But what does a good content marketing plan for a manufacturing company look like? How do you go from point A, with traditional marketing methods or no marketing strategy at all, to point B, a fully-fledged content strategy that runs as smoothly as your factory does?

In this article, we’re going to show you exactly how to create that strategy. We’ll begin with a brief introductory discussion on content marketing for manufacturing to get newcomers up to speed, and cover some powerful ideas for types of content you can create.

Then, we’ll dive into an eight-step plan for putting your own content marketing plan into action.

A 101 on content marketing for manufacturing

Let’s start simple:

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of various forms of content assets across multiple touchpoints during the buying process.

This means that content can be used to support top-of-funnel marketing efforts designed to attract customers and drive brand recognition, as well as bottom-of-funnel, conversion-focused strategies.

The content itself can take a number of different forms.

Written content such as blog posts (like this one) are probably the most common, but content also extends to video explainers, images used on social media platforms, and in-depth whitepapers or product spec sheets.

A great content marketing strategy considers the entire buyer’s journey (from needs recognition right through to purchase and customer retention), and maps pain points and needs to marketing messaging for each stage.

That messaging is used to fuel content creation and inform the kinds of content that are appropriate for each touchpoint in the buying journey.

For instance, say your organization is a rubber components manufacturer.

You’re looking to target the dairy industry, as you know that dairy farms must regularly replace the rubber teets used on their milking equipment.

An example of how you might use content at the top of the funnel could be a light-hearted video that raises the pain point many dairy farmers have: rubber components perish too quickly.

Later down the funnel, when customers are closer to converting, you’ll distribute a more product-focused content asset: a whitepaper that details a study showing how your rubber components last 50% longer than those of your competition.

As a manufacturer, a well-designed content marketing strategy can help you:

• Reach more potential customers
• Grow your brand awareness
• Differentiate your business from competitors
• Move customers down the sales funnel faster
• Create more relevant and engaging sales conversations
• Save time by running automated digital marketing campaigns
• Convert more potential buyers into paying customers
• Enhance your onboarding and customer retention practices

5 content marketing ideas for manufacturers

Shortly, we’ll dive into an eight-step process for designing a high-performing content marketing plan for your manufacturing business.

But first, let's examine five types of content your business might choose to develop as part of that plan.

1. SEO content creation

SEO content is the backbone of the majority of content marketing strategies.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is the practice of creating and optimizing pages to be found in search engines (mostly Google). These pages are mostly blogs, as they represent a tonne of ranking opportunities, though a good strategy also works to optimize your landing pages.

This blog post is a clear example of SEO in action.

Someone who wants to learn more about content marketing for manufacturing might search for the topic, and this article would come up because that keyword is featured in this article. That’s the power of SEO.

If you create relevant, helpful, optimized content, you stand a good shot of being found organically. You attract potential customers to your site and, therefore, your brand without directly paying for that interaction (like you would when running a paid ad).

Determining the right topics to write about is, for many manufacturing companies, the hard part. Here’s a quick guide to put you on the right track:

1. Determine areas where you have topic knowledge (you can write extensively about that topic area)
2. Consider what pain points and interests your customers have at the start of their buying journey
3. Focus on opportunities at the intersection of those two areas (in other words, find areas where customers need help)

Dive deeper: The ultimate guide to crafting an effective SEO content strategy (+ examples).

2. Proprietary industry research

Engaging in proprietary industry research and then publishing your findings is a super powerful content marketing tactic.

Take this report from The Manufacturing Institute.

They studied a variety of manufacturing supply chains, then pulled together their findings into a helpful guide-style report.

Content like this feeds into a number of marketing goals:

• It positions your company as an industry thought leader
• It provides backlinking opportunities (as others might cite your report and link to it in their own content)
• It can be a good lead generation strategy (if customers have to enter an email in order to download it)

3. Spec sheets

Spec sheets are a good bottom of the funnel (at the end of the buying journey) content asset.

A spec sheet details the capabilities of the equipment you use, or of the specific components or products you manufacture.

This is a particularly important content type for those who custom fabricate components on behalf of their clients.

Your clients will want to know about things like manufacturing tolerances, turnover speed, and quality control, all of which can be outlined in a spec sheet.

This can be a self-downloadable asset on your website, but also double as a helpful sales engagement asset, allowing your sales reps to really dig into the benefits of working with you by exploring the details of your equipment’s capabilities.

4. Case studies

Case studies are an excellent way to demonstrate your abilities as a manufacturing plant in a real-life context.

A case study explores a job you’ve completed recently, ideally for a high-profile client (to maximize your ability to leverage social proof), and where the impact of your work was high.

Minnesota Rubber & Plastics, for example, regularly publishes case studies about the custom rubber components they have manufactured.

These case studies give the manufacturer an opportunity to put its skills and abilities on display, and create a mental picture of success for potential clients by highlighting specific results.

5. Interactive calculators

Effective, quality content goes beyond writing. In fact, one of the best ways to engage your audience while providing actionable value is to focus on interactive content.

These helpful online calculators from Compressed Air Systems Inc are the perfect example:

Customers can calculate their precise air compression needs and then browse a range of (only relevant) products or services.

How to get started with content marketing for your manufacturing business

Now that you’ve got your head around a few of the most important content types, let's dig into the actual “how to” of getting started with manufacturing content marketing.

1. Set content marketing objectives

First, you need to get super clear on the objectives of your content marketing strategy.

