Senior and engineering
$75 to $120/ hour
Catalogue architecture, ERP and CRM integration, quote flow instrumentation, search strategy, and the technical writing that needs an engineer's judgement.
Manufacturing marketing
Manufacturing marketing agency, measured in orders
Industrial buyers evaluate on specification, decide across quarters, and often order through a distributor. We build the technical content and the catalogue that get you specified, then instrument the path from web enquiry to quote to order so you can prove which of it worked.
What does a manufacturing marketing agency do?
A manufacturing marketing agency helps industrial companies get found by the engineers and buyers specifying what they make, then proves which enquiries became quotes and orders. The work is technical content, a capability catalogue that answers specification questions, narrow paid search, and instrumentation from enquiry through to order.
The second half of that sentence is the part most agencies skip, and it is the part manufacturers actually care about. An industrial company does not have a traffic problem. It has a question about whether any of this produced work for the plant, and most marketing reporting cannot answer it.
We come at this from the operations side. We build the systems manufacturers run on, which is documented on our manufacturing software page, and a meaningful share of that work ends at the same place: a company that cannot connect what it spends on demand to what arrives as orders. That is an integration problem wearing a marketing costume.
Why is marketing for manufacturers different?
Industrial marketing differs in six ways that break standard playbooks: a technical and sceptical buyer, a sales cycle measured in quarters, a distributor frequently sitting in the middle, tiny high intent search volumes, trade shows that still matter, and a website that is usually the weakest asset in the business.
The buyer is technical and sceptical
Engineers and plant managers evaluate suppliers on specification, tolerance, lead time and certification. Marketing language that would work for software reads as evasion to someone who wants a datasheet.
The cycle runs in quarters, not weeks
Capital equipment and tooling decisions get attached to budget cycles, plant shutdowns and capital approval. A lead in March can be an order in the following financial year, which defeats any measurement built on monthly attribution.
A distributor often sits in the middle
If you sell through distribution, the company generating the demand is not the company taking the order. Attribution and lead handoff both break at that boundary, and most agencies have never had to deal with it.
The search volumes are small and specific
Nobody searches for industrial automation solutions. They search for a part number, a material specification, or a very particular failure. Tiny volumes with extremely high intent, which rewards depth over reach.
Trade shows still do real work
In most industrial categories the show is where the relationship starts. Digital marketing that ignores it, or that cannot tell you which show contact became a quote, is missing a large share of the pipeline.
The website is frequently the weakest link
A supplier with forty years of process knowledge and a website that cannot show a spec sheet on a phone loses deals to a competitor with less capability and a better catalogue.
Take the third one seriously, because it is the one agencies most often discover late. If you sell through distribution, every piece of demand you create is handed to a company whose systems you do not control and whose reporting you may not receive. Any measurement plan that does not address that boundary will produce confident numbers about the wrong thing.
The fourth is the one that changes strategy most. Search volume is a poor guide here, because a query with thirty searches a month can be worth more than one with three thousand when a single order runs into six figures. We select queries by what the searcher is deciding, not by what the volume tool ranks highest.
What does an industrial marketing service actually include?
Six things: technical content an engineer will respect, a searchable capability and product catalogue, search targeting specification level queries, narrow paid search, an instrumented quote and RFQ flow, and distributor enablement. The catalogue and the instrumentation produce more than the rest combined.
Technical content that an engineer will respect
Application notes, material comparisons, tolerance and failure guides, selection criteria. The content that gets found by the search a specifying engineer actually types, and that earns a call because it demonstrated you know the process.
Product and capability catalogue
A searchable, filterable catalogue with real specifications, downloadable drawings and lead time guidance. In most industrial categories this single asset outperforms the entire blog.
Search for specification level queries
Targeting the specific, low volume, high intent queries your buyers use, rather than the category terms your competitors are bidding on. Volume is a poor proxy for value when one order is worth six figures.
Paid search where the arithmetic works
At 27 to 38 dollars a click in this category, paid search only works on the queries closest to a purchase. We run it narrow and we say when it should not run at all.
Quote and RFQ flow that does not leak
The journey from a web enquiry to a quote to an order, instrumented end to end. This is where most industrial marketing loses its evidence, and it is engineering work more than marketing work.
Distributor and channel enablement
The pages, data feeds and co marketing material your distributors need, plus a way to see which demand you created ended up in their orders.
