We often think of online content as the text on a web or blog page. The focus there is to optimize it for keywords or phrases for people to find your website when searching for relevant terms. That however is only part of the solution because if your content doesn’t engage the visitor s/he won’t take a desired action to move forward in the sales cycle.
Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, Inc. said it best when she wrote, “Passive reading of your content is not going to help online marketing initiatives shorten buying cycles or increase customer acquisition and revenues.”
Your online content needs to play a much more active role in moving site visitors along in his/her buy decision. According to Bob Carrigan, CEO of International Data Group, “It [content] fulfills the promise of the Web, which is relationship marketing.”
Using content or Inbound Marketing, you are able to make that key connection with your prospects by delivering specific content needed in order to make an informed decision.
Your prospects are at different stages of their decision making process when they visit your site. You can’t satisfy all of them with one-size-fits all content. Depending on the stage of the prospect, your content needs to:
Depending on the length of your sales cycle, conditions at your prospect’s end may change resulting in projects being put on hold. Your sales team must report to marketing and put these leads back into the hopper for nurturing. That closes the loop in your content marketing cycle while minimizing loss of qualified leads.
Your content also needs to perform another key function. It must help your customers make the best use of their purchase. After-sales support such FAQs, How-to videos, Troubleshooting guides, User forums are all examples of after-sales content.
How well is your content performing for you?
Depending on the level of assistance you’re looking for, Tiecas offers customized content marketing solutions for engineering and industrial companies.
A real-world overview of industrial content marketing based on our 35+ years of hands-on experience working with manufacturers and engineering companies.
A one-hour live (online) consulting session with Achinta Mitra to discuss your industrial marketing challenges. I’ll try to provide general guidance that you can apply right away.
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Let’s start with a free 30-minute consultation to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. Our conversation will be a friendly chat to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.
Industrial Marketing Today is an integral part of Tiecas, Inc., a Houston-based industrial marketing agency. We’ve been in business since 1987, serving the marketing needs of manufacturers, distributors, and engineering companies from various industries.