Content Marketing For Manufacturers – The 5 Components To Success

Welcome [00:01:30] everybody to our webinar, Five Steps to Content Marketing Success. We’re super excited to have you here with us today, thanks for taking the time during your lunch to spend with us. Today we’re going to be talking [00:02:00] and reviewing how you as a manufacturer can implement a successful content marketing strategy within your organization. We’ll be sharing some strategies, some tools, some tips, some tricks, to creating a successful content marketing program.

So before we get started, let’s do a brief intro and some housekeeping, and I’ll introduce myself. My name is Jacob Robinson, I’m a marketing automation strategist [00:02:30] at Crafted, we work exclusively with manufacturers, helping them with their lead generation and branding efforts. We work with manufacturers all over the world to do this. But enough about us, what about you? What are you here for today? Maybe you’re curious about learning the basics of content marketing, or maybe you’ve already started and now you’re just a little stuck? Either way, you’re in the right place.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to look at content marketing through a unique lens, the lens of manufacturing. [00:03:00] Let’s just jump right in. So what is content marketing? Pretty basic question, but we need to answer this before we even move forward. What is content marketing? Content marketing does not need to be complicated. There’s a lot of complicated definitions out there, but let’s keep it simple. Content marketing is an effective marketing strategy for creating content that drives targeted leads and increases brand awareness. It’s that simple. I want to point out one quick thing in this definition I’m showing you, that is the words “clearly [00:03:30] defined audience,” I think the important part of what we’ll talk about today, so just keep that in the back of your mind.

So why should you as a manufacturer care about content marketing? What’s all the hype about? Why is it important? Let me share some statistics with you to lay the foundation for our conversation today. 47%, I take that back. Content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more traffic than non-leaders. [00:04:00] Think about that. Why is this important? Well, the more traffic we drive to our site, the more opportunities we have to convert traffic into leads, and the more leads we can get for our sales reps, the more opportunities we have to close new deals and increase company revenue. Super important to drive more shopping to our site, and content marketing lets us do that.

47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. This is one of my favorite stats. Customers are information hungry, and they don’t [00:04:30] just want to talk to sales. They want to do their own due diligence, and we have to provide them that information. This is important because many of the manufacturing customers that we work with are sales-heavy organizations, meaning that they have large sales teams that drive revenue, and it’s absolutely critical to understand the buyer’s journey and the role that content plays in it. If you can do that, we can drive more leads for our sales reps. Think about content marketing and the content that we’re creating [00:05:00] as a mechanism that lets us get around company gatekeepers and directly into your prospect’s office.

Number three. 96% of b-to-b buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. You as a manufacturer are built to be a thought leader. You’re a full subject matter expert, and people want industry thought leaders, so you need to be one, you need to be an expert in your industry, and people will come to you and look for you for information.

[00:05:30] Then finally, this one’s pretty straightforward, and a really cool stat. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing. What I’m saying here is that you shouldn’t scrap your traditional marketing budget or all of your traditional marketing, but it’s important to have a combination of both. Content marketing is very cost effective. So I’ll leave it at that. That kind of lays the baseline. With content marketing, you’re getting more for less. [00:06:00] So what’s the issue? Content marketing costs less than traditional marketing, consumers want it, and there’s a demand for industry thought leaders. So why are manufacturers not harnessing the power of content marketing?

In our experience in working with manufacturers all over the world, it’s three major things. Number one, manufacturers generally are late adopters. Look at the majority of manufacturers’ websites, or their social media. They tend to be laggards in fields, especially [00:06:30] technology fields, which has benefits, but it also has its downsides when it comes to marketing. Manufacturers lack human capital, they don’t want to hire, they don’t want to spend a lot of money on salaries for a marketing team, so what we see, even in very, very large organizations, marketing teams of two to four people. People within those organizations, within those marketing teams, are wearing multiple hats.

Then number three, manufacturers [00:07:00] are not sure necessarily to start. There’s not always a ton of experience on those teams to implement newer marketing strategies, so hopefully today we’re going to help overcome some of these obstacles to starting content marketing inside a manufacturer, and you’re probably feeling some of these pains inside of your current organization.

