Content Marketing for Manufacturers: Tips, Planning, and Tools

Customers spend more time with your website than with your sales team. Your digital marketing isn’t driving qualified leads. Potential buyers need technical information but it’s not your specs that set you apart. Sound familiar?  

Content marketing may be the solution. 

Content Marketing for manufacturing companies and industrial settings is often overlooked but should be a foundational piece of your overall brand strategy. Content marketing involves digital assets – such as blogs, white papers, case studies, and video explainers – designed to capture buyers as they research suppliers and keep customers on a confident path to purchase. 

One key tenet of content marketing is to help the customer before you sell them. For manufacturers, you might think of it as lifecycle marketing. In the research phase, customers need comparison guides, for example. In the vetting phase, customers need explainers on field or sector applications. In the transaction phase, customers need content that demonstrates product quality, technology, and customer service. 

From end to end, content marketing powers demand generation and boosts lead generation by associating your brand and product with helpful research and relevant information.

What is the Best Marketing Strategy for a Manufacturing or Industrial Company?

A multi-faceted approach is best for an industrial or manufacturing company’s marketing strategy. This means combining advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, website design, and more. Content marketing interacts with nearly every digital channel.

For your content to reach the buyer at each critical step, your should:

• Develop buyer personas and ideal client demographics 
• Create content geared toward the buyers’ pain points 
• Distribute multi-channel educational content  
• Highlight your niche or how you’re different from competitors
• Integrate customer management systems to identify and follow up with leads

Next, let’s take a closer look at how content works for inbound marketing, sales enablement, and increasing your market share. 

Content Marketing for Manufacturers

If an in-market buyer is switching suppliers and hasn’t shopped around in years, how easily will he find your company’s website? And if he does find your site, how quickly will he find relevant product info, industry tip sheets, and insights from your experts? If you’re still hoping he’ll just call the office, consider this: More than one-third of B2B buyers want a digital-only sales experience. 

And industry data projects that soon buyers will spend 80% of their time in a virtual sales experience. That means content marketing and other digital strategies will be – or already are – your top lead generators. Your marketing strategy doesn’t need to change the buyer’s behavior but should position your content to provide the kind of answers and help customers who once relied solely on sales reps for in the traditional model.

How is Content Marketing Different for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies?

Universally, content marketing needs to be interesting, educational, and relevant without explicitly selling to your reader or viewer. Most consumers know if they’ve landed on your blog, for example, that you’ll link to product pages. But to build trust and further their interest, your content should be genuinely helpful. 

For manufacturers and industrial companies, content marketing is both a top-of-funnel and mid-funnel play. Examples include how-to guides for niche applications, state-of-the-industry white papers in your target sectors, and thought leadership blogs to increase brand and product awareness.

Effective content marketing for manufacturing and industrial brands serves to:

• Produce higher-quality leads
• Position your site higher for buyers on Google  
• Differentiate your product 
• Command premium prices
• Add customer value by answering key questions
• Increase your market share
• Promote your expertise

Let’s look at a couple of examples to get your creative juices flowing.

Industrial and Manufacturing Content Marketing Segments

As you establish how content propels your brand identity and syncs your marketing strategy to your value proposition, it helps to think of your prospective customers in groups. 

In marketing, this is often referred to as segmentation. Say for example your company is a die-cast precision component manufacturer. One large audience segment for your content marketing might be automotive buyers. Drill down further and the segment could be automotive buyers who commission aftermarket consumer key fobs made from recycled material. 

The deeper you understand your consumer needs, the stronger your content marketing will be. Manufacturing and industrial marketing teams should consult with experts in every corner of the company to identify which topics will resonate best with potential customers. The sales team is a great partner for going deep with your research. 

Using the example above, an industrial content marketing blog or email newsletter item could feature a Q&A with an in-house raw materials manager to discuss the cost benefits of using scrapped and recycled alloy in production. 

Other content types might speak more broadly to the pain points, frustrations, and motivations of your target buyer. Next, we’ll look at an example of a marketing persona – the hypothetical (but very realistic) person who is reading or viewing your content. 

Industrial and Manufacturing Content Marketing Personas

Developing a marketing persona in your industrial or manufacturing customer base will increase the relevancy of content and the likelihood of converting consumers to buyers. 

Personas are similar to marketing segments but typically involve deeper insights, observations tied to behaviors, and determining real-world motivations or influences. 

Say for example you manufacture packaging products for the food and beverage industry. Your existing customers are largely industrial food processors. You want to target delis and fresh food counters that buy to-go packaging products in bulk. 

A buyer persona in this situation could be a company’s food prep services manager or a corporate sustainability supervisor. Either way, you’d build content around the specific needs, interests, and challenges facing the prospective buyer. For instance, a blog with charts and graphs showing how your products reduce waste and emissions and support sustainable supply chains. Or for the services manager, it could be an animated video that showcases the product’s ease of use and minimal storage requirements.

What Should be Included in Content Marketing?

You might create an online customer-focused knowledge center with spec sheets and customer case studies complemented by a blog aligned with your expertise. Subject matter expert interviews (engineers are great for this, FYI) can add value for your existing and prospective customers. Assets such as how-to guides and innovation explainers can simplify technical information without compromising depth and quality.  

All told, content marketing does best when it leads with the customer’s need – not a hard sell. 

A content marketing strategy geared toward either a segment or persona will utilize several layers of touchpoints to trigger the customer’s engagement. 

Manufacturing and industrial companies can use gated content – where a customer enters their email address in exchange for exclusive industry research, data, or reports. Integrating your content strategy with email marketing tactics can build brand awareness and pre-qualify potential leads for your sales team.   

Optimized content for search engine results pages (SERP) will help your target buyer find you more quickly during their early research phase. Extensive internal page linking throughout your content will connect the potential customer to more resources and information, deepening the value and their engagement — and increasing their interest. 

The right content plan coupled with overall sound marketing strategy will deliver relevant, educational material when consumers have peak interest or need. Investing in this approach builds trust with your buyers and turns complicated decision-making into confident buying. 

At Beyond Marketing, we dive deep into your company’s offering to design content marketing that sets your brand and product apart. Ready to drive better leads and get more traction with buyers? Call us today!