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Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Nicki Howell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:07:13 +0000

TL;DR:Financial services marketers face stricter advertising, privacy, and disclosure rules from regulators like FINRA and the SEC, along with added state and global oversight. That means tighter controls around claims, consent, data use, and approvals across every channel. Centralizing processes, standardizing disclosures, and using helpful tools to manage permissions and audit trails can help teams reduce risk, stay compliant, and scale campaigns with confidence.

Intoduction

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission, local regulations, and privacy laws … it’s a lot to contend with, isn’t it? You likely already have enough on your plate, working to prove your marketing’s impact to leadership and helping your team feel less overloaded. But at the same time, you know that when it comes to compliance, you can’t afford any mistakes.

Whether you’re brushing up on financial services advertising regulations for 2026 or you’re new to the industry and figuring out which ones to watch, we’ve broken down the most important ones, along with tips for keeping up at scale when your team is already stretched too thin.

Why Advertising Regulations Matter More for Financial Services

As a financial services marketer, you likely have a long list of goals to hit this year. The challenge is reaching those goals while checking all the important compliance boxes. And this year, advertising regulations matter even more because:

Consumer trust is key

The trust required for financial transactions is significant. People don’t casually try out a new bank the way they might stop by a new restaurant for takeout on the way home from work. And that sets the bar for credibility even higher.

Plus, the stakes are serious. More than half of respondents have considered switching financial institutions in the past two years. So, you don’t want to break trust for any reason, especially not when it comes to financial services advertising regulations.

Regulatory security continues to tighten

Stricter rules on consumer data collection from the Federal Trade Commission, along with increased oversight of advertising claims and disclosures from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, make it harder for financial marketers to stay compliant and do so at scale.

Risk of noncompliance comes at a great cost

Strict regulations also bring the risk of fines, not to mention the potential for broken trust and reputational damage. As the number of marketing channels has grown over the years, financial marketers now face compliance risks from many directions.

For example, a bank was recently fined $850,000 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for sharing social media posts from an influencer that weren’t considered fair or balanced and included exaggerated, unwarranted, promissory, or misleading claims.

Key Financial Services Advertising Regulations to Know in 2026

As a financial marketer, it’s your job to understand which regulations you need to follow and how to stay compliant across all the channels you manage. But which ones matter most? Here are a few financial services advertising regulations to watch in 2026, including:

1. FINRA Advertising and Communications Rules

FINRA compliance focuses on standards that require your communications with the people you serve to be fair and balanced and not misleading. It covers things like the emails you send, the content on your website, your social media posts, and the brochures your team puts out into the world.

FINRA Rule 2210 is the main rule that governs how you communicate with the public through marketing, advertising, and promotional content. These regulations set expectations around disclosures, substantiated claims, and supervisory oversight across channels.

2. SEC Marketing and Disclosure Requirements

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission oversees investment adviser marketing standards under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, and its modernized marketing rule clarifies exactly how advisers must present performance data, testimonials, endorsements, and third-party ratings in their promotional content.

For example, regulators recently held nine firms accountable for violating the marketing rule. They were called to account for “disseminating advertising that included untrue or unsubstantiated statements of material fact or testimonials, endorsements or third-party ratings that lacked the required disclosures.” The organizations ended up paying roughly $1.2 million in combined civil penalties.

3. State-Level and Global Oversight Considerations

Beyond federal rules, you’ll also need to account for state regulations and global oversight. U.S. states enforce their own consumer protection laws, which often prohibit unfair or deceptive practices and can be used to challenge misleading marketing. If you operate across borders, international requirements also apply. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK has specific rules governing financial promotions.

So, you’ll want to track not only the advertising regulations for financial services and federal laws but also any regulations that apply to the specific geographies where your organization operates.

Financial Services Data Privacy Regulations and Marketing

With technology advancing quickly and more tools collecting and using data for all types of purposes, consumers are understandably concerned. They want to know who has their data and how it’s being used. And the laws are working to catch up. Here are a few areas to watch around financial services data privacy regulations:

Before you start collecting data, make sure you collect it lawfully and clearly document your process. Your customers and the people you serve need to actively consent to specific uses of their information. Examples of privacy laws include the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and broader regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Privacy requirements also mean you’ll want to build consent capture into your forms, landing pages, and anywhere else you gather data. Standardize the language and carefully track the purpose and use of each data type. You’ll also want an efficient way to store those records so you can demonstrate compliance, whether you’re using the data for email marketing, segmentation, or something else.

Storage use and considerations

Data privacy in financial services doesn’t only govern what types of data you collect. The regulations also govern how you store and safeguard that data. That means protecting customer data from unauthorized access and using it only for the purposes to which people consent. In practice, this often includes strong access controls, encrypted storage, and clear retention and secure disposal policies.

For marketing teams, that means being intentional about where customer lists and behavioral data live. Disconnected spreadsheets and ad hoc processes can create security and compliance issues, especially when you need audit trails, documentation, and clear oversight.

Impact on targeting and personalization

Financial services data privacy rules often change how you approach segmentation and personalization. When broad consent isn’t possible, you may need to rely more on context-based targeting or aggregated data instead. Rather than using detailed individual profiles to trigger a nurture email, you might structure journeys around life cycle stages or high-level behaviors that don’t require sensitive personal information.

Regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act and the General Data Protection Regulation make it harder to depend on highly granular personal data without clear permission, which naturally shifts teams toward broader privacy-safe approaches.

Cross-channel personalization can also get more complicated, especially when it involves third-party cookies or external data sharing. Those tactics need careful review against current privacy requirements. Focusing on strong first-party data practices, like opt-in lists, owned analytics, and clear audit trails, helps you execute effective marketing while reducing the risk of crossing regulatory lines.

How Advertising Regulations Affect Different Marketing Channels

Regulations don’t only impact what you can say but also the operations of your different marketing channels. Every channel needs to be easy to review and to show compliance. A few examples include:

Email marketing and compliance

When crafting email marketing strategies for financial services, you’re often entering regulated territory. Some tools allow you to create templates that lock in those disclosures so your team can’t edit or remove them without the proper permissions.

Digital advertising and content marketing

Paid ads, landing pages, blogs, and social posts are all examples of content that might fall under financial services advertising regulations. But the challenge is often related to the overall scale. For example, you might have dozens of ad variants to manage. Teams can centralize approved claims and disclosures, then build campaigns using that approved content. This speeds up creation and helps reduce risk.

Campaign approvals and recordkeeping

Every new campaign goes through legal review and approval, and you need to document that it happened. Tracking approvals and related communications in one system helps you move faster without missing important oversight steps.

How Marketing Automation Helps Financial Services Stay Compliant

As you build broader marketing strategies for financial services, compliance becomes trickier at scale. The more segments and campaigns you’re running, the higher the chance that something gets overlooked. Manual processes can create additional issues, but marketing automation software can help address them with the following:

Centralized control

When campaigns live across multiple tools and technologies, it’s easy for outdated copy or unapproved claims to slip through. Marketing automation helps you centralize templates and create fixed blocks so all the important compliance pieces stay intact.

For example, teams can lock required risk language into email and landing page templates so it can’t be changed accidentally. Marketers can then build from those approved components rather than starting from scratch with every campaign.

Permission management

Privacy regulations and internal policies often require clear direction about who can contact which customers. Consent, opt-out, and channel preferences all need to be followed, and manual tracking can be risky.

Marketing automation helps fix this by ensuring each contact record and its preferences are enforced. If a customer decides to opt out of a channel, they’re automatically excluded from future sends.

Audit trails and consistency

Regulators often expect proof. You need to show what was sent, when it went out, who received it, and which version of the content was approved.

Built-in audit trails make that possible. Archived messages, version histories, and documented approvals help you run compliant campaigns and confidently defend them during audits.

Financial Services Marketing Automation Strategy Guide

Preparing Your Marketing Team for 2026 and Beyond

Compliance might be a large part of your job, but that doesn’t mean it has to weigh heavily on your team. With the right tools and resources, you can still creatively reach your audience with the content they need at the right time while staying compliant with financial services advertising regulations.

