Content marketing is a powerful, long-term strategy for business growth in the manufacturing industry. Compared to other marketing tactics, it's one of the best ways to gain visibility from your target market. It enables you to drive more traffic to your website and solve those burning questions your potential customers have.

However, content marketing for manufacturers is complex. It requires extensive research, planning, and development, making its cost vary widely depending on the scope of work.

If you want to learn how much you should budget for content marketing for your manufacturing business, look no further.

The Components of Content Marketing for Manufacturers

When it comes to establishing the amount of money you should budget for content marketing for your business, there are multiple elements that you need to consider.

An effective content plan is broken down into three main pieces: research, strategy development, and content creation.

Research Phase

One of the most critical elements of creating manufacturing content is the research phase. This process can get pretty comprehensive and includes:

• Auditing all of the existing content on your website
• Analyzing your competitor’s performance
• Setting up tracking with Google Analytics
• Identifying topics and keywords that are relevant to your business

And so much more.

This research is critical to achieving the results you set out for in your content marketing endeavors.

Strategy Development

Once initial research has been conducted, the next piece of a successful content marketing campaign is a well-planned strategy. This strategy should be hyper-focused on achieving your specific business objectives, whether they are to build brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, generate more leads, and so on.

The development of an effective content strategy may consist of:

• Establishing the appropriate cadence for new content production
• Identifying opportunities to optimize existing content
• Pinpointing content that can be repurposed into different formats
• Setting KPIs based on your business goals

Ultimately, this strategy can look vastly different based on your business’ unique nuances.

For example, if you serve multiple different verticals, your content plan may consist of short sprints designed to gain visibility in each of those markets. If you're looking to build general brand awareness or assist your sales team, this plan may be much longer and hit on many different topics.

Content Creation

The final step to a content marketing strategy for manufacturers is actually creating the content.

With proper research and planning in place, you can begin to create compelling blog posts, case studies, and other content that resonates with your target audience and boosts your brand's authority.

At the end of the day, someone has to sit down and write or create your website's content. And the complexity of your content can cause the price to vary significantly.

Some manufacturers have people on staff who are adept at writing about their products and services. This can and should be done when possible, because no one knows your products like your own employees.

While this can save money and produce accurate content, it isn't always the final step in the content process. If content is written internally, it is often a good idea to work an SEO expert and writer to ensure that your content is optimized to be found by your target audience. And sometimes it's not feasible for your employees to write the content themselves, either due to time restrictions or a lack of writing expertise.

A contractor may charge by word count, an hourly rate, or a flat rate per piece of content. Typically, one piece of written content will run you in the range of $150-$1,000. Obviously the upper range of that would be for a more extensive piece of content. You can expect to pay a price of $500-$3000 or higher for extremely large projects for more interactive pieces of content such as ebooks, videos, or infographics.

Working with a digital marketing agency can often be a cost efficient choice, since you have access to a stable of content, SEO and digital marketing experts who are able to produce content for you as part of a broader online strategy. To learn more about the costs of working with a manufacturer digital marketing agency, read our article here.

The Total Cost of Content Marketing for Manufacturers

Overall, the implementation of a complete content marketing strategy for manufacturing and industrial companies can broadly range from $1000-$3000 per month or around 18% of your digital marketing budget as a whole. This number is mostly dependent on how aggressive your growth goals are and the types of content you wish to create.

Getting Started with Content Marketing

Although the upfront cost of producing content may seem steep, content marketing should be viewed from a long-term perspective. Once content is published live on your website, your work is done, although you should plan some time to optimize it in the future. In the meantime, it will act as an impactful lead generation and brand building tool that requires little to no attention.

You'll want to put tracking in place to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts. While the initial investment in content can seem expensive, with the right tracking in place, you'll likely find that some of the content you're producing can pay for itself many times over by bringing in qualified leads and increasing your quoted business.

Want to learn more about how to get started on creating content for your manufacturing company? Here are 6 Effective Types of Content for Manufacturers.

Looking for other digital marketing strategies to drive lead generation and sales for a manufacturing company? Check out our Manufacturing Marketing Resources page.