Content marketing tips for manufacturing businesses
Content marketing is all about telling stories, and it’s a great way to draw in a sizeable crowd that will grow to trust your business.
But can content marketing work for any industry? Absolutely! So, manufacturing, even?
Yes!
Here’s 5 brilliant tips for content marketing if you’re a manufacturing business, or looking to find a role within that sector.
1. Become a thought leader
A huge part of content marketing centres around blogging.
However, ‘traditional’ business blogging for manufacturers doesn’t quite fit this strategy, because those kind of blogs used to be devoted to nothing more than company news and case studies.
Now, you need to become a thought leader in your field, which means regularly publishing hints, tips, commentary and insight about your products that offer a genuine benefit for your audience.
Think of actionable advice you can provide for free and make it worthwhile for whoever decides to click through.
2. Make your brand more human
This isn’t as tricky as you might think.
In order for a content marketing campaign to be successful, you need to make your brand as human as possible.
This will give you a leg up against the competition and turn your business from just any old manufacturer into one that has a voice.
The content you create in tip 1 should echo this persona throughout by being playful in its language and not afraid to crack a joke or offer a forthright opinion about something that’s taking place in the industry.
3. Don’t just publish written content
Although content marketing centres principally around blogging, you can do an awful lot more in order to engage your audience.
Try producing some in-house video content (you’ve got a smartphone, right?), and think about introducing a podcast. “How to…” videos are particularly popular with consumers – for example, if your business manufactures washing machine parts, you could create a series of really helpful step-by-step videos that teach people how to fit or replace some of these parts. And don’t forget to publish the post on YouTube, as well as sharing the video via all your other social media channels and your blog.
The more rich content you produce, the more chance you stand of capturing the eyes of people who might otherwise head in the direction of the competition.
4. Don’t forget to use PPC and SEO
You can write the best blogs in manufacturing and craft the most engaging video content possible, but if it doesn’t have an outlet that’s optimised for search traffic and advertising, you won’t get very far.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO) are two separate disciplines but they’ll both help you get your content out there and in front of the right kind of audience.
The trick lies in not overspending, and calling on the services of an experienced hand in both areas. You can’t really go about PPC or SEO alone unless you know exactly what you’re doing; it can quickly turn into a black hole for your marketing budget otherwise.
However, the spend you’ll have to accept as being the norm for SEO and PPC should pay back dividends as your search traffic grows and new enquiries begin to flood in.
Content marketing is unlikely to succeed without PPC and SEO – a crucial fact many businesses sadly tend to overlook.
5. When all else fails, think like your audience
Sometimes, inspiration is hard to come by, and if you’re crafting the ideas for your content marketing efforts in-house, you’ll occasionally hit writer’s block.
Never fear, though – when that happens, just take a moment to sit back and think like your audience. What problems and unanswered questions do they have? Tune your content to answer those questions and provide solutions to those problems – even if it means you’re giving away invaluable advice (see tip 1).
Wrapping up
Content marketing will help your manufacturing business reach a bigger audience than you ever thought possible.
Our tips above only scratch the surface, but they should put you on course for a brilliant content marketing strategy.
