Unleash Greatness
Unleash Greatness
In most organizations, a marketing department’s two primary goals are Lead Generation and Brand Positioning/Awareness.
There are a variety of tactics available to help you reach these goals. But, are you leveraging one of the most critical…content marketing?
The manufacturing industry tends to be a laggard when it comes to various areas of their business and this is reflected in their marketing departments as well. This is because of the average age of employees inside these manufacturers but also the audience they do business with.
But, the tides are changing for manufacturers. They’re becoming more digital and connected.
They’re becoming more effective and efficient organizations, as they start to leverage new technologies, platforms, and strategies to help reach their business goals. Content marketing is one of those strategies that an increasing number of manufacturing marketing departments are starting to leverage. And there’s a variety of reasons.
So, where do you stand as a marketer operating inside a changing and growing manufacturer? How are you meeting your goals of lead generation, industry leadership, and brand positioning?
Hopefully one of your answers is Content Marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that leverages the creation of relevant and valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers. Instead of a marketing tactic like a magazine ad that sprays your message into the market place, content marketing works in the opposite direction, bringing people to you by providing them content that helps them learn, identify opportunities, and solve problems.
You may be at various stage of your content marketing journey from the “haven’t started” to the “we’re a content producing machine”…or you may be somewhere in between.
If you haven’t started, then let’s get started.
Content marketing doesn’t have to be hard. It can appear daunting. But this is easy to solve. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, set proper goals, and put one foot in front of the other.
If you’ve have any semblance of a content marketing strategy, take a step back and make sure you’re implementing a process that will make it a success.
Too often we see manufacturers “content marketing” but over time they’ve strayed from their strategy. They’re just producing content without a strategy or process in place. They’re just creating noise.
No matter where you stand on the content marketing spectrum, there are 5 steps that are critical to your success. You can make them as simple or as complicated as you’d like. But, don’t neglect them. Don’t skip any. And be sure to revisit and refine each step on a regular basis.
So, without further ado, here are the 5 steps to a content marketing strategy.
Your content strategy is the baseline foundational element of your content marketing strategy. It’s your road map that set’s goals, identifies personas and more.
It’s the most important piece to your content marketing but so many manufacturers don’t take the time to do this. At Crafted we work with manufacturers doing in depth content strategies, but you can certainly do yours yourself, keeping it high level so you don’t get overwhelmed. In our webinar XYZ we cover the various pieces of your easy to implement content strategy.
Ideation is exactly what it sounds like. Coming up with ideas that fit within the guidelines of your content strategy is critical. There are tons of ways to ideate and there are even more tools you can use support the ideation process. A lot of these are covered in our webinar XYZ.
Spend the time to intentionally ideate, coming up with ideas that are relevant and speak to specific personas and that help you meet your business goals.
Creation is the piece where most manufacturers excel. Manufacturers are chock full of subject matter experts that have a wealth of knowledge that can, in the hands of a prospect, be extremely valuable. Be sure you are leveraging them and your leadership in your content creation efforts.
Most organizations stop after the content creation step. But, if you do all this hard work only to not promote it, you’ve done yourself a huge disservice. Have a plan for promoting each type of content. Have promotional calendar and implement social media automation.
There’s a quote by Peter Drucker that says “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
How are you measuring the success of your content marketing? Measure your success in relation to the goals you set in your content strategy. There are various ways to measure success that we discuss in our webinar XYZ. Most importantly, make sure that this is a consistent action. This is the easiest step to skip, but measuring consistently will allow you to hone your content marketing efforts.
Manufacturers that start content marketing effectively are going to be well positioned within their respective industry to drive more leads and increase thought leadership. With content marketing leaders experiencing 7.8X more traffic than non-leaders (Neil Patel), be sure you are putting a concerted and intentional effort into driving inbound traffic through content marketing!
Want a more in depth look at each of these steps? Yes, you’re right, I didn’t give you all the information in this blog post…I can’t, it’d be way too long. So, we created a webinar. In our webinar, “Content Marketing for Manufacturers — The 5 Components to Success,” we dive extensively into the state of content marketing for manufacturers, giving you tips, tools and processes, for implementing each step of your content marketing strategy.
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