For all the talk on the podcasts, for all the advice dished out on LinkedIn, one question sits on the lips of virtually every manufacturing marketer: What actually works in the real world?
It is strange that a quarter of the way through the 21st century there are still questions over this. We have never had more access to performance data. We have got more technology underpinning everything we do. And collectively, we B2B marketers run thousands of campaigns every year.
Of course, there is no shortage of people willing to offer advice.
The answer is ABM.
The answer is social.
The answer is whatever the latest shiny thing happens to be.
Wait a few months for another bubble and the answer will be something else entirely. Fortunately, the person touting it will have a course to sell you or a community you can join or a cutting-edge piece of martech for you to check out.
It is crazy.
As a B2B specialist agency, we like to think we know what works and what does not. We do this stuff every day across sectors and geographies. But with all the conflicting evidence on offer, we cannot be complacent.
Do we believe in content just because we happen to do content?
Are we overestimating the power of differentiation because we have a programme for that?
Are we just as much a victim of our own biases as all the influencers clogging up your LinkedIn feed?
Uncomfortable questions for sure. What if we are wrong?
Maybe it was the tipping point of another “XYZ is dead, do this instead” post but we finally decided to park our egos at the door and go looking for answers.
Not to do things by halves, we commissioned the world’s largest in-depth study of real-world B2B marketing effectiveness.
We asked over 1,000 senior marketing pros a wide range of questions about their efforts. We asked about their strategy. We asked about customer insight. We asked about what they measure.
Then we went further and asked about the specific tactics they use for brand building, demand generation and lead generation. We asked which tactics deliver value and which are turkeys. And we had them rank the effectiveness of just under 40 different approaches.
The result became the B2B Effectiveness Engine.
The data in the Engine allows us to split high performers from everyone else. We can look at what they do differently. We can see how tactics for manufacturing differ from technology and professional services. We can understand how tactical choices are affected by deal size and objectives.
The B2B Effectiveness Engine has quickly become the foundation for how we do business.
Thing is, we never planned to publish the findings.
The Engine was an internal tool. Something we hoped would separate us from the hundreds of other B2B agencies. But as we began to talk about it, whether in person or on podcasts and webinars, the one request we got over and over was to publish a guide to the findings.
Eventually we buckled. What you are reading is the result, the Manufacturing Edition, built on the responses of the 260 manufacturing marketers in the larger study.
In this guide, we are going to unpack what works in manufacturing marketing today. Not because we believe it (in fact, some of the results majorly reset our beliefs) but because this is what senior marketers just like you have told us.
There is a lot here. However, it is still just a fraction of the data we gathered. Success differs by sector, deal size and objective among other things.
What works for a manufacturer selling components into SMEs with an average order value under £100k will be different from one selling £1m+ capital equipment to large enterprises. It will be different again for a similar-sized business in technology or professional services.
One-size-does-not-fit-all.
While we will not be able to give every permutation (you will need to speak to us about your specific objectives), we can paint a broad overview of some of the major factors that separate peak performers from the also-rans.
This report will split the findings into what we term the upstream foundational elements (strategy, measurement, differentiation, objectives and so on) and the downstream tactics used across brand building, demand generation and lead generation.
We will zero in on the factors that appear to make a significant difference to success. And we will explore some of the tactical recipes that deliver the greatest results.
One of the overriding findings of this research is that popular does not equal effective.
We see time and time again in the data that what is top of the most popular lists is often near the bottom of the most effective lists. It is like our parents always said, just because everyone else is doing it does not mean you should too.
To illustrate, in manufacturing:
And on and on it goes.
If you are currently struggling to deliver the results you need from your manufacturing marketing, hopefully you will find something here to help.
If you really are killing it, the data will show you why (it might not be for the reasons you think).
And if you simply want an antidote to all the crap you see posted online, we have got you.
Let us get started.
If you have not come across Les Binet and Peter Field’s research into marketing effectiveness, you are missing a trick.
Published as The Long and the Short of It, the pair analysed whether short-term tactical activity (activation, as they term it) or long-term brand building delivers greater impact for today’s businesses.
Of course, this is not a case of either/or.
They found the optimum mix is that around 60% of your budget should go to brand building and the rest to activation. It became known as the 60/40 rule.
But that’s going to be skewed by all the B2C data right? Yes, but not as much as you may think.
The pair re-examined the data with the LinkedIn B2B Institute and found that in B2B, 46% of the budget should go to long-term brand marketing and 54% to short-term activation.