I’m going to throw this interesting stat out to you really quickly to try to drive everything home. Only 19% of manufacturers consider their content marketing efforts as mature [00:07:30] or sophisticated. That leaves 81% saying that their content marketing maturity level’s adolescent, young, or in its first steps, and what this means for you is that there’s a ton of opportunity out there for you to get ahead of the competition. There’s a large opportunity for you to own a valuable piece of internet real estate as a content marketing thought leader.

So where do we start? Well, what we’re going to do today is we’re going to dive into five simple steps to a successful content marketing program inside of a manufacturer, [00:08:00] this is all based off of our experiences, what we do in real life with our customers. The goal here is to give you a place to start, and in this process, you’re going to learn a lot of things, and hopefully, you’re going to take away some really cool tips, tricks, strategies, that are really going to benefit your organization. So the five things we’ll go through are strategy, ideation, content creation, promotion, and measurement.

So number one, content strategy. [00:08:30] Content strategy is probably one of the most overlooked steps in content marketing, but in my opinion, it’s the most important step. This is literally the foundation for a strong content marketing program. It’s a reference point as you’re going through the content marketing process. It influences everything. When you get started, your content strategy doesn’t have to be in depth. We spend months with some clients creating content strategies and this could be a 20 [00:09:00] page, 30 page, 40 page document, but to get started, yours is going to be a single page document. It can be a two page document, just make sure you start somewhere, and importantly, make sure you write it down.

Fun stat here, 31% of manufacturers only have a documented content strategy, so the big takeaway here is document it, write it down, it’s going to have a big impact on your business. It’s going to transform your entire organization more than you can even think of right now. The basics to a content [00:09:30] strategy. We’re going to run through these, and I’ll give you a little insight into each one of these, but each one of these pieces of a content strategy are absolutely critical.

Number one, establish goals. What do you want to achieve through your content marketing? Ask yourself right now. Is your goal to increase leads? Web traffic? Engagement with current customers? For example, your goal could be to increase website traffic by 50% over the next six months. That’s your goal? Great, that’s awesome. The best way to reach your goals [00:10:00] is to actually write them down, so write them down inside your content strategy and you will be more likely to achieve them.

Number two, identify personas. Who are you writing your content to? Remember when we talked about content marketing being towards a defined audience, a targeted audience. These are your personas, these are people that you want to do business with. So define the people that you’re marketing to. For manufacturers, this could be engineers, or someone in procurement. [00:10:30] It could be an owner or a CEO. Personas allow you to craft content that’s relatable, and relevant to your customers.

Establish your KPIs. So we’ve set our goals, establish KPIs to help you measure your goals. Some KPIs, these could be web traffic lead retention rate, sales, there’s a litany of KPIs, establish whatever they are and track them. Define your content types and [00:11:00] topics. There’s a variety of topics you’re going to want to write about based on industry. For example, we have a customer in the machine tool industry, maybe they would write about aerospace machine. That could be a topic. Establish those topics and then decide what types of content you want to produce around those topics. These could be white papers, webinars, they could be blog posts. Whatever they are, establish those types of content that you want to create and write them down.

Again, the goal of each one of these steps is to write down what you plan on doing. [00:11:30] Establish stakeholders. What kind of people do we want to be involved in our content marketing? This could be anyone from a writer, an editor, to even your VP of sales. Who is going to have a stake in this process? One of our favorite stakeholders inside of manufacturers are actually engineers. They’re subject matter experts, and they make awesome marketers. They understand exactly what customers need.

[00:12:00] And then finally, establish your distribution channel. So where are you distributing your content? Write them down, doesn’t have to be anything in depth. It can if you want to, you can go into how you want to distribute and the frequency in which you want to distribute, but at least know where you want to distribute your content. Don’t use too many, you don’t want to get overwhelmed. Pick a number that you can commit to. A good example is most manufacturers we work with leverage Linkedin to promote their content, but very few use Instagram, and the reason [00:12:30] is because their audience is not normally on only, or not on Instagram. They’re on Linkedin. I’m just going to say this one more time, establish distribution channels that you know you can commit to.

So, here are our six pieces that make up a content strategy, and these are absolutely, I can stress it enough, absolutely critical to everything you’re going to do going forward, so make sure you spend some time on your content strategy, no matter how simple [00:13:00] it is. So step number two. We have a content strategy, but we’re not going to get too far if we don’t ideate. We don’t come up with content ideas that we want to create, so ideation is simply the way in which we come up with topics for our content marketing efforts, plain and simple.

