Welcome back to Manufacturing Marketing Thursdays at the SageRock blog!

You can find all of the Manufacturing-related articles we write about here: Manufacturing Marketing.

I’m in the process of putting together an infographic of the manufacturing industry and how it is using Web marketing.

If you’ve never seen one, infographics are these cool visual representations of data. Visualizing statistics helps us all understand the data in a more deep way.

To get the data, I created a survey that asked a series of question about how specific manufacturing companies use:

• The web in general
• Search engines
• Social Media, which specifically included questions about:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• And then I asked how important all of these things were to the specific manufacturing company.

I would say that the findings are surprising.

Most manufacturing companies are taking parts of the Web very seriously.

Some are doing some of the most advanced Web marketing I’ve maybe ever seen.

I learned a lot about this industry by doing this survey.

I used the Zwoor Survey tool for ipad, iphone, android, tablets.

That was a great tool that let me quickly compile my answers on my phone and then they were uploaded directly to the Zwoor site.

I especially loved that they had an “offline” feature of the app. That’s great at conferences where Internet connections are non-existent or just generally terrible.

If you are focused on a specific industry for your company I would highly recommend doing this kind of survey of your potential clients as it pertains to the services you offer.

I can’t say enough about how much more aware I am of the manufacturing world from a Web marketing perspective.

I’ll be unveiling the research I found each Thursday for the next few weeks here on the SageRock blog.

What I can tell you is that manufacturers and the Midwest have a lot in common. Being a Midwesterner myself, I know my people quite well.

They are both generally suspicious of “new.”

They want to see long, solid proof of a new strategy before they jump into it.

I respect this pragmatic approach to things. There is little point in being the first person to buy something only to find that it was just a passing fad.

But here’s the problem: We are moving out of a predominantly manufacturing era and solidly moving into a knowledge-based era.

That’s not to say that things aren’t being manufactured. The opposite is actually true.

More people have desires to get things manufactured than any time in history.

3D printers can now be researched and bought directly online by anyone. Here are the paid search listings on Google for some 3D printers:

The difference between the manufacturing era and the knowledge era isn’t a decline in manufacturing. It is an increase in the speed at which new ideas get prototyped and manufactured.

The difference of the two eras is speed.

Kodak is an excellent example of a company that did not understand this principle. People still take pictures and get pictures printed. They just don’t want to wait, even an hour, to get it done. They want to see their pictures now! And today they want to instantly share them with the entire world.

When I got into search engine marketing in 1999 I thought things moved fast. I wish the world moved at 1999 speed. The changes and adoption rate of society by these new tools is blindingly fast.

I see no change in the pace of change today except that it is going to try to get faster.

You see, in a knowledge economy it’s not what you produce that makes the most money, it’s what you think of to produce that is where the money is at.

I tell this story to the manufacturing world and to the Midwest for one reason: I don’t believe we live in a “tried and true” world any more.

Google is king today. But Bing and Facebook are aggressively uniting to change that fact.

People are on Facebook today. They liked Pinterest yesterday. Now they like Instagram. But that’s not to say Pinterest has gone away. Google Plus wants to be the Facebook of tomorrow so bad you can practically smell the desire.

Live online videocasts are becoming higher quality and easier to do.

If you wait for something that is “tried and true” you will never get on the bus.

Where the “good” that is being sold is “knowledge” the most valuable piece knowledge is the one that is able to produce something that resonates with the world today. Who knows what will sell tomorrow. (I mean literally tomorrow. Friday.)

This only matters because I’m preaching to the choir of some of your competitors. This is obvious to some. But it is earth shattering to others.

This matters to you because you are losing market share today, right now, to people who get this concept.

So I am here to help the manufacturing marketing world in any way I can to understand these new tools and how to use them to the best of your ability.

Every Thursday is Manufacturing Marketing day here at the SageRock blog. Just come back then to get the latest marketing tips and tricks specifically for you manufacturers.

Next week I’ll have more of the infographic done and we can start to look at the specific findings. See you then!