Guide to Manufacturing Marketing for 2026

The manufacturing industry has always stayed on the cutting edge of innovation. As R&D teams, field engineering, and technical departments take their slice of the budget, there’s often little left for marketers to work with.

But now more than ever, marketing has a critical role in helping manufacturers maintain their competitive advantage, and the tides are shifting. It’s simply “no longer enough to have the best products and engineering teams,” according to a recent industry report by Bain & Company.

The benefits of investing in marketing are clear:

• You can build stronger brand awareness, which means you’ll be considered for more opportunities.
• Potential buyers become more educated and develop a better understanding of what you do and how you can help.
• You can deepen relationships with prospects, so they remember you when they’re ready to find a solution.
• You generate more leads that you can pass on to your sales team.
• You find new opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell to existing clients.
• You’ll build greater loyalty from customers that choose to work with you time and time again.

What Makes Manufacturing Marketing Different?

Manufacturing marketing isn’t like typical B2B marketing; it’s more technical, more specialized, and often far more complex.

Manufacturers sell high-value products with long lifespans, long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers involved, from engineers and procurement teams to operations managers and finance. That means the buying process is slower, more risk-averse, and driven heavily by evidence, specifications, and proof of performance.

Unlike software or services, manufacturing products require buyers to understand physical capabilities, compatibility, safety considerations and total cost of ownership. Marketing must therefore translate complex technical information into content that is clear, accurate and commercially compelling. Trust is paramount, because a wrong purchase can halt production, increase downtime or impact safety.

Manufacturing marketing also relies heavily on hybrid channels like trade shows, distributor networks, printed catalogues and on-site demos, as well as digital research, webinars and 3D product exploration. Buyers expect detailed documentation, CAD files, certifications, and demonstrations they can review before ever speaking to sales.

The result is a marketing discipline where technical depth, educational content, and proof-driven storytelling matter far more than hype. To be successful, manufacturing marketers must bridge the gap between engineering expertise and commercial clarity.

Digital Transformation is Driving Manufacturing and Marketing

Traditionally, manufacturing marketing relied heavily on physical presence and direct interaction. Trade shows, industry events, and factory visits set the stage for live demos and handshake deals. Print ads in trade publications and targeted direct mail campaigns were the primary channels for reaching potential customers, and all roads led to a face-to-face B2B sales pitch.

In the words of BigCommerce publication, “historically, it was about who you knew and who would refer you to someone else.”

On the surface, the steps required to sell manufacturing products or services today haven’t changed much: “[it] includes discovery and pricing comparisons, quotes, demos, and final purchase decisions. You may have to prove your worth to more than one level of decision-makers; typically, the bigger the purchase is, the more levels you have to impress.”

What’s changed is how you sell manufacturing.

Today’s decision-makers expect compelling digital experiences that highlight the value and capabilities of your manufacturing, and they want access to your business at their fingertips. That’s why manufacturing marketing needs a touch of digital magic, through which physical products can come to life for customers across digital touchpoints.

Ultimately, it’s not about forgetting traditional manufacturing or machinery marketing strategies; it’s about digitizing and optimizing them for modern customers and adopting new solutions to long-standing sales and marketing challenges.

9 Steps to Build a Manufacturing Marketing Strategy

To build a strong manufacturing marketing plan, you need to follow a series of practical steps that give you clarity on who you’re targeting, what they care about, and how you’re going to reach them.

This nine-step framework will help you get started:

1. Define Your Marketing Objectives and Target Audience.
Decide what you want your marketing to achieve, whether that’s generating more RFQs, increasing demo requests, strengthening distributor engagement, or building demand in new sectors. Be specific about which industries, accounts, and job roles you want to speak to.

2. Conduct a Competitor Analysis.
Look closely at how competing manufacturers position themselves. Study their website content, technical resources, pricing approach, and the channels they prioritize. This helps you understand where they’re strong, where they’re weak, and how buyers compare you side-by-side.

3. Define Your Unique Value Proposition.
Set out the reasons a customer should choose you instead of someone else. It could be manufacturing precision, reliability, compliance, engineering support, or lifetime cost advantages. Whatever it is, make sure it’s clear and defensible.

4. Create Buyer Personas.
Identify the different people involved in the purchase, from engineers to procurement leads, maintenance teams, operations managers, and so on. Capture what each group cares about, the problems they’re trying to solve, and the information they need to make a decision and document this with buyer personas. 

