Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is no easy task, but for B2B industrial manufacturers, there’s an added layer of challenge: The products they sell are often highly specialized and may come with big price tags.
This creates marketing challenges for B2B teams. How do they effectively capture interest, generate leads, and make conversions in a market that prioritizes consistency over change and cost savings over innovation?
Here’s a breakdown of the top trends in B2B industrial sectors, some common challenges, and a step-by-step approach to help boost marketing impact.
The biggest trends in industrial B2B markets are tied to how consumers purchase products. As noted by Digital Commerce 360, 65% of industrial buyers now order products online, and 58% of purchases happen outside traditional distributor relationships.
Consider the move to online buying. While companies have long been comfortable creating and receiving quotes digitally, the precision required for industrial products made it difficult for decision-makers to skip in-person evaluations, since even small deviations could create large complications.
B2B buyers could find themselves out of work if they made purchasing decisions that created production slowdowns or led to unexpected downtime.
The move to online buying suggests growing customer confidence in the ability of B2B industrial companies to deliver what they promise, when they promise it, and within expected tolerances.
The shift to non-traditional distributor relationships, meanwhile, speaks to the impact of ecommerce on the market at large. What was once the province of enterprise-level industrial operators has now become accessible for small and medium-sized producers, many of which offer innovative solutions and more personalized experiences.
New buying trends represent both opportunity and challenge for marketers. While ecommerce accessibility has increased total market volume, it has also intensified the need to capture customer interest early and often. Given the highly regulated nature of industrial products and their use cases, this is no easy task.
Other common challenges for B2B industrial companies include complex product portfolios, ongoing supply chain disruptions, long buying cycles, and changing expectations.
Industrial companies often have large and complex product portfolios. Even manufacturers that specialize in a single sector or vertical typically sell a multitude of incrementally different products that are tailored to specific use cases.
While these small differences would be minor in a vertical such as clothing retail, they can make or break industrial installations. If buyers order parts that are a millimeter too wide or a quarter of an inch too long, they’re often unusable.
As a result, companies need a way to manage complex product portfolios consistently.
Disruption is “the new supply chain normal,” according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). Increasing fuel and logistics costs are part of the challenge, along with rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. The result is an industrial supply chain that rewards diversity and puts single-source product pipelines at risk.
To effectively manage disruptions, manufacturers need complete visibility into supply chain operations to align marketing efforts with current conditions.
Long buying cycles are a familiar feature of B2B industrial sales. It makes sense: In business-to-consumer (B2C) buying, the seller-to-buyer ratio is 1:1 — one buyer, one consumer.
In B2B sales, the seller-to-buyer ratio can range from 1:2 to 1:5 to 1:10, depending on business structure. This means marketers aren’t just selling to an individual. Instead, they need a pitch that gets them in the door, up the chain, and lands them on the desks of decision-makers.
Just like their B2C counterparts, B2B customers want personalization. But this isn’t an easy task. While companies can use first and zero-party data to create curated sales promotions for consumers purchasing outdoor gear, sporting goods, or cosmetics, the same approach is more difficult for industrial B2B operations.
This is because the B2B buyers are both businesses and people. Staff aren’t purchasing $50 or $100 items for themselves or a friend — they’re spending thousands, tens of thousands, or more on highly standardized products.
For marketers, this means finding a balance between highlighting business advantages such as consistency and reliability and delivering personalized messaging that captures human interest.
To navigate the new industry framework, B2B marketers need a new strategy. Here are five steps for success.
As buyers shift to digital-first purchasing models, manufacturers need to ensure that product data is created and collected consistently. This makes it easier to populate product data across multiple platforms and ensure buyers always have access to the most current information.
Product information management (PIM) tools have historically been used to accomplish this goal. These systems help identify high-priority product data, eliminate redundant information, and track product content.
More content in more places means more work. This can lead to frustrated and burnt-out marketers who spend most of their time updating resources and tracking down issues rather than creating new campaigns.
Automated product management tools are essential to handle this “grunt work,” allowing teams to focus on complete and accurate content syndication.
The sheer amount of data generated by industrial manufacturing, quality control, sales, marketing, and follow-up practices can lead to highly distributed and dysregulated data.
This creates problems with both redundancy and requirements. Redundant data can lead to over- or under-weighting specific values, which in turn impacts marketing strategy. Inaccurate data, meanwhile, can lead companies to miss changes in business process requirements, leading to ineffective marketing efforts.
Solving this issue means creating a single source of truth for all marketing and sales data. By funneling information from multiple applications and processes into a single source, B2B manufacturers are better prepared to flag and resolve data issues.
It’s not enough to meet buyers where they are. To stay ahead of the competition, manufacturers need to meet B2B buyers where they’re going to be.
In practice, this means leveraging big data analytics to understand purchasing patterns, track seasonal buying trends, and benchmark the competition. The more marketers know about what customers want, the better prepared they are to create content that arrives ahead of expectations.
No B2B industrial marketing strategy is complete without AI.
Effective efforts start with content creation based on collected data, paired with a healthy dose of human oversight to ensure accuracy and readability. AI is also essential in theshift toward generative engine optimization (GEO).
Put simply, it’s no longer enough to reach the top of the first page of search engine results. B2B brands must also prioritize their place in generative summaries that appear before these search results. AI tools can help identify content that needs improvement or updating to meet the criteria for a reputable generative source.
As noted above, PIM tools remain popular for product data management. Much like SEO, however, these tools are no longer enough on their own.
To navigate the evolving expectations of B2B industrial marketing, companies need advanced product experience management (PXM) solutions. These tools enable teams to quickly onboard product content, validate supplier data, automate digital shelf processes, and leverage intelligent digital agents to curate content and tackle complex tasks.
PXM, as the next step beyond PIM, is also what Salsify co-founder and chief innovation officer Rob Gonzalez covered at length as a guest on a recent episode of the "B2B Ecommerce Show."
Bottom line? Marketing for B2B industrial manufacturers is evolving, taking on characteristics historically seen in B2C purchasing practices. Keeping pace means going beyond PIM processes to create new marketing strategies powered by intelligent PXM solutions.