How to create your marketing foundation

Laying your strategy foundation

We’re going to focus on the hardest part of your marketing efforts: defining your product and customer.

Bear in mind that this is a process in which the bulk of the work is done at the beginning.

At first it might seem hard, but you’ll add more information and drop some points as you go through deals and test some assumptions.

The great benefit of doing this upfront is that you do this once and you only tweak it from time to time.

It will make 95% of the remaining marketing work much easier and profitable.

Define your product

It might seem incredibly obvious to define your product, since in manufacturing the product is pretty much self-explanatory. Same goes for services.

Not so fast.

What seems obvious to you and your team most likely won’t be for your prospects.

To give you a real life example, when we worked on the marketing of an industrial heating company, their main product were thermal oil boilers and most of the marketing content revolved around it.

However, after doing the research, we found out that most of the ideal customers weren’t aware of that precise solution and were looking for industrial heating systems instead.

At the end of the day, it’s still a thermal oil boiler the product that goes into the heating system.

But the customers were asking a “bigger” or “meta” question for the whole heating system.

By defining your product just like your prospects are searching for you put yourself way more favourably in your prospect’s mind, and makes the whole process easier.

Takeaway: Figure out what’s the best way to define your product beyond the technical specs.

A good rule of thumb is a definition that your prospects get in the first try, every time. If you have to go through a 5 min explanation to make it clear, time to fiddle with it a bit more.

Best technical points

Time to show-off your impressive specs. This is the part to delight your most technical part of your prospects: engineers, chemists and technicians.

Aside from the ever present technical sheets, the best practice here is to highlight the 3 main key points that a project requires from your solution.

Common key points are capacity, power output, power consumption, certifications, and so on.

Takeway: Figure out the 3 most asked features of your product or service. Make it incredibly easy to find and remark them.

Define them in benefits

This is usually the hardest part to achieve in a technical driven environment since it is usually mistaken by salesy verbatim.

I get it; from your point of view, your product does all these incredible things, save money and time to your customer and it even is a gorgeous piece of machinery.

But did you take the time to put all those benefits in your marketing material? Or you just put generic words like “efficiency”,”savings” and you followed with a sea of technical specs?

My experience tells me that 90% of the times, most manufacturing marketing material falls into the latter.

It’s very easy to fall into this; you work every single day with your product and it’s second nature to you.

But we have to bear in mind that a prospect is not at the same level as you and won’t be able to connect the dots. We have to make sure we connect them for him by describing the benefits.

This goes mainly for a less technical audience, but if done right (i.e. not blatantly) many technical minds will appreciate the effort and will enable them to get up to speed and be able to ask further technical questions for their project.

In the manufacturing sector, most benefits fall into two categories: your solution either makes more money or saves money.

Real life example: an environmental engineering firm we work with offers water and air treatment solutions.

Often times, many businesses can benefit from their waste, by treating it and either using it as a power source, or selling it.

This was obvious to the company, but it was hidden in their material. It is usually thought of as an expense, but instead, here’s a solution that make them money.

We changed all the material, focusing on the businesses that could benefit the most, and explained all the benefits that they could get if they considered the solution.

Afterwards, we explained the technical details. The response changed dramatically.

Takeaway: Explain the benefits of using your product or service.

Will they save money or increase their revenue? Be as specific as you can, without being over optimistic.

Taking action today

All this sounds good, but goes nowhere without action. Time to hit the keyboard!