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As economies are rebuilt and business looks to take on continuing supply chain disruptions and economic uncertainty, one thing is clear—Marketers now more than ever need to rediscover the fundamentals of our discipline.
The fallout from the worst global pandemic in a generation has triggered a reset around the world.
The rigour of getting the strategy right first and then looking to the tactics. The disciplines of committing to the strategic process—doing the research & insights, building a segmented map of the market, positioning, and making decisions around which targets to focus on, so we can help our organisations win in the market. And sometimes this means avoiding the distraction of the latest shiny digital toy or vanity metric which more often than not get in the way of adding serious strategic value to the organisation.
In adopting a strategy first approach, we can get insights from the market to validate or re orientate the positioning, armed with these insights and a map of the market, we can make informed decisions around where to play and how to win. But only by putting down the tactical tools to get the strategy right first.
A ground up marketing approach for business to business companies and industrial brands
This playbook covers the core concepts and strategic process to develop an industrial marketing strategy and tactical program, from research and targeting to campaigns, channels and distribution. Its an end-to-end deep dive of the process and elements of a best in class industrial marketing approach.
PART 1 – Developing the Industrial Marketing Strategy
Helping Define the Focus, Issues and Opportunities for Industrial Brands
Painting a Complete Picture of the Market
Getting it Right in a Complex Channel
The Need to Crystalise & Double Down
PART 2 – The Toolkit of Marketing Tactics for Industrial Brands
An industrial brand customer journey in action
A Research Based Approach to Setting Prices
How Expectations are Changing
A Guide to Potential Tactical Approaches. Integrated Marketing Communication
Developing an industrial brand marketing strategy and implementing an effective tactical program calls for a unique set of skills for the contemporary industrial marketer or agency partner. This is underscored by looking at what’s involved in needing to get your head around the business buying journey, a complex suite of products/services, industry dynamics, competitors and multiple channels to market.
This guide is a roadmap of a strategic process and tactical approach set out in order of the key steps involved in developing a robust industrial marketing strategy. It follows the typical strategic process:
Following Mark Ritson’s well researched planning approach.
The Playbook is based on our research, strategic and tactical work for some of Australia’s largest industrial brands and industrial companies. Over 24 years of great partnerships, taking on a range of industrial marketing challenges:
Industrial marketing refers to the strategic process of promoting and selling goods or services from one business to another within the industrial sector. Unlike consumer marketing, which targets individual consumers, industrial marketing focuses on the unique needs, complexities, and decision-making processes inherent in business-to-business (B2B) transactions.
It is often characterised by having a complex route to market with a large and complex buying group including procurement, operations and C-suite targets within the buying group for example and at all levels of an organisation.
This specialised form of marketing involves building strong relationships between businesses and navigating the intricate landscape of industries such as manufacturing, construction, and energy. Industrial marketers employ tailored strategies to address the distinct challenges and requirements of businesses operating within these sectors, aiming to provide solutions that enhance efficiency, productivity, and overall success in the industrial marketplace.
While both consumer marketing and industrial marketing share fundamental marketing principles, they diverge significantly in their target audiences and approaches. Consumer marketing directs its efforts towards individual end-users, aiming to create demand and satisfaction on a personal level. In contrast, industrial marketing concentrates on B2B interactions, involving businesses selling products or services to other businesses. The focus shifts from individual preferences to the collective needs of industrial entities. The decision-making process in industrial marketing is often more complex, involving multiple stakeholders and intricate considerations related to functionality, efficiency, and long-term value. B2B which includes industrial brands makes up half the global economy according to some sources, so its never been a more exciting time to be in an industrial organisation.
The first step in all significant strategic projects including the annual industrial company marketing planning cycle is to establish an understanding of the band health and target market, both through desk and also first-hand research.
Constantly speaking to customers and the market allows marketers to respond to changes, find opportunity and avoid falling behind.
The initial phase involves carrying out quantitative and qualitative research interviews with key target accounts to get the insights that will underpin the marketing approach.
This phase of activity involves looking at:
Using a combination of desk and in-market research its critical to get a deep and 360o understanding of the brand, Industrial customers and its competitors. This will be used to identify the brand’s current perceived strengths and weaknesses and also recommendations and opportunities for the brand’s future development.
