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Add a Blog to Jump Start Industrial Websites

  • By Achinta Mitra
  • December 19th, 2012
Reading Time: 2 minutes

It is not uncommon to find industrial websites that have not been updated for a long time or with outdated content. Providing a cosmetic facelift is not going to improve the site’s performance either. What can you do if a complete website redesign is not feasible?

Adding a blog to your current site is a quick and easy way to breathe new life into an old or underperforming industrial website. Now, every time I mention the word blog to manufacturers and industrial companies, they put on their mental brakes. This is because they think they won’t have anything to write about, at least not as far as publishing new blog posts on a weekly or even a monthly basis.

Here are two practical tips to help you overcome this hurdle of content creation for industrial marketing:

  • Start with your in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) – Application engineers or Design engineers. They interact with customers every day and have a very good handle on what is important to your customers. They are the best source of material for writing blog posts that focus on your readers’ pain points rather than talking more about the company and its products.
    This strategy will fail if you ask your SMEs to write blog posts over and above their regular responsibilities. What makes their expertise valuable is the fact that they spend bulk of their time solving customers’ problems and issues. Blog posts will always be on a much lower priority no matter how important it may be to marketing.
    For help with this problem, read my earlier post, How to Coax Content Out of Engineers
  • Another rich source of content for blog posts is your current library of News Releases. These are usually product-centric and need expanding before they can be effective blog posts. For ideas on how to use Product or New Releases  for lead generation, refer to my post, “Why Industrial News Releases Make Good Blog Posts.”

Adding a blog to a website is not complicated but it does require some marketing TLC in order to make the user experience seamless when moving between your frontend site and the blog. Have your IT and Marketing people collaborate on this task or hire a qualified outside consultant to set up a blog.

Do you use a blog site or did you add a blog to an existing industrial website?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Achinta Mitra

Achinta Mitra calls himself a “marketing engineer” because he combines his engineering education and an MBA with 35+ years of practical manufacturing and industrial marketing experience. You want an expert with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s objectivity who can point you in the right direction immediately. That's Achinta. He is the Founder of Tiecas, Inc., a manufacturing marketing agency in Houston, Texas. Read Achinta's story here.
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Comments:

  1. Tom Repp says:

    Good stuff Achinta:

    I would add that we have actual experience with this. We are a web developer that focuses on SEO for the industrial market place. Hands down, this is the best way to enhance visibility to the search engines. Because of Google’s new “rules” in their search operating systems (Penguin and Panda) this is now a requirement for improving PageRank. Yet, industrial marketers continue to bury their heads in the sand and ignore this opportunity.

    The key is finding someone in-house that can create good content. In our experience, I would agree with Anchinta…getting content out of an industrial or engineering company is sort of like having Congress agree on anything.

    However, having said that if you can crack that code…your company has a significant opportunity in your own market niche.

    Take advantage of it.

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