Content Marketing for Manufacturers – A Simple Guide

January 5, 2020

|In Content Marketing, Strategy & Consulting

You’ve probably heard about creating content and how it can help you to get inbound leads. But content marketing for manufacturers can be tricky.

The majority of the content guides on the web are for other industries. Most are for B2C, some are for service-based businesses, and some are for more ‘exciting’ industries.

So we created this simple guide to get your content marketing strategy on the right track.

Quality Content Matters

When it comes to content marketing for manufacturers, the quality of the content matters more than the quantity. Many marketers have the misconception that they can just put out lots of content on social media and blogs, hoping they will generate some interest.

But that’s not the case. Then they wonder why the hundreds and thousands of articles are not generating any leads for them.

That’s because they neglected the quality of the content. Your prospects are going to read the content. They will only engage and enquire to learn more about your offer if they resonate with your message and find it useful. In fact, the opposite is true.

Having poor quality content can even work against you. People will think that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thus, damaging your reputation.

The first step to crafting quality content is to know your buyer persona.

For manufacturing companies, your buyers can be engineers and technicians who are learning about the details of your product. There is no way you can put out low-quality content with the wrong facts. You will lose your credibility quickly. So it’s always important to check the facts on the content that you are posting

Another person who may be reading the article is the decision-maker. He is the one making the final purchasing decision. This person may not be technical. But the content that you make also has to appeal to him.

That’s why manufacturing companies claim-making content for multi-role as their number one challenge. You must know the buyer persona – what problems they have and what solutions they’re looking for.

It will help you to make useful content that is relevant to them. And position your product as the ideal solution for them.

Being Strategic With the Keywords

Where do you go when you’re looking for information related to your business or personal needs? For instance, you may be typing into Google for “content marketing for manufacturers” and find this article.

For most people, Google is the first place they will go to. That’s because Google provides relevant search results for their users. But how exactly does Google do that?

It uses an algorithm to find out what your article or blog is about. Not only do you need to write the article for your readers, but it must also be optimized for the Google bot to figure out what the article is about.

This is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

One of the best ways to start SEO by yourself is to include the keyword you want to rank for in the headline of the article. It tells Google what the article is about so that keyword is important.

Now, knowing where to put the keywords is one thing. Knowing what keywords to go after is another thing.

That’s where keyword research for your content marketing comes in. Find out exactly what your buyers are searching for. And see if there is a good volume of people searching and who else is competing for that same keyword.

Then build your content marketing around strategic keywords. These include blog posts, articles, and case studies that make up your content marketing strategy. All of these are good potential to rank on Google and generate traffic to your business.

For manufacturers, it’s a good idea to make product videos and post them on YouTube. Keep in mind YouTube is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine, after Google.

Create Evergreen Content

Once you understand what your buyers are looking for, you can create content for these topics. Typically your prospects are searching for the same topics as part of their buying journey. This is an opportunity for you to make evergreen content.

These pieces of content will be relevant for a long time. Some examples include:

“How to” topics
Product videos
Case studies
Whitepaper

You can reuse these contents again and again.

Ride on Trending Topics

This is the opposite of evergreen. Here you’re writing on topics to ride on a trend.

This works because it’s something at the top of your prospects’ minds. It grabs their attention and attracts them to consume your content.

It can be something related to your industry, such as new technology and innovation, or trade shows that you or your clients are attending.

Or it can also be major news that affects a large group of people. For instance, the global pandemic or the groundbreaking SpaceX launch.

The topics may not exactly match your content marketing strategy. The important thing is to relate it back to your product offering. And how it can help your prospects solve their problems.

Trending topics provide prospects with educational and entertainment value. They are especially good for your social media and blog posts.

Tell Them What To Do Next

No marketing is complete without a call to action. You’ve attracted readers to your content. They have taken the time to read it and gotten value out of it.

Now is the time to tell them what to do next. This may be:

Downloading a whitepaper
Requesting a quotation
Signing up for a product demo
And many others

The important thing is to have only one call to action. Not having any will hurt you because viewers don’t know what to do next and will just leave. Too many are also not good because readers will get confused and not know what to do. What is the point of generating all the content if you’re not getting demand for your products?