2025 feels like a whiplash year for many in manufacturing and ancillary industries across the United States. While the overall economy continued in expansion for the 61st month after one month of contraction in April 2020, reports the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), economic activity in manufacturing contracted in May 2025 for the third month in a row. Respondents to ISM’s Manufacturing Report On Business® shared this sentiment, noting the holding pattern of customer orders as result of tariff uncertainty and the challenge of passing tariff costs on through price increases and surcharges.
While tariffs present a significant hurdle across the enterprise – from supply chain and logistics to sales and staffing – how do they affect marketing?
Huh?
As one of the “Ps” of marketing, pricing and related tactics should require marketing leadership at the forefront of such strategic conversations. But that’s not always the case. Pricing strategy is often relegated to other functions of the business, like sales or accounting, and marketing is treated as a series of “set-it-and-forget-it” activities by small-to-mid-sized manufacturers. This approach, however, can lead to a rude awakening. The kneejerk reaction to redlining event budgets and pulling back on advertising, which is common to such businesses, can act as an impediment before the next manufacturing economic growth cycle.
Dale Harrison with Inforda Life Sciences documents the impact of stopping brand awareness marketing. His research found that the buyer recall of a company with the least market share, which is typical of SMB companies with limited resources, dropped substantially more than other competitors six months after marketing was paused [see image 1]. Even more so, it took at least eight months of resumed marketing for the same company to reach previous recall highs.
But there’s still time to change reactive behavior.
In this environment, dollars are finite and competition for mindshare is stiff. Manufacturers have an opportunity to develop greater efficiency in their marketing efforts while increasing customer value to satisfy both financial and business development concerns, without causing long-term, negative consequences. Here’s how:
1. Double Down on Customer Education and Value Engineering
Buyers are scrutinizing every dollar. Instead of pushing specs and prices, lead with content that quantifies ROI, reduces perceived risk and simplifies complex purchasing decisions. Success stories, webinars and engineering-led sales content are now conversion tools, not just awareness drivers. Focus on messaging and activities, such as value engineering, that underline your commitment to customer partnership, which becomes validated when it’s tested during economic contractions.
You can also train sellers in solution sales techniques, especially for non-commodity sales, to better control buying decisions. And be sure to keep sales managers planning and managing teams, as Author Scott Edinger cautions: “To win business, it’s common for managers to go back to the trenches and do more selling and closing business. This…weakens the role of the salesperson, reducing their presence in these accounts because the manager is doing the seller’s job [and] takes managers out of the role of coach where they can have the broadest impact on success.”
2. Fix Your Sales and Marketing Data for More Automation and AI Payback
Most SMB manufacturers have data issues. Duplicate data, errors, outdated information, inconsistent formats and data silos are just some of the many data challenges continuing to plague companies today. Unfortunately, these challenges also aren’t often handled through a unified approach. One Salesforce survey found the majority of IT leaders don’t have an integrated data strategy. Bringing in more technology and artificial intelligence will only exacerbate these data difficulties. Economic slowdowns can be the right time to tackle missing data or data quality bottlenecks to give you the bandwidth to maximize your usage of CRM, marketing automation and sales enablement tools and generative AI. The net effect should allow for enhanced prospect and customer personalization, marketing and sales efficiency and productivity and timely and proper follow-up based on user behavior – at scale.
After IT consulting and outsourcing company SG Analytics centralized its client’s data into a unified data warehouse that was also integrated with its CRM, their client realized an “80% reduction in time spent on data extraction and cleansing and enhanced outreach accuracy, leading to a 60% increase in…buyer engagement rates.” A word of warning, however: this isn’t an overnight, nor a singular department, task. Setting data governance policies (particularly in light of cookie tracking protection policies in place for Firefox and Safari browsers), developing standardization practices, undergoing validation and cleaning, deploying regular audits and updates and providing training is a cross-functional, company-wide endeavor. With strategic marketing leadership at the helm, though, you’ll have much more of a customer-first data focus to reap low-hanging fruit like improved e-mail deliverability, uncovered sales opportunities and new market potential.
3. Use Data to Drive Predictive Campaigns
Armed with clean and high-quality data, you can then rely on it to expand your campaign efforts. Data from purchase histories, channel effectiveness tracking, inquiry behavior and service patterns can be pulled to help create predictive models for cross-sell and upsell campaigns as well as new product or service launches. Using cluster modeling, for example, you can group different classes of target prospects with shared buying behaviors for more streamlined pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Forecasting is another model commonly in place in manufacturing. Yet, its demand application is often limited to historical sales, inventory, production scheduling and resource allocation. By tying in market trends, accurate sales deal forecasts and marketing campaign impacts, you can work towards greater precision in your product and sales predictability.
And the broader economic influence shouldn’t intimidate predictive campaign advancements. In fact, researchers in this MIT Sloan Management Review article found that, “on average, new products launched during a recession have higher sales and market share and remain on the market longer than those launched during boom times.”
Leading with Confidence
Marketing is competitive armor for your manufacturing business, especially during uncertain times. CEOs who treat marketing as a core growth function rather than a support role will be best positioned to thrive as conditions shift. Today’s economy demands clarity, trust and speed. Your marketing must deliver all three. When resources are limited, bandwidth is minimal and talent is green, a manufacturing fractional CMO helps to bring strategic direction, executive-level leadership and measurable impact without the heavy overhead. If you're ready to lead with confidence, not caution, let's talk about how Towers Fractional Marketing leadership can help you outpace competitors in 2025 and beyond.
