts. While the age-old problem of … Read more

Why Industrial Marketing Plans and Strategy Must Go Together

June 15, 2020June 15, 2020 by Achinta Mitra

I’ve had many conversations about creating industrial marketing plans that start something like this, “Can you create an industrial marketing plan for us?” My answer: “Of course I can.” However, I find there is a … Read more

Content Preferences of Engineers and Industrial Buyers

March 12, 2020 by Achinta Mitra

Understanding the content preferences of engineers and industrial professionals is crucial to your success with industrial content marketing. That applies to the content for industrial websites too. Compounding the problem is the fact that engineers … Read more

Industrial Marketing in 2020 and Beyond

January 3, 2020 by Achinta Mitra

Industrial Marketing in 2020, my interview with Pete Hoelscher

Happy New Year! I recently had a very interesting conversation with Pete Hoelscher, the Acting CEO of IEEE GlobalSpec. He shared his thoughts on the state of industrial marketing in 2020 and the challenges that … Read more

Why Email Marketing for Manufacturers is the Cornerstone of Industrial Marketing

December 4, 2019 by Achinta Mitra

Email marketing for manufacturers continues to perform well, but there are some serious challenges to overcome. It is a mixed bag of good and bad news. Keep reading for all the details based on research … Read more

Marketing to Millennial Engineers

November 13, 2019October 22, 2019 by Achinta Mitra

Marketing to millennial engineers requires a deep understanding of the age differences among the engineering workforce. I have talked about this in the past and it was also a key talking point of my presentation … Read more

How Industrial Distributors Can Use Content Marketing

November 13, 2019October 7, 2019 by Achinta Mitra

Content marketing for industrial distributors can be very challenging. The biggest problem I’ve seen is that there is very little differentiation between distributors serving the same niche. Their competitors show the same line cards and … Read more

Industrial Marketing Budgeting and Planning

November 13, 2019September 26, 2019 by Achinta Mitra

Industrial marketing budgeting and planning activities pick up at this time of the year. As they say, “ʼTis the Season.” Things begin to get very hectic as we go deeper into Q4 and it becomes … Read more

Industrial Marketing for Manufacturers: New Research Findings

November 13, 2019August 20, 2019 by Achinta Mitra

Industrial marketing for manufacturers is a complex process that takes time, expertise and money to produce tangible and repeatable results (aka more quality sales leads). And I’m not talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) either. … Read more

Making Email the Foundation of Industrial Content Marketing

December 5, 2019September 13, 2018 by Achinta Mitra

You may think email marketing is dead or passé with all the talk about social media. However, that is far from the reality that I see every day, working with manufacturers and engineering companies, especially when it comes to industrial content marketing.

Engineers and industrial professionals do read emails, provided you’ve earned their trust with valuable content and can get through their spam filters. According to the research report “How Engineers Find Information 2018” published by engineering.com, 95% of engineers will consider an email in their inbox.

You can read about this in my earlier post, Industrial Email Marketing for Engaging Engineers and Technical Professionals.

Email should be an important component of industrial content marketing

Given the above findings, it makes a lot of sense in making email marketing a key component of your overall industrial content marketing strategy. My opinion is corroborated by independent research findings.

Industrial Email Marketing for Engaging Engineers and Technical Professionals

June 19, 2018 by Achinta Mitra

Do you think industrial email marketing is dead? It would be easy to jump to that conclusion given the declining click rates and the difficulties in getting past the sophisticated email spam-filtering methods. Engineers and technical professionals know how to opt out and have much higher expectations from vendor emails.

Think twice though before you discard the tried-and-tested industrial email marketing strategies. Sure, the old way of “batch and blast” is no longer effective and email marketing is facing challenges, but it is not dead by any means. I can say that based on my own experience working with manufacturing and engineering companies on a daily basis.

Industrial Marketing – Budgets, Challenges and Performance

April 20, 2018April 20, 2018 by Achinta Mitra

Curious about how your peers and the competition are spending their industrial marketing dollars? You are in the right place at the right time.