On paid search specifically, a note about cost. Published cost per click in this category runs between roughly 27 and 38 dollars on the agency search terms, and the terms your buyers use are often more competitive still. That does not make paid search wrong, it makes it narrow. It works on the queries closest to a purchase decision and wastes money on everything upstream of them, which is the same discipline we apply on the paid search side of the business.
What problems do manufacturers bring us?
Five recur. Enquiries that cannot be traced to orders, a website that does not show what the company actually makes, revenue concentrated in a handful of customers, a permanent argument about lead quality, and a previous agency that delivered blog posts nobody technical would read.
We generate enquiries but cannot prove they turn into orders
Usually the web form writes to one system and the quote lives in another, with no shared identifier. The fix is an identifier on the enquiry that survives into the quote and the order, which is the same entity resolution problem we solve in CRMs.
Our website does not show what we actually make
Very common in companies that grew through relationships. The capability exists, the evidence is in a filing cabinet and a salesperson's head, and the website shows a stock photo of a factory floor.
Everything comes from three customers and a trade show
Concentration risk that nobody addresses until one of the three leaves. Search is the usual way to widen it, because the buyers for what you make are already looking for it specifically.
Marketing and the plant disagree about which leads are real
Marketing counts enquiries, operations counts jobs that can actually be run. Without an agreed definition of a qualified enquiry, the argument is permanent and nobody wins it.
We tried an agency and got blog posts
The most common complaint we hear in this sector. General agencies apply a template built for consumer or software marketing, produce content no engineer would read, and report on traffic.
The first and the fourth are the same problem seen from two sides. When nobody can trace an enquiry to an order, the only available argument about lead quality is opinion versus opinion, and the loudest person in the meeting wins. Fixing the identifier chain from web form to quote to order does more for that relationship than any amount of agreed process, because it replaces the argument with a number.
The second is more common than people admit. A company with decades of process knowledge frequently has a website built once, by a local firm, around photographs rather than specifications. The buyers are then evaluating you on the one asset that represents you worst.
What does a manufacturing website actually need?
An industrial website needs a searchable catalogue with real specifications, downloadable drawings and datasheets, honest lead time guidance, visible certifications, and an enquiry form that asks what a quote actually requires. Photographs of the factory floor are not a substitute for any of those.
The order below is roughly the order of impact we see, which is close to the reverse of the order most industrial sites get built in.
A catalogue you can filter. Not a PDF, and not a list of product families with marketing copy. A structured catalogue where a buyer can filter by the dimensions they care about: material, size range, tolerance, pressure rating, certification, whatever decides the purchase in your category. Every filter is also a page that can rank, which is why this asset outperforms the blog in nearly every industrial business we have looked at.
Specifications on the page, not behind a form. Gating a datasheet behind a form costs more enquiries than it captures. Engineers researching options will simply use the supplier who published theirs, and the contact details you harvested belong mostly to people who were never going to buy.
Drawings and models to download. In categories where the part gets designed into an assembly, a downloadable model is the single strongest conversion asset that exists. A component in a drawing is very hard for a competitor to displace later.
Lead times, stated. Approximate is fine. Silence is read as long, and buyers under time pressure eliminate suppliers who will not say.
Certifications where procurement will look. Quality standards, industry approvals, material certifications. These are disqualifying questions, which means they belong somewhere obvious rather than in a paragraph on the about page.
An enquiry form that asks the right things. Most industrial forms ask for a name, an email and a message, then an inside salesperson spends two days gathering the quantity, material, tolerance and timeline before they can quote. Asking for those on the form shortens the quote cycle measurably, and time to quote is one of the few win rate levers entirely within your control.
It has to work on a phone. A meaningful share of this research happens on a shop floor or in a corridor between meetings, on a device where a table that scrolls sideways is unusable.
How do you find the queries industrial buyers actually use?
Mine the quote log and talk to inside sales. The real queries are part numbers, material and specification phrases, failure descriptions and capability questions, almost none of which appear in a keyword tool at usable volume. The words customers use on the phone are the words they type.
Five sources we work through, in the order they tend to pay off.
The quote log and the RFQ inbox. Hundreds of real requests, in the customer's own words, already filtered to people who wanted to buy. This is the most undervalued search research asset in any manufacturing business and almost nobody opens it for this purpose.
Inside sales and applications engineers. The people answering the phone hear the same six questions every week. Those questions are pages, and the answers already exist as spoken explanations that have been refined over years.