5. Document Your Buying Journey.
Lay out the stages buyers move through, from the moment they recognize a problem to the point where they’re ready to place an order. Note what they look for at each stage, including proof of performance, compliance information, cost breakdowns, installation guidance, or ROI detail.

6. Develop the Right Marketing Mix for Your Business.
Choose the channels that make sense for your customers. For most manufacturers, that includes a mix of trade shows, SEO, technical content, LinkedIn, email, webinars, distributor support, and industry publications.

7. Create Compelling Content.
Publish content that answers the questions your buyers are already asking. This could include spec sheets, comparison guides, demo videos, CAD drawings, troubleshooting resources, certifications, or real-world case studies.

8. Measure Results.
Monitor how each channel performs by looking at metrics such as engagement, downloads, demo or quote requests, and conversion rates.

9. Refine Your Strategy.
Use what you’ve learned to adjust your approach. Sometimes, that means shifting spend, updating messaging, improving content quality, or targeting different accounts. Treat your strategy as something that evolves, not something you set once.

Manufacturing Marketing Tactics to Try

Having a strategy is only half of the picture. To really move the needle for manufacturers, it’s important to try tactics that are proven to work.

Add QR Codes to Your Marketing Collateral

For manufacturers, in-person events are still essential. But there is a way to make physical marketing materials work harder for you, and that’s to include a QR code that sends people to your website.

You can use QR codes to send people to virtual factory tours, exclusive webinars, or your company’s social media channels. And you can place them anywhere, including:

• On your business cards, marketing brochures and event stands, to send people to your homepage or event-specific lead-capture landing pages.
• On printed adverts in magazines or other physical advertising assets, to direct them towards your website.
• On your products, to point people towards manuals, maintenance logs and other technical information.
• On packaging or crates, to share setup guides, unboxing instructions, and more.
• On components, to help customers easily order replacements or schedule maintenance.

Let People Experience Your Products With AR/VR

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) can give prospects new ways to access, explore, and interact with your products.

Rather than just telling customers about your equipment’s capabilities, AR/VR lets you show them. For example, AR can overlay information on physical machines, turning a smartphone into an interactive manual. VR builds on this interactivity, giving you the power to create simulations where customers can experience your products in a safe and realistic environment.

It’s critical for building trust during long sales cycles, and particularly useful if it spares potential buyers from traveling to visit your facility in-person.

There are many ways you can introduce AR and VR to your manufacturing marketing, including:

• At trade shows, to create a virtual booth where visitors can explore your manufacturing products, services and facilities in 3D, download brochures, and even chat with sales reps via avatars.
• For product exploration, where customers can point their phone or tablet at a catalog page and watch a 3D model of your product(s) come to life. They can zoom in, rotate it, and even see animations of how it functions.
• For digital overlays that give customers X-ray vision. They can point their device at a product and see a virtual representation of its internal components, how they move, and how they interact, etc.
• For virtual factory tours, so prospects can familiarize themselves with your operations, see your equipment in action, and even “meet” key personnel virtually.

Build a Community on LinkedIn

Every marketer recognizes LinkedIn’s InMail feature as a steadfast tool for lead generation, but focusing too much on InMails can steal your time and attention away from the platform’s other use cases.

Consider approaching LinkedIn from a different angle and using it as a digital community hub where your business can share thought leadership, advice, product content, and more.

This helps you translate physical relationships with prospects you meet at trade shows and events into digital connections that keep the conversation going.

It can also encourage more sales – if you can get your community to become engaged. The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) discovered that their community users with at least one activity per month generated 5x more revenue than users with one or fewer activities per month.

LinkedIn is also great for building consistency and developing long-term relationships. While buyers may move between careers, promotions, and localities, their LinkedIn profile remains a pillar you can use to stay connected with them no matter what.

Consider Attending Online Events and Webinars

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the manufacturing industry to totally rethink the approach to sales and marketing without access to face-to-face interactions. Thankfully, many businesses embraced the change and even discovered new and efficient engagement strategies like online events and webinars.

Although some buyers will still prefer traditional face-to-face interactions, these digital touchpoints are a great way to engage buyers globally or nationally who can’t get to you.

However, it’s not as easy as directly swapping out a live seminar for an online webinar, as challenges still remain in encouraging buyers to give your business their time and energy.

For this reason, digital events and content must be as educational and thought-provoking as any meet-up, providing valuable insights on the manufacturing industry’s headline-worthy topics.

