“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two and only two functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.” – Peter Drucker

Your goal of marketing your business is simple: get leads & new business.

For job shops and contract manufacturers these days, marketing is even more critical. Competition is fierce. Moving from a continental to a global manufacturing economy has created huge pressures – greater options for manufacturing sources around the globe, margins have contracted, and the quality of your competition is greater due to many job shops going out of business during this shift. Differentiating your business from competitors will only become more critical as supply chains shrink and the Internet evolves.

But the tasks to capitalize on these conditions are often foreign to you because your talents are based on designing and building tangible products. You create technically advanced parts and assemblies from raw materials to accurate specs and requirements. Marketing communications and a strong grasp of new online media likely aren’t your strong suit, and you may even see them as nuisances.

And the world continues to change. Your prospects and customers are using these emerging media to find you. If you’re not online with the right message, you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Like all businesses, you must attract new customers, move into new markets and keep your sales and prospect pipeline full to accrue future revenue. But the unique demands and requirements of manufacturing prospects and the buyers of your services make how you market unique.

This Knowledge Center will define many of the useful elements of a successful industrial marketing plan, and help you to create and maintain a strategy for your manufacturing business by focusing on these facts:

  • Why Market? To feed your sales and prospect pipeline and MAINTAIN COMMUNICATIONS
  • How buyers are using the web to find suppliers; business conditions (global manufacturing economy vs continental)
  • Collect leads to contact and harvest future work and develop relationships with them
  • The primary purpose of sound marketing of your manufacturing business is to differentiate your business from your  competition
  • Buyers looking for custom & discrete parts manufacturing are following one of two buying cycles:
    • Long-term research – assessing the capabilities of various sources to supply parts and assemblies for extended projects
    • Short-term acquisition – having encountered a supply chain disruption, in immediate need of an alternative source to eliminate or reduce the disruption

Following these 3 steps in order can save you time, help you craft a strategy that’s right for your business, and maximize the likelihood that you’ll get more work and meet more prospects.


Step 1: Get Your Website Right

Your Website is where your prospects, leads and buyers go to see if you’re worth taking it to the next level. They visit when they need you, or when they find you via other more (+)



Step 2: Work The Channels

 It’s important for you to leave ‘breadcrumbs’ to your Website, from the places that your prospects and customers inhabit online. And for a contract manufacturer or job shop, that means locating the right ‘outposts’ that attract engineers, buyers and industrial sourcing professionals when they are engaged in research to find services like yours.

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Step 3: Follow Up and Outreach

This piece of the marketing strategy is often the most-overlooked by small manufacturers. The reason is simple – once a buyer selects a source other than you or a customer’s contract has ended, you are likely motivated to move onto the next thing.

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