Purpose built tools like Act-On’s marketing automation for financial services help you strike the balance between executing what’s needed to reach your goals and not accidentally stepping into costly compliance violations.

5 Manufacturing Marketing Metrics That Matter in 2026

Act-On — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:06:41 +0000

TL;DR: Manufacturing marketers can more easily defend their impact in 2026 by tracking more metrics that tie marketing activity to pipeline and revenue. These manufacturing marketing metrics include pipeline contribution by source, lead-to-opportunity conversion, buying group engagement, long-cycle revenue attribution, and marketing-sourced revenue. Together, these metrics help your team prove more value and replicate your highest-performing activities.

Introduction

If you’ve ever sat in a leadership meeting fielding questions that basically translate to “how much revenue did marketing help create?” you know the importance of metrics. The challenge is that there are dozens of metrics you could track, but many of them still don’t tell the full story about the impact your team is making. And with the marketing trends for manufacturers showing budgets heading downward, you need every defensible point you can make.

The reality is that prospects can spend months researching, learning, and comparing options before building internal consensus and closing a deal. Research shows the average sales cycle in the manufacturing industry is roughly 130 days.

During that period, marketing is working hard, often creating nurture sequences, website content, webinars, and more to keep prospects engaged throughout their entire journey. That’s why it’s worth revisiting the manufacturing marketing metrics you’re tracking and the story they tell, so in the months ahead you can paint a clearer picture of marketing’s impact to leadership and focus on doing more of what’s working.

Five Manufacturing Marketing Metrics That Matter Most in 2026

Even if you’re diligently tracking metrics, it’s easy to get stuck when there’s a disconnect between those metrics and pipeline contribution. And while you’ll likely want to keep some of your favorites, we’d also recommend considering these five marketing metrics for manufacturers in 2026.

1. Pipeline Contribution by Marketing Source

It’s rare for a large amount of revenue to come from a single campaign, channel, or event. More often, revenue results from a combination of channels that build over time, leading up to the final interaction: the sale. In other words, prospects typically come to you through a mix of activities, such as webinars, email campaigns, and trade shows. And that’s what makes tracking tricky.

Capturing all this activity requires visibility into a very long, multi-touch buying journey. Tracking pipeline contributions by marketing source by using Act-On’s marketing automation platform helps you use first-party engagement data and tie it back to known contacts and accounts. This gives your team a much clearer understanding of how different marketing sources contribute to revenue, from early awareness through opportunity creation.

2. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate

Successful lead generation strategies for manufacturers focus on quality. Lead quality is essential because you’re working with technical buyers, large buying committees, and long sales cycles.

When you’re considering manufacturing marketing metrics, focusing on lead-to-opportunity conversion rates helps prioritize quality and understand exactly how buying decisions progress. For example, an engineer might download a spec sheet, while someone in procurement reviews a pricing guide or reads a white paper about ROI. You need to know what information each member of the buying committee needs and when.

Tools like marketing automation help you measure lead-to-opportunity conversion and apply lead scoring based on engagement patterns, content interactions, and behavioral signals over time. This is especially helpful in manufacturing, where intent to spend builds gradually across many touchpoints. It also gives your team a much better understanding of which campaigns and content produce leads that convert, so you can double down on what’s working without increasing your budget.

3. Account Engagement Across the Buying Group

As you track manufacturing marketing KPIs and metrics, you probably know it’s incredibly uncommon for just one person to hold all the decision-making power, which means you need to measure account engagement across the entire buying group and multiple channels.

For example, a deal might include engineers evaluating the technical fit of your solution, people in operations weighing reliability, and finance professionals assessing cost and risk. You may also have someone in procurement managing vendor approval.

So, if you’re looking at engagement activity through a single contact, it limits your view of the full buying group and doesn’t tell the whole story.

Measuring account-level engagement gives you a clearer picture by showing whether multiple roles within an organization are actively researching and interacting with you over time. Some automation tools support this by tying engagement data back to accounts rather than individual contacts. And as different roles in the buying committee interact with your website, emails, and online events, those activities roll up into a shared view, so you can see patterns, track engagement, and act on them throughout long sales cycles and complicated buying decisions.

4. Revenue Attribution Over Long Sales Cycles

Revenue attribution is especially tricky for manufacturers because deals unfold over a long series of interactions. Research shows that over half of industrial buyers make a purchase decision before they ever speak with a manufacturing company. A buyer might engage with your content for months before the opportunity is created, attending a webinar mid-cycle, and perhaps revisiting your resources during the final evaluation. That’s why relying on first-touch or last-touch attribution oversimplifies how buying actually works, and undervalues marketing’s role.

As a result, attribution needs to acknowledge that revenue is won over a long period, across channels and stakeholders. A tool like marketing automation can help you measure manufacturing marketing metrics, such as revenue attribution across a long sales cycle, by analyzing interactions throughout the entire buying journey.

Instead of piecing together disconnected data from different systems, automation gives you a complete view of the marketing opportunities as they progress. As manufacturing trends continue to push teams toward greater accountability and revenue alignment, this visibility makes it much easier to evaluate influence across multiple touchpoints, understand which efforts tend to appear in successful deals, and do more of what works in the future.

5. Marketing-Sourced Revenue

Marketing-sourced revenue is one of the clearest ways to show your impact to leadership, especially when leadership is focused on tight alignment between spend and pipeline generation.

Unlike basic B2B manufacturing marketing metrics like activity, marketing-sourced revenue connects your efforts directly to business outcomes. Rather than reporting on email engagement or lead volume, you can point to the dollar value of pipeline and closed revenue that originated from marketing-created opportunities.

Marketing automation supports this by capturing and organizing first-party signals that show when an opportunity originated from marketing activity. This includes tracking engagement across content marketing, email, events, social, and website interactions, then tying those signals to individual contacts and rolling them up to the account level over time. When an opportunity is created and eventually closed, that full view of engagement provides a clear context for why marketing is credited as the source.

How Automation Tools Make Metrics Actionable

Defining the right manufacturing marketing metrics to track is step one. Step two is having the tools that let you track them easily and quickly.

Centralizing data is the starting point, because you can’t track the right information if you don’t have access to it or if it’s fragmented. And that’s also one of the many benefits of marketing automation in manufacturing. It allows you to track data across channels and touchpoints and bring those interactions under a “single roof.”

As a result, you can make better budget decisions and clearly defend them to leadership. And as you move into 2026, you’ll have both the right manufacturing marketing metrics and the right tools to guide smarter decisions and replicate what’s working at scale.

Summary

In 2026, manufacturing marketers need metrics that clearly connect marketing activity to pipeline and revenue — not just engagement. This article breaks down five manufacturing marketing metrics that matter most, including pipeline contribution by source, lead-to-opportunity conversion, buying group engagement, long-cycle revenue attribution, and marketing-sourced revenue. Together, these marketing metrics for manufacturers provide a clearer picture of marketing’s true impact, help teams defend budget decisions to leadership, and identify which activities are worth scaling in long, complex sales cycles.

Ready to improve manufacturing marketing ROI? Check out our The Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing eBook to start.

Or, if you’re ready to see how marketing automation can support your business right now, getting signed up for an Act-On demo is fast and easy.

How AI Is Changing Manufacturing Marketing

Nicki Howell — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:24:22 +0000

TL;DR: AI is helping manufacturing marketers handle long sales cycles and large buying committees by turning fragmented data into actionable insights. It improves marketing effectiveness through predictive analytics, personalized messaging for different stakeholders, and cross-channel optimization. AI also reduces manual work (like lead scoring and segmentation), connects disconnected data systems, and helps teams focus on strategies that drive ROI. Marketing automation platforms with AI (like Act-On) make it easier to identify buying signals, prioritize accounts, and engage prospects at the right time without overloading small marketing teams.

Introduction

As a marketer in the manufacturing industry, you likely have a long list of goals to hit this year, along with the added task of proving that every action you take and every marketing dollar you spend has an impact. And if you have a smaller team that is already stretched very thin, this challenge becomes even bigger.