It's helpful to think of this on two levels:

1. Your larger organizational growth goals
2. Your specific marketing goals and related metrics

Say, for example, your big goal is to grow revenue by $2 million this year. You plan to achieve this by successfully converting 15 new customers.

You know that your sales team (who are primarily fed by marketing leads) close ⅕ of the customers they speak to.

So, your marketing team needs to deliver 75 more pre-qualified leads over the course of the year. This gives you a relevant goal for your content marketing strategy to pursue, which is perfectly aligned with wider business objectives.

2. Develop a content marketing strategy

Now, you’re going to work on the broad strategic element of your content plan.

This should involve:

• Analyzing the competitive landscape to look for differentiation opportunities
• Understanding which channels you’ll use to distribute content
• Building out a customer journey map (the typical steps your customers go through to purchase)

Developing a content marketing strategy involves many moving parts, more than we can cover in this overview of content marketing for manufacturing. Dive deeper with our guide on strategy: How to create a winning content marketing strategy: A 12-step template.

3. Determine which content types you’ll focus on

You’ve got a huge range of options when it comes to choosing which kinds of content you’re going to use to pursue your goals.

Bear in mind that you don’t need to create content across all approaches. It might be better to focus on a few at first and broaden your efforts as your content marketing plan develops.

You might decide, for example, that you’re going to focus on three content types:

1. SEO blog content aimed at attracting new potential customers to your website
2. In-depth guides aimed at providing more context about buyer pain points, and how a product or service like yours might be able to help
3. Case studies aimed at converting customers who are close to converting but need to see some proof first

4. Build out your content production workflows

The best content marketing plans are those based on tested, refined, repeatable production workflows.

When you have a content workflow for each type of content you create, you’ve got a predetermined set of steps for your team.

Let’s take blog content production as an example. The typical steps involved in this process are:

• Topic ideation and keyword selection
• Brief creation and writer assignment
• Article outline creation
• Article drafting
• Editor review and feedback
• Writer edits
• Final editor review
• Image design
• Approval and upload

Best practice is to design an SOP (standard operating procedure) document for each of these stages, as well as a mother document that outlines the broad process for production, as well as points of collaboration.

Then, you’ll want to use a tool like GatherContent to create a workspace for that content production workflow.

5. Assemble your team

As you get started, you might create and upload all of your company’s content by yourself.

But as your content efforts scale, you’re going to need to hand off some tasks to others. At a certain scale, you’ll simply oversee the content production process (which is why those SOPs from step four are so important).

The people you bring into your team depend largely on the type(s) of content you’re creating.

If you’re writing blog posts, for instance, then you’ll need a writer, and probably an editor. If you’re creating case studies with lots of images, diagrams, and graphs, then you might need to add a designer to the mix.

As your volume scales, you may even consider the need for a virtual assistant or other “non-creator” roles within your content production process.

For instance, at high volumes of SEO content creation, publishing the new pages on your site can become a bottleneck, but it can be alleviated by bringing on a VA with specific knowledge in the area.

Decide which roles make the most sense for your current content strategy, then keep an eye out for bottlenecks as production scales, and grow your team as needed.

6. Start slow

Now is the point where you put all of that planning into practice and start actually creating content.

Best practice is to start at a low volume and then scale up to your desired pace over the course of several months or quarters, depending on your content goals.

For example, say you want to publish three new case studies a month. You might start out at one a month for the first three months, bump that up to two a month for the next quarter, and then kick things up to your desired scale from quarter three.

As with any new undertaking, issues, barriers, and challenges are going to pop up, many of them unexpected, and you’ll need to learn how to deal with them.

In short, you may not produce as much content as you first think, and you’ll spend time tweaking and optimizing processes. Speaking of…  

7. Optimize content operations processes

The best content managers pay keen attention not only to what is being produced, but the processes their teams use to produce it.

They constantly examine their workflow for bottlenecks and put strategies in place to resolve them.

You should also be on the lookout for issues where content doesn’t align with expectations, as this might point to a need to update and improve your SOP documents.

8. Report, analyze, and improve

Remember how, back in step one, we set some goals for your content strategy?

Well, here’s where they come into play.

Recall our goal from step one (obtain 75 new customers), and say we’re going to analyze performance on a quarterly basis.

At the end of quarter one, our goal is to have delivered 19 new leads, but we’ve only achieved 13. A good effort, but we need to pump those numbers up, so we’re going to start asking questions:

• How are our social media marketing ads performing? What would happen if we adjusted our audience profile?
• Is our SEO content performing as expected? Are there any pages we can further optimize or update?
• What does engagement with our case studies look like? What percentage of page viewers are downloading the PDF? Could we A/B test some conversion copy to improve engagement?

Establish a reporting cadence for your chosen marketing metrics (monthly is generally a good idea), or use your marketing analytics software tool to build a custom dashboard.

Then, analyze your performance data at regular intervals, and put strategies in place to improve.

Drive content operations for manufacturing with GatherContent

For manufacturing companies who are serious about long-term growth, content marketing can be a truly powerful strategy.

A good content marketing plan not only attracts leads at the top of the funnel, but nurtures them throughout the entire customer journey and even aids with conversion.

To get your content machine up and running efficiently, you’re going to need well-designed workflows and a powerful solution for content collaboration.

With GatherContent, content operations leaders can do the following:

• Create a unified place for marketing team collaboration
• Maximize compliance with internal policies by creating easy-to-follow workflows
• Control who gets access to what, optimizing the balance between collaboration and security

Find out for yourself how GatherContent can transform your manufacturing company’s content marketing workflows. Start your free trial here.