For the B2B Effectiveness Engine, we split activity three ways:
Demand generation has become a somewhat contentious term. Some claim it doesn’t exist, others that it is the only game in town.
The ins and outs of this would consume a guide in their own right. For our money, demand generation does exist but is distinct from ‘demand creation’ in some important ways. Call us if you want a lively discussion on this.
Adding in demand generation makes for a less clean-cut split than brand vs activation. We could have saved time and money by avoiding the distinction.
However, our experience has shown that given that only around 5% of potential buyers are in-market in any quarter, most marketers will need to focus their attention longer term.
Importantly, however, we’re not always talking about the very long term that brand building deals with.
We’ve called this demand generation to match the wider industry (though ‘demand acceleration’ is probably a more accurate term). It’s where you are marketing to potential clients who may be aware they have a problem but are not yet sure they should do something about it. Or if they are beginning to make plans, they’re uncertain what their options are.
Both demand generation and lead generation are forms of activation, just with different time horizons. So how do our manufacturing respondents split their efforts?
In manufacturing, just 29% of marketers’ focus goes to brand building, with the remaining 71% going to activation. That falls well below Binet and Field’s 46/54 target split for B2B, and it is the lowest brand allocation of any sector we studied.
To get a little more granular, if we look at demand generation versus lead generation, the split is roughly 50/50 with a slight lean towards lead over demand (36% to 35%).
Manufacturing marketers are, in other words, the most short-termist in B2B. They put barely a quarter of their effort into the long game that builds the brand.
Given what is coming up about the Day One List, that should worry you.
We gave respondents a choice of nine different objectives. They could select as many as they wanted but we also had them nominate their primary objective.
On average, manufacturing marketers are working to a combination of just under four different objectives. This is consistent with other sectors.
Perhaps unsurprising in our more commercially focused times, the most common objective is increased revenue, selected by 59% of respondents.
In second place comes greater market demand for products and services (53%), then increased brand equity (49%), then greater market awareness of the brand (44%) and the number of leads into sales and pipeline (42%).
At the bottom of the table, lower cost of acquiring customers (CAC) comes last by some degree on 17%.
But that is the average. Things shift for higher performers.
The changes are typically a matter of degree. Increasing revenue still rules.
Increasing revenue still rules. The top-performing manufacturing marketers are more likely to place greater emphasis on greater market demand and increased brand equity, though revenue still leads.
In terms of the primary marketing objective, increased revenue leads by a considerable distance, named by 43% of manufacturing marketers. Greater market awareness comes second on 19%, greater market demand third on 14% and increased brand equity fourth on 10%.
Understandably, those with different objectives make different tactical choices.
If we look at demand generation, those with a primary objective to increase revenue lean towards different tactics than those chasing market demand.
In reality, these are not always the highest-performing demand gen tactics. But it goes to show that what you have as your primary objective will inevitably skew your tactical decisions.
Read any marketing textbook or take any course worth its while, and you will quickly learn that having a marketing strategy is one of the fundamentals of success.
If you do not know what you are trying to achieve for the business, why do marketing in the first place?
The vast majority of our manufacturing respondents agree: 85% say they have a marketing strategy that flows from the business strategy. That is the highest of any sector, so manufacturing marketers clearly understand the theory.
The importance of this snaps clearly into focus when we split out high performers from everyone else:
Of course, just because you have a strategy does not mean you have the backing and budget to execute on it.
When we probed deeper we found that the number of manufacturing marketers whose strategy has been signed off by senior management dropped to just 45%.
This is important.
There are too many studies showing CEOs having too little faith in their heads of marketing. Often this comes down to a perception that marketing is out of touch with the wider business realities. It may be unfair but perception is reality.
Having tough business-level conversations with senior management about marketing’s role in the business is a key marker of success. Gaining c-suite agreement ensures marketing is clearly seen as a core part of the organisation, not a nice-to-have add-on that can be axed when times get tough.
You have the strategy. You have sign-off. But do you have the budget to execute?
Just 20% of manufacturing marketers said they do.
This is a worryingly low number, the lowest we saw anywhere. If you have to fight over and over for money to do your job, you’ll always be a hostage to the quarter-to-quarter fortunes of the wider business. And this is in markets where what you do today may not show results for three or four quarters at best.
If the strategy is clear, if it is directly linked to business success and if senior management agrees, there should be no reason why budget cannot be invested to execute on it.
In manufacturing, the gap between having a strategy (85%) and being funded to deliver it (20%) is a 65-point chasm. That is the single biggest disconnect in the data.
