Before you dive in to the data, a quick note on what you’re seeing here.
This is a stripped down version of the findings of the B2B Effectiveness Engine research for the manufacturing sector. It’s more of a high-data, low-commentary version than the full report.
If you want more in-depth analysis, head over to the full report here.
Email is the single most popular lead generation tactic in manufacturing, yet it doesn’t make the effectiveness top ten. Top-of-funnel content is the most effective lead generation tactic of all, and barely one firm in six uses it. And in any given quarter, only around 5% of buyers are actually in the market.
Read those three figures together and an uncomfortable pattern emerges: the tactics businesses reach for first are frequently the ones delivering the least.
Few will admit this out loud, but manufacturing marketing tends to run on habit rather than evidence. Firms keep doing what’s familiar, what’s easy, and what the engineers in the next room have always trusted.
To test this, we surveyed more than 1,000 senior B2B marketing professionals across just under 40 tactics, at 95% confidence with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. For this reports, we’ve pulled out the ~260 manufacturing marketers in the sample.
The gap between common practice and genuine effect turned out to be wide. Here’s what the data shows.
In truth, not much. When we set how often a tactic gets used against how well it actually performs, the relationship was faint.
| Tactic | Popularity rank | Effectiveness rank |
|---|---|---|
| Email marketing (lead gen) | 1st most popular | Outside the effectiveness top ten |
| Top-of-funnel content (lead gen) | Used by roughly 1 in 6 | 1st most effective |
| Sales velocity (measurement) | 18th most popular | 5th most effective |
Take a second look at that table. Email is the first thing manufacturing marketers reach for in lead generation, and it doesn’t even crack the effectiveness top ten. Top-of-funnel content is barely used, yet it ranks first.
In fact, just five of the ten most popular lead generation tactics make the effectiveness top ten at all. Across the study, what the crowd favours and what the evidence rewards keep diverging.
Manufacturing is the most short-termist sector out of those we studied. Importantly, it’s acting against research on brand-building versus activation that’s about as robust as marketing evidence gets.
| Benchmark | Brand building | Activation |
|---|---|---|
| Binet and Field 60/40 rule | 60% | 40% |
| LinkedIn B2B Institute (all B2B) | 46% | 54% |
| Manufacturing marketers (actual) | 29% | 71% |
Manufacturing firms are putting just 29% of effort into brand building and 71% into activation.
That’s the lowest brand allocation of any sector we studied, and a long way short of the 46/54 benchmark for B2B.
Within activation, the split between demand generation and lead generation runs roughly 50/50, with a faint lean towards lead gen at 36% to 35%.
The reason this matters comes down to the 95:5 rule, drawn from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. At any moment, only about 5% of buyers are in-market. Spending more than two-thirds of your effort chasing that 5% while neglecting the 95% who’ll buy later isn’t really a strategy, it’s impatience.
Offered a list of nine possible objectives, the average manufacturing marketer committed to just under four. This tends to scatter effort in several directions at once.
| Objective | % selecting it |
|---|---|
| Increased revenue | 59% |
| Greater market demand for products and services | 53% |
| Increased brand equity | 49% |
| Greater market awareness of the brand | 44% |
| Number of leads into sales and pipeline | 42% |
| Lower cost of acquiring customers (CAC) | 17% |
Increased revenue leads at 59%, while lowering customer acquisition cost trails everything else at 17%. Forced to name a single primary objective, 43% chose increased revenue, with greater market awareness a distant second at 19%.
High performers lean a little harder on market demand and brand equity, though revenue still dominates.
The lesson here is to choose a small set of objectives and let them carry real weight. Gravity if you will. Whatever you measure, and whichever tactics you back, will bend towards your chosen objectives. So it’s worth choosing carefully.
More have a strategy than in any other sector, which is exactly what makes the funding picture so frustrating.
| Strategy milestone | % of manufacturing marketers |
|---|---|
| Have a marketing strategy from business strategy | 85% |
| Have it signed off by senior management | 45% |
| Have the budget sign-off to execute | 20% |
So 85% say they have a strategy that flows from business strategy. This is the highest figure of any sector we studied. Yet only 45% have it approved. And just 20% hold the budget to actually deliver it.
