The Right & The Wrong Ways To Launch Your Content Strategy

The content strategy for your manufacturing firm is finally complete and you’re ready for implementation.

Congratulations!

You’re in good company. Content Marketing Institute, reported a 72% increase in the percentage of manufacturing marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy (31% in 2016 vs. 18% in 2015).

You’ve made the investment and the box is checked — but a content strategy without action is just an expensive piece of paper. To ensure a return on investment on your valuable time and money, you now need to make several decisions on how that content strategy is activated.

Here are the two most frequent (but wrong)decisions we see:

• Turning over responsibility (exclusively) for creating content to a marketing agency.
• Turning staff loose to write and post about whatever they want (thinking they’ll leverage the content strategy).

Sure, in both scenarios content gets created. The problem is neither of these approaches position you to reach what is possible.

In fact, how effective your content strategy will be in driving your business forward will depend totally on who is creating the content and how that process actually occurs over time.

Don’t Completely Outsource Content Creation

The problem with farming out content creation completely is that financially, its rarely sustainable. And, content is a long-term play. While the content might be accurate enough, it won’t be anchored by the experiences and beliefs of those (engineering, sales, service, management, etc.) out in the trenches talking to customers.

The absence of those little nuances that signal authenticity often results in the failure of the piece to make any impression on its reader.

Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have an agency whose writers manage to make a decent impact. Your agency is now aligned with your vision, but is there alignment within your company?

Avoid a Misaligned Internal Content Creation Process

Internal contributors who are unguided and unchallenged may be creating a lot of content, the question is how aligned is the content (if at all) with that content strategy?

Without any unifying point of view, process/rules, or any other kind of support to develop as experts, we’d guess not very.

If there’s no overarching “why” for the reader to attach to, it’s rhetoric rather than thought leadership.

How to Correctly Implement Your Content Strategy

The bottom line is that the implementation of your content strategy must be activated and energized by leadership.

There must be a clear process and rules of engagement.

1. Gather: Create a team of content creators from across the company and provide them with a program that helps them develop as experts.
2. Train: Meet weekly or semi-weekly to cultivate more authentic ideas and points of view.
3. Engage Experts: Hire a professional editor to give constructive feedback in terms of content clarity, without hijacking the original kernel of the idea. Invite your agency to hold training sessions on how to run a content creation meeting.
4. Meet: Hold content creation meetings on a regular basis. Assign everyone homework, and give them a chance to present to the group and get feedback on their idea before they develop their piece.
5. Commit: Do what is necessary to execute on the creation process month after month. It’s the discipline to participate consistently that creates the transformation in your company. Make content creation part of their day to day.

In the end, what’s this really all about?

It’s about making a cultural change in your organization that creates stakeholders in different departments (engineering, sales, service, management, etc.). Not only will you get better content, but everyone will get better at their jobs because they share their own experiences, resulting in better thought leadership.

When this happens, your organization will grow together. And it all starts with how you implement your content strategy.

Are you a manufacturer without a content strategy, or maybe you’re not sure how to implement it? Schedule a quick consultation to see if Crafted is a good fit for your company.

We work with manufacturers to develop and implement content strategies that make an impact on company sales and culture!