The marketing landscape is shifting, and what worked a couple of years ago may not stand up the new world of AI-powered procurement and increasingly digital-first buying.
While we can’t predict the future, having a good understanding of manufacturing marketing trends will ensure that your strategy remains up to date, and you’re ready to embrace new opportunities as they arise.
Digital-First, With Human Expertise When Risk Is Highest
There’s so much that we can outsource to machines, from embracing marketing automation software to AI-powered tools that act as our own personal assistants.
These changes are also adopted by manufacturing buyers, who want an increasingly digital-first experience.
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience for much of their journey. Buyers want to research independently, compare suppliers, and build understanding without early pressure.
But that doesn’t mean sales involvement is disappearing. The same research shows buyers still value human input for high-context decisions, such as assessing organizational fit, navigating compliance, building ROI cases, or de-risking implementation.
For manufacturers, this highlights the need to design digital journeys that do more than simply generate leads.
You need to focus on making your website and content easy to access, from your specifications and certifications to pricing realities and integration requirements, so buyers can self-serve. But you also need to engineer clear handover points where expert support becomes available to prospective buyers, whether that’s through web chat or something else.
Unfortunately, many B2B businesses struggle with consistency. Buyers frequently encounter conflicting information between a supplier’s website and what sales teams say later, according to Gartner, and this mismatch increases perceived risk. In complex, high-stakes purchases, it’s essential to make sure your message aligns across marketing, sales, product and partners.
Content to Validate Decisions
Another trend we’ve observed is that manufacturing content is becoming more evidence-led. That’s great news, since sharing things like case studies or detailed product information are some of the best ways to convert website visitors.
Content isn’t new, but what’s changed is buyer expectation. They don’t want to be inspired; they want information that helps them to evaluate options and justify purchases.
As Forrester found, deals are significantly more likely to progress when suppliers provide clear validation assets, including demos, trials, reference customers and third-party proof.
This is also why in-person channels remain so effective. Manufacturing marketers consistently rank events among their strongest distribution channels, because that’s where buying groups can see, test and verify the solutions on offer.
If you’re thinking of updating your content strategy, it’s worth noting that video continues to outperform other formats, particularly for explaining complex products and processes.
Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows video is rated as the most effective content format by manufacturing marketers, even when it isn’t the most widely used. That’s because the format is particularly good at compressing complexity and showing, rather than telling.
Account-Based Marketing for Building Consensus
Thanks to the manufacturing sector’s uneven adoption of account-based marketing, it remains a huge opportunity.
ITSMA benchmarks show that only a minority of B2B teams run mature ABM programs. Yet among those that do, most report that ABM outperforms traditional marketing.
It’s a trend that manufacturers should embrace, because it’s perfect for tackling the complex buying groups that you often encounter. ABM is particularly good at building consensus, so you can stop deals falling through simply because the buying group can’t agree.
If you want to launch an effective ABM program, it’s wise to focus less on hyper-personalization and more on coordinated experiences built around shared problems and credible evidence. That means making sure the buying group gets to see things like performance data, ROI models, compliance documentation and peer validation.
But there’s an important nuance to be aware of: research suggests that messaging tailored to the buying group improves consensus, while overly individualized messaging can actually increase internal conflict.
This means that, for manufacturers, ABM works best when it supports collective decision-making, not just individual engagement.
Technology Shifts from Assistance to Execution
Another trend we’ve noticed is AI moving beyond content generation and into execution mode.
Gartner research shows that while most marketing leaders now use generative AI tools, relatively few have embedded them into core workflows. At the same time, analysts predict that many early “agentic AI” projects will be cancelled due to unclear ROI or weak governance.
For manufacturing marketers, the most reliable gains come from narrow, measurable use cases tied directly to revenue, such as account prioritization, proposal assembly or content routing, rather than ambitious end-to-end automation.
But you can also use AI to build shared product models or digital twins to create consistent, high-fidelity assets across every stage of your sales funnel.
Connect Buying Signals to Conversion Messages
Despite the hype, most personalization remains basic within B2B. HubSpot reports that many teams rely primarily on firmographic and role-based segmentation, which is often limited to email.
For manufacturers selling through long, multi-channel journeys, that level of personalization is barely visible. The real opportunity lies in finding buying signals, like intent data, product usage, service interactions and commercial context, and using them to craft and share role-specific messaging and proof.
These signals can also help improve your attribution, which many B2Bs struggle with. Traditional, lead-based attribution increasingly fails to reflect how complex B2B purchases actually happen. As buying groups grow and trials become central, manufacturers are shifting toward metrics tied to buying signals that reflect buying-group engagement, proof consumption and deal velocity.
Sustainability Becomes a Buying Criteria
Sustainability isn’t a new trend, but it’s increased importance means it’s gone from being a corporate positioning exercise to something that’s essential for procurement.
Research shows that B2B buyers already buy more — and plan to buy more — from suppliers that support their sustainability goals. But over the coming years, sustainability is expected to rank alongside quality and price in supplier selection.
In response to this growing trend, manufacturers must change how they market sustainability. Buyers care less about pledges and more about product-level outcomes, like energy use, emissions, lifecycle performance and compliance.
This is underlined by regulatory changes that reinforce this shift, turning traceability and disclosure into requirements for some B2B deals.
Spot Hidden Buying Signals on Your Website
As buyers do more research independently, one challenge remains: knowing which companies are actively evaluating solutions.
Lead Forensics helps manufacturers identify the businesses visiting their website, understand intent across key pages, and prioritize high-fit accounts. This helps your marketing and sales teams to focus effort where it drives real pipeline impact.
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