We mentioned earlier that just 5% of buyers are likely to be in-market at any one time. This is called The 95:5 Rule and is based on research by John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Now let’s add another: The Day One List.
The Day One List is based on research from Bain which found, “buyers already have a list of potential vendors in mind before starting the search process, and 90% of the time end up buying off that day one list.” And it gets worse. According to Matt Dixon (of Challenger Sale fame), 40% to 50% of potential deals end in no decision.
Why are we telling you this?
The brutal reality is that there are very few buyers in market at any one time and the vast majority of those that are already have a clear preference for the vendor they’ll ultimately choose.
Say, for example, you target enterprise buyers in ~1,000+ employee businesses in Europe. Of course, your real addressable market is likely to be a subset of this. But let’s go with the bigger number.
There are approximately 10,000 companies you could talk to. But just 500 of these are likely to be in-market in any quarter. And if you are not on the Day One List, around 50 of these may consider buying from you.
These same 50 will also consider buying from all your competitors. (Oh, and half of these opportunities will end in no-sale.)
These are not great odds.
You have a choice. You could devote most of your time and energy competing for those 50 in-market buyers. Or you could build a brand to get you on the Day One List.
Again, this is a Long and the Short of It question. The answer is that you should do both. But too many B2B companies do too little of the long and too much of the short.
This is why the B2B Effectiveness Engine data shows such a massive impact of having a clear, differentiated position in the market.
Here is the good news, and it is genuinely good. Manufacturing marketers are getting positioning right more often than most. Three quarters (75%) say they have a position they have both tested with customers and reviewed against competitors. That is the gold standard, and it is a higher proportion than we see in many other sectors.
But, again, we see stark differences between higher performers and everyone else.
Between 82% and 84% of top performers say they are truly differentiated. Conversely, just 46% to 48% of average performers say the same. Basically, you are around twice as likely to be in the top-performing groups if you’ve got your positioning sorted.
This is why we tell clients that if they only get one thing right, positioning is the one to go for.
This is a critical distinction. When we look at the data, it is only when you have a positioning that is tested with customers and reviewed against competitors that you see this advantage.
If you have only tested it with customers or only reviewed it against the competition, you are far less likely to be in the leading groups. And if you think you’re differentiated but haven’t tested it at all, you have a 0% to 1% chance of being in those high-performing groups.
Getting positioning right has a powerful knock-on effect on everything that comes after. Those that hit the gold standard here see greater effectiveness from virtually every tactic they use
It’s that important.
Customer insight should be one of marketing’s superpowers. The more we understand our customers’ worlds, the more effectively we can talk to them about what really matters.
But all too often, these ‘insights’ are actually assumptions. Things we believe to be true because that’s how it looks from within the organisation (or because that’s what the sales team tells us). There is no substitute for going out and actually speaking to customers with an open mind and no agenda other than to learn.
The good news is that in manufacturing 88% of respondents conduct some kind of market research, one of the highest rates in the study. However, here again we see a clear difference between top performers and everyone else. Some 93% of the most effective marketers invest in research. Their less effective colleagues? This drops to 72%.
So then the question becomes, what research are they doing and which delivers the greatest value?
The most popular research types among manufacturing marketers are researching the broader views of customers and prospects (67%), researching what the market thinks of their products (45%), researching the customer purchase process (38%) and researching the key outcomes customers want, or Jobs to be Done (38%).
We gave respondents the choice of 9 different types of customer research. The top five most popular are:
But that’s popularity, what about effectiveness?
The results were surprising. Just three of the options correlate with a positive increase in a company’s likelihood to be in the top performing groups:
All the others had a negligible or negative impact — something we didn’t expect. Interestingly, one that had one of the most negative effects was research to segment potential buyers.
This flies in the face of much currently accepted wisdom — especially the prevailing focus of many in B2B to opt for tighter segmentation linked to advanced personalisation.
However, studies have shown the claimed effectiveness of personalisation to be highly suspect.
An academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School found that something as basic as gender targeting is only accurate 42.3% of the time. The accuracy for something more specific such as senior IT decision makers? Just 7.5%.
What the work of Binet and Field and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute both show is that increasing reach leads to greater sales and market share growth. You succeed by marketing to the widest number of potential buyers in your market. So, researching your market to overly-segment it may well be counterproductive.
There are a multitude of things we can measure in marketing.
We ask about 32 of them for the B2B Effectiveness Engine. Everything from the classic MQL and pipeline to cost per lead and conversion.
