There’s a lot of generic marketing advice out there. Blogs, podcasts, LinkedIn posts, webinars, courses… you name it. And a lot of this is useful stuff, but what if you’re operating in a niche sector like manufacturing? A lot of this marketing advice is not geared towards complex sectors that require specialist guidance (although good advice is still out there… like this blog for example!)*
*This is your cue to read on.
So, ever read about ‘buyer personas’ and ‘content funnels’ and think, right, but how does this work when my industrial product takes nine months to specify and the buying committee has six people on it? That’s the disconnect this blog digs into – why manufacturing company marketing is so hard to get right, and what it takes to do it well.
Most marketing frameworks assume you can distil a product into a punchy value proposition fairly quickly. A sentence or two that captures what it does, who it’s for and why it’s better. That works when you’re selling something like project management software. It gets significantly harder when the product is an electron beam welding system or a bespoke powder containment solution like the ones we market for our client, Hosokawa Micron Limited.
Manufacturing products tend to be technically dense, application-specific and sold on performance evidence rather than brand appeal. The buying decision hinges on specifications, compliance and long-term total cost of ownership (and potentially other factors like installation constraints, depending on the exact nature of the business).
Condensing all of that into marketing copy that resonates – without dumbing it down or losing credibility – is a skill. And it’s one that most generalist agencies underestimate.
Black masterbatch. Size reduction technology. Powder processing. Smart lifting solutions. We Get It.
The temptation is to go one of two ways. Either you lean too far into the technical detail and end up with content that reads like a data sheet, or you swing the other way and produce something so vague it could apply to any company in any sector.
Manufacturers have usually experienced both before they come looking for a different kind of partner.
This is before we’ve even discussed targeting people at different stages of the buyer journey – and what messaging works at which stage in that journey.
A significant chunk of your audience will be engineers or technical specialists. These are people who evaluate products for a living. They read test reports, compare performance data across suppliers and want to understand how your product handles edge cases. They’ll dismiss anything that feels like it was written to impress rather than inform.
But there are commercial stakeholders in the buying committee too. These are people who care about ROI more than tensile strength of a product. For the MD or commercial director evaluating marketing spend, the question is to the point: Is this investment going to connect to growth? Creating material that satisfies both the engineer and the boardroom takes sector – and persona – understanding.
Manufacturing sales cycles are long, and the length alone isn’t really the problem; it’s the complexity within that timeframe. A single purchasing decision might pass through engineers, procurement, operations and senior leadership before it’s signed off.
Each group with their own evaluation criteria and their own concerns.
Your marketing has to sustain relevance across all of those people and all of those months. Content that lands perfectly with an engineer in month two might be irrelevant to the procurement lead in month eight. If your agency doesn’t understand that dynamic, it’s likely that they’ll build campaigns around a single message for a single persona and wonder why it stalls.
Understanding who’s involved in the buying decision matters more than most agencies realise. That’s why utilising the right strategy to target the right people is key (and a point for another time, although we do have a separate blog on that which you can read here).
Long sales cycles. Technical buyers. Multi-stakeholder decisions. We Get It.
Here’s where it gets interesting, though. The manufacturers getting results are using digital marketing to address these challenges directly. For example, savvy manufacturing marketers are building the right content that serves different stakeholders at different stages. They’re also using SEO, as well as AEO and GEO, and thought leadership to be visible during the months of independent research that happen before anyone picks up a phone.
The ones struggling tend to be working with agencies who treat manufacturing like any other B2B brief. The same playbook they’d use for a tech startup or a professional services firm, then being surprised when it doesn’t convert. That’s the core of the problem.
The answer? In very simple terms, it is the right marketing – built by people who understand niche sectors like manufacturing.
At Move, industrial, science and technology sectors are where we’ve spent our careers. They’re the reason we built the 8 Moves Programme as a methodology designed specifically for complex B2B. We turn that sector understanding into measurable ROI, and we can prove it.
When your agency already speaks the language of your industry, you’re not spending the first three months teaching them what your product does. You get straight into the work that connects marketing investment to commercial outcomes.
Because manufacturing company marketing shouldn’t feel like a compromise. When the complexity is understood from day one, it becomes the advantage. And that’s what we mean when we say: We get it.
Ready to work with an agency that understands manufacturing? Let’s talk about your sector.
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