That 65-point gap between having a strategy and being funded to deliver it is the single biggest disconnect anywhere in the data. And 20% is the lowest funding rate we recorded.
A strategy you can’t fund is really just a document. Manufacturing marketers grasp the theory better than anyone but they simply aren’t being trusted with the budget to act on it.
One thing: positioning. The good news is that here manufacturing is genuinely ahead of the field. We say to anyone who’ll listen, if there’s one thing worth fixing above all others, this is it. And it’s one manufacturing has largely got right.
Three-quarters of manufacturing marketers (75%) have a position they’ve both tested with customers and reviewed against competitors. That’s the gold standard, and a higher proportion than most sectors manage.
The payoff is clear. Between 82% and 84% of top performers describe themselves as truly differentiated, against 46% to 48% of average performers. So getting positioning right makes you roughly twice as likely to be a top performer.
If you think you’re differentiated but have never tested it, your odds of reaching the high-performing groups sit at 0% to 1%. That’s not merely low, it’s basically non-existent. To be clear, the advantage only appears when positioning is both tested with customers and reviewed against competitors.
Why does it weigh so heavily? Partly because of what Bain calls the Day One List. Their research shows buyers pick from the shortlist of vendors they already knew before doing any research roughly 90% of the time. Matt Dixon’s work adds that 40% to 50% of deals end in no decision at all.
If you’re not already lodged in the buyer’s mind, you’re rarely in the deal. Manufacturing has done the hard thinking on positioning. The job now is to fund the brand building that turns it into Day One List status.
Manufacturing does plenty of it, though not all of it pays off. 88% of manufacturing marketers conduct some kind of market research, with 93% of top performers investing in it against 72% of their less effective peers.
Manufacturing marketers were asked about 32 possible measures. On average, they keep an eye on between five and six. Unusually, manufacturing’s popular measures line up reasonably well with the effective ones.
Chances are, not the ones you are running. The average manufacturing marketer uses around six lead generation tactics, rising to ten among those who track MQLs or have researched their ICP. The five most effective tactics for deals under £1m and for deals over £1m overlap on only two. It’s a reminder that the right mix shifts sharply with the size of the work you’re chasing.
| Most popular lead gen tactics | Most effective lead gen tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Email marketing | 1. Top-of-funnel content |
| 2. Videos | 2. SEO |
| 3. Bottom-of-funnel content | 3. Online articles and blogs |
| 4. Your own in-person events | 4. Mid-funnel content |
| 5. Top-of-funnel content | 5. Your own primary research |
| 6. Sales enablement | 6. Sales enablement |
| 7. Paid social media advertising | 7. Programmatic advertising |
| 8. Online articles and blogs | 8. Your own in-person events |
| 9. SEO | 9. Bottom-of-funnel content |
| 10. Media advertising | 10. Collaborative campaigns with other brands |
The average manufacturing marketer runs five demand generation tactics, rising to seven among those who track MQLs or have researched their ICP. As with lead generation, the lists for the smallest and largest deal sizes overlap on only two tactics.
The average manufacturing marketer runs five brand-building tactics. This is the fewest of the three disciplines, and another sign of the sector’s short-term bias.
| Most popular brand building tactics | Most effective brand building tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Videos | 1. Guest articles on third-party media |
| 2. Email marketing | 2. AI-generated content |
| 3. Bottom-of-funnel content | 3. Referral programmes |
| 4. SEO | 4. Content syndication |
| 5. PR | 5. Influencer marketing |
| 6. Your own primary research | 6. Reseller and partner programmes |
| 7. Online articles and blogs | 7. Top-of-funnel content |
| 8. Webinars | 8. Loyalty programmes |
| 9. Paid social media advertising | 9. Retargeted advertising |
| 10. Case studies | 10. PR |
In manufacturing brand building, it’s all about content + reach.
The effective list is dominated by tactics that borrow someone else’s audience and credibility. Think guest articles, content syndication, influencer marketing, reseller programmes, PR. It’s the halo effect at work. This brand is trusted by people I already trust, so perhaps I should consider it too.