On average, manufacturing marketers are juggling between five and six different measures to judge the effectiveness of their efforts, slightly fewer than other sectors.
Unlike other sectors in the study, these track reasonably well with the list of the most effective. (Cost per click is actually the 10th most effective measure.)
Here are the top five:
The stand out here is sales velocity. As you can see, it ranks 5th for effectiveness but only 18th in the popularity chart.
If you haven’t read the earlier sections and have simply jumped ahead to get the juice on tactics, please go back and check them out.
Getting the foundational upstream factors right will often do more to improve your effectiveness than any magic combination of tactics. Specifically, the big three of strategy, differentiation and customer insight have a significant impact on everything else.
But if you have taken all that on board, what are the highest-performing tactics in lead generation?
Well, it depends. Sorry.
We see significant shifts in effectiveness for tactics across deal levels. What works hardest for a £50k SME deal isn’t the same as what will help land a £1m+ enterprise one.
If we compare the top 5 list of the single most effective tactics for deals under £1m and the top 5 for deals over £1m, just two tactics appears on both lists. Two.
We don’t have the scope to cover every single permutation here. So we’ll only talk about tactics for manufacturing marketing as a whole. If you want to know the ideal combination for your specific circumstances, get in touch.
We asked respondents about their use of just under 40 different tactics. On average, manufacturing marketers are using a combination of around six. This increases for those who measure success by MQLs and rises further still for those who have invested in researching their ICP (both use an average of 10).
The top 10 most popular lead generation tactics are:
The ten most popular lead generation tactics in manufacturing are email marketing, videos, bottom-of-funnel content, your own in-person events, top-of-funnel content, sales enablement, paid social media advertising, online articles and blogs, SEO and media advertising.
But these are just the popular options. Just five of these are on the top 10 most effective list.
Drumroll…
The top 10 highest-performing lead generation tactics for manufacturing brands are:
We’ll be honest, some of these fundamentally challenged our thinking about what works and what doesn’t in lead generation.
Despite the fact that top-of-funnel content is one of our specialisms, prior to this research we would never have recommended it for lead gen. And yet it came in first place.
However, when we step back to consider the findings of The Long and the Short of It, this is perhaps not so surprising.
Top-of-funnel and mid-funnel content are both a clear way to differentiate your brand to a potential buyer. It shows you have expertise that others don’t and that you know how to apply it.
If lead generation is about the 5% of buyers who are in- market this quarter, demand generation is about the ones who aren’t right now but who could/should be in the next year or so.
It’s a woolly definition admittedly. As mentioned previously, there are also some who say that there is no such thing as demand generation, there is only lead generation (or lead capture as they’d describe it) and brand building.
They may have a point.
We would argue that in many markets there is an important group that has a need but doesn’t yet fully understand it, the impact it is having on their business or the solutions available.
This will be less so in highly mature markets and more so in less established ones.
For these buyers, the task is to clearly demonstrate that they have a problem, that it is important and urgent, and that it can be fixed.
More accurately, this would be called demand acceleration.
If you are in the ‘demand generation doesn’t exist’ camp, you can safely skip this section and move on. If not…
As with lead generation, we see deal size having a significant impact on tactical effectiveness. (None of us should be too surprised by this.)
Similar to lead generation, when we compare the top five tactics for the lowest level deals with the same list for the highest, again, just two tactics appear on both.
We don’t have the scope to cover every single permutation here. So we’ll only talk about tactics for manufacturing marketing as a whole. If you want to know the ideal combination for your specific circumstances, get in touch.
Again, this is from a list of just under 40 different tactics. On average, manufacturing marketers use a mix of 5 for demand generation. This varies depending on what they measure and their objectives. Those who track MQLs and those that researched their ICP both use 7.
The top 10 that win the beauty parade for demand generation are:
We see 3 of these also appearing on the top 10 list of the most effective tactics. Which are…
The top 10 highest-performing demand generation tactics for manufacturing brands are:
Content of all types will help differentiate your brand and position you as the go-to people in your industry.
If a buyer suspects they have a problem that needs fixing, they’ll start trying to get their head around it before going too deep and subjecting themselves to a sales call. The right content can accelerate them into action.
The different levels (top, middle, bottom) are a reflection of how close a prospect is to beginning to commit to action.
SEO and third-party events expand reach. They get your brand in front of people who may not be currently aware of you. Analyst reports deliver a halo effect — this brand is trusted by people I trust and respect, so maybe I should consider them.
If lead and demand generation represent tactics focused on the immediate and mid-term, branding is primarily about long-term enduring activity.
