As the post-COVID boom slows and some industries face outright contraction, many manufacturers recognize they need to step up their marketing to sustain and increase future sales. Enterprise Minnesota marketing expert Amy Hubler uses Enterprise Minnesota’s seven-part process to help manufacturers build an infrastructure for revenue growth.
The approach is built upon manufacturers gaining a deeper understanding of their own capabilities while developing a clearer picture of their customers’ needs. The remaining five components of a marketing plan are developing messaging, connecting with customers, understanding the impact of these efforts, determining key learnings, and sustaining the effort.
Hubler says the urgency for developing a marketing strategy is a 10 on a scale of one to 10, regardless of a company’s current revenue. “You can’t wait until times are tough to try to quickly develop a marketing and sales strategy because these things take time,” she says. “You build up the infrastructure, you try a few things, see how they work, look at numbers, and make adjustments. All that takes time.”
The urgency is even greater for companies with one or two customers comprising a big chunk of sales. “If a customer who accounts for 75 or 80% of your sales walks away, you could be in big trouble. Clients in that situation come to us because they realize they need to diversify their customer base,” Hubler says.
She adds that even companies that are humming along with revenues in line with projections need a strategy. “Even if you aren’t struggling, your goal is to grow, and that’s where a marketing strategy is helpful,” she says.
Identifying and understanding customers
The more manufacturers understand their customers, the better they can identify the ideal channels and messages to reach them and expand revenue. Beyond the basics such as location and size, they should also know the key decision-makers and influencers within the company –– and what drives them. What are the factors that influence who they choose to do business with? Understanding these motivations is key.
The founder or leader of a company may have lots of information about each customer, but not everyone in the company has access to those details. “A lot of our clients know their customers, but it all lives in somebody’s head,” Hubler says.
It’s important to document that information and share it more widely across the organization, particularly with those who will be involved in the marketing effort. “The owner or leader’s intuition is really important; they really will know who’s making decisions and what drives their customers. Documenting the owner’s intuition will help build a great foundation for future revenue growth.”
In addition to the intuition and institutional knowledge a company has about its customers, informal conversations with customers, vendors, and even competitors can enlighten manufacturers about potential clients. Hubler also recommends formal surveys as an avenue to understand customer needs. “The type of response you get to a survey can really be a good indicator of how engaged your customers are with you. If you get a good response quickly, that typically means your customers are engaged with you,” she says.
Hubler recalls one manufacturer survey that yielded a fast response and a very high participation rate. “There were a couple replies that were negative, but you could also tell in those negative responses that they were giving constructive feedback because they cared about this company,” she says. “They wanted to help them improve; they weren’t just complaining for the sake of complaining.”
One piece of feedback the manufacturer received involved lead times. They had gone through a period when they were short-staffed and their lead times became really long, but they had corrected that. “When we sent out this survey a couple of years later, a lot of the responses came in complaining about their lead times,” Hubler says.
The manufacturer realized that they had not done a good job communicating to their customer base that their lead times had improved. That became an action item –– they put the current lead times on the website and sent out an email to clear up that misperception.
Another exercise Hubler strongly recommends as manufacturers work to improve their understanding of clients is customer segmentation. She suggests separating customers into distinct groups and identifying and documenting key facts about them, including what drives them.
In her workshops, Hubler breaks participants into groups and asks them to do this exercise using Home Depot as an example. “That’s a really clear example, because they have do-it-yourselfers and they have contractors. Those different customer groups are motivated by different outcomes and the messaging for them –– both what it says and how it reaches them –– will be different,” she says.
For manufacturers, customer segmentation can be based on industries –– maybe a manufacturer serves aerospace, medical, and agriculture. Another way to segment is to distinguish between customers that are end users of the product and those that are OEMs or distributors. These segments matter when companies are working to drive sales because they will help shape message content and the best channels to reach them.
Knowing your company
Understanding your company is as important as understanding your customer, Hubler says. “It’s a key part of overall formal planning, both strategic and marketing, to understand mission and values, competencies and capabilities, and how you meet your customers’ needs.”
Hubler urges companies to think deeply about what makes them different. These qualities should go beyond what customers expect. Manufacturers that promote quality and on-time delivery aren’t thinking about what sets them apart. “What would you think of a restaurant that promotes the fact that it has salt and pepper?” she asks.
She advises companies to focus on their unique value: What’s distinctive about how they meet customers’ needs, how they solve customers’ problems, and how they anticipate and prevent problems? “Those things matter to customers. They will drive them to do business with you,” she says.