This snapshot guide covers an overview and starting point for your industrial marketing research:
Along side firsthand qualitative and quantitative data we would mine any publicly available third party data. As an example, in our industrial manufacturing / equipment segment research, buyer’s key criteria generally centre around a range of purchase criteria. Recent research into equipment buyers had the most important criterion ranked as:
– Price
– Safety
– Experience with the brand
– Warranty
The sources of information actively sought out by purchase decision makers are dominated by:
– Dealerships
– Classified websites
– Drivers and peers
– Equipment Trade media
In most industrial organisations it is the front line sales staff that possess an absolute wealth of knowledge and understanding about the customer. Sales Managers provide a deep understanding of the industrial sales process and are able to validate any market observations and assumptions.
Implication: third party available data is a rich resource to inform the insights and planning phase alongside interviews with key sales staff.
A strong industrial customer segmentation takes the total addressable market and divides it into industrial customer groups with similar sets of identifiable characteristics.
This requires mapping the market;
Segmentation is a middle ground between mass marketing to an entire market verse tailoring to each individual in a market. This means creating patterns around the market.
A strong segmentation is formed from the research phase and takes into consideration; what’s important to each sub set, their purchase criteria and customer journey.
Implication: The industrial buying group is diverse and ranges from roles including technical, those ‘’on the tools’’, through to purchasing and procurement. Industrial brands need a strong segmentation to cover all of the customer groups. One in place, decisions can then be made about which of these customer groups to invest in for Targeting.
Industrial marketers and consulting partners must excel at driving multifaceted programs for complex organisations. Many large industrial brands have multiple business units targeting the spectrum of industrial buyer audiences. To solve their complex organisational issues, industrial marketers work closely with the C-Suite, Operations and Marcoms teams to build trusted relationships with key spokespeople and drivers across each business unit – allowing marketing to truly understand the challenges and opportunities within each division and advise on the right organisational and communications approach. It’s about quickly understanding the business, customer insights, asking the right questions and delivering a strategy based on fundamentals and not the latest shiny digital toy.
If Segmentation is about building a complete view of the market, then the Targeting phase is about making strategic decisions around which industrial customer group to invest in and go after, and more importantly – which ones to not target.
Michael Porter in What is Strategy says that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Ideally you would narrow the choices down to one or two industrial customer groups from the segmentation. Showing restraint is incredibly important. Keep in mind that some industrial customer groups will spill over or cross over into others – so select industrial customer groups with spill over. For example, Builders as a target group will have spill over between commercial and residential builders and therefore would be ideal to include in a building material or industrial brands’ targeting.
The ideal targeting criteria would include elements such as:
Select 2 or 3 pointy and SMART objectives that are measurable. Spend a year focussed on moving the needle on one segment – based on new research, new positioning, new materials and new execution. Measure the results through annual brand tracking and then feed this data back into the annual B2B marketing planning cycle to inform the plans and execution for the following year.
In developing the approach to and making decisions around Targeting, Byron Sharp’s widely acclaimed theory in his book ‘How Brands Grow’ promotes the following conclusions when it comes to brands driving growth:
Sharp advocates for sophisticated mass marketing which is about reaching everyone in the category. For B2B this means going after the 5 or 10 decision makers.
In their research Binet & Field (2013) The Long And The Short Of It overlay sophisticated mass marketing with the idea that there are two ways marketing works:
Brand building primary driver growth delivering YOY growth – consistency and building on what has been done previously.
When there is lots of focus on sales activation prompts – for example ‘buy now’, the effect on sales decays more rapidly than the brand building impact. Facts are not as memorable as the emotional impact of brand building. And its not a choice of one over the other. Smart business do both – 60% brand building, 40% sales activation.
Once you have made the decision around who to target, developing personas or segment portraits is a useful tool to bring to life the customer or for agency briefing purposes – but only when they legitimately mean something. Customer portraits are not a wanky write up of TV shows someone likes or what time they get out of bed or walk the dog.
Using the research from the previous phase – legitimate buyer personas can be created to showcase the key behavioural and or psychographic traits of each B2B customer group.
A good segment portrait is based on research of your B2B customer groups (from the earlier phase of work). It includes information such as:
How this works in practice for an industrial brand
The following customer portraits are based on research conducted with two customer groups for a typical industrial brand scenario.
These two typical personas are:
(i) users or the ‘person on the tools’ and
(ii) procurement or purchasing roles
Leveraging deep insights from research is key
Industrial customer group 1 -Typical B2B equipment customer persona
Based on our research, what matters to this B2B customer group?
Industrial customer group 2 – B2B procurement or purchasing decision makers
Based on our research, what matters to this B2B customer group?
Identify the important value points that a VP needs to speak to in order to resonate with this important industrial customer group.