To be clear, brand does affect immediate sales. The Day One list research proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
If 90% of customers buy from companies they already knew before doing any research, you need to do whatever you can to be on that list.
But brand building works on a different time horizon. It’s about the always-on, perpetual activity that compounds over time.
This is why we see such a massive difference between those companies that have a differentiated positioning and those that don’t in the B2B Effectiveness Engine research. As we said earlier, if you get just one thing right, this should be it.
So what does the data say?
Again, we see differences in the effectiveness of specific tactics at specific deal sizes.
At the lower deal sizes, bottom-of-the-funnel content, top-of-funnel content and PR are favoured. At the upper end, SEO, webinars and online articles and blogs are preferred.
The average number of tactics used for brand building is 5. As with lead generation and demand gen, there are variations. Those that track MQLs average 7 and both those that research their ICP and those that track closed:won average 6.
But which tactics?
The top 10 we see used most often for brand building are:
But as you may be bored of us saying, popular and effective are often very different things.
When we look at effectiveness (without taking deal level into account) the top 10 are:
It’s clear that when it comes to brand building in manufacturing, content rules. This was another surprise. We expected it to do well but would have predicted that paid advertising would have done better.
We were wrong.
Prior to seeing the data, we would have expected mid-funnel to perform better than top-of-funnel content given its practical how-to nature. But it is the top-of-funnel content that leads (and by some degree). It appears that, when it comes to content, brands are built more on perceptions of in-depth expertise competence.
Outside of this, guest articles and content syndication perform surprisingly well. However, this is another way to expand reach and fits well with the findings from the rest of the data.
We’ve covered a lot in this report. And yet it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface. So much of the learning from the B2B Effectiveness Engine data is affected by specifics and context.
The best approach for your business will come from a combination of getting the upstream elements right, determining what to measure (and being clear why you’re measuring it and what the knock-on effects will be), and selecting an optimum mix of tactics for your deal level and available budget.
Basically, it’s about finding what works for your specific business and challenges. The beauty of the data is that it can give you a better place to start from. If you can separate out poor-performing tactics and focus on the ones that actually deliver success, you face a process of fine-tuning rather than scattergun random acts of marketing.
So what could a blueprint for effectiveness look like for today’s manufacturing marketers?
Ensure it flows from the wider business strategy and has the executive support and the required budget to execute.
These will bias what you do, what you measure and impact the results you achieve.
Especially if it comes from a source that has a vested interest in how you spend budget.
Not simply what you wished they cared about — research this and focus on it 100%.
The numbers don’t lie.
The Day One List powerfully demonstrates why this should be job #1 for today’s B2B marketers.
From identity elements to personality to the quality of the content you create
Market to the broadest possible market for your products — distribution matters (a lot).
This is a proven way to grow your brand.
Find new ways to say the same thing and repeat, repeat, repeat.
These are not leads and will undermine your authority.
As we’ve shown, there is now, finally, solid research to show which is which.
Of course, the devil is in the details. There is an entire programme of activity in each of the 12 above.
However, the data and findings in the research show that while there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to B2B marketing, there are approaches that will deliver greater effectiveness than others.
Some, like positioning and brand building, are difficult to do well but deliver compounding effects year after year.
Others, such as specific tactical choices are often about separating the popular from the effective — doing less of the former and more of the latter.
We hope you’ve found value in the B2B Effectiveness Engine data. It may be that you now have everything you need. In which case, good luck (and let us know how you get on).
But if you think you could do with some additional help, we’d love to talk. We’ve worked with businesses across precision metal manufacturing, custom components and hardware. We may not have worked in your specific sector but chances are we’ve helped a brand with similar challenges.
01: Our Fast-Track Positioning programme can get you to a distinctive position in the market fast — this is fundamental to building a brand that can compete for Day One List status.
02: We can use the B2B Effectiveness Engine data to help you plan a more effective approach for your specific challenges — going beyond the limitations of this report, we can look at your market, strategy, objectives, deal size and budget to help identify the optimum mix of tactics for you.
03: And we can help you publish world-class content of all types — using our Mapping & Gapping methodology to help you out-think the market rather than out-spend it. The kind of content that will clearly demonstrate why you should be on any buyer’s Day One List.
The first step is to schedule an initial call. There’ll be no hard sell, no PowerPoint, no agency BS — just an honest conversation of what you’re trying to achieve and some thoughts about possible ways forward. Simple as that.
You can contact us at hello@consideredcontent.com or book a convenient time slot to talk right now.
Speak soon.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.