Three Manufacturing Trends to Focus on in 2022

Product-based industries, such as the manufacturing industry, has had some rough years.

They were included in more “breaking news”-stories and targeted by more headlines than they probably expected.

And while the old saying goes, “bad publicity is better than no publicity”, the news did look quite bad last summer.

Remember “Evergreen”? The cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days, blocking hundreds of thousands of ships and disrupting global trade?

Or have you recently visited trade ports in the Netherlands, USA, and Hong Kong? Cargo ships are queuing for extraordinarily long periods.

Logistics companies are pressured by manufacturers, as more and more SKUs move through the supply chain. Evidently, the aftereffects of COVID remain.

The worst part is that we already see predictions from The New Yorker: Kids may not get what is standing at the top of their Christmas wishlist!

Also, The Financial Times reported back in September that 40 percent of EU manufacturers cited a broken supply chain and lack of “lack of material and equipment” as factors that hinder them from following customer demand.

It has been two demanding years for manufacturers.

Last year in 2020, they were forced to move products from brick and mortar to digital shelves, as e-commerce penetration exploded due to global lockdown.

This year, contradictorily, manufacturers had to get products back on the shelves to follow skewed demand.

So, what now, as we look to 2022?

Goodbye to 2021 – hello to 2022

As a new year begins, we believe manufacturers will see the light at the end of a dark two-year tunnel.

We expect they will convert supply chain shortages into supply chain continuity, find ways to cope and become more resilient.

But heading into 2022 requires more than just coping.

With an accelerated digital agenda due to COVID, we predict manufacturers will take the next step to exceed customer expectations and improve productivity.

Here are three topics that B2B manufacturers will focus on in 2022.

Omnichannel excellence in manufacturing

While the omnichannel trend is nothing new, COVID tested manufacturers’ ability to cater to customers’ expectations, as remote interactions became the primary medium for customer interactions.

A McKinsey study shows that while most B2B buyers expect to meet with customers in-person by the start of 2022, only 15 percent expect the frequency of physical meetings to bounce back.

Buyers now prefer the channel that best balances their need to get the correct information and content – and its convenience.

That is a challenge for global manufacturers with many offices that offer complex product portfolios through many routes-to-market.

• Some challenges worth mentioning are:

  • Inability to differentiate away from the competition by delivering integrated customer experiences across own and distributors’ channels

  • Decentralized assets and content, leading to manual work processes and inability to distribute the right content efficiently

  • Content is created from scratch instead of reused or repurposed

  • Inconsistent brand identity & use of CVI across borders

  • Risk of infringing rights or ensuring decentralized assets with claims meet regulative standards across markets

But the manufacturers that solve these gain a competitive advantage and a way to propel their growth.

• Achieve what truly resembles an omnichannel manufacturer:

  • Personalized and customized experiences.

  • Virtually rich and immersive content.

  • Device and channel-agnostic content distribution.

  • Information and content delivered in the customers’ preferred language, format, and unique needs.

  • Consistent experiences across, e-commerce, digital marketing, distributor, wholesalers, marketplaces, dealer networks, and retailers.

But realizing these hallmarks is easier said than done.

To meet the demand for omnichannel engagements, manufacturers must streamline their content operations to capture the content lifecycle fully.

That includes three areas:

1. Content creation

2. Content management

3. Content distribution

This is where a DAM platform plays a pivotal part to realize the hallmarks of an omnichannel manufacturer. Learn more on how the enterprise manufacturer can become omnichannel.

Sales enablement technology for the hybrid seller

While selling face-to-face will never disappear, sellers must accommodate buyers’ need to interact virtually.

According to research by RAIN, sales organizations conducted a larger share of their sales interactions virtually post-pandemic.

Before the pandemic, just 27 percent of respondents reported conducting more than half of their sales activities virtually.

Post-pandemic, 71 percent were conducting more than half of their sales virtually.

That is a 163 percent increase. This was a significant shift in a short period.

As the graph shows, a shift to virtual channels has happened, but a mix of physical and virtual ways of selling is now the norm for sellers in 2022.

Yet, as buyers go omnichannel, salespeople must become hybrid sellers and excel at virtual selling as much as they do physically.

Although a larger share of sales activities is virtual, a poorly conducted physical meeting can ruin the entire experience for the omnichannel buyer.

This notion sets requirements for sales leaders responsible for people and tech capabilities in the commercial organization.

And it sets expectations for salespeople who must be willing to understand and apply new ways of selling on top of traditional ways: Become a hybrid seller, capable of selling interchangeably across channels.

But this is no easy task.

A challenge lies ahead for sales leaders. What should they do to ensure that B2B sellers feel they’re more effective at selling virtually as they do physically?

We see two areas where sales leaders should invest to ensure their salesforce is fit-for-purpose in the new buying environment:

a. Build virtual selling capabilities in the salesforce

b. Ensure the right content and tools are easy to find and share

A. Virtual selling capabilities:

First off, virtual selling is not a methodology and doesn’t replace the fundamentals of selling.

