Today, it is no longer optional for manufacturing companies to produce compelling marketing content. As many as 82% of manufacturing marketers attribute an increase in business over last year to more effective content creation.
But how do you make your time and marketing budget go further in the manufacturing space?
This post reveals 5 of our favorite tactics for creating and distributing more effective manufacturing marketing content.
Strategize and Schedule
Did you know that only one-third of manufacturing marketers have a documented content marketing strategy?
It’s imperative that a manufacturing business creates a documented marketing strategy. That means answering some of the following questions:
- What is the goal of your marketing efforts?
- How will you reach that goal?
- Who is your target audience?
- What types of content do you need to create?
- What resources does that require?
- How often will you post each type of content?
- How will you measure if what you’re doing is working?
Answer those 6 questions and you’ll have a rough beginning of a strategy. You can use any number of template guides online.
Segment Your Audience
You can’t create content without an accurate sense of who is buying your offering and where they are in the buying stage.
You must create different content for different buyer personas, as well as different content for the same buyer persona in different stages of the buying process.
Imagine that your customer or potential buyer is like a diner in a restaurant. Different diners have different food preferences, and they have different needs as they progress through each course of their meal.
Your audience has a similar set of preferences and needs. You must research your current customers and determine a set of characteristics that define them from those that aren’t interested in your offering.
Don’t be afraid to ask your customers what kinds of content would be useful to them.
Apply that set of knowledge to your current lead base and your lead generation efforts. You’ll learn how to move leads down the pipeline all the way towards the sale.
Use Manufacturing-Specific Content Types
A lot of these lists will tell you that some of the following types of content are the best for effective lead generation, nurture, and conversion. These lists include:
- Case studies
- Blog posts
- Videos
- White papers
- Infographics
These are effective types of content to add to your ideal content blend. But they aren’t manufacturing-specific and they certainly won’t catch potential buyers’ eyes.
Try these types of content instead:
- AR and VR training and demos
- 3D CAD models
- 2D drawings
- Live Q&As
Think about the tools and processes your customers use on a daily basis. Then see if you can use more useful and innovative technologies to help your customers more effectively do something at their job.
Track Your Content Marketing Maturity
Like a human growing from child to teenager to adult, your content marketing strategy has levels of maturation.
A more mature content marketing program will be more successful and be scalable across the organization. A younger program is still answering the questions above. There are many steps in the middle.
Here is an overview of the stages of content marketing maturity:
- First steps – creating content but without a process in place
- Young – experiencing growing pains, as there are still issues with strategy and measurement
- Adolescent – developed a business strategy and is now measuring and scaling
- Mature – marketing program is successful but lacking in integration with the rest of the organization
- Sophisticated – business value is proven with accurate measurements and efforts integrating across the organization
To grow your organization’s marketing maturity, you must continue to improve your measurement, strategy, and scaling.
Make Ideas Go Further
When you have a marketing idea, sit down and break it into valuable little pieces. A good idea can be broken down into so many different content forms.
Start with smaller forms of content, like individual social media posts with data visualizations. Then translate that same idea into a short-form blog post. As you distribute this content, determine if these smaller pieces of content are well-received by your audience.
If so, make the ideas even larger. Create long-form blog posts, maybe even VR or AR tutorials. Create templates, case studies, and white papers.
If you already have big content, you can reverse engineer it to be smaller content. Break that massive white paper into tiny social media posts and shorter blog posts. Use one idea to make 5 or more pieces of content.
Every manufacturer is using content marketing today, which means that it’s more challenging than ever to stand out. Try applying these tactics to your own content marketing practices and see if your content has a bigger impact as a result.