The good news is that AI-driven marketing for manufacturing is giving the industry a much needed boost. Data that was once fragmented and hard to access is now being used to understand buyers in context, keep people engaged over long manufacturing sales cycles, and reach everyone involved in buying decisions. Understanding the potential of AI marketing for manufacturing as you move forward can help your team hit its goals and prove its impact.

Why AI Matters More Than Ever in Marketing for Manufacturing

Your buyers jump from channel to channel and follow sales cycles that are often long and drawn out. Research shows the average sales cycle in the manufacturing industry is about 130 days. In the meantime, your team works to meet buyers where they are and stay relevant as they move from interest to decision.

Latest manufacturing marketing trends point to extended cycles, while timing and relevance being more important than ever. A prospect might engage with your technical content early, go quiet for weeks, then re-emerge ready to go, with their ducks in a row and a budget approved. When you consider how long it takes to move from interest to decision, combined with the reality that buying committees are often large, tools like AI become important for maintaining buyer attention, especially when stakeholders are spread across many departments. One recent survey found that an average of 13 people are involved in B2B buying decisions.

AI powered marketing for manufacturing gives you the insights and tools to stay top of mind with multiple stakeholders across large committees and long buying cycles. And when your team is operating at full capacity, or let’s be honest, sometimes beyond capacity, having tools that lighten the load is incredibly valuable. Just as important, they help you show the impact of your efforts and prove ROI to leadership.

Four Ways AI is Transforming Manufacturing Marketing Today

Does your team have large goals and limited resources to accomplish them? AI marketing for manufacturing offers inspiration and hope for hitting those goals successfully without burning out your team. Here are the top ways we’re seeing AI transform the industry right now.

1. Predictive Analytics

You’re sitting on beautiful little nuggets of behavioral data, but in the past, turning those nuggets into ready-to-use insights wasn’t always easy. AI-driven marketing for manufacturing helps you analyze engagement patterns over time and home in on the signals that really matter in long manufacturing buying cycles.

For example, AI-powered marketing tools can flag an account that’s been quiet for weeks, then suddenly shows renewed engagement across multiple roles, like an engineering team revisiting technical documentation or a procurement contact opening ROI-related emails. Instead of treating each of these actions as isolated events, AI connects that data and serves up insights for marketing and sales. This type of intelligence allows teams to respond much faster.

2. Personalization at Scale for Complex Buying Groups

The days of “Hi {Name}” personalization are so far behind us that most prospects now consider it generic. Keeping attention requires messaging that fits who you’re talking to on the buying committee and where they are in their journey.

For example, an engineer reviewing technical specs and a procurement lead evaluating cost risk should each receive messaging personalized to their needs, challenges, and status in the buying process. AI tools help you customize content paths for specific roles within an account without building complicated, separate campaigns for every scenario. This makes hyper-personalization much easier when your team already has a full calendar and limited time for manual work.

3. AI-Driven Optimization Across Channels

Prospects aren’t always predictable. They jump from channel to channel, which makes it more important than ever to reach them where they’re engaging. AI-driven marketing for manufacturing helps by identifying signals and recognizing when it’s time for meaningful follow-up.

For example, AI can recognize when a prospect reads a technical email, visits a product page later that week, and then registers for a webinar, even when those actions happen across different channels.

Based on that activity, AI can automatically trigger a follow-up, such as a role-appropriate nurture sequence or a sales notification with content aligned to the prospect’s interests. This type of cross-channel optimization helps manufacturing marketers respond when interest is highest, without manually monitoring every touchpoint.

4. Improve Marketing ROI Through Better Decision-Making

Meeting the big goals you’ve set for the year likely involves a series of important decisions. And those decisions are only as strong as the data behind them. AI can improve marketing ROI in manufacturing by supporting better decision-making, uncovering patterns in what’s working and guiding where to invest more resources.

For example, AI can help you understand which combinations of content, channels, and roles consistently show up in won deals versus which efforts tend to stall. With that insight, you can reassess how you’re spending resources, shifting them toward the activities that clearly tie to ROI and your goals.

Common Marketing Challenges AI Helps Solve

Wondering how to use AI to optimize manufacturing marketing? The answers lie within your biggest challenges. Some of the largest we commonly see include:

Data overload. You likely have large amounts of behavioral data about your prospects, including website visits, content downloads, webinar attendance, and email engagement. On its own, that data can be overwhelming to analyze and interpret in context. AI helps you find patterns and understand meaningful buying signals that your team can quickly act on.
Manual processes. AI can also help you reduce manual processes around list building, lead scoring, and campaign adjustments. Instead of exporting engagement data or updating spreadsheets, AI can continuously group audiences based on behavior and adjust scores as interest rises and falls, funneling them into the most relevant nurture paths automatically. This is especially helpful in manufacturing, where buying activity can move at a painfully slow pace.
Disconnected systems. When your systems aren’t connected, it can create frustrating blind spots that impact many areas of the business. For example, when engagement data, account insights, and prospect data live in separate places, it’s difficult to understand what marketing influenced and when. AI helps align these signals across systems so marketing and sales can focus on the insights that matter most.

Sales teams can see which stakeholders are active and what topics they care about, while marketing can clearly see how engagement connects to opportunity movement.

AI Tools for Manufacturing Marketing

The right AI tools for manufacturing can help you continually refine how audiences are grouped and prioritized based on real-time engagement patterns. If an account, or specific roles within it, suddenly increases activity across emails, landing pages, and resource downloads, the system can flag it and help you respond.

You set the strategy, which might mean automatically adjusting a nurture path, updating lead scores, or passing a prospect on to sales. These are just a few examples of where AI fits into marketing automation and helps improve your manufacturing marketing ROI. Overall, it helps you focus your energy on strategy while automation handles the day-to-day adjustments that fine-tune campaigns and improve your manufacturing marketing ROI.

How Act-On Helps Marketers Put AI to Work

Act-On helps marketing teams get the most out of AI and prove important ROI to senior leadership leveraging purpose-built marketing automation for manufacturers that supports you with:

AI-powered insights. Instead of reacting to single data points, you can start to see patterns in how prospects and accounts interact with your marketing over time. That might include repeat visits to technical resources, cross-channel engagement, or other signals that show progressing intent.
Segmentation and targeting. You can group audiences based on behavioral engagement signals and create more relevant messages without requiring heavy manual effort or burning out your team. This approach helps you understand which actions drive engagement across the buying cycle, whether that includes engineers, operational leaders, or procurement teams.
Predictive optimization. You can use historical performance and engagement patterns to understand which campaigns and segments are most likely to contribute to movement along the buyer’s journey. This understanding helps you focus your efforts and show clear progression and impact to leadership.

With Act-On’s AI tools for manufacturing marketing, you can improve the impact of your marketing without putting additional strain on your existing team. You can also reduce manual work tied to tasks like segmentation and reporting while supporting more consistent impact across long sales cycles and complicated buying committees.

Need Help Getting Started?

Interested in getting started with AI-driven marketing for manufacturing? You don’t have to completely overhaul your strategy or processes, and you can start slow by understanding latest trends and the best tools to help.

A marketing automation platform like Act-On is designed to help you meet your marketing goals by bringing together automation, analytics, and AI-driven insights in a way that supports the long sales cycles manufacturing marketers face.

Also, check out our Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing for best practices for generating high-quality leads, creating segmented experiences, and using AI in ways that help your team hit even your most aggressive goals this year.

Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies

Nicki Howell — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:25:47 +0000

TL;DR: Manufacturing buyers often complete most of their research before ever contacting sales, spending time in the “dark funnel” through private conversations, reviews, and independent research. To generate more qualified leads, manufacturing companies need a structured strategy that defines target buyers, maps the buyer journey, creates stage-specific content, and nurtures prospects with marketing automation. By offering clear next steps, capturing information gradually, and tracking engagement, manufacturers can build trust earlier in the buying cycle and create a consistent pipeline of high-quality leads.

