For Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), the network has always been a key business driver. Whether personal connections, referrals, channel partners, or sales reps, OEMs have reached out to prospects at events, through cold calls, or other networking channels. Everything works seamlessly — as long as the market is growing, and everyone is receptive to phone calls or in-person meetings.
But in today’s tough market, budgets are scarce and buyers are completing up to 70% of their purchase journey autonomously through online research. In circumstances like these, this conventional approach simply does not deliver growth. It’s a problem for OEMs that are not properly showcased where buyers are looking, but it’s also a major opportunity.
Digital marketing can help OEMs and their sales and channel partners gain a competitive advantage and avoid the scourge of feast-or-famine growth. This blog explains why.
It’s what your customers want
A survey from research firm Gartner predicts an exponential rise in digital sales interactions between buyer and supplier. The firm predicted that 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. Key decision-makers in major technology and manufacturing companies are digitally savvy. They are used to going online as the first step in any purchase, whether personal or professional. As a result, for many senior level decisionmakers, sales reps have become just one of many possible sales channels.
With less customer face time, OEMs need to be present at the time and place that customers are conducting their information search. Digital marketing channels such as websites and social media enable you to place your insights at your customers’ fingertips at any time. Combined with good organic and paid search strategies, you can efficiently provide your customers with the content they need to make their decisions.
It gives you a competitive edge
While COVID-19 forced many OEMs to dip their toes into digital marketing because events and face-to-face interactions were curtailed, this didn’t last. Today, many of your competitors have gone back to relying on face-to-face or phone call-based selling. Investing in digital marketing will allow you to stand out from the competition.
The other advantage of digital marketing is speed. You can quickly respond to changing customer preferences or emerging market developments with insightful content, becoming the first source of truth on critical events. If you’re in cybersecurity or business continuity, responding to the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024, for example, would be a great opportunity to be a first mover in a time-sensitive opportunity.
It leads you straight to your ideal customer
Not all customers are at the same stage of the purchase cycle at the same time. You must engage with them differently depending on what they want to achieve. 65% of tech buyers say that the purchase process is becoming more complex: digital marketing makes it simple to support your customers with exactly the information they need at each stage of the purchase cycle.
Using a range of keywords means that your customers can find you helpful no matter what they are looking for. Present your perspective on solving key industry issues to reach customers at the top of the funnel (TOFU), when they are looking for help on broader topics such as how to solve business issues.
In fact, OEM marketing is a SEO dream, as it involves highly technical and specialised content. You can also use long-tail keyword strategies and present extremely granular solutions to technical problems to engage customers who are ready to buy.
It expands your addressable market
OEMs rarely market to customers in just one geography. Often, attractive prospects are spread out around the world – maintaining sales and channel presence in each geography may often be unviable. As a result, you focus your resources on the markets closest to home, for example. Or you might be hoping for success with a ‘land and expand’ strategy where you follow a customer into a new market and hope to gain more customers there.
All these strategies limit you to just a few convenient geographies while your customers might be elsewhere. One powerful advantage of digital marketing is that it expands your addressable market with minimal additional effort. You can target prospects regardless of geography and through multiple channels with highly specific campaigns relevant to the needs and developments in specific parts of the world.
It delivers great value for money
For an OEM, a digital marketing campaign that runs throughout the year can cost you less than a stand at just one of your many trade shows. A simple, well targeted campaign can deliver huge bang for your buck, allowing you to focus in-person resources on prospects who are ready to close the sale at that moment.
A survey of tech B2B buyers we conducted this year found that audiences respond to a variety of content, particularly case studies, videos, blogs, and webinars. Create a diverse and rich bank of content that makes an impact on your customers at the right time. Best of all, they’re completely trackable so you can quickly identify what campaigns have traction and optimise to achieve even stronger results.
At Isoline, we specialise in delivering digital marketing campaigns that work for OEMs. Get in touch at hello@isolinecomms.com if you’d like to explore what digital marketing can do for your OEM business.
