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ChatGPT is the fastest-growing and most quickly adopted technology. Ever. By far. After its release in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity and in February 2023 it reached over 1 BILLION page visits. At first, professional copywriters voiced concern that artificial intelligence (AI) was going to take over their jobs. But fear has become excitement after learning that unique (human-generated) content is still prioritized by search engines. AI can help tremendously with idea generation, content planning, editing, and research to save time and fuel the brainpower that goes into content marketing.

HubSpot is a powerful CRM solution with three main "hubs" - Sales, Marketing, and Service. While these hubs work together seamlessly, they can also be integrated with other tools. For manufacturing businesses, HubSpot's Marketing Hub is an excellent marketing automation tool that can be easily integrated with other leading sales CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

As a B2B manufacturing company are your marketing, sales, and service functions integrated and automated? An effective CRM increases sales revenue because it:

Does your manufacturing company rely on sales team activity to drive revenue? You’ve likely heard about HubSpot as a CRM but do you wonder if it can really add enough value to the sales process to justify the expense? You may already use Salesforce or another CRM so think there’s no need to use HubSpot as well.

Listening to potential customers and tracking their inquiries is beneficial to manufacturing marketing for many reasons. A primary benefit of documenting questions (by phone, form submission, email, and chatbot) is to gain ideas for future content but it also shows how the content that marketers created attracts new prospects or reveals opportunities to enhance (or pivot) the approach.

B2B manufacturer marketing is not flashy because unlike B2C it is not about new trends and selling an irresistible product to people with disposable income. In B2B, there has to be a justifiable business need for someone to seek out products or services and since the investment is usually large, the buyer has no room for purchasing errors. That means the buyer needs a lot of clear, organized information that instills confidence that the product or service will work well in their process, integrate with the existing system, and solve their problem.

Producing content about your products and services is the most effective way to leverage organic search through an inbound marketing strategy (also known as content marketing). People such as engineers and plant managers searching for manufacturing equipment, typically experience a buyer’s journey that includes three phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. To leverage the power of inbound marketing for manufacturing equipment, content should be created or optimized for each of these stages in order to attract, engage and delight customers.

When B2B manufacturing marketers promote a new product, reaching the target audience takes an organized plan of attack and someone dedicated to managing the project. The frequency of product releases is different for every manufacturer so whether it is something that happens every few weeks, every few months, or every few years, keeping a documented playbook handy makes the process smoother for everyone involved. It also ensures no channel is overlooked and over time marketers hone the digital strategy that yields the best results.

If you work in B2B manufacturing marketing, you put a lot of thought into how to reach prospective customers including what marketing channels are best and the messages to resonate with your target audience. Your sales team is actively engaging customers and leads at tradeshows and through regular contacts but that only engages the leads you know about.

Social media platforms have been available for businesses for over ten years yet many manufacturers still dismiss the platforms as frivolous rather than embracing the potential to build a brand reputation through organic posting and to target specific audiences with ads. Social media is not just for B2C brands and taking a look at Industry Week’s top 10 manufacturing companies, leading B2B manufacturing marketing departments leverage the platform for branding. (Ironically, Clorox and Apple, the two manufacturers of consumer products in the top ten list, are the least active on Facebook.)