Introduction

Wouldn’t it be nice if the sales team at your manufacturing company had not only more leads, but higher-quality leads? It’s a common ask, but without a solid system for generating them, results can be lackluster or inconsistent at best. However, when you figure out a framework for creating leads on a regular basis, and in a way that doesn’t overtax your already busy team, you can make both marketing and sales happy.

But it’s not always easy to know exactly where to start, which is why we’ve shared a lead generation strategy for manufacturing companies that makes your sales team excited without overburdening your marketing team.

More Research Is Happening in the “Dark”

An increasing number of manufacturing buyers are spending time in the “dark funnel,” where they research solutions through untrackable channels such as private discussions, review sites, or word-of-mouth conversations. In fact, research shows that B2B buyers are nearly 70% through their buying process before they ever reach out to a sales team.

Recent marketing trends for manufacturers point to even longer sales cycles. If you can reach buyers earlier in the buying cycle, you can get a head start on building trust long before your competitors even know a prospect is shopping for a solution. And with any luck, they’ll never find out, because the prospect will already be sold on your solution. But to make this happen, you’ll need stronger manufacturer lead generation, which starts with:

The Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing

Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies

1. Define Your Target Buyer Profiles

You’ll want to get very clear about your top buyers. Are you speaking to maintenance managers, design engineers, or executives? Once you answer that question, you can dig deeper to understand each buyer persona, their largest pain points, where they go for research, and the factors that influence their decisions.

2. Map the Buyer Journey

Next, you’ll want to understand exactly how buyers move from recognizing a problem to making a final decision. Here’s a quick breakdown of each stage of a buyer journey map:

Awareness. The prospect recognizes a problem or need.
Consideration. They research options and compare different approaches.
Decision. They shortlist suppliers and request quotes or demos.

For each stage, make a list of the questions a buyer asks. If you’re not sure what those questions are, connect with your sales team. They can usually rattle them off pretty quickly. You’ll also want to note what types of content buyers consume at each stage, and the action they’re likely to take next.

3. Create Content for Each Stage

Once you’ve mapped out the stages, focus on creating helpful resources that support prospects at each stage of their journey for manufacturer lead generation. Content marketing for manufacturers has its nuances. To succeed, consider:

Awareness content, answering broad questions. Examples include blog articles, educational guides, industry trend overviews, or problem-focused explainer pages. This content helps buyers understand their challenges more deeply before evaluating potential solutions.
Consideration content, comparing different approaches and potential benefits. Examples might include white papers, comparison guides, solution overviews, or webinars that help buyers evaluate their options.
Decision content, supporting choices with strong proof. For example, you might create detailed case studies, customer testimonials, or implementation guides that help buyers feel confident moving forward.

At every stage, aim to create resources that offer so much value that prospects begin to trust you and look to you for answers as they work to solve their challenges.

4. Offer Clear Next Steps

Every piece of content you create for manufacturer lead generation should point to a clear next step via a call-to-action (CTA). For example, an awareness-focused blog article might offer a deeper guide to solving the problem in exchange for an email address. After reading a case study, you might invite readers to download a white paper that outlines how to address the same challenge. Or, for a technical comparison blog, you could provide a downloadable checklist or tool to help evaluate options.

5. Capture Interest with Progressive Forms

Have you ever been on the cusp of downloading a resource, only to see a 10-field form and quickly hit exit? You can avoid this with your prospects by keeping forms minimal and only asking for what you truly need. For example, you might limit your questions to:

Email address
Role
Industry

Some marketing automation tools support progressive forms, which means leads only see a few fields on their first visit. Each time they return, they’ll see a few new fields. Over time, this approach helps you gather more profile information so you can segment leads for future manufacturer lead generation efforts.

6. Create Nurture Sequences

As you capture information about your prospects, you’ll want to create email nurture sequences personalized to their specific needs and interests. For example, after a prospect downloads a guide about solving a specific problem, you might create a sequence that includes:

Email #1. Additional tips related to the core problem they downloaded.
Email #2. A strong story showing how others solved similar issues connected to the problem your prospect signaled interest in.
Email #3. A comparison guide or ROI checklist for a potential solution.
Email #4. A helpful webinar related to their problem.

Horizon Distributors is a great example of this strategy. They used segmentation to create more personalized campaigns and ultimately attracted and captured 200% more leads.

7. Track Engagement Behavior

You’ll want to understand not only who your prospects are but also the actions they’re taking. For example, you might track content downloads, pages viewed, repeat visits, and email opens and clicks.

Marketing automation for manufacturers can help you track these metrics and double down on the actions driving the most success. It can also provide clear breadcrumbs that show which topics and asset types prospects care about most at each stage of their journey.

Automate Your Manufacturer Lead Generation

As sales cycles become longer, understanding how to support your sales team with a solid framework for generating leads becomes increasingly important. As you learn what works best for your prospects, and use the right tools to fine-tune your efforts, and create more content and experiences that generate trust, you can design prospect experiences that automate your lead generation and support your team in winning more deals.

Need More Help Getting Started?

We’re personally huge fans of using marketing automation to support lead generation strategies for manufacturing companies because it can maximize your results. Our Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down exactly how it can help you connect with your customers, deliver value, and build deeper relationships that earn more business.

Marketing Automation Strategy Guide

Content Marketing for Manufacturers: Strategy, Formats & KPIs

Nicki Howell — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:27:44 +0000

TL;DR: Content marketing for manufacturers focuses on building trust over long, complex buying cycles by delivering helpful, educational content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The most effective formats today include video, case studies, and whitepapers, supported by a clear strategy built around buyer needs, content distribution, and measurable KPIs. Success takes time, but consistent, value-driven content helps manufacturers become the preferred choice when purchasing decisions are finally made.

Introduction

If you’re a manufacturing marketer, your world looks pretty different from that of those in the B2C space. Buying decisions often take quarters or even years, not days or weeks. And those decisions usually involve committees, which adds even more complexity to an already long buying cycle.

That’s why the faster and more consistently you can build trust with prospects, the better. It’s also why many turn to content marketing for manufacturers. The challenge is that even if you’re using content marketing, it’s not always easy to do it well. A recent survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute found that many marketers only feel they’re performing at an “average” level. And who wants to be average, right?

So whether you’ve been doing content marketing for years or you’re just starting to experiment, we’ve put together industry trends and strategies to help guide your path to success.

How is Content Marketing for Manufacturing Different?

The basic idea behind content marketing for manufacturing companies is that you’re building trust with content over time. While there are many manufacturing marketing ideas out there, the best approach is to play the long game.

You want your content to be so helpful that when it’s time to make a decision, you’re the obvious choice for your prospects. You can do this by creating valuable content at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to consideration, all the way to that final decision. For example, when a prospect is just becoming aware of a challenge, you might create educational blog posts, explainer videos, and basic guides.

As they start to consider their options more seriously, you might share comparison content or case studies. And as they reach the decision stage of the journey, you might go deeper with whitepapers and total cost of ownership guides. When you offer value throughout their entire journey, it becomes much easier for prospects to feel confident saying yes to your solution.

Content Formats That Drive Best Results

As you help prospects move through their journey, you’ll need to figure out which types of content they actually need. Maybe you already have internal metrics showing which formats work best for your audience. But if you don’t, you can take cues from broader research on what’s working for other manufacturing marketers.

The Content Marketing Institute’s survey dug into exactly what content types are working best right now in the industry. Here are the top three formats.

1. Video content

The majority of manufacturing marketers (74 percent) said video produced the best results with their audience. And it makes sense, right? When you’re selling complicated products, a visual representation goes a long way, especially when nontechnical leaders are part of the buying committee.

Website tracking capabilities can help you understand exactly how that content performs, including which videos prospects watch and for how long. With that data, you could create email nurturing sequences that build on your most popular content and guide prospects to the next step in the journey.

2. Case studies and real-world success stories

The second most popular format was case studies and customer success stories, with nearly half of respondents (45 percent) saying this content type produced the best results. And really, it’s no secret that buyers want proof. They want to see how your solution performed under real conditions, what pains it addressed, and what outcomes it produced.

