Marketing for manufacturers is never easy. Manufacturing itself is anything but boring: you work with incredible technology, create amazing products, and literally build the world and society we live in. Still, marketing for a manufacturing business is a struggle because people are under the impression that your day-to-day operations are “dry.” 
Those misconceptions mean you need to focus on creative marketing strategies. You’re the expert in your field, but none of your expertise matters if no one notices you. You want to be memorable, so you have to rise above the rest of the noise. Creativity takes up time and resources, which might leave you feeling exhausted when you get behind on organization and details.
Even if you already have plenty of creative marketing ideas, you might not be reaching your goals because you’re getting bogged down with the brass tacks of the marketing process.
Marketing tools are one way you can ease that exhaustion. A good marketing tool allows you to spend less time on tedious nuts and bolts; it also allows you to spend more time on being creative, sharing your expertise, and getting results. In short, the right marketing tools will increase your productivity.
Canva, Hootsuite and Redbooth are three of the marketing tools Inbound Systems uses. These tools allow us to manage our time wisely and focus on what we’re good at: inbound marketing.
Hopefully, these tools can help you the same way.
Use Canva for Quick, High-Quality Image Production
People are attracted to high-quality images. That goes double on the internet, where attention spans are short and aesthetics are highly valued.
You need superb, eye-catching images for your marketing efforts. Canva features thousands of ready-to-use templates, images and fonts rolled into a convenient web editor. You don’t need to be a photoshop expert to make use of Canva, and even if you are a Photoshop expert, it might streamline your custom image creation process.
Once you have an idea and an image, you still need to optimize it for email newsletters, social media, web content, and blogging. Every publishing platform works best with images of different sizes and dimensions and Canva’s templates make the optimization process easy.
Some of Canva’s best images can cost a dollar or two, but that’s pretty cheap in the marketing world. If you have your own original images, Canva remains totally free.
Canva is great because it produces those necessary high-quality images in almost no time at all. It’s an easy-to-use time saver, which makes it an essential tool for a busy manufacturing marketer. We love it, too.
Use Hootsuite to Streamline Your Social Media
Using social media is a must for any modern business, but if you’re marketing for a manufacturing business you can’t spend all day on Facebook. Keeping active on social media can feel like a chore if you’re already swamped with other marketing work. That’s why Hootsuite is the perfect all-in-one starter kit for social media marketing. For more serious manufacturers, we suggest (and also use) HubSpot.
The free edition of Hootsuite allows you to schedule and publish future social media posts, manage three different accounts from one platform, integrate various other social media apps, and provides a handy URL shortener.
Scheduling your social media posts is a great time saver. Scheduling is quick and efficient because it enables you to take care of all of your social media posts for a day (or week) in just 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of the day. That means you don’t have to drop what you’re doing every three hours or so just to brainstorm and post on your social networks.
Hootsuite also lets you manage your Facebook, Twitter and one other platform from one window. Putting everything all in one place (with an easy interface, to boot) is a definite time saver. Consolidating your social networks into one platform lets you reach your audience wherever they are.
You can also integrate plenty of other social apps into your Hootsuite dashboard. Hootsuite’s URL shortener is a lifesaver, too, and it’s necessary for Twitter.
If you want to spend less time on your social media marketing and get positive results, Hootsuite is a great starting point. Once you start getting better results and spending more time with social media, you might consider a more robust platform like Hubspot. Regardless, streamlining your social media process will free up time for other marketing tasks.
Hootsuite enables you to share your manufacturing expertise across all your social media platforms in a small amount of time. It will help you stay organized and spend less time on social media.
Use Redbooth to Organize Your Marketing Projects
If you’re anything like us, you have dozens of marketing projects flying around at any given time. At least in that regard, marketing for manufacturers is the same as marketing for an inbound marketing company: we’re all busy.
Redbooth is a valuable tool for us because it lets us keep track of projects, keep track of who’s working on which project and shows us what still needs to get done. Redbooth helps you organize the project management process so you can spend more time on your actual marketing projects.
Collaboration is a big part of why Redbooth works so well. Its interface makes assigning projects, checking on progress and communicating with co-workers easy. It even offers a built-in instant messaging function so you can ask questions and check up on a project’s status instantaneously.
Redbooth also lets you track your progress and performance with helpful, visual representations of your project data.
Redbooth condenses many of your organizational needs and small details into one easy interface. That lets you focus on sharing your expertise and meeting your marketing goals.
With a Little Help From Our Friends
In the marketing world, simple tasks like creating images, posting on social media, and keeping your projects organized can pile up quickly. We never do our best work when we’re overwhelmed, so we rely on these marketing tools to increase our productivity.
Marketing is always hard work, but using the right tools will make marketing easier. You’ll spend less time worrying about the little details and spend more time sharing your manufacturing expertise with the world; and that gets results.
To your inbound marketing success!
-Brodie
