Most industrial and manufacturing marketing teams are wrestling with the same problems: long sales cycles, complex RFPs, multi-stakeholder buying groups, and fragmented marketing ops spanning channels, regions, distributors, and product lines. All of these challenges make it difficult to get a unified view of pipeline influence.

That complexity is exactly why so few teams have built out even basic lifecycle marketing. The average manufacturing marketing team spends just 36% of its budget on digital channels, which means most are still running ad-hoc campaigns rather than a connected lifecycle programme.

The opportunity here is significant: implementing the fundamentals, and extending them to offline-sourced leads too, is enough to create a real competitive advantage.

In this guide, we outline the unique challenges facing marketing teams, and the lifecycle marketing solutions that help solve them. The challenges are listed in the order of customer lifecycle maturity, and while best practice is always the long-term aim, a crawl-walk-run approach will get you easy wins: start with solving the basics, then build out from there.