You can also use case studies in nurturing campaigns and segment your buyers by industry, product interest, and previous website behavior. For example, a visitor who researched safety and compliance might receive a case study that focuses on those specific benefits.

3. Whitepapers and guides

The third most successful content type noted by manufacturing marketers is guides and whitepapers, with nearly half (43 percent) saying this format produced their best results. In addition to educating buyers on why a solution category is the right fit, you can also use these assets for lead generation and nurturing.

For example, when someone downloads a whitepaper, you can use progressive profiling or email nurture campaigns to continue the conversation naturally by sharing comparison guides or other helpful content. Website behavioral insights can also show where readers spend their time, which helps you understand where they may need more education.

And if you’d like some examples of how real companies are using these formats, we’ve pulled together some of our favorites here.

Building a Content Strategy for Manufacturing

Now that you understand which content formats are working well for manufacturing marketers, how do you integrate them into an actual plan? You can go pretty deep with a content marketing strategy for manufacturing, so we’ll give you a few important basics as a starting point, and you can always build from there later.

1. List your buyer types and what they need

Think design engineers, procurement officers, maintenance teams, and managers. What does each group care about? What challenges and pains do they face? Are they focused on costs, ROI, or compliance? Write all this down. And if you haven’t already, make sure this information is rooted in data. Talk with your sales team, your customer success team, and your best customers, the ones you would actually want to replicate.

2. Map out your buyer’s journey and content formats

Identify which types of content fit each stage of the journey, from awareness to consideration to decision. Also, consider how much internal bandwidth your team actually has to create the content.

3. Figure out how you will get the content in front of your audience

Will you distribute it on social media? If so, where does your audience spend time? Will you integrate it into your email channels or include it on your website?

4. Identify the tools that support your goals

Act-On’s marketing automation for manufacturers can help you distribute content in the right places, measure impact, and capture insights that show where you should spend more time. It also speeds up processes, which is especially helpful if you are tight on resources.

5. Set your KPIs

Before you launch your program, define the metrics that matter most for your team. Are you focused on generating leads, improving engagement, or driving more demo requests? Choose KPIs that align with your business goals, then establish a measurement cadence so you can track what is working and what is not, and prioritize the content that creates the most impact.

And remember, one of the most important things about content marketing for manufacturing is that it takes time. Some research suggests 4 to 5 months to show measurable results, while others put the timeline at 6 to 12 months. Basically, it is a long game.

But with a solid strategy, you can build trust over time, create results that help you hit your marketing goals, and get excited about the impact your work has on the business.

Get More from Content Marketing with Act-On

We’re personally huge fans of using marketing automation with content marketing for manufacturers because it can support many of the strategies above. Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down exactly how it can help you connect with your customers, deliver value, and build deeper relationships that earn more business.

Summary

Content marketing in manufacturing differs from traditional B2C marketing because buying cycles are longer, decisions involve multiple stakeholders, and trust must be built over time. Successful manufacturers use educational and solution-focused content to guide prospects through awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Research from Content Marketing Institute shows that video, case studies, and whitepapers consistently produce strong results by simplifying complex products and providing proof of value. By aligning content with buyer needs, distributing it strategically, leveraging automation tools like Act-On, and tracking meaningful KPIs, manufacturers can create a sustainable content strategy that drives engagement, nurtures leads, and supports long-term business growth.

4 Successful Manufacturing Marketing Campaigns & Examples

Nicki Howell — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:53:47 +0000

TL;DR: Manufacturing marketing campaigns succeed when they balance technical expertise with clear, human communication. The most effective campaigns build trust over long sales cycles by aligning content with buyer priorities, developing a distinct brand voice, answering real prospect questions through accessible formats like video, and using industry language strategically. The best examples show that strong manufacturing marketing focuses less on jargon and more on relevance, clarity, and relationship-building.

Introduction

Jargon. It’s pretty easy to get lost in it, right? And the manufacturing world is full of it, with plenty of examples that show exactly what happens when jargon wedges itself between you and your prospects.

And we’re not talking about the kind that helps you connect with your prospects and makes them feel like you’re a fly on the wall (how did they know that about me?). We’re talking about the phrasing that gets off track, not because it’s bad marketing but because it misses the mark between what your audience needs to hear and what you’re delivering.

As you work to create your next manufacturing marketing campaigns, we’ve pulled together a handful of examples that show how to win points with your audience, build trust, and be the first company they think of when they’re ready to move from a long sales cycle to active shopping.

What Makes Manufacturing Marketing Campaigns Different?

Before we dive into our favorite manufacturing marketing examples to inspire your campaigns in 2026, let’s take a quick step back to understand why manufacturing marketing is so darn tricky.

Unlike our friends in consumer-focused marketing, manufacturers usually target other businesses. According to the latest manufacturer marketing trends, that means longer sales cycles and a pretty high bar for building trust. After all, your prospects are often spending thousands of dollars rather than hundreds.

Here are a few considerations as you design your manufacturing marketing campaigns:

The communication is super technical. You’re usually sharing technical information, and that means you have to walk a fine line between showing you know what you’re talking about and getting so technical that the content becomes unrelatable.
You’re building trust over a long period of time. That’s why many marketers rely on marketing automation for manufacturing and lean into content marketing to nurture their prospects with email marketing, whitepapers, thought leadership blogs, and explainer videos (stay tuned for some good examples).
You’re building relationships in person and through digital channels. Manufacturing marketers often balance more traditional channels, such as trade shows, with digital channels like social media and email marketing.

So while it’s true that you have plenty of options for spreading the word about what your company offers, it is always helpful to have some inspiration. That’s why we’ve curated a few of our favorite manufacturing marketing campaigns and examples with tips to get you started.

Example #1: Sell Your Whitepaper, Rather than Offering it

Whitepapers are still a powerful tool for building trust with prospective buyers. In fact, research shows that 76% of B2B decision-makers in 2025 still rely on whitepapers when making decisions.

The first step is writing an amazing whitepaper, and the second is selling it to your prospects. And that starts with the landing page.

We love Avery Dennison’s approach to its landing page. They anchor the whitepaper to trends in their market, making it as much about sustainability and purpose as the core issue at hand, which is packaging.

We suggest tapping into your audience research to make your landing page as impactful as possible. What do your buyers care about? Why are they making a purchase? We’re willing to guess Avery Dennison knows buyers care about sustainability, which is why they took that angle. And if you do something similar on your landing page, you’ll have a much easier time guiding prospects to the next important step in their journey, which is taking the leap to download.

Example #2: Create a Voice That Is You

Your audience doesn’t necessarily need more information. Getting their questions answered is easier than ever with a few quick keystrokes and an AI overview. So they aren’t necessarily looking for more knowledge; what they want is perspective.

For manufacturing marketing example, we love Kris-Tech’s blog. Their down-to-earth voice is a breath of fresh air compared to some of the stuffy voices that crowd the manufacturing space.

Sure, any brand could write “9 Supply Chain Trends to Keep an Eye on in 2026,” but what makes their content different is the perspective of internal experts and the brand’s voice. In this piece, for example, they didn’t say, “The events of 2024 were difficult.” Instead, they said, “…you’d probably agree that it feels like one heart-pounding event after another.”

As you deliver highly technical information to your audience, think about how you’d explain it to a real person. If you read it out loud, would they understand? Would their eyes glaze over from boredom? And if you want a few more ideas, check out this post where we share additional tips for developing a brand voice.

Example #3: Turn Prospect Questions into Bite-Sized Content

What types of questions are your prospects asking on sales calls? What are their most common objections? And why are you winning deals? Use the answers to these questions as fodder for new content, like explainer videos.

Hitachi is our next manufacturing marketing example. They use video to make very technical topics bite-sized and approachable, and most of their explainer videos run just a couple of minutes.

You can also embed these videos in related content to make it more engaging, including your blog posts, email sequences, and social media posts.