Galaxy Precision, Inc. in Albany, Minn. began working with Hubler in the summer of 2024 because revenue had started to decline alongside the industries they typically served –– agriculture and off-road equipment. Galaxy Precision, which offers CNC turning, milling, Swiss machining, and parts manufacturing, developed a clearer picture of their strengths as they went through the marketing strategy process with Hubler, and then shared that with current customers.“We have
customers we’ve been working with for years, but we haven’t necessarily shown them everything that we can do,” says Mark Finken, Galaxy’s COO. “We were able to let them know we can also help with other things. Since we have the customers already established, it’s nice if we can build off of that.”
Messaging and connecting
Understanding their own capabilities and recognizing distinct buckets of customers helps manufacturers make decisions about which segments offer the most opportunity or value. The next two steps in Hubler’s strategy involve messaging and connecting with customers. “Knowing what to say –– and who we should say it to –– is our best link to drive sales. Moving on to the other steps in the marketing process depends on this.”
Developing messaging is a direct outgrowth of the customer segmentation exercise. “With those different customers defined, we can talk through how this is going to resonate with segment A, whereas this other concept is going to resonate with segment B,” Hubler says. “For each segment, we also determine how we can reach them.”
Determining customer segmentation was important at Vistabule, a St. Paul-based manufacturer of teardrop campers that reached out to Hubler when sales began to slow after the COVID-era surge. Lily Taylor, Vistabule’s chief administrative officer, says the company didn’t really have a marketing strategy before working with Hubler.
“We weren’t really doing any advertising, maybe an obscure travel magazine that would reach out to us every once a year or something. We didn’t have a newsletter. We posted Google ads on social media here and there,” Taylor says. “It was very much word of mouth combined with a little bit of piecemeal advertising, but not a full-blown strategy.”
Initially Vistabule worked with Hubler to understand different potential groups of customers, which allowed the company to target its messaging efforts more effectively.
Hubler then helped Vistabule develop a new marketing strategy, including an updated website that targets potential campers with testimonials emphasizing the ease and fun of camping with its teardrop campers. It has a targeted newsletter that reaches owners and potential buyers, and it participates in RV shows and other events to reach likely customers.
Understanding different customer segments helps Vistabule target even more narrowly. Many customers are empty nesters, so Taylor says they try to reach them on Facebook instead of Instagram, which typically draws a younger demographic.
Another segment is those with specific hobbies. “We know that people who fly fish are usually in that empty nester target age category, and they like to spend a decent amount of money on fly fishing materials,” Taylor says. Knowing that, the company now attends fly fishing shows to promote its campers.
Vistabule also developed a nationwide ambassador program that connects camper owners with potential buyers, a critical avenue for personal outreach for customers who can’t visit the St. Paul showroom in person.
Like Vistabule, Galaxy Precision grew organically for years. Finken worked with customers and followed potential leads, essentially growing by word of mouth. Since the summer of 2024, Hubler has worked with Mark Finken and CEO/CFO Sharon Finken to develop a complete marketing strategy that can reach more customers in a systematic way. “They have a lot to offer, but they weren’t reaching a big pool of potential customers,” Hubler says.
After completing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and a customer segmentation exercise, Galaxy Precision has a more comprehensive approach to reaching customers. Working with Hubler and a marketing firm, the company has updated its website, improved search hits on Google, and identified new markets where it can submit responses to requests for quotes. “I can definitely tell that in the last four to six months RFQs have really gone up,” Mark Finken says.
Assessing, adjusting, sustaining
The ultimate goal of a marketing strategy in a manufacturing company is to drive sales, but Hubler urges companies to look beyond revenue growth as they assess their efforts. A deep dive into results can help manufacturers understand which efforts bring value, guiding their adjustments in strategy and helping sustain their efforts over time.
Hubler calls it a “growth scorecard,” a way to track performance metrics over time, usually monthly. It could be the number of visits to the client’s website. It could be analyzing the win rates on the number of quotes or proposals they issue.
“It’s more than just the number of units sold,” she says. “If they do email marketing, we might look at the open rates over time. Are the click-throughs going up or down? If they’re doing paid advertising, what are the results of that?”
Manufacturers who analyze marketing data can make appropriate adjustments. She likes to use the acronym REAP to capture the steps: review, evaluate, adjust, and prioritize.
“You have to think through, with your limited budget, where you’ll prioritize your efforts, with both budget and time,” she says.
Finally, Hubler urges manufacturers to follow through with the final step of her approach: sustain. She works ongoing support into her marketing projects. “I have a lot of clients where, on a regular basis, we’re looking at all of this and we’re doing the monthly REAP session. Then quarterly we broaden it and think about the big picture: What are we trying to accomplish, what are our goals?”
She encourages clients to have action items or projects that are tied to achieving those larger goals. “If you’re not careful, the implementation is where it can fall apart,” Hubler says.
“Developing your company marketing strategy, growing your business, and driving revenue growth are the keys to moving forward. There’s a clear connection between success and having a formal marketing strategy in place,” she says.
Return to the Spring 2025 issue of Enterprise Minnesota® magazine.
