If you work in B2B manufacturing marketing, you put a lot of thought into how to reach prospective customers including what marketing channels are best and the messages to resonate with your target audience. Your sales team is actively engaging customers and leads at tradeshows and through regular contacts but that only engages the leads you know about. 

What about the people (in every corner of your market) searching online for products like yours? Will their question be answered at the moment (day or night) they search for answers online? Does it engage them at the right stage of their buyer’s journey? This is where content marketing for manufacturers is critical; it attracts the right buyers to your website at the time they are searching for answers. They have a need and if your product content is positioned well, it can be just the answer someone is looking for. 

Strong content also saves precious time for your sales team. Thoroughly describing your product gives visitors a clear picture of whether your products meet their needs. If not, they can move on without sapping time and energy from your sales team. Don't hesitate to describe what you don't do because as content guru, Marcus Sheridan says, “talk about the negatives” because it builds trust and alleviates fears about your product.

Manufacturing Content Marketing

The friction we hear from manufacturers who’ve tried content marketing: The in-house team doesn’t have enough time to write the content and often they aren’t experienced copywriters. But manufacturers tell us that their attempts to outsource content development result in external writers without enough technical savvy to create meaningful content. We get it, someone with technical knowledge, writing abilities, and knowledge of how to put it all together for a great SEO ranking is a unicorn. If content marketing didn’t work for you the first time, it may be the approach so in the resources below we share tactics to help set you up for successful content marketing.

Resources for In-house Manufacturer Content Marketing

WebStrategies’ CEO, Chris Leone and Senior Director of Strategic Accounts, Howard Deskin present a webinar on planning your content calendar that can get you started. Then we recommend viewing SEO Tactics that get attention from engineers & plant managers to understand how the target market for a B2B manufacturer searches so you can position content most effectively.

Look at how your website content is structured. Are the main website pages set up to match the terms your target audience uses to search? It is impactful to include Industry Pages as Part of Your Marketing Manufacturing Strategy and to establish pillar pages around the key search phrases the company should be known for. Then link supporting blog posts and other content back to the pillar pages - that is a signal search engines that a pillar page has valuable content.

Manufacturing Marketing Agency that Excels at Writing Technical Content

We’re your unicorn.

What does WebStrategies know about your industry? Maybe a lot, but often with new industrial manufacturing clients, the answer at first is “not much”. But that doesn’t last long because, through our onboarding process, we study clients, the products, and who they serve. Then we dig in to research the details and our content team crafts a plan around several factors, including:

• SEO phrases that get web pages found
• Gap analysis to identify existing content to enhance and what needs to be developed
• Content for the various stages of the buyers’ journey
• Prioritizing content according to business objectives
• Goals, measurement, and followup

WebStrategies gets results for manufacturing clients. You can see from some of the client feedback below, that our strategy is effective and gets noticed:

• About content on explosion relief doors, a client said:
  "I have to tell you, your writers, sometimes when I read their content, I think WOW - for people that don't deal with this for their job, they really research this stuff - and the content is GOOD! I can tell the articles have gotten better and better with how they're written and the knowledge that goes into them."
  
  
• When asked if our content plan is on track, the point of contact said: 
  "Oh yes! I love it - I think this is the first time a marketing person, with no previous knowledge about our company, has come to us asking these sorts of questions - or done enough research to somehow be asking the almost exactly right questions just out of the gate like this!"
  
  
• And for feedback on About Us page copy, the client simply said it was “pretty darn awesome”.

WebStrategies is an agency with seasoned expertise in the digital marketing landscape and can implement an effective content marketing strategy at your industrial B2B manufacturer. Leverage our manufacturer marketing resources if you want to fine-tune or level up your content marketing and SEO efforts on your own. Or contact us to take the next step with a digital marketing agency.