I just finished reading the research report, 2018 Budget Trends in Industrial & Technology Marketing published by engineering.com. To put their findings in the right perspective, the top three segments of their demographics were:

32% Manufacturers
20% Software companies
16% were companies that provide Consulting/Engineering services

See the chart on the right for a complete breakdown.

The average industrial marketing budget is under $100,000 for more than half (52%) of these companies. There are a few (7%) with a budget of more than a million. Raise your hand if you are one of them!

Avergae size of industrial marketing budgets

Happy Holidays

December 18, 2017December 18, 2017 by Achinta Mitra

As 2017 draws to a close, I’d like to thank all of you for being regular readers of this blog. Some of you have become new clients. I truly appreciate your confidence and the loyalty … Read more

Stop Your Industrial Website Redesign from Derailment

October 12, 2017 by Achinta Mitra

industrial website redesign and train derailment What does industrial website redesign have to do with a train derailment? I’m not trying to be funny here by using this image of the Montparnasse derailment that happened on October 22, 1895. The action of a train leaving its tracks accidentally can have catastrophic consequences.

Similarly, obstructions that prevent a redesigned website from meeting its goals and objectives can be devastating for a company. I’m not exaggerating to scare you, but I’ve seen too many industrial website redesign projects get sidetracked and go completely off course.

Are industrial website redesigns worth the time and money?

Let’s face reality here, it takes a lot of time (4 months or more) and money (budgets of 15K or more) to complete a redesign that will turn an informational website into a lead generating system. And that’s just the start, you have to continue to invest in optimization, promotion and content marketing.

It is worth spending that kind of time and money, because your target audience of engineers and technical buyers is online for work related purposes. They are in self-select and self-serve mode for a large portion of their buying journey.

Using Digital Industrial Marketing for Reaching Younger Engineers

July 27, 2017 by Achinta Mitra

Digital industrial marketing is the norm these days, not because it is fashionable but because that’s how industrial buyers now prefer to interact with their suppliers. I’m sure you are aware of the fact that the industrial buy cycle is made up of four stages. Publishing generic content that is not tailored to each stage is not very effective.

It is virtually impossible to create relevant and engaging content unless you have a very good understanding of the roles engineers play at every stage of the buy cycle. Two more factors that you should be aware of to make your industrial digital/content marketing effective are:

Engineers are time challenged – 44% of engineers are working on more projects now than they were two years ago and 55% of engineers are being asked to do more with less. (Source: IEEE Engineering360 survey).
Understanding the age gap is important in digital marketing for industrial companies – 49% of engineers surveyed are less than 49 years old (Source: 2017 Digital Media Use in The Industrial Sector, IEEE GLOBALSPEC)

For more on point number 1, see my post “Overcoming the Challenge of Marketing to Busy Engineers.”

Role of the engineer in the buy decision

In this post, I’ll focus on understanding the age difference and how it affects your industrial digital marketing strategy and tactics. Before I dive deep into that, first let me give you some anecdotal evidence as to why this is important.

Overcoming the Challenge of Marketing to Busy Engineers

May 21, 2018April 24, 2017 by Achinta Mitra

Engineers from different fields probably make up a large part of your target audience if you are a manufacturer, distributor or an engineering company. As an industrial marketer, you know it is a challenge marketing to engineers.

While engineers do use social media, they tend to be passive participants making it hard to engage with them using those channels. To illustrate that point, here are a few key findings from the 2016 Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector report published by IEEE ENGINEERING 360.

82% of engineers and technical professionals spend no more than two hours weekly on social media for work-related purposes.
70% of industrial professionals have never shared or posted news about their companies to their own social networks.
64% of engineers and technical professionals say the biggest challenge in using social media for work is its inefficiency when compared to other methods such as search engines, supplier websites and online catalogs.
55% said that social media has too much noise and not enough substance.

Industrial Marketing