Without a strong leadership link between strategic plans and marketing, it’s easy for tactical marketing results to stagnate, opportunities to diminish and customer relations to dip.
Winning More Business with Smarter Marketing
Susan Towers, MBA | Towers Fractional Marketing
For mid-sized job shops and OEM fabricators, marketing often takes a backseat to production, quality control and operations. It’s viewed as a support function that’s typically filled in-house by a generalist or a marketing agency specializing in marketing tactics: pay-per-click advertising, branding, search engine optimization and the like. However, without a strong leadership link between strategic plans and marketing, it’s easy for tactical marketing results to stagnate, opportunities to diminish and customer relations to dip. The law of diminishing returns can wreak havoc on marketing efforts that expect the same success with a doubled or tripled budget – or a budget that’s been cut in half. So what’s the magic formula, particularly for shops on a shoestring budget? The most effective marketing is simply smarter marketing.
Smart marketing involves a strategic lens, one that comes from a marketing director or fractional Chief Marketing Officer (fCMO) in collaboration with leadership, who can translate the strategic business plan and its objectives into a comprehensive go-to market strategy and assemble the resources, like budget, talent and marketing technology stack, for seamless execution and measurement of its impact. With a strategic marketing executive in place, there is a foundation that should be laid before your marketing advances.
Regardless of whether your business specializes in CNC machining, metal fabrication, injection molding, or other manufacturing processes, a good fCMO should take the following first steps to help attract new customers, differentiate yourself from competitors and expand your market reach.
Audit and Align for Clarity, Not Critique
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” While this quote is attributed to the father of the temperature scale that included absolute zero, Lord Kelvin, it applies just as much to marketing as any other aspect of business. That’s why an ideal fCMO begins with a strategic audit to assess both the internal marketing foundation and external market positioning of your company. This includes reviewing existing assets, messaging, customer data, sales alignment, team capabilities and performance metrics. The goal isn’t to critique past or current efforts. The intention is to clarify by identifying gaps, uncovering hidden strengths and mapping current efforts with business goals. Through one such audit, a fabricator had positioned itself as a typical job shop, grossly undervaluing its capabilities and services. The next year the same fabricator was named to the top 10 of the FAB 40.
From there, the fCMO develops a prioritized roadmap that supports growth without overwhelming existing staff or agencies, often leveraging and upskilling any junior marketers already in place. Throughout, the focus remains on measurable outcomes, efficient use of resources and ensuring your leadership feels confident - not burdened or overwhelmed - by marketing’s role in driving revenue.
REALLY Know Your Ideal Customer
It’s well known that prospects are conducting the vast majority of their research - some report up to 70% of the buying journey - prior to talking to sales reps. But how well do you and your sellers know your ideal customer and how they perceive your competitors? Developing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), in which you include your target industries, size of company, job roles, location(s), budgetary range, goals, pain points and other criteria, helps to focus your marketing and sales efforts on the prospects that are best fit for your organization based on your competitive advantage.
A well-defined ICP process also includes a competitive analysis component, which identifies who else is targeting your same buyer directly or indirectly and how they position themselves in the marketplace. A perceptual map, such as this template shared by project management software developer Asana, can be a useful tool to plot out and monitor your competitive landscape. Competitive insight not only sharpens your focus on best-fit prospects but anchors your positioning in the context of the market landscape.
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A sample perceptual map of competing automotive manufacturers based on two key characteristics, Style and Price. The Product Marketing Alliance reminds us to always view the buying process from the lens of your target customer, asking: “How does my product compare with market alternatives?” Image credit: PMA.
Once you know who you’re targeting and what you’re up against, you can develop a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) that speaks directly to their needs and stands apart from the noise. NIST recommends Lean Canvas’ customer-problem-solution template to try out, but a word of caution: it looks easier than it is. A strong UVP is not just a slogan; it’s a strategic message that’s simple, distinct and built to differentiate.
With a clear understanding of your audience and your market, the next step is translating that insight into messaging that resonates - delivering the right message to the right people, at the right time, through the right channels.
Messaging that Moves Markets
Effective messaging translates the UVP into language that directly addresses the ICP’s specific pains, goals and decision-making criteria, ensuring relevance across every stage of the buyer journey [see image 2]. This includes developing differentiated positioning statements, proof-driven value messages and consistent brand narratives tailored for each channel and persona. This process may sound like a lot, and it can be, but it’s necessary. After all, you wouldn’t send the same message to a new CPO buyer as you would an existing, loyal engineering customer and still expect successful results.
The key is clarity over cleverness. Messaging should be simple, specific and focused on outcomes the customer values, such as high-quality parts delivered on time to the right facility. Done right, this alignment builds trust, shortens sales cycles and increases marketing efficiency.
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Effective messaging translates the UVP into language that directly addresses the ICP’s specific pains, goals and decision-making criteria, ensuring relevance across every stage of the buyer journey as pictured above. Image credit: Qualtrics.
Your Business Deserves More Than “Good Enough” Marketing
In today’s manufacturing landscape, where buyers are more informed, competitors are more aggressive and differentiation is harder to prove, "good enough" marketing no longer cuts it. The reality is that no amount of ad spend, polished brochures or catchy taglines will move the needle without a clear strategy rooted in your business goals and market realities. That’s where an industry-specific fCMO delivers outsized value by aligning your marketing function with the way your buyers actually behave and the way your business truly grows.
It takes a strategic partner who understands how to connect the dots between quoting more jobs, winning more contracts and building long-term customer relationships, without wasting time or budget. If you're ready to finally turn marketing into a real growth driver instead of a cost center, it's time to explore what a fractional CMO can do for your manufacturing business.
The right strategy could be the difference between your pipeline stalling or winning new business.
Susan Towers is principal of Towers Fractional Marketing, a marketing leadership consultancy specializing in SMB manufacturers looking to solve their big challenges to grow revenues and increase customer retention. Contact her at stowers@towersfractionalmktg.com or via LinkedIn to learn more.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of ManufacturingTomorrow
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