I want to make an important note here. Ideation is a very intentional act, so make sure you put effort into this step. We encourage our [00:13:30] partners to meet on a regular basis, normally every month, only ideate. This is really important, make sure you set time aside to do ideation, however that manifests itself inside your organizations. We’ll talk about some tactics that we use to ideate and to come up with ideas for our content here at Crafted and with our customers. So number one, just general research. Do some research, research your competitors. It’s hard to know everything. Look at what your competitors write about, look at the [00:14:00] types of content they create, look at how they write. Our competitors are generally normally pretty smart people, so we can always learn something from them, because I guarantee you they’re learning from us.

Research industry publications. Industry publications are a wealth of information and can contain ideas about the latest and greatest things in your industry, and you can get some really great ideas from them, and then finally, research similar industries. Don’t stay pigeonholed [00:14:30] inside your industry, don’t stick your head in the ground and not understand what’s going on around you. A lot of times, if we look inside of other industries, we can see similar things with things that relate to our industry, and we can write about those things. So intentionally setting aside a time to do content research will pay very, very, very big dividends for your company’s content marketing.

So you can do research, that’s awesome. Another way that we come up with [00:15:00] really great ideas, and this is one of our favorite methods for ideating, and it’s called the KJ method, and it’s a great way to ideate as a team, and it requires four things. A white board, it requires sticky notes, a pen, and then just your brain. Here’s the process. What you do is you first as a group establish a problem that your customers face. Something that you’d like to solve. Everyone takes 10 minutes silently to write down as many ideas as they can on an individual sticky note [00:15:30] about how we can solve that problem or topics that can help someone solve that problem, and at the end of the 10 minutes, one by one, you have everybody read their ideas, and then you group these ideas if they’re similar together on the board, and then as a group, you vote. You vote on your favorites, and then you document them.

The benefit here is that this is not a high pressure exercise, it allows people that don’t generally speak up to speak up, and if we can give you one tip here is that [00:16:00] this should be a very company-oriented process. Don’t just invite marketing, invite sales, service, engineering, or anyone that has a unique perspective. Inside your organization, you have a wealth of untapped knowledge and experience and thought leadership, so make sure you tap into it.

Some tools for ideation. So, we’ve come up with some ideas but we need something organization around this process, [00:16:30] or some tools to help facilitate this process again. Here’s some of our favorite tools that we use. A content aggregator, a good example is Speedlight. This basically pools information into a feed from various sources and lets you consume information on one platform, and a content inventory document, you can do this in Google Sheets, but it allows you to categorize the current content you have on your website by topic, type, persona, and the benefit here is it allows us to identify content gaps. [00:17:00] What have we not written about? Maybe we identify we haven’t written about tooling accuracy.

With a content inventory document, we can identify that, and we can fix it, we can write about that. An idea tracker. As you start ideating, quality topics are going to rise to the top, and it’s important to track these somewhere, so make sure you’re tracking these. It could be in a Google doc, in Google Sheets, in Evernote, and then an idea board. So this is a little different than an idea tracker. This is an organic placed digital [00:17:30] or physical where you can or your team can put ideas as they come up with them if they’re on the road, in the office, it’s not formal, just a place to store ideas until you decide to add them to the idea tracker, if they warrant it. But do what works for your organization. Feedly, Google Sheets, Evernote, Trello, they all work really well. You can use one or all of them, but definitely use some of these tools to help facilitate the ideation process.

So number three, [00:18:00] content creation. We’ve talked about ideation, and creating a content strategy, so let’s talk about the actual process of creating content. This is again a process where we’re intentionally acting on the ideas that we came up in our ideation process. It’s a way to create content with a purpose. The internet is full of noise, and we do not want to be noise. [00:18:30] We want to be a thought leader, we want to set ourselves apart, and the only way to do this is through unique and creative content.

The process that we use at Crafted and that we use with all of our manufacturing clients is the hub and spoke model. If you’re not familiar, I’ll give you a quick overview. First in this process, you identify a central topic that you want to create content around, and then we’re going to create a high value piece of content around [00:19:00] this topic, so this could be a webinar, and then once you establish your central topic or hub, so you’re going to need to establish spokes. These could be blog posts, or social media posts. A lot of different things.