Search Console, read properly. Not the top queries, which will be your brand. The long tail of specification phrasings you are already appearing for without trying, which tells you what the market is asking in language you did not choose.
Cross reference and equivalent queries. Buyers searching a competitor's part number for an equivalent are in market and specific. A cross reference table is a legitimate, useful page, and it is one of the few places where naming other suppliers serves the reader.
Failure and symptom language. People rarely search for a solution category. They search for what is going wrong: the seal that keeps failing, the finish that will not hold, the tolerance that drifts in summer. Content built on symptoms catches buyers earlier than content built on product names.
Expect the resulting list to look unimpressive to anyone used to consumer marketing. Thirty searches a month against a query where one order is worth six figures is a better target than three thousand searches from people who will never specify anything.
How do trade shows fit with digital marketing?
Trade shows still generate real industrial pipeline, and most companies waste the surrounding digital opportunity entirely. The work is targeting attendees before the show, capturing contacts into a system that will follow up, and measuring which show contacts became quotes months later.
Three windows, each handled badly by default.
Before. Exhibitor and attendee lists are usually published. That is a named account list handed to you, and it is the one moment when outreach has an obvious, honest reason to exist: we will both be in the same building on these dates. Booked meetings beat booth traffic by a wide margin.
During. The failure is almost always capture. Badge scans land in a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is imported a fortnight later, and by then the context of each conversation is lost. Capturing a one line note about what each person actually needed, attached to the record, is worth more than the contact details.
After. The follow up window is days, not weeks, and the content should reference the specific conversation. Then, critically, the record needs to survive long enough to be credited when the order arrives two quarters later, which is the same identifier problem described earlier on this page.
Measure shows the way you measure everything else here: quoted value traceable to show contacts, over a window long enough to match the sales cycle. Plenty of shows that look expensive on a same quarter view are the best channel in the business when measured over a year, and a few that everyone attends out of habit are not.
Should manufacturers run account based marketing?
Often yes, because industrial markets are naturally account based. If you can name the two hundred companies that could specify what you make, you already have the target list that most B2B companies spend months constructing, and the economics of long cycles and large orders suit the model.
The conditions that make account based marketing work are unusually common in manufacturing. The buyer universe is finite and nameable. Contract values are large enough to justify spending real money per account. The buying committee is genuinely multi person, with an engineer, a purchasing manager and often a quality function all involved. And the sales cycle is long enough that staying present matters more than catching a moment.
The condition that frequently fails is the data. Industrial CRMs tend to have decades of accumulated records, several entries per customer company, distributor and end user records tangled together, and no reliable way to say whether an account is new. That makes measurement by account impossible until it is fixed.
We cover the approach on the ABM page, including account tiering and the measurement model, and the underlying record problem on the CRM data quality page.
How should manufacturing marketing be measured?
Measure quoted value from web sourced enquiries, quote to order conversion by source, time from enquiry to quote, cost per qualified enquiry, and share of revenue outside your largest customers. Traffic and impressions are diagnostics and should never appear as headline numbers.
| Measure | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Quoted value from web sourced enquiries | The first number that means anything. Total value of quotes traceable to a digital enquiry, reported on the cohort of enquiries rather than the month the quote was raised. |
| Quote to order conversion by source | Tells you whether the enquiries are the right kind. A source producing many quotes and few orders is producing the wrong enquiries, which is a targeting problem rather than a sales problem. |
| Time from enquiry to quote | Almost entirely within your control and almost always worse than people think. In categories where several suppliers are asked at once, responding first is a significant share of the win rate. |
| Cost per qualified enquiry | Only meaningful once operations and marketing agree what qualified means. Write the definition down before measuring it, or you are measuring an opinion. |
| Share of revenue outside the top three customers | The strategic one. If digital marketing is working, concentration falls. If it is not, you will see that here before you see it anywhere else. |
Report these on cohorts. Group enquiries by the month they arrived and follow that group forward, rather than counting quotes raised in a calendar month. With a sales cycle running two quarters or more, calendar month reporting will show a strong month of demand generation as a weak month of results, and somebody will cut the wrong budget on the strength of it.
The last row is the one to put in front of ownership. Customer concentration is the risk most industrial businesses actually carry, and it is the clearest evidence that marketing is doing something structural rather than decorative.
How long does this take to work?
Expect the first traceable enquiries within two to three months and a fair verdict at nine to twelve, because the sales cycle itself is two quarters in most industrial categories. Catalogue and website fixes show up fastest, since they improve conversion on demand you already have.
