The Great 8 Pillars: ROI-Driven Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

copyright © 2023 christopher peer

All rights reserved.

the great 8 pillars

ROI-Driven Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

First Edition

isbn

978-1-5445-4407-6 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-4406-9 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-4408-3 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Challenging Your Marketing Paradigm

1. Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

2. What Is an ROI-Driven Marketing Operation?

3. Executive Perspectives

Part Two: Building an ROI-Driven Marketing Operation

4. The Diagnostic and Roadmap

5. The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing

6. Pillar 1: Goals, KPIs, and Industry Benchmarks: Defining Your 10X

7. Pillar 2: Value Proposition, Messaging, and Branding

8. Pillar 3: Marketing Strategy

9. Pillar 4: Marketing Team Structure

10. Pillar 5: The Almighty Website

11. Pillar 6: Analytics and Reporting

12. Pillar 7: Technology Stack

13. Pillar 8: Templates and Guides

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Introduction

As humans, we all want to do things faster, with less effort. It’s why the diet and exercise industry sells billions of dollars’ worth of fad products. This book is not about secret marketing tactics or shortcut remedies to improve metrics. The methodologies included in this book are based on building a professional marketing infrastructure that is scalable and predictable. It’s about building a well-oiled machine that continually delivers.

For the past twenty-plus years, I have owned and managed a successful marketing agency, driven by a passion for helping manufacturing companies thrive. Why manufacturing? I don’t really know. Perhaps it is because my father was the president of a manufacturing company. There’s just a feeling that comes over me when I walk the shop floor and see people working on the various stages of production. Perhaps it’s the smell of oil or the exhaust of an older tow motor. Maybe it’s the sound of industrial machinery as it cuts, bends, and grinds metal. There’s just something about the whole process of manufacturing that intrigues me.

When I first started writing this book, people asked me why I was willing to openly share our proprietary processes and methodologies. Why was I giving away the secrets of our success?

I started my company in 2002, and since then, I have tirelessly worked to hone our marketing methodologies to ensure our manufacturing clients get a return on their investment. My goal is to help them avoid the mistakes that so many others have made while helping them to scale faster and more efficiently. Just as they work so hard to bring quality products to life, I feel that it is my job to deliver for them. It’s my turn to give back and help our manufacturing community the best I can.

Over the years, I’ve found that manufacturing companies have a lot in common when it comes to marketing:

They don’t trust agencies to deliver because many have failed.

They don’t like spending money on things that don’t work.

They don’t like wasting time on things that don’t work.

Winning a manufacturer’s business is a feat in and of itself. You must demonstrate that you can be trusted and that you will deliver on your promises. You must overcome their fears and prove that you understand their business and, perhaps more importantly, that you understand their customers and how they make purchasing decisions.

Through my deep relationships with manufacturers, I also recognized that they all lacked the same operational requirements for driving a marketing return on investment. Of the hundreds of clients my company has served, not a single one had an existing marketing strategy documented in writing prior to our working relationship. Most others did not have the basic foundational elements of a marketing program, such as defined goals, correlating key performance indicators, defined buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles. Some of our clients are small businesses securing $10 million in revenues; others are billion-dollar enterprises. After seeing the pain and frustration shared by so many marketing leaders and executives, we decided to do something about it.

This book outlines my years of marketing experience and explains how to structure your marketing operation using proven strategies, methodologies, and tools to deliver a 10X return on marketing investment (ROI). The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing framework is based on a system that has consistently delivered outstanding results for my clients. Using this system, my clients earn an ROI from their marketing spend, many of them over 10X; one even attained a 27X return on investment. This system drives marketing ROI while reducing marketing output, stopping work on vanity projects, and measuring the outcomes.

For twenty-plus years, my company, SyncShow, honed its methodology, compiled research, and tested, tweaked, and formalized a tried-and-true approach. We assessed exactly what worked and what didn’t. We documented our findings and continually refined them. The result is a marketing framework built to deliver a 10X return on investment from marketing spend, and you can do it too.

The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing offers manufacturing leaders a helping hand in achieving real results and peace of mind from their marketing effort. It is written for those who are stuck in a world of whack-a-mole-style tactical marketing, where more blogs, more videos, more SEO, and more effort are not working to move the needle.

This book is for you if you are a marketing leader or manufacturing executive who is:

Investing in growth and looking to scale

Frustrated that your marketing efforts are not producing the desired results

Sick and tired of wasting time and money on marketing that does not work

Confused about knowing what to do and when and how to do it

Burned out from long working hours and continually reinventing the marketing wheel

Tired of the monotony of developing more, more, and more marketing collateral

Frustrated by continuous turnover of your marketing team members

This book outlines exactly how you can do it—every step—including how to build marketing strategies, craft value propositions that stand out, establish ROI-driven marketing goals, define key performance indicators, set up reporting, acquire data, and prove that what you do matters.

This is a book for business-to-business (B2B) marketing and executive leaders who are looking to drive increased performance and a measurable return from marketing. It’s for marketing and sales leaders who are looking for a proven system for delivering real ROI from marketing. It’s for anyone who is sick and tired of wasting money on marketing that does not work and for anyone who wants long-term results. It’s not for marketers who are looking for a quick fix. There is no magic bullet in ROI-driven marketing.

You, too, can drive real change and growth at your company, and I will help you drive a 10X return on marketing spend! It won’t be easy. It’s hard work. But if you follow the process, it will significantly change the way you look at marketing and how you define success.

I am excited to guide you through this process!

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Throughout this book, I have included Lesson Learned sections, where I share with you some of my failures in marketing. These failures helped to reshape my paradigm on marketing and often were the catalyst for change. Every one of them was a valuable lesson learned. I hope you will find them valuable too.

Part one

Challenging Your Marketing Paradigm

One

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

Early in my marketing career, I made a lot of mistakes. Those mistakes cost my company a lot of money, but worse than losing money, I lost valuable time. Time is something you cannot get back. Time is something we don’t have the luxury of squandering.

To scale a manufacturing business or your marketing operation, time and timing are critical. You cannot wait