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- Portfolio optimisation – manufacturers are reinforcing the core of their portfolios, favouring focus over differentiation.
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- Digital muscle – new digital initiatives hold promise for improving companies’ agility and scalability in the marketplace.
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- Supply network ecosystem – manufacturers are increasing their flexibility in global supply networks by forging new business partnerships that add needed capabilities.
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- Social responsibility – manufacturing leaders are finding ways to combine “doing good” with doing ‘well’, linking socially conscious initiatives with increased profitability.
- Digital activity is on the rise over traditional events, causing skill gaps. Sales teams are having to learn to adapt to less face-to-face meetings which is often hard as sales people tend to be very specialist with many years/decades of experience in that sector.
- Webinars – hot subject at the moment, but many don’t know what makes them successful or what topics to focus on. We’re learning that to launch successful webinars four conditions are needed:
- Your brand must be known
- You must have customer lists who have heard from you before
- You must have content that you need to know about, ideally aligned to a standard/accreditation
- An engaging/well-known speaker helps but the manufacturers brand trumps every time.
- Customer details – the shift to digital relies on customer data which is often in a poor state, badly stored and hard to use, which is becoming more and more of a problem during Covid-19
- Long purchase cycles and challenges on throughput means activity plans can be more long term and less tactical. As staff return to work post furlough in UK, social distancing means factory floors have to move from being super-efficient spaces with everything packed in, to including social distancing. This means that lower levels of through-put are possible. This can temper marketing ambition. But there is an opportunity for integrated marketing activity to support sales people including ABM and updated brand comms.
- Innovation stories are everywhere but often under communicated or not seen as anything worth shouting about. There is a real opportunity to help uncover these and tell them to a wider world.
- Events may not ever be the same again – Most of our clients have attended global events with international audiences (just the nature of being so “niche”). With social distancing policies in specific countries being different due to different post-covid19 recovery strategies, and cross-border arrivals facing quarantines for arrivals, the word on the street is that global events are going to be forced to evolve. They are likely to be replaced by one nation events which of course mean a much smaller audience size, and a much harder ROI justification if clients go. This will push the international manufacturers to develop and push their own channels as large events will no longer be there as an option.