As a manufacturing marketer, you no doubt find yourself navigating an increasingly complex landscape where traditional marketing approaches may not always align with your business’s specific needs.
Unlike other industries:
- Manufacturers typically target highly specialized audiences such as engineers and procurement managers, who demand in-depth technical information before making purchasing decisions – requiring a tailored approach to digital marketing.
- Generating high-quality leads and targeting niche decision makers can be a time-consuming and costly process if you don’t have a well-defined digital strategy and a dedicated internal resource to help guide it.
That’s where digital marketing – when done well – comes into play, offering a unique opportunity to effectively and efficiently reach niche audiences and drive high-quality leads. Here are tips to help you craft a digital strategy that gets results in 2025 and beyond.
5 Tips to Help Manufacturers Achieve Digital Marketing Success in 2025
Before executing on any digital marketing initiative, it’s critical to have a solid understanding of your audience's needs so that you can create content that resonates with them – and moves them to action.
With that in mind, here are five tips to help manufacturers achieve digital marketing success:
1) Align with Buyer Preferences
Understanding buyer behavior is critical, particularly as industrial buyers increasingly prefer digital self-service options. In fact, Gartner found that a whopping 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience, with 87% wanting to self-serve through much of the purchase consideration process.
You should align your digital strategies with these preferences, offering self-service tools for pricing and specifications whenever possible.
2) Enhance Website Product Pages
Stemming from the previous tip, manufacturers should also optimize their product and service pages with detailed descriptions, application examples, and visuals such as CAD drawings and case studies.
Interactive elements like product configurators can significantly enhance user experience and engagement.
But don’t just focus on your public-facing product pages. On the back end, make sure to track where traffic to those pages is coming from so you can attribute high-quality leads back to any ad campaigns you’re running. This will help ensure you’re investing your ad dollars where they’re driving the greatest return.
3) Leverage Short-Form Video Content
Video marketing, and short-form video in particular, continues to grow in effectiveness and importance, with platforms like YouTube evolving into vital channels for reaching B2B audiences.
Publishing videos on YouTube can also boost your YouTube following over time and gives you great digital marketing content. Adding videos to your website can help boost your SEO rankings and gives you the ability to easily use them on various ad platforms.
By showcasing products through engaging video content on YouTube and in social media, as well as on your own website, manufacturers can effectively differentiate themselves from competitors. Not to mention that it’s an effective way for potential customers to get to know your products without having to contact a sales rep (see Tip #1).
4) Embrace the Use of AI
Artificial Intelligence offers manufacturers a powerful tool to enhance their digital strategies. AI can be used to analyze data, generate content, and optimize user experiences.
When it comes to content, AI can offer new perspectives on existing content or help you reword it. Additionally, AI-driven data analysis can uncover user experience pain points, illuminate buyer behavior, and inform strategic decisions that lead to further optimization. For accurate data analysis and insights, though, you must ensure data consistency across platforms.
That’s why it’s so critical to ensure that your analytics strategy is solid. If you can’t trust your data, you and/or your AI tools will draw the wrong conclusions. A great way to ensure data accuracy is to start by auditing your GA4 setup and GTM configuration. Visit our GA4 Hub for information and to reach out to us for an audit or assistance.
And don’t forget to always use AI as a complement to human expertise to ensure technical accuracy and maintain strong customer relationships.
5) Conduct an Accessibility Audit
If your company does business abroad, you’ve probably heard of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which introduces stringent compliance requirements for companies selling consumer-facing products in the EU.
Manufacturers engaged in D2C online sales in the EU must ensure digital services like websites and mobile apps meet EAA accessibility guidelines, or face penalties for noncompliance starting in June 2025.
The best step to get started on the path to EAA compliance – and to meet WCAG accessibility guidelines here in the US – is to conduct a comprehensive accessibility audit.
You can start by using tools like Wave, Google Lighthouse, and Axe, but don’t rely on automated accessibility tools alone. For a comprehensive audit, work with an agency like Northwoods that utilizes both automated and assistive tools, along with manual review, to identify issues and provide a thorough plan for remediation.
We also recommend adding an accessibility statement on your website that details your compliance efforts and provides contact information for accessibility issues.
Regardless of whether you need to comply with accessibility laws or not, making your website accessible for all users is good business and generates good will – a happy by-product of offering an exceptional user experience.
In this dynamic digital landscape, manufacturers that deeply understand their audiences’ needs, buyer behavior, and digital trends – and that can capitalize on emerging opportunities – will be well-positioned to achieve digital success in 2025 and beyond.
If you need guidance with your digital strategy or assistance executing your digital marketing plans, Northwoods has deep manufacturing experience and the digital expertise to help you reach your goals. Contact us to learn more, or see how we’ve helped our manufacturing clients achieve success.