Example #4: Connect with your Blog Content

At the start of this post, we talked about jargon. And while you don’t want your content to be dripping with it, we do acknowledge that at times, it has its place. For example, during sales calls, you might notice that prospects describe their problems using specific phrasing that includes a bit of jargon. It’s probably safe to use some of that language in your manufacturing marketing campaigns and content.

For example, Horizon Distributors creates very technical content. In this blog post, they’re likely explaining something their prospects are confused about and using a small bit of jargon, but only in the context of speaking their audience’s language.

So if you use jargon, make sure it helps you relate to your audience rather than slipping into “company speak” that creates a divide between you and your prospects.

Learn (or Steal!) from the Best

We subscribe to the belief that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The manufacturing companies killing it with their marketing campaigns are the ones worth emulating. They’ve figured out how to launch and maintain robust content marketing programs in a challenging industry. In the world of manufacturing, reaching the right audience requires you to showcase your expertise in a way that’s accessible, trustworthy, and consistent.

Using Automation to Improve Your Campaigns

We’re huge fans of marketing automation because it can support many of the strategies above. Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down exactly how it can help you connect with your customers, deliver value, and build deeper relationships that earn more business.

Summary

Manufacturing marketing campaigns require a unique approach due to long sales cycles, complex products, and highly informed buyers. The most successful campaigns focus on building trust and delivering value over time through content that speaks directly to audience needs.

From positioning whitepapers around industry trends to developing an authentic brand voice, creating bite-sized educational content, and using technical language thoughtfully, these examples demonstrate how manufacturers can connect with prospects more effectively. By combining strong messaging with consistent content and powerful marketing automation software, manufacturers can create campaigns that nurture relationships and move buyers confidently toward purchase decisions.

Manufacturing Marketing Trends to Watch in 2026

Act-On — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:04:29 +0000

TL;DR: Even with tight budgets and long sales cycles, manufacturing marketers still have plenty of exciting opportunities in 2026 when they focus on the right trends. These include shifting from lead volume to revenue contribution, using marketing automation as an operational backbone, supporting buyer-led journeys, prioritizing first-party data, applying AI for insight, evolving ABM to support buying groups, and investing in credibility-building technical content that builds trust.

Introduction

For 2026, many marketers are keeping a close watch on manufacturing marketing trends while dealing with longer sales cycles, increased leadership demands, and shrinking budgets.

Recent manufacturing marketing statistics show that B2B manufacturing CMOs reported a drop in marketing budgets from 8.5% of total revenue in 2023 to 6.7% in 2024, and more recent research suggests the figure may be closer to 1%–3% of total revenue.

So if you feel squeezed to deliver more trackable results with fewer resources, you’re not alone. Many manufacturing marketers are facing the exact same challenge.

However, that doesn’t mean the year isn’t full of exciting new opportunities, many of which are tied to manufacturing marketing trends. And when you can connect your marketing strategies to these trends, you can capture momentum, and meeting leadership goals becomes much easier.

Seven Manufacturing Marketing Trends for 2026

As you plan your strategies for the months ahead, understanding emerging trends can give you a tailwind that helps push your team closer to success. Here are seven marketing trends for manufacturers to watch, and how to use them to give your team an edge this year.

1. Marketing Strategy Shifts From Lead Volume to Revenue Contribution

As budgets tighten, the microscope is also zooming closer on what you’re spending money on and why. As a result, the focus is shifting away from lead volume and toward revenue contribution.

For example, instead of optimizing for how many forms are completed, more teams are focused on engagement from the right accounts, influencing buying groups over long sales cycles, and showing clear impact on revenue and outcomes.

As you consider these marketing trends for manufacturers, tools such as marketing automation are helpful because they connect engagement data across all channels and tie it back to specific accounts, roles, and opportunities. So instead of treating every completed form the same way, teams can understand exactly which signals indicate buying intent and where multiple stakeholders are engaging. These insights along with a slew of manufacturing marketing metrics help marketers focus spending on programs that influence active deals and show their contribution to pipeline and revenue.

2. Marketing Automation Becomes a Core Operational Layer

Research shows that manufacturing CMOs are “optimizing the resources already at their disposal.” And while a resource like marketing automation for manufacturing can support single campaigns, teams focused on optimization are also shifting away from using it only for one-off efforts and toward using it as a core operational layer. But what does that actually look like?

It basically means connecting the data, engagement, and measurement across all channels so that each new interaction builds on the last.

For example, instead of launching a one-off email or gated asset and measuring it in isolation, teams can track how engineers, procurement stakeholders, and executives from the same account engage across emails, web pages, and webinars, and then allow sales to follow up accordingly. These signals roll up at the account level to trigger more relevant messaging and nurture paths, while giving marketing and sales a shared view of exactly what’s happening. All this happens through the core operational layer, which connects all of the different ways prospects interact across channels.

3. Buyer-Led Journeys Replace Linear Funnels

Wouldn’t it be nice if manufacturing buyers moved neatly from becoming “problem aware” to making a decision? However, the reality is that prospects now interact very differently, shifting toward more buyer-led journeys.

What’s more, manufacturing marketing statistics show that 57% of industrial buyers make a purchase decision before ever speaking directly with a manufacturing company. And if buyers aren’t moving along a straightforward path, we need to meet them exactly where they are, with what they need.

This is likely why more manufacturing marketers say they’re prioritizing customer journey experience optimization over channel-specific optimizations. Further research shows that those who maintain a “holistic channel strategy” are 43% more likely to exceed revenue goals than those with a siloed approach.

For example, an engineer may first engage with a technical white paper, while a procurement stakeholder may initially engage through pricing or compliance content on your website. A buyer-led approach uses engagement signals across channels and audiences to adapt messaging, surface relevant follow-up content, and nurture the right buyers with the right interactions over time. They also use digital marketing strategies for manufacturers to strengthen content and interactions.

4. First-Party Data Strategy Separates Leaders From Laggards

Third-party data is useful, but we’re seeing a manufacturing marketing trend toward using first-party data more strategically to lock in the results your leadership team is pushing you to achieve.

And the good news is that marketers already have access to a decent amount of first-party data. This includes your website data, content interactions, event data, and CRM systems. You can tap into this data to better understand prospects, segment audiences, and create more relevant messaging and interactions.

For example, you can use first-party engagement data to identify accounts that repeatedly consume content, attend webinars, and visit pricing pages, then follow up with personalized nurture sequences or direct sales connections at the right moment. These consistent, well-timed interactions create more opportunities and drive pipeline movement over time.

5. AI Shapes Marketing Direction — Not Just Execution

AI continues to be important for manufacturing marketers, but for far more than just generative AI use cases. We’re seeing a manufacturing marketing trend among marketers using AI to identify patterns, which helps them better understand how to use resources and shape strategy.

For example, teams might use AI-driven insights in marketing automation tools to surface early buying signals across multiple channels or identify exactly where engagement typically drops off in long sales cycles. With this data, teams can then adjust the content, timing, or channel mix to refocus resources on the programs most likely to impact pipeline and revenue.

6. ABM Evolves to Support Multi-Stakeholder Manufacturing Deals

Account-based marketing (ABM) is on the rise, and for good reason. Research shows that 76% of marketers report higher ROI with ABM than with any other marketing channel. This is especially important for manufacturing marketers working through long sales cycles, as it helps teams focus on high-value accounts and personalize messaging across many stakeholders.

For example, teams can group engagement by role, such as engineers, procurement stakeholders, and executives, and then personalize content and outreach based on each role’s challenges and priorities. Then, as different stakeholders engage with content, whether through email, web pages, or social, those signals help determine what to deliver next for more targeted follow-up.

7. Technical Content and Credibility Outperform Volume Publishing

Research shows that marketers are struggling to create content that converts. One survey revealed that 66% of manufacturing marketers report that creating content that prompts a desired action is hard. What’s more, even though teams are creating a wide range of content, from data sheets to interactive content and e-books, only a few key categories are producing the strongest results.

That same research found that when asked which types of content perform best, manufacturing marketers pointed to videos, case studies, customer stories, and white papers. As a result, it will be even more important to focus on high-quality technical content rather than sheer volume moving forward.

