According to a recent report by the Content Marketing Institute, the manufacturing industry has finally begun to embrace both content marketing and video marketing. Eighty-six percent of manufacturing marketers say they’ve recently adopted some form of content marketing in their organizations.
But what is content marketing? A definition we like describes it as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience.”
What Is Content Marketing, And Why Is It Relevant To The Manufacturing Industry?
First, consider a 2010 report from the Marketing Science Institute titled “Survival of Manufacturing Firms in Fortune 500”. It tried to understand why so many manufacturing companies have a hard time retaining their positions on the Fortune 500 list for more than a year. According to the authors of the report, “If a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm were to incrementally spend 1% of its average sales revenues on marketing and another 1% on R&D for five years, that investment would reduce its risk of leaving the list by 27.8%.”
Marketing isn’t just a good idea for manufacturers – it’s also good business. But marketing in 2015 is nothing like it was even five or 10 years ago. Today, it involves creating the sort of relevant and informational content your future customers are already looking for online. That content can come in the form of the written word – blog posts, articles and white papers, for instance – but it can also come in the form of online videos or audio podcasts.
Why Content Creation Is A Must for Manufacturers
- Fact: There’s both an art and a science involved in the process of pushing a company’s message out to the people who most want to hear it.
- Fact: Most manufacturing firms still don’t do a very good job of that.
But thanks to the increasing popularity of content marketing, manufacturers are beginning to learn some crucial strategies. For instance, the importance of speaking about the benefits a product offers, and not necessarily its features. And the importance of sharing those benefits in the form of a story.
Here’s the bad news: Of all the manufacturing marketers who claim to have adopted content marketing strategies in their organizations, only 30 percent describe themselves as effective content marketers. That tells us that while the manufacturing industry is beginning to understand the importance of educating customers with quality content, they’re still not sure how best to go about doing so.
There’s one more fact manufacturing marketers need to keep in mind: Today, over 90 percent of all buyers begin their search for products and services on the Internet. In other words, having a dynamic web presence rich in relevant and informational content is perhaps the most important strategy today’s manufacturing marketer can undertake.
Video Is The Most Effective Way For Manufacturers To Share their Stories
Over 80 percent of manufacturing marketers use YouTube to distribute content. According to recently surveyed manufacturers, YouTube now proves more effective than any other content distribution tool in their arsenal.
That makes sense. YouTube enjoys more than 1 billion unique visits each month. You may have even heard the claim that by 2017, video will be responsible for an estimated 74 percent of all Internet traffic. Video, of course, allows the story of a complicated product to be told in an entertaining and easy-to-digest manner, and that’s one reason the medium has proved so effective in the manufacturing sector. A product demonstration video can be a powerful way for a manufacturing marketer to explain the unique benefits of whatever he’s selling. Simply put, video drives engagement.
How IQnection Can Help Put Your Story In Front Of The Right Consumers
Creating useful, high-quality content for blogs, websites and social media platforms isn’t easy. It’s also very time consuming. At IQnection, our team of professional writers and videographers produce content that has two main objectives: It’s proportioned to appeal to your site’s visitors, and it’s designed to meet the strict criteria of search engines.
Even more importantly, we’re adept at creating both written and video content that engages human users, generates leads, and drives conversions. This is crucial, because in order to successfully capture and retain the interest of your ideal customers – those people who are already searching online for the products or services your company offers – you need to capture and retain their attention. Only then will you engage them in an ongoing conversation with your brand.
Contact us at the link below to learn more about how our web design and online marketing solutions drive engagement and deliver leads for manufacturing firms every day of the week.
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