How to Advertise an Industrial Tech Company
I've advertised a dozen heavy industry, manufacturing, and tech companies in the Nordics and across Europe. Here's what I've learned about advertising for industrial and manufacturing brands.
Strategy
Nothing should start without a strategy in place—unless there's no problem to solve, no obstacle to navigate, and everything is smooth sailing. In that case, just go for it and do the thing you need to do. Everyone else get in line to the strategy shop.
I've seen too many brands launch advertising campaigns simply to spend budgets or because sales teams are pushing for leads (high-quality, salivating to buy, preferably yesterday!).
Read it once in Mark Pollard’s book and it stuck with me: "strategy is simply an opinion on the best way to win". It could be intuition-based or data and research-driven, but it has to provide a clear path to achieving a specific goal by overcoming an obstacle. There has to be a BIG IDEA—an insight that opens a way over or under the obstacle.
Whether it's a nested strategy or a one-pager using the "Get-Who-To-By" template (big fan), it can be a formal document with citations and references or just a fancy presentation. The format is about aesthetics and convenience; the substance is what makes or breaks a strategy.
It can be good, bad, half-baked, rare, or well-done—whatever—but it has to exist before anything else starts.
Story
The story is the vehicle for embedding a new memory, a new neural pathway, into the minds of your audience.
Is it the story of a 200-year-old defense and shipbuilding company that became the backbone of its country’s economy and now plans to bring us closer to Star Trek-level tech in the next 100 years?
Is it the story of people who want to save the world and delay global warming by making the energy sector 1% cleaner through reducing inefficiencies and predicting issues by analyzing a massive amount of data?
Is it about state-of-the-art manufacturing machines that allow companies to improve their margins, keep working through recessions and logistics nightmares, and, by extension, keep people employed and their communities financially secure?
This story is the vehicle that takes us down the path of executing the strategy.
Courage
Telling a story in a cowardly way (“We’ve always done it like this,” “Our competitors are doing it like this,” “We’re a serious business, and our audience expects us to be bland and soulless, “No one has done that before in our niche”) is worse than not telling it at all. Be funny, emotional, self-referential, sarcastic, inspirational, anything but not dull.
You won’t even be remembered as cowards.
You won't be remembered at all.
If there’s a machine that no one has used before—an entirely new product—we invent a new use for it. If there’s a simulation environment that hasn’t gone mainstream, we simulate its use. But do it bravely and proudly.
The brand and the product are the heroes of the story.
If you don’t believe in your heroes, no one else will.
Copy
All copy is sales copy. This text is sales copy. I’m selling you my advertising expertise, my understanding of the heavy industry and manufacturing business, and the idea of how it can be done better. I could put a price tag on each word in this paragraph.
The moment you start believing in the words of the fictional yet great poet of modernity, Kendall Roy, that “Words are what? Complicated airflow,” your campaign is already lost. Writing corporate fluff and churning out AI-generated slop places your company in the pole position in the race to the bottom.
When meeting your prospective clients face-to-face, can you afford to say to them whatever generic corporate gibberish everyone else is saying? Your communications via advertising should be held to the same standard.
Don’t be afraid of long copy or jargon-heavy copy. This is not e-commerce, and purchasing €450k of machinery is not an impulsive decision that requires creating a sense of urgency. Respect the needs of the reader, entertain them, and make them feel understood. Reassure them that their business is going to be alright, in as many words as needed.
Media Placements
The medium is the message. Who do you want to be associated with—Forbes and Economist readers or niche engineering communities on Reddit? Does your audience have the money to travel to big expos, or do they all work remotely from home? Do they listen to podcasts on sustainable energy, or do they prefer a print version of an industry publication?
The audience will associate you not just with the communications aimed at them but with the context in which they receive those communications.
The safest way to advertise is to meet your audience in the context and places where they already are. As banners to the right of an op-ed, on their LinkedIn timeline, at the top of their search results, on the giant screens in the airport, or as a one-line mention in a 150-subscriber newsletter.