What These Trends Mean for Manufacturing Marketing Teams

As your team moves into 2026 and faces tighter budgets and sales cycles that continue to stretch out, success will depend less on activity and more on tying your efforts to revenue. And when you use a marketing automation platform to connect the results to what you’re doing, you can replicate what’s working, stay ahead of long sales cycles, and create the momentum you need to drive success in the new year.

Do you want to take advantage of this year’s manufacturing marketing trends and generate higher-quality leads? Check out our e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Manufacturing Marketing, which lays out a clear road map for using automation to connect with buyers throughout long sales cycles and reach them even during the darker phases of the buying journey.

Planning Successful Deliverability for 2025 Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns

Brandon Blair — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:02:32 +0000

The holiday season remains the most critical time of year for email marketers. It’s when volume and frequency surge to meet ambitious year-end goals. However, email deliverability news in November 2025 are changing the game. In 2025, deliverability is not just about best practice, it’s about mandatory compliance.

With Google and Yahoo implementing strict new sender requirements, any email program that is not fully compliant will face delivery disruptions. This updated guide integrates time-tested holiday strategies with the new technical mandates necessary to survive the season and ensure your emails land in the inbox, not the junk folder.

The New Mandate—Technical Compliance is Non-Negotiable

If you send 5,000 or more emails per day to Gmail or Yahoo addresses (a threshold easily crossed during the holidays), you are considered a “bulk sender” and must comply with new, enforced standards.

The November 2025 Deadline and the Crackdown

Google has announced a major ramp-up in enforcement on non-compliant traffic beginning in November 2025. Messages that fail to meet the requirements will experience temporary and permanent rejections. This means that if you are not prepared before the holiday rush begins, your entire campaign could be blocked.

Mandatory Authentication: The Three Pillars

To be compliant and earn the trust of Mailbox Providers (MBPs), your sending domain must be fully authenticated using all three security protocols:

SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Verifies that the sending server is authorized to send email on behalf of your domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Provides a digital signature to ensure the message was not tampered with in transit.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): This is now mandatory for bulk senders. It tells MBPs what to do if SPF or DKIM fails (e.g., quarantine or reject the message), providing accountability and protection against spoofing.

The Critical Spam Complaint Threshold

Under the new rules, your user-reported spam rate is the single most important metric. Compliance means consistently seeing under 0.1% spam complaint rates.

Best Practice Goal: Strive to keep your spam complaint rate below 0.1% (1 complaint per 1,000 emails).
Hard Limit: Your rate must never exceed 0.3%. If you hit this ceiling, you will face severe delivery penalties, including message rejection and having your domain deemed ineligible for delivery mitigation support.

Holiday Strategy for the Compliant Sender

Once the technical foundation is set, you can focus on optimizing your strategy to maintain a low complaint rate and maximize engagement during the high-volume season.

A. Benchmark and Ramp Up Responsibly

ISPs are on high alert during the holidays. Sudden, massive volume spikes are a red flag, even for a clean sender.

Establish a Baseline: Review your delivery, open, and click rates during the non-holiday season to set accurate, achievable goals.
Ramp Up Slowly: If you plan to significantly increase your daily volume, ramp up your emails gradually. As a general rule of thumb, do not increase your email volume by more than 50% of your previous day’s or week’s highest point. This warm-up period is essential to condition ISPs for your higher send rate and maintain your positive sender reputation.

B. Relevancy is the Ultimate Spam Filter

Engagement is king, and irrelevant emails are the fastest way to drive spam complaints. In a compliant world, every single complaint pushes you closer to that hard 0.3% rejection threshold.

Segmentation is Key: Segment your audience based on purchase history, recent engagement, and expressed interests. Target small groups with relevant offers rather than mass-blasting your entire list.
Frequency Control (Opt-Down): A subscriber who signed up for a weekly newsletter may be overwhelmed by daily holiday emails. To prevent them from hitting the “This is Spam” button, implement a clear, easily accessible preference center that allows users to adjust their communication preferences (topics, frequency) or “opt-down” instead of completely opting out.

C. Data Hygiene is Deliverability Insurance

A clean list protects your sender reputation by avoiding spam traps and un-mailable addresses, which are especially risky when increasing volume.

Bounce Rules: Ensure your bounce rules are rigorously enforced.
Verification: Before mailing inactive or high-risk segments for the first holiday send, consider using a third-party list verification service to scrub out any potential threats like spam traps or inactive emails.

Holiday Monitoring with Built-in Tools

Monitoring your performance during the holidays is essential. You must check your metrics daily and have instant access to complaint data. You must leverage the direct reporting tools provided by the mailbox providers:

Monitoring Tool	Purpose	Key Metric to Watch
Google Postmaster Tools v2	The primary dashboard for monitoring Gmail deliverability. You must register your sending domain here using a TXT record	Spam Rate: Must be monitored daily to stay below 0.1% and prevent exceeding the 0.3% hard limit.
Yahoo Sender Hub	Provides visibility into your Yahoo Mail performance, reputation, and complaint data. You must register your sending domain here using a TXT record	Spam Complaints/Delivery Errors: Monitor for spikes and immediately remove any users who file a complaint.

Immediate Action is Required: If you see any increase in your spam complaint rate or delivery errors in either of these tools, you should pause, identify where the issue is, and regroup.

By establishing full authentication and rigorously monitoring your complaint rates, you can safely navigate the high-volume holiday season and deliver the gift of joyful, successful email campaigns. Email deliverability news in November 2025 are a game changer. Need a little extra support?

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New Yahoo Deliverability Dashboard and What it Means for Email Marketing

Matthew Volkman — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:33:51 +0000

There’s a lot happening in the world of Yahoo email deliverability news. Yahoo Mail continues to represent a large share of today’s email addresses, and if you are sending marketing emails to Yahoo users, their new “Insights” dashboard is big news. Yahoo manages email delivered to Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, so it has a very large impact on anyone emailing consumer addresses.

Now part of the Yahoo Sender Hub, Insights offers visibility into how Yahoo users receive and react to your emails. It’s a major step forward in deliverability transparency, helping you move from guessing about inbox placement to managing it with real data.

New Yahoo Email Deliverability Dashboard Surfaces Key Metrics

For the first time, Yahoo is providing verified insights into:

First-time visibility to a “true complaint rate,” the percentage of inboxed messages that received spam complaints (Previously, only sent and accepted complaints were visible).
More exact Spam Complaint Rate and sum of Delivered messages.
Daily delivered mail volume to Yahoo domains.
Displayed aggregated delivery statistics for the DKIM.

Yahoo also gave clear complaint thresholds to guide marketers:

Aim for below 0.1% to maintain a strong reputation.
Rates above 0.3% risk filtering or throttling.

The main takeaway is that you can see early signs of deliverability issues, such as throttling or rejections, before they impact engagement or conversions.

If you send through multiple subdomains under one DKIM signature, Insights aggregates that traffic, showing how each stream contributes to your overall sender reputation. You can then identify what content or campaigns drive complaints and adjust your frequency, segmentation, and list hygiene accordingly.

Getting Started in Yahoo Sender Hub

The best way to learn about these new metrics and features is to log in to Yahoo Sender Hub and explore them for yourself. Our team can help assist

Log in to your Yahoo Sender Hub
Go to Dashboard in the main navigation.
Select a verified DKIM domain from the drop-down (or add and verify one by adding a unique TXT record).
Click Activate to enable Insights.

Once verified and active, data will begin populating within 24–48 hours after you’ve reached the minimum sending threshold for that DKIM domain. Finally, make sure your deliverability and marketing ops teams have access for ongoing monitoring.

Yahoo’s Insights gives marketers what’s long been missing, direct deliverability data from the source. Use it to monitor complaint rates, track sending volumes, and refine your campaigns to achieve better inbox placement. Marketers who adopt Insights early will gain a measurable edge in reaching (and staying) in the Yahoo inbox.