Instead, it is selling in a new and demanding format that requires sellers to be even more structured and take full ownership of meetings and interactions.

Because it isn’t easy to keep engagement when selling virtually, as salespeople compete against YouTube and emails for buyers’ attention.

Sellers agree: 91 percent find it challenging to “gain buyer’s attention and keep the buyer engaged virtually.”

• Here is our take on what a B2B manufacturing seller in 2022 should do:

  • Thoughtfully orchestrate and own the facilitating role to keep potential buyers engaged.

  • Ensure the meeting objective and agenda is even more clear and concise, as time is often shorter than in physical meetings

  • Be even more structured, and practice beforehand to achieve a good meeting flow, especially if many attend

B. Ensure the right content and tools are easy to find and share

Beyond virtual selling capabilities, salespeople must have the right content and tools to keep the buyers’ attention.

A meeting experience can be completely ruined if salespeople spend time during the meeting finding and trying to share the right content. They need a fast way to search for the right type of content in a sea of different images, documents, and videos.

Not only that, without the right technology, salespeople can’t sophistically curate content into sophisticated presentations efficiently and have relevant discussions with potential buyers.

How DAM software empowers virtual sales enablement

While a DAM solution doesn’t improve virtual selling capabilities, it enables sellers to find the right assets and content to succeed.

DAM provides a single source of truth of sales-oriented content and tools.

Examples are 3D objects such as product demonstrators or configurators, quotes stored as PDFs, or how-to explainer videos.

Without a DAM, salespeople will have difficulty finding the exact content to share with the potential buyer.

For example, that’s how LM Wind Power, a subsidiary of General Electric and global producer of wind turbine rotator blades, has automated many time-consuming, non-value-adding tasks for 3,000 employees and made sales interactions much more powerful.

Balancing the art of centralizing and decentralizing content creation and management

As a result of an increase in channels, data, and more sophisticated marketing technology, marketing is manufacturing companies matures.

But it inherently also comes with an added layer of complexity.

It requires that marketing as a whole, both local and central marketers, win as a one team.

That they play on each other’s strengths to make the most out of their limited resources.

Unfortunately, many manufacturing organizations struggle to allocate what marketing activities to centralize (HQ marketing responsibility) and decentralize (regional/local responsibility).

Some marketing activities are done by central but should be done locally – or the other way around.

But when both teams do it, they create duplication of work.

So there is a need for either ownership or collaboration across central and local marketing. 

Marketing activities cut across everything from generating market insights to managing martech platforms.

Let’s take market insights as an example:

While central marketing can spot macro trends and develop a detailed overview of global competitors, most marketing organizations in global manufacturing companies choose to get market insights from local markets and place the activity decentrally.

Why? Because local proximity and knowledge are imperative for nuanced and actionable insights about customer wants and needs, local regulation landscape and competitors.

Other marketing activities are often central. Managing martech platforms such as CRM, for example.

CRM is usually placed centrally because it (a) applies to many across different departments, (b) is scalable, and (c) requires specialized competencies to manage its many functionalities.

A critical marketing activity that is difficult to place in the “centra-decentral” spectrum is content creation and management.

The reason why it is difficult to place, is because it has both pros and cons.

When placed decentrally, marketing organizations experience the benefits of content tailored to local needs.

But they also experience duplication of work and inconsistent representation of the corporate brand (different colours, fonts, and off-brand messaging, etc.).

On the other hand, if placed centrally, content is better positioned to scale across markets, and there is no risk of duplication of work.

But many regional/local marketing managers highlight the irrelevance of centrally created content, stating that “it doesn’t resonate with customers in my market”, “my market is different”, etc.

Leading manufacturers in 2022 follow a hybrid approach when it comes to content creation and management.

They manage content globally through digital asset management, which enables regional/local content developers to ensure the messaging, so it aligns with local needs.

This is important for global manufacturers, but absolutely critical for those who drive sophisticated, full-funnel marketing programs with varying content formats.

How DAM software provides scale and flexibility to content creation and management

Digital asset management allows manufacturers to do two such things:

1. Globally manage the content lifecycle, from creation to distribution

2. Give local marketing the flexibility and ability to tailor content to make it fit-for-purpose in a local context.

Global manufacturers are left with the benefits of scalable content that caters to local customers, competitors, regulations, languages, and cultures.

Ultimately the realization of omnichannel ambitions.

Are manufacturers ready for 2022?

Manufacturers survived supply chain issues and COVID – now is the time to take the next three steps.

1. Go omnichannel

2. Convert your salespeople into hybrid sellers

3. Ensure content creation and management is both scalable and flexible

It is a long journey, but all three trends share a common, yet critical enabler: Digital asset management.

Want to learn about DAM?

Contact us today for a free, personalized assessment of where you are today and we’ll be happy to share our expertise and insights on how you can help your business hit your 2022 growth goals.