Use this checklist for your industrial marketing strategy:
We hear lots of phrases thrown about like brand essence, mission, value proposition, positioning, tagline or brand idea. Let’s simplify things. It doesn’t matter what you call it, whatever term you use to describe Positioning – it could even be magic unicorn dust, we advocate for picking a single term and sticking with it. In its simplest form Positioning is simply wanting our customers to know we exist and the customer recalling 2 or 3 things about our brand. That’s it.
From the marketing team of Al Ries and Jack Trout: “Positioning is not what you do to a product; it is what you do to the mind of a prospect.”. Its not about what we are selling, its about what they are buying.
Focus on the three Cs:
Source: Kenichi Ohmae, Japanese organisational theorist.
Leveraging the typical industrial equipment buyer persona from the previous phase of work, we understand a range of behavioural and attitudinal insights and should work to align the positioning to these. Using a European brand piece of equipment as an example that represents great value upfront – European features but a more affordable price and because of longer service intervals fuel efficiency and good parts pricing – its genuinely cheaper to run – ever day, every drive. This could lead to the positioning;
MORE VALUE
EVERY DRIVE.
<Tagline>
Everything you’d expect from European equipment… except the price.
A number of positioning territories could be developed and homed in on for a final selection. This would then be brought to life via:
Outcome of this phase is to have a single agreed brand positioning to be progressed.
Read here for more on how to create a B2B marketing strategy.
Strategy first…
And now to the tactics
With the strategic process now complete, it’s time to address the tactics. This is what is typically referred to as the 4 Ps – Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
Like any marketing or communications program, the best work is built upon insights and an understanding of user behaviors, technology, your business and cultural trends. The tactical program is no exception. The phases we’ve proposed are very typical of how I.M.A B2B launches any new successful campaign and fit within our proprietary and well tested Planning Framework shown below. This framework represents the epitome of best practice today in planning programs. This is how we use research to find insights, align an integrated program around a core strategy, execute a series of socially integrated campaigns, and measure the results.
We’ve made B2B marketing so complex – micro segments, 1:1 targeting, the 30 Ps of marketing etc and we’ve missed the point entirely. Customers are just looking for a job to be done – for a product to do a job for them – fulfilling a need that they have.
That’s why it’s important to build a touchpoint model or customer journey – to deeply understand what job a customer needs to be done – and ensuring your brand experience is helping them to get this job done at each stage of the buyer path.
A useful checklist:
Outcome: This shows a B2B brand which touch points matter – from the customer point of view.
What’s the most important touch point for customer?
This could be;
Phones
Understanding the buyer path or customer journey for the key B2B customer groups or buyer personas ensures organisations have mapped touch points and opportunities across the purchase funnel.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it…”
Peter Drucker
Measurement at each phase of the funnel is critical to understand which steps in the funnel require attention and investment. For example, top of funnel awareness may be strong however NPS/loyalty incredibly low scoring. Marketing investment therefore would be better placed at the NPS/Loyalty end of the funnel.
Ignore the typical funnel of – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Loyalty, ensure you map the buyer path that a customer follows in your B2B organisation. You must then measure each stage of the funnel to get a baseline set of metrics that can inform decision making and benchmark efforts and improvements. An exemplar funnel that includes success measure of customers passing through each sage.
It’s important to map the journey in detail and then deeply understand where you can have impact to gain a competitive advantage.
We see this as a critical aspect of a business to business organisations’ future success particularly with the customer relationship being predominantly managed and influenced by a dealer or distributor network. All recent research shows customers rate the experience as important as the product.
It’s well known that 80% of profits come from 20% of products – it’s the law Henry Ford established – keeping focus on what’s working, and not developing product based on ability but on customer need. It’s worth carrying out regular customer
and market research including NPS to understand your product value hierarchy and ensure you’re not wasting resource on developing new products or service improvements that aren’t backed by customers research / needs.
Product value hierarchy for business to business marketers
Review your current and future product offer and map it across these factors to inform decisions around future developments or enhancements to the offer:
Outcome: a robust framework to evaluate and view the position/role of each of your product or service streams within the wider business offer.
An increase in profit by 10% can be achieved by simply increasing price by 1% (HBR). Meaning the most significant impact on profitability is be driven by increasing prices. The hard and sad reality however is that the dominant method for setting price is guess work.
B2B marketers have trained customers to look for discounts over the years and its very hard to break this cycle and move back to profitability. Nancy Smith CEO of Analytics Partners says a limited set of promotions makes sense but within a more robust long term strategy. However, discounting causes bullwhip effects with ripple effects out into logistics chaos, price fluctuations and an impact o brand perception.
