Survey: Customer Acquisition Top Priority for Manufacturing Marketers in 2017

As manufacturing marketers shift their objectives in the new year, research now shows that they were heavily focused on customer acquisition in 2017.

The “2017 Trends in Industrial Marketing: How Manufacturers are Marketing Today” from IEEE GlobalSpec recently took a look at which objectives marketing executives in the manufacturing industry focused on last year. The research showed that customer acquisition was still the top priority for 42 percent of respondents in 2017. This was the sixth year in a row that “customer acquisition” took the number one spot.

Other key objectives for manufacturing marketers in 2017 included demand generation (23 percent), brand awareness (18 percent) and customer retention (12 percent).

When it came to separating themselves from the competition, 54 percent of marketers said that the quality of their products/services offered separated them from the pack. This was followed by their variety of products/services (16 percent), customer service/experience (15 percent) and price (6 percent).

In terms of challenges, the majority of manufacturing marketers were still struggling with too few marketing resources (36 percent). Thirty-four percent said that last year, they were not generating enough high-quality leads for sales.

Manufacturing Marketers and Content Marketing

Manufacturing marketers had several objectives in 2017, but previous research indicates that they were starting to turn to content marketing more frequently.

IEEE GlobalSpec teamed up with Marketing Profs to conduct the “Manufacturing Content Marketing: 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America” report and discovered that the vast majority of marketers (86 percent) utilize content marketing. About 57 percent have a small or one-person content marketing team that serves their organization.

Approximately 46 percent of respondents are still in the “young/first steps” phase of content marketing maturity.