Manufacturers: Getting Started with Modern Lead Generation
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
Lao Tzu
It’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the new and seemingly confusing tactics now available to reach the modern buyer.
However, the companies that are the most successful at lead generation have two things:
- A deep understanding of their customers.
- A documented content strategy.
Know Your Audience — Buyer Personas
In this era when the buyer is now in control of the information and the purchase process, the surest key to success is to start with your buyer.
“Many organizations I’ve worked with have found that an excellent approach is first to do some buyer persona research.”
David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (6th Edition)
Despite what many self-styled marketing gurus will proclaim, there is no secret sauce for modern digital marketing. However, the next best thing is having a deep understanding of your buyer personas.
As defined in Adele Revella’s bestselling book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business:
“In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them.”
At the core of leveraging buyer personas are what the author calls “The 5 Rings of Insight.” Understand these buyer insights and you’ll have an unfair advantage over your competition.
You’ll gain a deep understanding of what your customers real needs are, how they research a solution like yours and how they make the decision to buy (or not buy) from you.
Here’s a quick overview of The 5 Rings of Insight:
- Priority Initiative: What triggers your buyer to seek a new solution?
- Success Factors: What does your buyer want or need from your solution?
- Perceived Barriers: What gives your buyer second thoughts about your solution?
- Decision Criteria: What is most important to your buyer when choosing a solution?
- Buyer’s Journey: How does your buyer choose a solution and who else is involved in the process?
The full process of developing buyer personas takes time, research and involves interviews with those who fit your persona archetype.
But the bottom line is that, armed with these insights, your product development, business development, marketing and sales, and customer service will be better informed and aligned to generate more happy customers and profitable growth.
Have a Plan — Content Marketing Strategy
Once you understand more about your buyer, the next step is deciding how to connect with them.
As mentioned earlier, starting a content marketing effort without a documented strategy is a recipe for disaster.
So what is a content marketing strategy and what should it include?
A content marketing strategy is an outline of your key business and customer needs, along with a detailed plan for how you will use content to address them.
There are no definitive templates for building a content marketing strategy — it's unique to each business. However, there are five elements that they commonly include:
- Your business case for innovating with content marketing: By communicating your reasons for creating content, the risks involved, and your vision of what success will look like, you are much more likely to gain executive support for your strategy — and to get permission to make a mistake here and there as you figure out what works best for your business.
- Your business plan for content marketing: This covers the goals you have for your content program, the unique value you are looking to provide through your content, and details of your business model. It also should outline the obstacles and opportunities you may encounter as you execute your plan.
- Your personas and content maps: This is where you describe the specific audiences for whom you will create content, what their needs are, and what their content engagement cycle might look like. You may also want to map out content you can deliver throughout their buyer’s journey in order to move them closer to their goals.
- Your brand story: Here, you characterize your content marketing in terms of what ideas and messages you want to communicate, how those messages differ from the competition, and how you see the landscape evolving once you have shared them with your audience.
- Your channel plan: This should include the platforms you will use to tell your story; what your criteria, processes, and objectives are for each one; and how you will connect them so that they create a cohesive brand conversation.
Manufacturing Continues to Evolve — Will You?
Manufacturing has gone through many evolutions that were initially resisted and later embraced, including:
- Lean Manufacturing
- Just-In-Time Manufacturing
- Lean Manufacturing
- Total Quality Management
- Six Sigma
- Agile Manufacturing
Adoption of each was forced by a change in external circumstances.
Manufacturing is now entering an era that will be characterized and driven by customer centricity.
Supply is outstripping demand. It’s a buyer’s world.
Manufacturing success in the future will require a greater focus on the needs of the customer instead of the capabilities of the manufacturer.
"As consumers become empowered with more information and insights, and as attitudes embodied in previous generations evolve, product value is moving away from price, functionality, performance, and even brand. Instead, product value is tied to how well the product solves a basic customer need or fulfills a specific customer desire, as other fundamental mandates around trust, loyalty, and customer priorities rapidly change."
KPMG, U.S. CEO Outlook, 2016 “Manufacturers Move Closer To The Customer”
In a similar vein, getting the attention of the modern buyer to increase awareness, preference and sales requires a similar customer centricity. Manufacturers that are focused first on educating and helping their buyers are beginning to achieve growth by stealing share from competitors.
As a new generation of manufacturers jettison the increasingly ineffective, interruptive approaches to marketing and adopt a modern customer-centric approach to lead generation, an inflexion point of acceptance will be quickly reached.
After that, most manufacturers will be racing to catch up with their more innovative competitors who will have built a substantial competitive advantage of building their own audience of buyers.
As a growth-oriented manufacturer, are you going to act now or react later?
- Executive Summary — Are you a manufacturer looking for more qualified leads?
- Chapter 1 — The World Is Flat — Worldwide Manufacturing Trends
- Chapter 2 — How A Manufacturer Can Grow in A Flat Market
- Chapter 3 — Why Traditional Sales and Marketing Is Less Effective for Manufacturers
- Chapter 4 — The New Rules of Sales and Marketing for Manufacturers
- Chapter 5 — How A Manufacturer Can Be Known, Liked, Trusted and Preferred
- Chapter 6 — Manufacturers Have a Product Problem
- Chapter 7 — Manufacturing: Selling Through A Distributor
- Chapter 8 — How Much Should A Manufacturer Invest in Marketing?
- Chapter 9 — Manufacturers: Getting Started with Modern Lead Generation