The key takeout to avoid being a commodity is to HOLD THE LINE – and take a leadership position on areas customers truly value.
Peter Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter offers a robust means for setting an ideal price range. The model asks four questions to identify critical psychological price points.
Implication: Research via Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter gives a more robust approach to have a discussion around pricing than pure guess work.
Right now it’s safe to suggest a mix of touchpoints are required for an impactful industrial brand experience (research online, discuss on phone, check out product in store, price check online, buy on-line or in-store or by email etc.). But what will be the most effective way of delivering this mix?
It starts with mapping that buyer path and journey as per the earlier phase of work.
“The trick is to identify each of your customers unique paths and pain points and create tailored solutions rather than one size fits all approach that has characterised retailing in the past”.
B2B companies need clarity on their distribution strategy to:
Rather than only considering an outward-looking approach of assessing possible B2B marketing channels to market we recommend using customer research to develop an evidence based customer-journey to achieve an understanding of the current and possible future preferences of customers.
Market research is required to not only better understand the current buying habits and preferences but also the future state as a more digital-native generation of customers start to dominate the customer base.
McKinsey research proposes that buyers and sellers not only intend to continue engaging remotely; two-thirds prefer it to in-person interactions at many purchasing stages. B2B marketers therefore need to support this remote engagement.
All Metal Australia opened its doors in 2009 as a specialist manufacturer and supplier of steel roofing and walling products, architectural cladding and related materials. Success quickly followed, and the business now operates from five locations in the Greater Sydney basin plus three branches in Tuggerah & Newcastle after experiencing strong growth over the past three years. But in an extremely competitive trading environment, All Metal realised that they needed to continually improve their customer experience and offer to grow share and retain loyalty.
Leveraging I.M.A’s deep understanding of the customer journey and Tradie segment insights, an online marketplace and digital sales channel was developed. It took All Metal’s product offer online, making customers more ‘sticky’ with the brand and adding even more value to the customer.
The launch of the new marketplace experience provided customers with a complete omnichannel experience. This element of the offer will continue to drive competitive advantage and customer loyalty for this growing manufacturer.
As machinery and smart infrastructure continues to evolve with connected machines already here and autonomous vehicles on the doorstep; the leading B2B brands must bring current customers along on this technology journey,
at the same time as enticing the broader market. As this technology shift happens it will be ever more important to communicate clearly with your traditional customer base, as well as prospective new customers. But the media landscape is also changing dramatically. Traditional channels are closing down as new channels emerge – both in social media, digital and online experience. And McKinsey’s latest research on B2B buying behaviour puts easy, meaningful and practical digital brand and shopping experiences now right at the centre of doing business.
An industrial marketer for a manufacturer could facilitate this by developing an experience whereby the customer could select the equipment, in this example a tractor or product on the manufacturers website or App, a 3D model of it can be placed into the real world using Augmented Reality.
Products can be walked around and viewed from different angles. Interactive hot spots can be selected for more in-depth information about the product.
Brand benefit messaging is linked to products and used to further support the brand platform.
Extending on the McKinsey research around a hybrid digital experience and to help prospects transform the way they work, brands can create interactive product finders running through primary websites or a mobile App.
By answering 5 simple questions you can easily find the best product to suit customer needs.
Contact details for the nearest dealer could also be served based on location data. Or if the user is an existing customer who’s logged in, the nearest dealer can automatically be notified to make a follow up call.
McKinsey research points to industrial buyers having significant comfort purchasing big online.
Whether you have a shop experience as part of your customer journey, B2B brands do require online destinations that deliver a cohesive experience, which is seen to be resourceful, meaningful and valuable.
These sites or portals are frequently required to effectively serve the wide variety of different user groups who engage with B2B brands.
Sites will also often need to integrate several different data services and tools as a single cohesive experience.
Functionality…
Reporting
Whatever eCommerce platform that you run with should include the standard suite of reports expected with an online store. Including but not limited to:
Value of orders
Customer records & purchase histories to assist with remarketing/promotions
Cost of sales
Identification of best selling categories and items, to help with promotions
Link to google analytics to monitor sales funnels & abandoned carts
Data studio/dashboard reporting to show key metrics at a glance
A meaningful digital experience will act as the central piece to your customer experience and hub for all supporting brand activity. It’s helpful to map this out using an ecosystem flow diagram like below which considers all of the interdependencies across the experience.
