Digital Marketing for Manufacturers: Targeting The Right Audience

Many manufacturing companies like to stay in their comfort zone when it comes to digital marketing. Investing in pay-to-play ads and articles on industry websites, using a website that’s nothing more than an online sales brochure, and very few KPIs in place to measure digital performance. If it’s not broken, why fix it, right? 

Fact: Your prospects are looking for information online. Reports and studies show that 94% of customers in the B2B market research online before they ever buy a product or service. 

How can you capture the attention of these customers? Implement digital marketing for manufacturers that targets the right audience. While the phrase audience targeting is often associated with Google Ads, you can create a digital strategy for your website that speaks to your target audience at every stage of the sales funnel.

Audience targeting will help your brand reach people at every stage of your sales funnel, widening your reach beyond distributors and sales teams.

Digital marketing for the right target audience can help your company attract a broader range of prospects: 

• Research and development teams
  
• Engineers and tech teams
  
• Key decision-makers (C Suite)
  
• Repeat customers
  
• Referral partners
  
• Industry influencers
  

At Knowmad, we believe that focusing on the right buyer personas, along with audience targeting online, can change the way you do business. Sifting through leads that aren’t a match for your product or service is exhausting. Reaching qualified prospects who believe that your brand can help them or solve their problems will make the sales process more enjoyable, more successful, and yield measurable results for your bottom line.  

Audience Targeting and Personas

Everything revolves around your ideal customer. The products & services you offer. The tactics you use to communicate those offerings. Your growth strategy. Even your address. Everything in your inbound marketing strategy is driven by the ideal customer you’re pursuing. That’s why you’re in business, right? To serve, educate, and help that customer?

Since everything depends on attracting that customer to your brand and your website, it’s crucial to develop a deep understanding of his or her likes, dislikes, habits, and passions. While having a gut-feeling of these factors may be helpful, creating a researched and organized profile of this customer launches you out of the hypothetical realm into a data-driven reality. We call this profile a buyer persona – a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer. Creating one could change the way you do business.

Strategies

According to The Content Marketing Institute, one size does not fit all for buyer persona research. Personas will evolve as you dive into research and create an audience around several personas to reach a broader audience.

Presenting yourself as a problem-solver is pointless if there’s no follow-through. Offering timely responses or answers to inquiries will go a long way toward developing your new status as a customer resource.

Creating content for audience targeting will:

• Give you a clear understanding of who your business is trying to reach
  
• Provide new ideas for products and services with a greater chance of success
  
• Help you to focus on opportunities aligned with your customers' wants/needs and eliminate those that are not
  
• Allow you to delight your customers with a high level of personalized service
  

How to create content for a specific audience:

Build a list to define your ideal customer. Consider the factors of gender, age, education, income level, geographical location, interests, family, and pain points.

Interview a few of your existing customers to gain a better understanding of their challenges, goals, and problems they're trying to solve.

Research online. If you’re trying to reach a CMO at a medium size restaurant chain, take a look at the publications and associations he or she values.

Compile this information into a simple, one-page document for your persona. Post this next to your computer or in a place you’ll see it every day. You’ll need it to direct your decision-making – both large and small. Use our Content Creation guide to meet your audience at every stage of the sales funnel:

Tip: Keep the number of personas to a minimum. Two to four is the most manageable way to start. Ten or more personas will destroy your focus. If you're building a new website or launching a redesign, focus on a few, then add more when your business is ready. 

Now What?

Download the persona guide below to create accurate, specific personas. 

Audience targeting doesn’t stop when you hit the publish button. Measuring the performance of your content is critical to long-term growth and success. Learn more about measuring performance from our KPIs for inbound article.

Pivoting your marketing strategy can help you move ahead of competitors who are engaging in the status quo. Begin with a strategic and proven marketing plan for your manufacturing company. Download our free eBook: Inbound Marketing for Manufacturers:

Share this blog post with your in-house marketing team, or reach out to us with questions. We’re always here to help.