Planning, creating and analyzing the performance of B2B marketing content is one of the greatest challenges to manufacturing marketing in Europe. In fact, a poll during our recent webinar, on “The Digital Transformation and the Future of Manufacturing Marketing” showed 45% of attendees feel content is their greatest marketing challenge. Join our expert panelists from the webinar as they discuss practical solutions to creating the right content to attract the right customers for your manufacturing business.
The first step, according to Matt Chilton, Founder of the manufacturing marketing media company Zenoot, is to do a content audit to understand what you have and what you must produce to meet your customers at the right time with the content they need to move through your sales process.
Jason Cort, European Director Product Management & Marketing at Sharp Europe adds that content is the most agile way to meet rapidly shifting market demands.
Watch these four short video clips to get advice on:
- Making the content
- Executing the content
- Getting attention
- Gathering Data
- Analyzing that data and making pivots
B2B Content and the Manufacturing Buyer’s Journey
Zenoot Founder Matt Chilton explains that B2B buyers in the manufacturing industry consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a decision. Not only do marketers have to produce enough content to keep up with that, they also have to understand the performance of that content at every stage. The only way to do that effectively is marketing automation.
Content is the Most Agile Marketing Tactic for Manufacturers
Jason Cort, European Director Product Management & Marketing at Sharp Europe, explains why manufacturing marketers should lean hard into content. In a word, it’s agility. Whereas large, expensive advertising campaigns are often set months in advance and end up being rigid in many cases, content marketing can quickly pivot to meet emerging needs, or try exciting ideas.
Planning Your Best Manufacturing Marketing Content
The first step toward planning your best manufacturing marketing content is to understand what you currently have that connects with your buyer personas. Knowing what you have and what is working provides the basis for planning what to create next. Additionally, look at what has inspired you recently. Where have you been motivated to give up your details to get a piece of content? Use that as a map to what you can create for your own manufacturing business.
Pro Tip: Jason Cort’s favorite, most effective content type is case studies. So, if you are stuck on choosing the best path forward, start by telling the success stories of your most valued customers.
Using Marketing Automation to Produce the Evidence-Based Stories Your Customers Need
Matt Chilton says we’d all be rich if we could truly target the exact right person at the exact right time. In reality, we can approximate the best content to send at the best time, and build relationships over time. Manufacturing marketing is all about telling the right, evidence-based stories backed up with marketing automation data.