The importance of designing a marketing plan for the industrial company
The industrial sector has by definition a cutting edge, innovative and technological character. However, when it comes to adopting new marketing techniques and trends, many industrial companies are still conservative:
- They prefer on offline marketing actions.
- The sales team performs tasks that should be carried out by the marketing department.
Historically this has been the case because in the industrial sector the sales processes are long, deliberate and complex.
However, in recent years the behaviour and purchasing habits of customers of industrial companies have also changed. Traditional channels are losing effectiveness and the industrial company needs a marketing plan to improve its processes and generate more business opportunities.
Nowadays, industrial companies must have an up-to-date marketing plan for today's world.
What a marketing plan really is
In essence, a marketing plan is a document that sets out the objectives that the company intends to achieve and the specific strategies and actions that it will carry out to achieve them.
The objectives have to be different and specific for each company, but in general terms they tend to focus on improving the reputation of the brand, increasing sales, optimising communication with customers and users, and increasing business volume with the use of marketing automation tools.
What is the structure of an industrial marketing plan?
The typical structure of an industrial marketing plan is made up of four sections:
- Market analysis. Objectively and quantitatively establishes the situation of the company in relation to the competition, the market and its trends. Study your strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities in a SWOT analysis. Determine the profile of the clients, analyse the political and economic context, etc.
- Goals. The goals to be achieved have to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
- Planning the strategy to follow and actions to be taken. This section establishes the specific actions with which it is intended to achieve the determined objectives. It is necessary to go into detail and establish a schedule and budget for each of them.
- Analysis of results. This involves checking the results achieved and making the relevant corrections if necessary.
What strategies do we include in a modern marketing plan?
At BCM Marketing we are exclusively dedicated to marketing for industrial companies, and these are some of the tools we use to achieve our clients' objectives.
Optimise the use of social networks
Communicating effectively with your customers and prospects through social media is often a pending issue for most industrial companies. Many still do not use them, and others lack a defined strategy for them. It is essential to discover in which specific social networks our buyer persona is on and create attractive, personalised profiles that provide value to the audience.
Get the most out of CRM systems
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an automated customer management system that facilitates the relationship between marketing and sales. It allows us to get to know our target better and personalise the content according to their particular interests.
Email marketing
It is one of the most powerful client communication tools that exists, but it requires a strategy in which nothing is left to chance: segmentation of recipients, responsive design, frequency and timing of emailings, etc.
Inbound marketing for the industrial sector
This methodology uses content marketing whose objective is to attract potential customers and get them to register in our database in order to establish regular contact with them.
Inbound marketing is based on the generation of valuable content. That is why it is an ideal methodology for the industrial sector: because it focuses on the creation of content focused on satisfying the needs and solving the problems and concerns of customers.
Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Account Based Marketing implements highly personalized actions focused on the different profiles of an organization with decision-making power in the line of business that interests us. It is ideal for very specific products or services that target very small potential customers and are therefore difficult to market using traditional marketing. It is an accurate and immediate system that can be combined with inbound marketing so that captured customers can be transferred directly to the sales team to contact them.
Industrial marketing is in continuous transformation
In industrial marketing, digital strategy increasingly plays a more relevant role, to the detriment of offline actions. At BCM Marketing we are specialists in online strategy. Do you need a marketing plan for your industrial company? Get in contact with us.
