Top 5 Marketing Challenges for Industrial Machinery and Equipment Companies
by Eli Merrell | Last Updated: Apr 3, 2023
Industrial machinery and equipment companies face their fair share of challenges, we hear you. You are connecting with an audience that isn’t easy to reach, you need to share important product and safety information and build relationships with your customers. These are just the hurdles with customers.
Your calendar is filled with trade shows. Effectively running a trade show booth is a lot of work. You need to keep staff on task while delivering a streamlined message.
Your products are intricate and require attention to detail. Managing all of your product information is a big task that is often left to the power of Excel sheets and printed materials.
Let's take a look at the top five marketing challenges for industrial machinery and equipment companies, and a few ideas on how to solve them.
5 Marketing Challenges and Solutions for Industrial Machinery and Equipment Companies
Share Important Information Fast
Your machines are complicated and often require specific safety information for operators. When the sun is rising and the team is eager to start the day on a job site the last thing they want to do is flip through a lengthy, printed manual. And that’s assuming they have your manual with them on the job site.
Place a QR code directly on the machine connecting your users to important safety and product information. Because the QR code is right on the product it is never lost. The information that keeps your customers safe is just a few seconds away.
Collect all safety and product information into one digital experience to create a one-stop shop for your customers. Product manuals are easily stored and accessed. Safety videos can be embedded directly into the digital experience. Time spent looking at a printed manual is now spent getting the job done.
Get to Know Your Customers
A major hurdle industrial machinery and equipment companies face is knowing who their customers truly are. Since your products are likely sold through third-party dealers, knowing who is actually using the equipment can be a guessing game.
Build a relationship with your end users to create brand loyalty and open the door to stronger customer feedback.
The use of forms in a digital experience is a great way to gather customer data. Ask for user feedback or have your customers register that they’ve viewed training videos. By making this process simple and digital your customers are more likely to engage, giving you the opportunity to know your end customer.
Make Trade Shows a Breeze
Trade shows are a huge part of industrial companies' marketing. This is where your team gets to show off new products and engage with dealers and customers. The contacts made at trade shows are potentially lucrative deals. However, managing the behind-the-scenes work is a heavy lift.
A digital experience is a great way to create a single source of truth for your team attending a trade show. Collect all event information into one place like travel info, booth logistics, and talking point so your team doesn’t get lost in a sea of emails.
Prompt the team to save the experience on their home screen, giving they quick access throughout the course of the event. Now, you’ve enabled your team to hit the trade show floor running.
Ditch Print
Manuals are expensive to print and heavy to lug around. It’s time to ditch print and save your company money and your users time.
Create a digital product guide to replace your heavy printed one. Digital experiences built with Luamvate can host documents including PDFs, Word Documents, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Load all of the owner’s manuals and spec sheets related to each product in Lumavate’s content management system (CMS). Then you can easily link to the content from any digital experience. When it’s time to update a manual, guide, or spec sheet, simply replace the file saved in the Lumavate CMS and the latest version will automatically be available in any linked digital experience. This ensures your customers always have access to the most accurate information.
The cost of printing materials that are often out of date once they leave the press is dragging down your business. Update information in your digital experience and right after clicking publish your users have the most updated information in their hands.
Organize Product Information
Your products are complex. There are a lot of details that your team has to manage and update consistently. These details are often left on an Excel sheet on someone’s desktop. Even worse, this Excel sheet is often filled with incorrect information.
Store your product information in a better way. A product information management (PIM) solution will store the details of your products and all of their related assets in one easy-to-use place. With solutions like Luamvate all of the information stored in a PIM can then be used in digital experiences.
The digital product guide we covered earlier just got even easier to maintain.
The marketing challenges you are facing are not small but can be solved. Going digital provides your customers with quick accurate information. Digital experiences can also be an amazing internal tool to share information and keep your product information up to date.
Learn more about digital experiences, book a demo today!