Let me give you an example. If we create a webinar about the types of materials you can use in the die-casting process, a spoke could be a blog post, a blog post about the importance of choosing the right material. Another spoke could be a tool on your website [00:19:30] that allows you to compare a materials problem. Our goal is create a bunch of high-quality content around a single topic that is going to engage prospect support or SCO efforts and move people through the buyer’s journey. This is a very, very efficient and effective way to create content, so we encourage you to implement this in practice in your organization. You can find blog posts about this on our website a little more in depth

[00:20:00] Another big piece to content creation is establishing a content creation checklist. We love checklists at Crafted. Checklists allow us to be more efficient and effective at creating content, because it eliminates human error. So we encourage you to create a content creation best practices checklist. If someone’s creating a piece of content, make sure they’re gong through this and checking off each piece. So the pieces that we use inside of our organization, inside of our checklist are [00:20:30] as follows. SEO. Let’s make sure we’re writing SEO-friendly title tags, and adding a description, strong headlines, and strong sub-headlines, make sure that whoever’s writing this content is checking those off. Make sure that they’re doing those while they’re writing, because it’s going to make this process much more efficient.

Number two, creating an engaging title. Make sure that your writer spends a concerted amount of time and effort in creating a title. The title you choose will make or break your article’s [00:21:00] success, so make sure it’s very, very powerful. There’s a lot of resources online around creating powerful titles. Establish your point of view. Make sure your writer checks the box saying that they are writing with a point of view writing with a point of view positions you and your company as a leader and it builds trust with the customers. It’s a way to start conversations, which is good because either people are going to agree or disagree with your point.

Number four. Focus on experience and readability. Are you using bulleted lists? Quotations? [00:21:30] Imagery? Bold? And other formatting to enhance the user experience. People skim, so make sure your content is easy to digest. Make sure whoever’s writing your content is taking these into consideration, and then write to a specific persona. Make sure that whoever’s writing your content asks themselves that question. “Who am I writing to?” And if they didn’t, then the content is not going to be as impactful, it’s not going to resonate.

So [00:22:00] in summary, to recap, make sure you establish a best practices checklist for your content creators. We talked about the five sections you should include and at the end, I’m actually going to send everybody a email with Crafted’s content creation checklist so you can actually have a look at ours and adapt it, or use it on your own business.

Then lastly as far as content creation goes, we’re going to talk about content creation tips and tools. [00:22:30] These are things that are going to help us facilitate the content creation process, and by far my favorite thing on this list is a writathon. A writathon is a time that we set aside at Crafted and that we encourage our customers to set aside when they want to create content, and basically you set aside maybe an hour and a half, an hour in the morning outside of regular office hours. You bring in some coffee and everybody gets together and they just spend and hour, and hour and a half just writing. [00:23:00] They got their ideas through the ideation session, and now they just write about it. It’s a really great way to streamline content, it’s a really good way to hold people accountable, and it will help you create a lot more content.

Ghostwriting. Maybe your organization doesn’t have very strong writers so hire a ghostwriter. Your company’s full of smart and talented people, so pair them with a ghostwriter that can extract and articulate that knowledge into a piece of content. Just be careful that they don’t lose their point of view. [00:23:30] A content creation checklist, we just talked about this. Establish that checklist, hold people to it, make sure they’re using it. It’s going to make sure that once they’re done creating content, it’s that much better.

Then finally, utilize the content calendar to schedule out your content. This is a great way to hold yourselves accountable, to actually publishing the content. We use a bunch of platforms, some that you might want to consider are Sauna, Outlook, Trello, Google Calendar, the marketing automation platform that you use may potentially have [00:24:00] an option to do this inside of it as well. The important piece here is to make sure that you keep this up to date.

So, promotion. We made a promotion where, we’re four out of five, and after five, we’re going to take some of your questions, I’m going to take some time to answer questions, and if you have questions, feel free to put them into the chat. I’ll try to get to those if I can. We made our way through establishing a content strategy, we ideated, [00:24:30] we made awesome and unique content that’s relevant to our customer personas, so now what? Well, we have to promote it, and we need a set way to promote our content. We can’t really wait for SEO to kick in. We have to get our content out there. Promoting our content is the difference between success and failure. It’s absolutely critical, and I urge you to not neglect it.

