By Alex Cairns, Managing Director at Move
Earlier this year I stood in front of a room full of Illinois manufacturers at Joliet Junior College and talked at length about something that’s been on my mind for a while now: Who controls the buying journey for your products?
It’s a question some manufacturers already know the answer to, even if they’re not sure what to do about it (we’ll get to that). The answer: it’s the buyer. In fact, the buyer has controlled it for a while now. And the gap between knowing that and doing something about it is where some manufacturers get stuck when it comes to marketing their products or services.
To set the scene a bit. That event in Illinois, which was run in partnership with the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, was designed to help manufacturers rethink how they approach marketing strategy in a world where the old rules no longer apply. I presented my own sessions at the event, and moderated others, and now I want to use this piece to expand on some of the core ideas from that day, because the challenges we discussed in Illinois are the same ones facing small and mid-sized (SME) manufacturers across the globe – whether it’s in the US, the UK, or wherever; the geography may change, but the problem doesn’t.
The Buying System Has Changed
The biggest shift in manufacturing marketing over the past decade has nothing to do with a particular channel or technology. It has everything to do with the buying system itself.
10 years ago, if you were sourcing a complex industrial product, you relied heavily on the supplier to guide you. You went to trade shows, booked meetings and maybe waited for the salesperson to advance the conversation. All of this means information was gated and controlled, and progress only happened when someone from sales picked up the phone. While that world has not gone, manufacturers (and other industries) must understand that digital now plays a major role in ensuring the buyer is in control.
Today, around 80% of the buyer journey for complex industrial products happens before a salesperson is involved.
Why? Because they can. They couldn’t before. This means they research independently; they are effectively self-educating and self-serving information. This may involve comparing alternative products, validating manufacturing claims and building internal shortlists without ever making contact. By the time sales enters the picture, most decisions are already framed.
This doesn’t mean salespeople are redundant. But their role has shifted from pushing information out to being a key consultative presence at the end of the process. The heavy lifting now happens earlier, in the research and evaluation phases, and that’s the territory of marketing.
Awareness Without Action
Here’s what I’ve seen consistently across our network of clients and connections, both in the US and the UK: most manufacturers are aware this shift has happened. They get it, at least in principle. But awareness and action are two different things entirely.
A significant number of the manufacturer enquiries we receive come from companies whose websites look like they were built in the 1990s. And to be clear: They know that, and improving their website is often one of the first questions or briefs we are faced with. So the understanding is there; they understand things have ‘gone digital’, and they know buyers are researching online. But these manufacturers may not have invested in the infrastructure to match that understanding. The gap between awareness and implementation is significant.
And that gap could get punished more severely. One key talking point from the event in Illinois is that we’re entering a phase where AI-driven search and generative engine optimisation (GEO) will reshape how buyers find information entirely. Buyers won’t be looking for links to company websites. They’ll be looking for direct answers to specific problems. If your digital presence doesn’t provide those answers clearly and credibly, you won’t make the shortlist. Worse, you won’t even be visible.
Understanding the importance of having a strong digital presence and wider ecosystem was a strong talking point on the back of my session, and indeed a general talking point throughout, and the questions asked by attendees were largely around ‘how do I get started?’, and ‘where do I start’? That’s the implementation issue that I mentioned. Manufacturers know what to do, but the ‘how’ to do it is the harder part.
A Global Problem, Not a Local One
One thing that also came through strongly on the day was how universal these challenges are. SME manufacturers make up roughly 99% of the manufacturing sector in most developed economies. That holds in the US, the UK and across Europe. And the core marketing challenges facing those businesses are strikingly similar regardless of where they’re based.
Challenges include:
These pressures exist whether you’re a family-run precision engineering firm in Illinois, USA or a specialist chemicals manufacturer in Ipswich, UK.
So, while the event was localised, and deliberately so, the takeaways are relevant to any manufacturer operating in a complex B2B environment.
Marginal Gains
One of the concepts I leaned on during the talk was inspired from what you might think to be an unlikely source: Sir Dave Brailsford – former Performance Director of British Cycling and General Manager/Team Principal of Team Sky. His ‘Marginal Gains’ philosophy is often utilised in the business world and is well-documented now. When he took over British Cycling and later Team Sky, his approach was to improve every small area of performance by 1%. Nutrition, equipment, sleep quality and even handwashing techniques. None of these things would win a race on their own, but collectively, they produced the most dominant period in modern cycling history.
Now, the point I’m trying to make here is that the parallel to manufacturing marketing is significant. Too many businesses approach marketing as a search for one big ‘fix all’ kind of approach, which rarely delivers. What does deliver is a series of gradual improvements across the entire buyer journey including things like:
None of these require massive investment or starting from scratch. But they do need to sit within a joined-up approach to marketing — one where your brand is working correctly, the website is doing its job and your campaigns are aligned to the right goals – whether that’s driving brand awareness or generating leads. Making marginal gains is great, but crucially, there’s a right system within which to make them. And that’s where specialist marketing support makes a difference.
The Leadership Problem
A recurring theme during the event was the challenge of getting C-suite buy-in for marketing investment. And it’s a problem I recognise from years of working with manufacturers globally.
Marketing in many manufacturing businesses still sits in a box labelled ‘promotion’. It’s treated as something you do to support sales, rather than as a strategic function that shapes how buyers experience your company long before sales gets involved. The result is that marketing budgets are often the first thing cut when times get tight, and the last thing properly resourced when times are good.
My advice is that if your business doesn’t treat marketing as a growth engine, that’s a data and validation problem. Whether you’re in marketing trying to build the case, in sales watching the pipeline shift, or in the boardroom making investment decisions – the evidence is there. The buying system has changed, and there’s a cost to being invisible during the massive part of the journey that happens without sales. If the data doesn’t move the conversation on, the challenge goes beyond marketing.
From Awareness to System
The manufacturers getting this right are building marketing that functions as a system rather than a collection of disconnected activities. A system that earns trust before the first sales conversation. That reduces friction across the buyer journey and makes credibility obvious without someone having to explain it in person.
Here at Move, that’s what our 8 Moves Programme is designed to do (and much more). It’s the real-life, 12-month implementation of a strategic methodology that we developed specifically for companies in complex B2B sectors like manufacturing. It helps teams find where their marginal gains are, prioritise the improvements that will compound over time and build marketing that keeps working.
The buyer journey has already changed. The opportunity now is to respond deliberately, with the right strategy – one smart improvement at a time.
The manufacturers who do will pull ahead. The ones who don’t will find themselves invisible to the buyers who matter most. In fact, it’s already happening.
If you want to ensure marketing helps you take back control of your growth, let’s get things moving. Feel free to drop us a line.
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