Industrial Content Marketing is NOT New

Manufacturers and industrial companies have been using content marketing for a long time whether they know it or not. What do I mean?

Product Releases have been a staple of industrial marketing long before inbound marketing with content became so popular.

Case studies, application notes, calculators, how-to articles, white papers and frequently asked questions (FAQs) have always been a part of industrial marketing.

What has changed is how you distribute your content today. More importantly, your customers and target audience consume marketing content differently now than in the last decade.

These days, you don’t have to wait for publishers from trade magazines to publish your technical articles. You can post them to your website and/or your industrial blog and broadcast them instantly via social media.

Industrial blogs are a key component of modern content marketing. Many of your existing content assets can be easily repurposed as blog posts. Here are a few ideas to do just that:

• Split a lengthy technical article into three or four shorter blog posts and publish one each week. Think again if you thought you had nothing to blog about!
• Edit old PRs and turn them into blog posts ready to publish. For more on this idea, see “Why Industrial News Releases Make Good Blog Posts.”
• Update old how-to articles and application notes to make them evergreen blog posts. They’ll continue to attract qualified traffic long after you’ve published them. (See “Don’t Let Lack of Content Stop You from Blogging.”)
• Guest blogging is an incredibly powerful strategy to widen your sphere of influence. I recently blogged about this technique in my post “Guest Blogging: An Important Strategy of Industrial Marketing.”

I understand old habits die hard and that industrial companies are having a hard time coming to terms with the new ways of marketing with content. Things have definitely changed and so should your industrial marketing strategies and tactics. Don’t continue to market like it’s 1999 and expect to generate results in the 21st century.

How has your industrial content marketing changed in the past few years? Do you currently have an industrial blog or are you thinking of launching one?