In a lot of manufacturers that we work [00:25:00] with, they stop after step number three. They create content, and then they wash their hands and rinse and repeat. If we don’t promote our content, we’ve really failed ourselves. So, let’s quickly talk about the promotional channels and tools that we can use to promote our content. You should have established these inside of your content strategy, but we recommend that our customers use at least the following promotional channels. E-newsletter, Linkedin, [00:25:30] YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. These are places where you’re going to get a lot of engagement, and it’s a place where your followers are, and where your prospects are, and where your current customers are.

A good example is one of our customers is a machine tool manufacturer, and they have an absolute cult following that engages with them on Facebook. It’s really awesome to see. So decide the channel that fit your audience and that fit the content that you’re creating. If you’re not making video then YouTube’s [00:26:00] probably not a great platform for you, and then start promoting.

To help you do this, you’ll see on this page we have Hootsuite. Consider using an automation tool like Hootsuite or like Sprout Social. These are going to be super beneficial to automating your process, to making your life easier. We’re all about making the content marketing process a lot more efficient and effective through tools like this. Speaking of that, make sure you have a content promotion [00:26:30] checklist. We’ve talked about checklists a couple of times. We have a content creation checklist. Make sure that you have a content promotion checklist that says, “Hey, this is where we want to promote content, this is how we want to promote it, this is the types of post we want to make, here are the hashtags we want to use,” any kind of that stuff, you can just streamline that process.

So we’ve gone through the first four steps, and it’s time to dig into the numbers here. [00:27:00] Measurement is all about establishing the KPIs you want tracking in regards to your content marketing. Remember, “If you cant measure it, you can’t improve it.” It’s a good quote. So here’s some standard KPIs most manufacturers track when it relates to content marketing. Number one is total website traffic. This is pretty straightforward, but how much traffic are you driving to your website overall?

Number [00:27:30] two. Specific content traffic. What types of content are getting traffic? For example, if we set up content groupings in Analytics to look at traffic for blogs and comparisons and technical data sheets, how much traffic are each one of these content groupings getting? Track these over time, and if your goal is to increase blog traffic, then track this increase in this content group. How are people getting to your site? This is a good number to know. It’s a pretty basic number [00:28:00] that you’ll find in Google Analytics, but make sure you’re tracking it, make sure you’re keeping tabs on it. Is social media driving an increasing number of visitors to your website? That’s good to see. If it’s decreasing, it’s good to see. If organic traffic is decreasing a lot, what are we doing to impact our website’s SEO that we need to address, so track these KPIs.

Leads generated. This is generally one of the most popular KPIs to track [00:28:30] in marketing departments because this is what leadership wants to see. Dive deeper than just how many leads we’re generating. What types of content are generating leads? Are white papers, webinars, how many total leads are we generating every year as a marketing department, or month over month? Is it increasing or decreasing? And then marketing attributed revenue. If you have the ability to track this, track this for sure. You can see what types of content marketing activities are [00:29:00] driving revenue. This is a little harder to track, and it potentially requires some outside software, but do your best and if you can track this, it’s super, super beneficial.

So, in summary, don’t focus on too many KPIs. Here are a few that we like to track for our clients. Pick a few and then work towards them, and the deal is if you pick too many, you’re going to get overwhelmed, so just pick five or six and stick [00:29:30] with them, increase them, and then once you’ve achieved your goals through these KPIs then move on. Some tools that we use to measure. Generally speaking, we use two main platforms for measuring. Number one, Salesforce is our CRM, so customer reports for tracking leads, presenting demo, close rates, deal size and much more, use customer reports in Salesforce and then marketing dashboards to [00:30:00] help you visualize high level the success you’re having from a sales standpoint.

And then Google Analytics, obviously most marketers are using this, but make sure you’re creating content groupings, so create a group for blogs or product pages, or maybe comparisons if that’s a type of content you’re creating, and then look at how these are performing against each other or over time. Set up in Google Analytics dashboards. Use dashboards to consume high level information, kind of like what I talked about in Salesforce. Consume that information on a very high level. Look at your [00:30:30] site’s performance. Create customer reports. Customer reports are good for finding information that’s not easily found through dashboards or through your standard Google Analytics reports.