As marketers look to deepen and broaden their B2B digital experiences, they may benefit from a structured process grouped around discovery, planning, design and development. Let’s look at each in turn.
1) Discovery
Begin by reviewing the various components of the business. This includes both online and off-site activity and the supporting services.
By also understanding current and future user activity you can establish the role of the online portal and use that to inform all project decisions.
2) Planning (UX/IA)
Taking what you’ve established in the discovery phase, you can then plan out how everything will come together. From external leads to integrated services, you can map user journeys, system integrations and bring it all together with a meaningful architecture.
3) Design
Leverage existing brand guidelines and industry best practice examples to design a product that is both user-centric and conveys a contemporary look. Design goes beyond making it look nice, it needs to be functional, a pleasure to use.
4) Development
Your development team will be part of the journey from Discovery, but this is where they really get to flex their muscles. They’ll create pages, do custom data integrations and build the back-end to ensure ease of use for ongoing content creation.
Across each of these stages marketers can iterate and de risk by ensuring the work in each stage builds upon the work in the preceding stage.
In addition to building a great strategic plan – its critical to then excel at the tactical execution. Tactical work needs to be grounded by the overarching strategic priorities, ensuring all the moving parts make sense for the broader brand. The following section outlines an approach and experience across a range of common tactical requirements in B2B marketing.
B2B brands should be channel agnostic when it comes to selecting comms channels. That means – rely on the advice of a well credentialed media researcher or buyer to look at what channels work the hardest in terms of reach for your target customer group.
How many channels is the optimal mix? The research points to strong benefits coming from an integrated mix of multiple channels.
“Great campaign planning means different tools to achieve different objectives… you generate awareness with PR, you build brand with TV ads, you generate information and preference with search and then you bring home the sale with fantastic sales people at the point of retail”
“You want 60% of your budget invested in long-term brand building and 40% on more immediate activation”
Mark Ritson, Marketing Professor and Consultant
The overall approach to media is about focus rather than scattergun. That means that identifying the core target and then using audience analysis tools like Roy Morgan to create a ‘hit list’ of media targets. This means you may have Gold, Silver and Bronze media targets that directly relate back to the audience you want to reach within the B2B buyer group. It means less wastage and coverage for ‘coverage sake’ and more coverage that is effective in its purpose. Business to business marketing teams would also use data to further explore lifestyle and attitudinal segments amongst audience groups to refine thestrategy and campaign messaging.
There are a range of important factors that should drive the consideration of channels in the marketing mix. These include:
Reach
Choose the strongest platforms to reach the target demos from a 1+ and reach % consideration, with aim of achieving at least a 40% reach.
Targeting
Focus on channels which allow us to be targeted and minimise wastage. Targeting all the buyers in the category.
Relevance
Consider placement and to reach potential customers across work and leisure time.
Impact
Inclusion of formats which are impactful and ‘cut through’ helping to increase the likelihood of consideration.
Creative
Opt for channels which compliment the creative and comms strategy, further helping to generate cut through.
ROMI
Which media platforms and networks will deliver the strongest ROMI from a reach & impact Vs investment perspective.
Media reports like the one below are interesting insight pieces to glean an understanding of the competition and their investment in certain channels. In this example, OOH was the medium most heavily invested in by this brand followed by Metro Radio and Regional TV. Overall they spent around $3.3M on advertising in the past 12 months.
Implication – use insights like this to determine share of voice and what you’re up against.
Media research and profiling exercises are important to minimise wastage. Media planners worth their weight will advise on media consumption for your target demo. The example below shows media consumption for males aged 30 – 64. Feeding this into the media. Planning process will help ensure wastage is minimised.
Even with the dominance of digital media there is still value in maintaining an off-line advertising presence for brand building, primarily through trade and industry journals but also extending out into other mass media publications favoured by key B2B customer groups.
Radio over-indexes for business owners and key decision makers. It is ranked the third highest consumed media for self employed people (closest demo to business owners/execs) – a strong choice for industrial brands targeting that business buyer group. With Breakfast being a peak listening time slot, brands are able to target potential customers during their commute. AM stations attract an audience who are interested in content and are typically habitual listeners.
Large format is a highly effective way of reaching commuters throughout the day.
Some of the key benefits include:
Transit will enable industrial brands to achieve high reach and frequency over a sustained period of time, with each asset driving reach across multiple routes.
Some of the key benefits include:
In some instances, regional TV can be more cost effective than radio.
Additionally, we can see that linear TV rates #1 for for media consumption of men 20 – 64 who are self employed/business managers.