LinkedIn is notorious for being the #1 spot for B2B companies, but not all general managers and procurement specialists spend their time scrolling there. Are they reading the news and checking weather forecasts? Are they searching for how to solve a specific problem—and where? (Search volumes from Microsoft Bing constantly surprise me.)
If they are going to ONS, EuroBlech, or IMTS, your out-of-home ads should greet them. Their social media timelines should tell them where to find you and tease what to expect, and when they leave and read the industry gossip and reviews of the event, your display ads should remind them of how you made them feel back there.
With heavy industry and manufacturing companies, there is distrust and a lack of familiarity with digital marketing and advertising. It has long been a business of flying to events, giving tours of facilities, and indulging in salespeople’s shenanigans afterward. Why not do the heavy lifting of making memories and creating an emotional context before they even arrive with a carefully placed ad?
Ad Budgets
How much should we spend on advertising? Can you do a global multichannel campaign for $1,000? (This one is not rhetorical, it's a firm "No.")
I had a client whose market share barely depended on their advertising spend—they could cut their spend to a couple thousand euro a month and still retain the same profits due to having a stable market, a good share of voice, and great deal/unit margins.
Another client needed a steady flow of leads and had to spend tens of thousands of euros a month running ads in dozens of countries just to sustain their profits. With a lower market share and super competitive market, they had to outspend everyone to grow.
We built media plans and did the calculations for those 200-year-old and sustainable energy companies mentioned earlier, and for them, it made sense to spend beyond the maximum short-term ROI so that they could reap better ROI long-term and have a lasting impact on culture.
Ten percent of revenue is a ballpark figure that can either seem too small or too big and scare the brand away from advertising. But those who can intelligently outspend market averages usually win.
Data and Reporting
The incorrectly attributed Peter Drucker quote, “You can manage only what you can measure,” sends a shiver down my spine.
How many great campaigns and interesting strategies were struck down before they could bloom into business growth and cultural impact? And how many more were designed incorrectly from the beginning due to the need to measure and report every single metric to prove that this investment is not a waste of budget?
I’m not advocating for old-school brand-only, creativity-run-rampant extravagance (I am, just not in this piece). I’m a numbers and spreadsheets guy. It’s just that without using data correctly—drawing legitimate conclusions, interpreting it in the correct context, and presenting it honestly while acknowledging limitations and biases—we might as well keep stabbing in the dark.
If we listen to raw numbers, all ads should have only “skip ad” as the CTA.
The DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid exists for a reason. What you get just from running a campaign is data, and maybe information at best. What you get from working with talented media buyers and analysts is knowledge; what you get from an experienced advertiser is wisdom.
Would laser beams improve if engineers and operators lied about how they work to protect their jobs each quarter? Would digital twins make sense conceptually if the data and environments they were simulating were bogus but comfortable for executives?
If businesses don’t compromise and accept silliness in their own operations, they shouldn't make an exception for marketing.
All of this makes a proper report an invaluable piece of communication that feeds back into the business and the campaign itself. Data can sing whatever tune the person working with it wants. A good report can’t lie.
Honesty and Fun
A good advertising campaign leaves a pleasant aftertaste. The same goes for a great collaboration with an advertising agency. It can be difficult; it takes patience, rigor, and grit to get the best out of each other—for both the brand and the agency. It also requires honesty. If the relationship doesn’t start with optimism, excitement, and hope, it will only get worse from there.
When one of the parties senses "this will not work", they have the moral and business obligation to drop the pitch, drop the campaign, and find a better fit.
That honesty will be more appreciated than any insurmountable effort required to make it work.
Working with an ad agency, even a performance marketing agency, should be fun. It’s still entertainment. You’re still discussing puns in headlines, buying ad spots on TV between football and news (or more often, CTV), and trying to find patterns in how your audience thinks.
If that isn’t the golden mean between industry and art, what hope do other jobs have?