Annotation, this is a really important piece here for us. Make sure you’re annotating Google Analytics with any kind of key changes in your marketing department or in your organization that might impact your site’s performance. So a good example here is if you acquired a new company, or [00:31:00] started marketing animation, make sure you just put an annotation in Google Analytics to say, “Hey, we acquired XYZ company.” That way, we can look back, maybe we see a huge spike in traffic, but we can say that was probably because we redirected their domain to ours. The last thing that we generally use is a content performance spreadsheet and this is just a great way to track content’s performance, so take some KPIs and track them, helps us to visualize what’s working [00:31:30] and what’s not working.

So, as we start to wrap things up, here’s the big take away. Content marketing is an ongoing process. You can’t just dip your toes in, you have to be committed to this. It has to be long term, it can’t be short term, and it really doesn’t have an ending. If you start it, it has to be a responsibility, [00:32:00] and to that point, that’s why it’s important to get leaderships behind it. But what we do know is that if you do make a commitment to content marketing, you’ll absolutely, unequivocally transform your company. When we do content marketing right, we’re going to increase website traffic, we’re going to increase lead generation, we’re going to increase brand awareness, customer attention, and we’re going to position our company as an authority, and if that doesn’t [00:32:30] get you excited as a marketer, then I’m not sure what does.

So as we wrap this up, I hope you learned some really, really great things today in this webinar. I appreciate you spending some time with us, and as I wrap this up, we’re going to take some time for questions, so if you have questions, I’ll go ahead and answer those. We’ve had some people send some in, and if you have any additional questions, definitely send those over to us. I’m going [00:33:00] to dive into the ones I have, and then we will see if any more come in, and if they don’t, then we’ll end this promptly.

So I have a question from Greg in Cincinnati, Greg asks, “How many pieces of content should we be producing per month?” That’s a good question, Greg. It depends on the types of content you’re producing. Webinars, blogs, case studies, or what kind of combination of those types [00:33:30] of content you’re producing. In general, there’s not necessarily a right answer to this question, but the general rule here is some is better than none, and more is always better than some. So first set yourself an achievable goal. I would say start there. If you have a small time, commit to doing something small, like two blog posts a month. That should be doable. Get good at that, and then grow [00:34:00] it into other types of content, maybe webinars.

The short answer to this question, Greg, is that we recommend somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 words of indexable, this means scrapable content on your website per month, and if you can do that, you’re going to be doing that well. That could be in blog posts, it could be in webinars, it could be in podcasts, but shoot for that number, and then once you hit that, you’ll blow past it and go higher. Hope that helps

[00:34:30] I’m looking at questions here. I’ve got a question from Eric and he says he’s from Greenville, South Carolina. Eric is a manufacturer with a limited budget for marketing, which tends to be the case. He has a limited budget for manufacturing, “So we need to make sure we put our eggs in the right basket.” I’m assuming that means you need to allocate the right amount of money. ” [00:35:00] What type of content is going to get us the most bang for our buck?” Great question, Eric. All right. So, by far the most cost effective type of content, and I assume you’re talking about when we say type, we’re talking about blog posts versus case studies versus webinars versus white papers. The most cost effective type is going to be a blog post.

They are extremely effective at driving prospects to your website, and relative to other types, they don’t require as much work. I would say start there, start [00:35:30] writing. This kind of goes in tandem with our question from Greg. Start writing, but don’t stop. Blog posts generally speaking are great, but they’re top of the funnel types of contents. This means that they’re great at driving awareness, but as you start creating content, make sure you’re creating content that hits the other pieces of the funnels, the consideration in the decision pieces of the funnel. [00:36:00] These can be case studies, they can be webinars. I hope that answers your question. Start with blog posts, and then move from there. That’s where you’re going to get the most bang from your buck.

It doesn’t look like we have anymore questions, so we’ll go ahead and wrap this up. I thank everybody for coming out today, this was a great experience for us, and we’re so happy you came out. If you want to connect with us, you can visit us at CraftedAgency.com or on social media. We have an awesome news letter [00:36:30] that we’d love for you to subscribe to. You can see the link there, and we hope you join us for our next webinar. Thanks guys.