Key actions to support this channel include:
Read more here on the role of PR in B2B and specifically the difference between Public Affairs and Public Relations.
A combination of Programmatic or ad buys across Streaming Services will enable a strong reach across target demographics and align your B2B brand with content that potential customers are most passionate about.
Benefits include:
Social Media is a cost effective way to drive your brands message to a targeted audience resulting in awareness but most importantly leads.
Some of the key benefits include:
Brand social display can also use the brand benefits to tell the brand platform story. Meta carousels can expand on the brand story with slightly longer copy and multiple images.
Prospects can be retargeted with product feature or price led messaging.
There’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and behaviours. B2B Social solutions should be designed to combine deep disciplines – like CRM, public relations, influencer relations, social media monitoring and amplification, strategically deployed analytics and listening, and online shopper marketing – and be rooted primarily in what drives behaviour.
To help ensure a successful digital program, industrial marketers should translate overarching goals such as creating positive brand association and affinity, into specific measurable actions that can be taken online, whether it’s acquiring supporters to your social channels, acquiring email addresses for outbound marketing efforts, or engaging broader online communities to independently disseminate your message.
A strategic PR Program aims to support the corporate brand– bolstering the efforts of the marketing team on the ground, by promoting the benefits of a brand against its competitors.
Key messages will be developed off the back of the brand health research phase. For a business to business organisation or industrial brand these could range from reliability, durability, ease of use and warranty and parts to support, with a view to generating wider discussion around partnership and performance leading to an increased share of voice.
One of the key goals would be to enhance the brand’s leadership position in areas which make it distinct from other players – and then double down on this position. Opportunities should be sought to promote the brand’s expertise and product offering in exciting new fields or offers, growing market awareness of new technologies or services to drive enquiry.
You may wish to consider adding another element to your coverage in the media by providing commentary on an aspect of relevant thought leadership relating to the economy or an aspect of public policy. This is a technique that is used to draw attention to a company and have it stand-out as an organisation that’s prepared to take a public point-of-view on a topic that is important and relevant to the community and the organisation. An example of this might be the opportunity afforded by the housing market outlook and challenges. Another example could be partnering with an organisation that is prepared to publish a research report on a matter of public interest (e.g. with a firm like Access Economics on transforming Australia’s manufacturing economy). Alternatively, you may consider having your name associated with an economic index (e.g. the ANZ job ads index).
Our research has shown us that humour underpins much of the ‘banter’ experienced on the worksite. Whether it be telling a joke, making humorous observations or generally ‘taking the piss’ builders and tradies appreciate a laugh, no matter at who’s expense. Another factor our research showed was that whilst many builders and tradies weren’t particularly active on social media, they did all regularly access and share humorous web content with their friends and workmates. It is this behaviour that can be capitalised on. By ‘top and tailing’ specific humorous, building related ‘accident’ videos with our “better way” message and promote the sharing of this content brands can seek to establish their positioning.
In a crowded market, with a number of aggressive competitors, targeting a largely disinterested audience there will always be value in offering an inducement to trial a ‘new’ brand, product or solution. Our experience shows that that the nature of that ‘reward’ needs to be different depending on who the decision maker is (i.e. the builder or female partner who may often managers the books/business administration).
Quite often the lions share of the communication happens amongst staff and other key stakeholders. Internal launches and ‘Thank You’ events are key component to a successful industrial marketing initiative – bringing internal stakeholders along on the journey.
Give internal users a hint of the new branding without fully detailing it.
Ideas
Release the brand across the world through a “live” online global event. Big visuals and global video assets along with messages from global CEO and leadership team to announce the release.
Ideas
Following the online launch, a physical event and/or installation across the key offices can help to engage and motivate staff about the new brand.
Ideas
With an engaged internal team, the rollout of the brand and guidelines can be taken to the dealers and other brand partners.
Measurement and reporting is a key element of any successful industrial marketing program – and is essential in maintaining the internal support needed to ensure the success of your strategy. We advocate for a flexible and needs-based system of measurement and reporting to ensure the program maintains its momentum, and that processes are improved and new opportunities identified. This starts with daily reporting / monitoring / recommendations, and goes all the way up to an annual strategic review.
The end of the marketing program should start back at the beginning with research via the annual brand health tracking piece.
24 years of partnering with Australia’s largest B2B industrial brands has got us to a point were we really ‘get’ industrial marketing and the challenges you face, from wading through the complexities of your strategy to creating simple to understand, go-to-market executions. And we can help you at every stage of your journey.
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