The sequencing we use, and the reasoning behind it.
First, fix what existing demand hits. If buyers already reach your site and cannot find a specification, every pound spent upstream is wasted at the same rate. Catalogue, specifications, mobile rendering and enquiry forms come before any acquisition work. This also pays back fastest because the traffic already exists.
Second, instrument the path to a quote. Before spending on acquisition, make sure you will be able to tell what it did. This is a few weeks of work and it determines whether the next nine months produce evidence or opinions.
Third, build the content that gets found. Application notes, selection guides and comparison pages against the queries your buyers use. Slow to start and compounding once it lands.
Fourth, add paid search on the narrow set of queries where the arithmetic closes. Last, because it is the only step that keeps costing money every month it runs.
Most agencies run that order backwards, because acquisition is visible and plumbing is not.
How do you market when you sell through distributors?
Market to the end user and sell through the channel. The company specifying your product is usually not the company ordering it, so the job is to be specified by the engineer while making it effortless for the distributor to fulfil, and to agree in advance what order data comes back to you.
This is the structural problem that separates industrial marketing from almost everything else, and it is where generic agencies run out of answers.
Specification happens upstream of the order. An engineer chooses a part, a material or a supplier long before a purchase order exists. If your content and catalogue win that moment, the order follows through whichever channel the customer prefers. If you only market to buyers, you are competing on price at the last step, which is the worst position available.
Make the distributor's job easy. Product data in the format they need, images and specifications they can publish, lead time and availability they can quote from, and co branded material for their own customers. A distributor with three competing lines will push the one that costs them the least effort to sell.
Agree what data comes back, in writing. This is the conversation almost nobody has before the programme starts. Which orders get attributed, at what level of detail, how often. Even partial reporting, such as order volume by region or by product family, transforms what you can measure. No reporting means your marketing is permanently unprovable.
Keep an identifier on the enquiry. Where you pass a lead to a distributor, pass a reference with it and ask for that reference back on the resulting order. It is a small operational ask and it is the single highest leverage change available in a channel model.
Watch for conflict honestly. If you take direct enquiries and your distributors know it, that relationship needs managing openly rather than quietly. The usual settlement is clear rules about which enquiries route to the channel and which do not, published to both sides.
None of this is marketing work in the conventional sense. It is commercial agreement plus data plumbing, which is why it tends to be skipped, and why the companies that do it have evidence their competitors cannot produce.
What does it cost to work with us?
We bill hourly against an agreed scope rather than a monthly retainer, so a month of catalogue and integration work costs what it costs and a quiet month costs less. The engineering that connects enquiries to quotes runs at our senior rate.
A first engagement is usually the website and catalogue fix plus the instrumentation, which typically lands between 60 and 120 hours depending on what the existing systems look like, followed by a lighter ongoing month for content and search.
Production
$24 to $45/ hour
Page build, catalogue data entry, content production, campaign build, reporting.
Indicative until we have seen the site and the systems behind it. Engagements start at ninety days with written outcomes, then month to month with thirty days notice.
When should a manufacturer not hire a marketing agency?
Do not hire when your market is a handful of named buyers, when capacity is already full, when nobody technical can review content, or when you need orders inside the current quarter. Each of those defeats the work regardless of who does it.
You sell one product to eleven buyers in the world
In genuinely tiny markets, direct relationships and trade shows beat anything we can build. We will say so rather than take the work.
Capacity is already full
Marketing that creates demand you cannot fulfil damages the relationships you have. Fix the constraint first, or target higher margin work rather than more work.
Nobody technical can review content
Industrial content is only credible when it contains specifics only your engineers know. Without an hour a week of their attention, the output will be the generic material you are trying to get away from.
You need orders this quarter
In a category with a two quarter sales cycle, nothing published this month closes this quarter. Paid search on the closest to purchase queries is the fastest honest option, and it is still not immediate.
The second is worth dwelling on because it gets ignored. Several manufacturers we have spoken to did not need more enquiries, they needed better ones: higher margin work, longer runs, or customers who do not demand emergency turnarounds. That is a targeting and positioning job rather than a volume job, and it uses a smaller budget than a demand programme.
If the constraint is inside the plant rather than in the market, the manufacturing operations page covers the software side, from scheduling and traceability to the integration between the shop floor and the ERP.
FAQ
Common questions
What does a manufacturing marketing agency do?