Top-of-funnel content leads the content tactics, ahead of the more practical mid-funnel how-to material. This is because manufacturing brands are built more on a sense of deep expertise than on instructions. In a sector built on long relationships and hard-won reputation, that borrowed trust is worth a great deal.
The study distils everything into twelve. Here they are, blunt and in order.
01. Be clear about your marketing strategy. Make sure it flows from the wider business strategy and has executive support and the budget to execute. In manufacturing, the budget is the bit that is missing.
02. Sign up to meaningful objectives. They will bias what you do, what you measure and the results you achieve.
03. Do not simply track the things that are easy to measure. Be very sceptical of data from any source with a vested interest in how you spend budget.
04. Understand what clients really care about, not what you wish they cared about. Research it and focus on it 100%.
05. Spend more time on the 95% of buyers who are not in-market than the 5% who are. The numbers do not lie, and in manufacturing the balance is currently tilted the wrong way.
06. Build brand and mental availability first and foremost. The Day One List shows why this is job number one. You have the positioning. Now fund the brand building.
07. Develop a distinctive positioning supported by a range of brand assets, from identity elements to brand personality to the quality of the content you create. Manufacturing is already strong here. Protect that advantage.
08. Prioritise reach over personalisation. Market to the broadest possible market for your products. Distribution matters a lot.
09. Invest in achieving excess share of voice against your competitors. It is a proven way to grow your brand, and manufacturing marketers already rate share of voice as their best measure.
10. Be consistent yet creative over time. Find new ways to say the same thing and repeat, repeat, repeat.
11. Do not pass non-leads to business development. Poorly qualified email addresses are not leads and they will undermine your authority.
12. Use tactics that work, not just tactics that are easy and popular. There is finally solid research to tell which is which.
These statistics come from The B2B Effectiveness Engine, the largest in-depth study of real-world B2B marketing effectiveness to date. It surveyed more than 1,000 senior marketing professionals and tested just under 40 tactics across lead generation, demand generation and brand building.
This Manufacturing Edition draws on the ~260 manufacturing marketers within that sample.
The work was produced by Considered Content, a B2B thought leadership agency that has worked with manufacturing firms across precision metal manufacturing, custom components and hardware. Our philosophy is straightforward: out-think the market rather than outspend it.
You can read the full Manufacturing Edition report or contact the team at hello@consideredcontent.com.
What’s the most effective B2B marketing tactic in manufacturing? It depends on the discipline. Top-of-funnel content tops the effectiveness list for lead generation, third-party events and tradeshows head up demand generation, and guest articles on third-party media lead brand building. The thread running through all three is reach and demonstrated expertise. The most effective tactics get the business’s knowhow in front of the right people again and again.
Is email marketing effective? Not relative to how much it’s used. Email is the single most popular lead generation tactic in manufacturing, yet it doesn’t make the effectiveness top ten. Only five of the ten most popular lead generation tactics reach the effectiveness top ten at all.
How should manufacturing firms split brand and activation spend? They currently put just 29% of effort into brand and 71% into activation. This is the lowest brand allocation of any sector we studied. The LinkedIn B2B Institute benchmark is 46% brand and 54% activation, while the classic Binet and Field rule suggests 60/40. Manufacturing is the most short-termist sector in B2B.
Why does positioning matter so much? 75% of manufacturing marketers have genuinely differentiated positioning (tested with customers and reviewed against competitors) one of the highest in B2B. Top performers are around twice as likely to be truly differentiated (82% to 84% versus 46% to 48%). And firms with untested positioning have just a 0% to 1% chance of being high performers. Add the Day One List finding that buyers choose from a known shortlist around 90% of the time, and positioning becomes the highest-leverage thing a firm can get right.
How many buyers are in-market at any one time? As a rule of thumb, around 5%. This is according to the 95:5 rule from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The other 95% are future buyers. This is why brand building aimed at the whole market matters more than activation aimed just at today’s handful. In manufacturing, where just 29% of effort goes to brand, the balance is currently the wrong way round.