This year’s manufacturing report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that there are some great opportunities for marketers to gain an edge over the competition and grab their audience’s attention. Here are six key findings from their annual report.
Related Content: Interested in our 2018 findings?
1. Content Marketing requires commitment from executive management.
According to CMI, 66% of the respondents have reported moderately successful or very successful results from content marketing.
However, success was skewed; 41% of respondents in the sophisticated/mature phase say their organization is very successful with content marketing, while 52% in the young/first steps phases have achieved only minimal success.
Observation
While content marketing is widely seen as a successful marketing strategy, it requires commitment from senior management to obtain strong positive results.
This has been a consistent finding from the Content Marketing Institute. The graph below shows a broader base of B2B Marketers and the implications are clear: Those organizations that have a strong commitment to content marketing have better results.
Those who have the backing of senior management to fund content marketing have the greatest success.
Action Item
Creating high-quality content is a critical part of any inbound marketing strategy. One of the key success factors is making sure to have a strong commitment from executive management.
Related Content: What is Inbound Marketing
2) Having a documented content marketing strategy is a key success factor.
Fewer than 1 in 4 manufacturing marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
Observation
From a broader B2B study from CMI, those 39% of marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy are far more likely to be successful (65% vs. 14%).
Having a documented content strategy helps the marketing, sales and executive teams focus on what matters by
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Aligning teams around common missions/goals
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Making it easier to determine which types of content to develop
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Keeping the team focused on documented priorities
Action Item
If your organization does not have a documented content marketing strategy, now is the time to create one.
3) Most manufacturing companies use buyer personas.
Observation
It is nearly impossible to know what to say if you don’t know who you are talking to. Having at least one buyer person is critical to any content and inbound marketing strategy.
Action Item
If your marketing organization does not have a documented buyer persona, now is the time to develop one.
Related Content: Why do I need a buyer persona?
4) Audience is not always a top priority.
Amazingly, (and not in a good way) 51% of the respondents say they always or frequently prioritize their sales/promotional message over the audience’s needs.
Observation
Manufacturing companies need to recognize that the way B2B buyers make purchase decisions has fundamentally changed. According to Forrester,
60% of B2B buyers prefer not to
interact with a sales rep as the
primary source of information.
A large part of this shift is due to the simple fact that the composition of the workforce has changed: the millennials are now the dominant generation in the work force and are often in positions of influence or decision-making. And as a general rule, millennials don’t like being sold to.
Action Item
If you have not read up on how the millennials are reshaping the workforce, read this article: How to Market to Millennials.
5) Selecting the right technology helps manufacturing companies measure results.
Observation
There are many technology platforms that provide point solutions to help marketers manage their content. Many use point solutions such as
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Hootsuite for social media publishing
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MailChimp/Constant Contact for email
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Google Analytics for analytics
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Wordpress for Content Management System (CMS)
But having several point solutions often makes getting actionable data in one place very difficult, and quite often, marketers are forced to export data into a spreadsheet and spend hours massaging the data into a usable form.
Action Item
Explore the benefits of using a unified marketing platform to consolidate your technology platform. For example, at i5, we use Hubspot to:
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Publish and manage social media posts
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Send out email campaigns
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Use the built-in Hubspot analytics, which provides not only KPIs on website performance, but also other marketing metrics such as blog performance, call-to-action A/B testing and landing page conversion rates
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Act as our CMS for seamless integration with our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Tools
Having a single place to manage our content and analyze its performance is a huge time saver, and decisions (both strategic and tactical) can be made without spending a lot of time consolidating and formatting data in an easy-to-understand format.
6) The top concern for manufacturing marketers are changes to the SEO/search algorithms.
57% of Manufacturing marketers are concerned about the changing nature of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Observation
Many companies (not just manufacturing companies) continue to follow outdated SEO practices. For example, using keywords and outsourcing companies to build hundreds of backlinks is no longer effective.
Action Item
Being found by search engines is great way to gain audiences at the beginning of a buyer’s journey. But getting ranked by Google cannot be done by trying to “fool” Google’s SEO algorithm. Savvy marketers have learned that the SEO game has fundamentally changed for the better.
Related Content: How SEO has Changed
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