A manufacturing marketing agency helps industrial companies get found by the engineers and buyers specifying what they make, then proves which enquiries became quotes and orders. The work is technical content, a searchable capability catalogue, narrow paid search on high intent queries, and instrumentation from web enquiry through to order.
Why is industrial marketing different from other marketing?
Six reasons: the buyer is technical and evaluates on specification, the cycle runs in quarters rather than weeks, a distributor often sits between you and the end customer, search volumes are tiny but extremely specific, trade shows still generate real pipeline, and the website is usually the weakest asset in the business.
How do you measure marketing for manufacturers?
On quoted value from web sourced enquiries, quote to order conversion by source, time from enquiry to quote, cost per qualified enquiry, and the share of revenue coming from outside your largest customers. Report on cohorts of enquiries by arrival month, because calendar month reporting misreads a two quarter sales cycle.
How long does manufacturing marketing take to work?
First traceable enquiries usually appear within two to three months, with a fair verdict at nine to twelve, because the sales cycle itself runs two quarters in most industrial categories. Website and catalogue fixes pay back fastest since they improve conversion on demand you already have.
Does paid search work for manufacturers?
On narrow, close to purchase queries, yes. Published cost per click in this category runs roughly 27 to 38 dollars, so paid search works where the searcher is close to specifying or buying and wastes money on anything upstream of that. It should be the last channel added, not the first.
How do you handle selling through distributors?
By treating the handoff as a measurement problem rather than ignoring it. The demand you create is handed to a company whose systems you do not control, so the work is agreeing what data comes back, giving distributors the pages and feeds they need, and keeping an identifier on the enquiry so you can see which created demand became orders.
We get enquiries but cannot prove they become orders. Why?
Almost always because the web form writes to one system and the quote lives in another with no shared identifier. The fix is to put an identifier on the enquiry that survives into the quote and the order record, which is an entity resolution problem rather than a marketing one, and it also ends the argument about lead quality.
What should a manufacturing website include?
A searchable, filterable catalogue with real specifications, downloadable drawings and lead time guidance, plus application and selection content that demonstrates process knowledge. In most industrial categories the catalogue outperforms the entire blog, and a site built around photographs of the factory floor represents the business worst.
What should a manufacturing website include?
A filterable catalogue with real specifications, downloadable drawings and datasheets, stated lead times, visible certifications, and an enquiry form that asks for quantity, material, tolerance and timeline. Do not gate datasheets behind a form, because engineers will use the supplier who published theirs instead.
How do you find the search terms industrial buyers use?
Mine the quote log and the RFQ inbox, then talk to inside sales and applications engineers. The real queries are part numbers, material and specification phrases, failure descriptions and capability questions, and almost none appear in a keyword tool at usable volume. Thirty searches a month can be worth more than three thousand.
How do trade shows fit with digital marketing?
Target attendees before the show using the published exhibitor and attendee lists, capture a one line note about what each contact needed rather than just their details, and follow up within days. Then measure quoted value traceable to show contacts over a window long enough to match your sales cycle.
Should manufacturers run account based marketing?
Often yes, because industrial markets are naturally account based: a finite, nameable buyer universe, large orders, a genuine multi person buying committee, and long cycles. The condition that usually fails is the CRM, where decades of duplicated customer and distributor records make measurement by account impossible until they are resolved.
How do you market when you sell through distributors?
Market to the end user and sell through the channel, because the engineer who specifies your product is rarely the person raising the order. Make the job easy for the distributor with product data and co branded material, agree in writing what order data comes back to you, and pass a reference with every lead you hand over so it can be matched to the resulting order.
When should a manufacturer not hire a marketing agency?
When the market is a handful of named buyers, when capacity is already full, when nobody technical can review content, or when orders are needed inside the current quarter. If capacity is full, the useful work is usually better targeting toward higher margin jobs rather than more enquiries.
Do you work with industrial companies outside manufacturing?
Yes. The same pattern applies across industrial distribution, engineering services, and capital equipment: technical buyers, long cycles, specification driven search, and a gap between the enquiry and the order that nobody has instrumented. The work changes in detail rather than in shape.
Keep exploring
Related
- Manufacturing softwareThe operations side: scheduling, traceability, ERP integration
- Paid searchThe same discipline, applied to expensive clicks
- Search that still convertsWhich queries survived AI summaries
- CRM data qualityWhy enquiries cannot be traced to orders
- B2B marketing auditThe full framework, published free
- Account based marketingWhen the buyers are a named list
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