Marketing Challenges for Manufacturing Enterprises
In some recent posts that I have written, I have shared views and reflections about Retail marketing (see for example here) largely influenced by the learnings we have made at Musqot through our collaboration with customers from the Retail industry.
While different industry verticals have many things in common, there are also things that clearly sets Retailers apart from Manufacturing companies or Financial Services companies, for example.
This inspired me to now write another article, focusing on some common challenges and marketing technology use cases specifically for enterprises in the Industrial Manufacturing industry. I should also say that I have written this not from a general martech perspective (then I would have had to write a full book). Instead I have focused on marketing planning specifically.
CHALLENGES
Large manufacturing companies are often extremely international in their business, with strong requirements for local adaptations of marketing collateral. In general, they are also very production oriented in terms of marketing material, with a lot of catalogues and brochures (printed and/or digitally distributed). Sometimes in-house teams manage the vast majority of productions, while other companies rely heavily on agency collaborations. The high volume of detailed requirements, tasks and deadlines are near impossible to manage with only spreadsheets and email.
For many B2B Enterprises, and not least manufacturing companies, one of the most important marketing channels are Events. A substantial part of the marketing team’s efforts goes into the planning, preparation and follow-up of the company’s own events as well as sponsored trade shows. These types of marketing activities are among the most complicated to manage without a detailed and accurate overview of the marketing calendar – an overview that surprisingly many Enterprises struggle to achieve.
SOLUTIONS
These are just some examples (low hanging fruits)…
Marketing Production Workflows
All the team members involved in marketing productions have various tasks that they are responsible for, and these tasks can often be pre-defined and planned in sequential steps for different types of productions. By leveraging the workflow builder of the Salesforce platform, all these tasks are set up in Musqot Marketing Planner and connected to each other.
This means that our customers can rely on Musqot Marketing Planner to handle task notifications, activity triggers and reminders in a completely automated way. This saves time and improves efficiency and leads to less stress and better reliability.
Examples (multiple people and tasks are usually required for each of these workflows):
A; Activity Proposal and Budget (high level decision to go ahead)
B; Brief Creation (strategic and creative input to production team)
C; Proof Generation (submission of creative drafts for review)
D; Annotation rounds (editing copy and images for approval)
E; Print production (specification and approval for ordering final printing and distribution)
Dynamic Marketing Calendar (Gantt)
The Gantt chart in Musqot Marketing Planner is a dynamic calendar tool, capable of illustrating the largest Enterprise marketing plans in multiple formats and variations. The calendar can be viewed on a high level for full overview, and it can be drilled into for details of a specific activity. You can set personal filters to see only your activities, and depending on your role in the company you can decide whether you want to include a visual display of tasks, milestones and deadlines, or if you just need a calendar with go-live dates.
The calendar is a planning tool itself, as it comes with Drag-and-Drop functionality. From the calendar view you may also copy and duplicate previous marketing activities to save time.
RESULTS
#1) Significantly better marketing plan overview, across all involved organizational functions.
#2) Superior operational control, in all production steps from the initial brief and all the way through approvals and final production.
#3) Highly increased accuracy and reliability in delivery times and deadlines.
#4) Massive gains in the marketing organizations operational resource efficiency.
#5) Improved alignment of marketing and sales, which leads to increased ROI for sales intensive marketing activities.