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Marketing Strategies for Financial Services That Hit Goals

Act-On — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 23:50:26 +0000

TL;DR: Financial institutions can reach ambitious goals—even with flat budgets—by focusing on high-impact marketing strategies for financial services. These include automated onboarding programs that build early trust, behavioral tracking to personalize outreach, event-based nurture campaigns that keep customers engaged, and automated cross-sell programs that expand customer lifetime value. Together, these strategies help teams deepen relationships, boost applications, and drive growth with fewer resources.

Introduction

Do you have a long list of marketing goals to hit this year? If you’re like many financial marketers, your goals aren’t small, and the pressure to meet them is high. However, oftentimes, your budget and resources don’t exactly match the size of those requests. Studies show that 39% of financial institutions expect their marketing budgets to stay flat in 2026, and another 7% anticipate decreases. And that means your marketing strategies have to give you the largest impact possible, with a workload your team can actually manage.

The good news is that even with lofty goals, your team can still achieve them when you have solid marketing strategies for financial services behind you. Here are some of our favorites to help you turn whatever your executive team has dreamed up this year into a reality.

Engage Customers with Automated Onboarding Programs

When a customer joins your financial institution, you’ve reached a pivotal moment. From here, they’ll decide exactly how much of their money they plan to bring to you. Many already have accounts across several institutions, which creates fragmented and shallow relationships. Studies show that Gen Z and younger millennials are the most guilty of this, spreading finances across multiple institutions, with many using more than six financial tools or services, and over half of them residing outside of their primary bank.

A great starting point is email marketing for financial services to build deeper relationships is an automated welcome series.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union created one for new members by partnering with internal teams to better understand the exact challenges newcomers faced.

The result was a new onboarding program that welcomed members and introduced them to helpful services like the mobile app and direct deposit setup. The automated email achieved a 77% open rate and built trust that paved the way for future automated cross-selling programs.

Track Your Customers’ Behavior

We’ve all experienced interactions that feel anything but personal. For example, when you already have a savings account at a bank, and they send you a marketing message promoting that exact same account. Doesn’t exactly feel personal, does it? Marketing for financial institutions needs to take this into account.

These misfires take an even harder hit on trust than in the past, with expectations around personalization growing. A recent survey found that 74% of customers want more personalized experiences from their banks, showing a clear opportunity for improvement.

When planning your digital marketing strategy for financial services, every click, form completion, and website visit tells a story about a customer. This behavioral data gives you information about what matters most to those you serve. Marketing automation for financial services is a tool that can help you understand this information.

For example, a financial institution might track visitors who view mortgage pages multiple times but don’t take action. Maybe they’re still comparing competitors or aren’t quite ready to move forward. Recognizing those behavioral triggers allows you to automatically send follow-up emails with more details, product comparisons, and helpful information that supports the customer’s decision-making.

That way, you don’t end up sending a generic savings account offer to someone who’s had that same account for a decade. And by staying top of mind, you can guide them toward choosing you when the time is right.

Trigger Engagement from Events

When a new customer joins your financial institution, they bring goals, dreams, and financial plans. Your job is to uncover them so you don’t miss opportunities to help. One way many marketers do this is by hosting educational events, such as webinars.

When hosting these events, you can put interested leads into nurture sequences that continue providing value, based on the topic of the event. Then, when your customer is ready for the next step, they’ll turn to you.

For example, imagine hosting a webinar about first-time homebuying programs that includes resources and a clear path to achieving that goal. After the event, you could add attendees (with their permission) to a nurture series tailored to their journey. Throughout the series, you might share guides, resources, and stories that inspire them along the way, building trust and positioning your institution as the clear choice when they’re ready to act.

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Go Deeper to Expand Customer Lifetime Value

Wouldn’t it be nice if customers brought you 100% of their business? Of course it would, because we all know it’s much easier to retain customers than to attract new ones. One of the best ways to do that is with a “land and expand” strategy, but with an automated twist.

For example, Georgia United Credit Union created a “next-best product” program designed to cross-sell existing members with complementary products to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Using member profiles, they segmented customers based on details like current products and credit scores. Then they sent a monthly email that automatically delivered personalized offers based on each profile.

With this program, they sold thousands of new products and drove a 96% increase in application volume, which was much easier to achieve than landing brand-new customers.

Moving Forward with Successful Marketing Strategies for Financial Services

It’s likely that your customers need a solution you already offer. Maybe they don’t know (yet) that you provide it, or perhaps they aren’t quite ready to move forward. Regardless, when you build financial services advertising campaigns that focus on trust and awareness, you can organically reach some of your toughest goals.

So even if you’re working with stubborn budgets that don’t match what you’re expected to execute, you can still make significant progress toward bringing your marketing goals to life.

Do you feel like you could use a little more guidance getting started?

Our detailed Marketing Automation Strategy Guide breaks down how marketing automation can support successful marketing strategies for financial services. It will help you connect with your customers, deliver real value, and build deeper relationships that earn more of their business.

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Stay compliant in 2026. Learn key financial services advertising regulations, including FINRA, SEC, and data privacy rules—plus tips to reduce risk at scale.

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Act-On

Financial Services Advertising Regulations Marketers Need to Know

Intoduction

Why Advertising Regulations Matter More for Financial Services

Consumer trust is key

Regulatory security continues to tighten

Risk of noncompliance comes at a great cost

Key Financial Services Advertising Regulations to Know in 2026

1. FINRA Advertising and Communications Rules

2. SEC Marketing and Disclosure Requirements

3. State-Level and Global Oversight Considerations

Financial Services Data Privacy Regulations and Marketing

Data collection and consent

Storage use and considerations

Impact on targeting and personalization

How Advertising Regulations Affect Different Marketing Channels

Email marketing and compliance

Digital advertising and content marketing

Campaign approvals and recordkeeping

How Marketing Automation Helps Financial Services Stay Compliant

Centralized control

Permission management

Audit trails and consistency

Preparing Your Marketing Team for 2026 and Beyond

5 Manufacturing Marketing Metrics That Matter in 2026

Introduction

Five Manufacturing Marketing Metrics That Matter Most in 2026

1. Pipeline Contribution by Marketing Source

2. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate

3. Account Engagement Across the Buying Group

4. Revenue Attribution Over Long Sales Cycles

5. Marketing-Sourced Revenue

How Automation Tools Make Metrics Actionable

Summary

How AI Is Changing Manufacturing Marketing

Introduction

Why AI Matters More Than Ever in Marketing for Manufacturing

Four Ways AI is Transforming Manufacturing Marketing Today

1. Predictive Analytics

2. Personalization at Scale for Complex Buying Groups

3. AI-Driven Optimization Across Channels

4. Improve Marketing ROI Through Better Decision-Making

Common Marketing Challenges AI Helps Solve

AI Tools for Manufacturing Marketing

How Act-On Helps Marketers Put AI to Work

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Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies

Introduction

More Research Is Happening in the “Dark”

Lead Generation Strategies for Manufacturing Companies

1. Define Your Target Buyer Profiles

2. Map the Buyer Journey

3. Create Content for Each Stage

4. Offer Clear Next Steps

5. Capture Interest with Progressive Forms

6. Create Nurture Sequences

7. Track Engagement Behavior

Automate Your Manufacturer Lead Generation

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Content Marketing for Manufacturers: Strategy, Formats & KPIs

Introduction

How is Content Marketing for Manufacturing Different?

Content Formats That Drive Best Results

1. Video content

2. Case studies and real-world success stories

3. Whitepapers and guides

Building a Content Strategy for Manufacturing

1. List your buyer types and what they need

2. Map out your buyer’s journey and content formats

3. Figure out how you will get the content in front of your audience

4. Identify the tools that support your goals

5. Set your KPIs

Get More from Content Marketing with Act-On

Summary

4 Successful Manufacturing Marketing Campaigns & Examples

Introduction

What Makes Manufacturing Marketing Campaigns Different?

Example #1: Sell Your Whitepaper, Rather than Offering it

Example #2: Create a Voice That Is You

Example #3: Turn Prospect Questions into Bite-Sized Content