Once you’ve handled the content, it’s important to translate other aspects of live events from stage to screen. Think about how you can turn audience participation or Q&A segments into interactive elements throughout the webinar, such as polls or response forms.

For example, in a B2B Revenue Masters webinar, Coltraco Ultrasonics included an interactive poll inviting participants to engage in an offer for a free book about revenue generation. As well as keeping the audience alert during the online session, Coltraco were able to gain data they could use to follow up with prospects after the event.

Explore Deeper Audience Segmentation

Digital marketing gives you the power to segment messaging to different industry verticals and decision-makers, steering away from a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s something that traditional methods of marketing, such as trusty live demos, can’t compete with.

Audience segmentation really does work in practice. For example, the sales teams at wire, sheet metal, and spring components manufacturer Filame faced challenges in qualifying leads due to the highly specialized nature of the products. Therefore, understanding their niche audiences’ wants and needs was difficult.

As a solution, Filame combined website visitor identification with tools like conversion trackers to discover which products catch visitors’ eyes, enabling them to better understand the activity, industry, and size of prospects in segmented categories.

Managing Director Jean Gabriel explained: “Our strategy works best when the data flows smoothly between our teams… we share the necessary data between our sales and marketing teams through our CRM. We have seen a massive jump in lead generation since using Lead Forensics.”

Similarly, this strategy proved successful for sheet metal vendor McAree Engineering, which generated €217,000 of new business after its sales and marketing teams prioritized tailored communications to each audience segment.

Retarget Potential Buyers Who Didn’t Convert

Digital marketing requires constant effort, amplified by the long sales cycles that underpin manufacturing. Retargeting strategies let you to send friendly reminders to prospects who didn’t convert and encourage them to re-engage with you.

Retargeting can yield excellent business development results, as metalworking machinery company Selmach Machinery attests. By using retargeting strategies and following up with website visitors who didn’t initially inquire about their business, Selmach Machinery closed over £100,000 worth of deals.

Here’s how Selmach approached their retargeting strategy:

1. Host an online webinar about a hot industry topic.
2. Reference a recent thought leadership article about this topic during the webinar. After the event, send an email thanking the participants and inviting them to find out more by providing a link to the thought leadership article on LinkedIn.
3. In the article, make sure you include links to your homepage, product pages, or other content, so that people will click and find themselves on your website.

Your B2B website should act as a hub for all digital marketing activities, and driving traffic to it should be a top priority for manufacturers. After all, BigCommerce magazine emphasizes that “one of the biggest KPIs for marketing is website traffic. If you can drive enough of the right people to a site, the thought is that you’ll make your sales numbers.”

Use ABM to Target High-Value Accounts

Account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns provide yet another opportunity to leverage audience segmentation to the best of its abilities. In manufacturing, one high-value client can significantly impact your bottom line, and ABM will help you win more of those all-important accounts.

Similarly, ABM might be right for you if your existing lead generation strategies are not reaching your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Coltraco Ultrasonics faced this exact challenge: “First, we needed to assess the leads to see if they were genuine leads. […] But, sometimes, we weren’t bringing in the right type of customers.”

Controlled cavitation technology developer Hydro Dynamics was in the same boat. They aimed to take a one-to-one approach to their messaging by creating a workflow that identified businesses in the markets they were most excited about growing.

Using a variety of tools to bring this to life, Hydro Dynamics were “blown away” by the results, which provided the ideal foundation for future targeted campaigns like ABM.

Spot Leads Before Your Competitors

Perhaps the biggest challenge with driving people to your website is that website visitors remain anonymous. Unless they complete a form, they remain invisible to you.

But buyers only reach out when they’re 70% of the way through their journey, 6sense found. And if they’ve asked to speak to you, they’re probably also in talks with your competitors.

There is a way to be first to call, and that’s by tapping into the early buying signals that website visitors give you. But you need a website visitor identification tool in order to spot this.

These tools arm you with valuable insights, including:

• Which companies are visiting your site, so sales and marketing can target leads based on their potential value and relevance to your ICP.
• What pages they’re viewing. This info helps you understand their interests and tailor marketing materials. For example, are they interested in a specific product line? Have they downloaded technical specifications?
• Contact details of key decision-makers. You can gain direct access to the people who matter within those companies, facilitating personalized outreach and relationship building.

This not only tells you who’s interested but also allows you to reach out to potential buyers long before they fill out an enquiry form or request to receive technical specs. It’s also how you can stay one step ahead of your competitors…