Category: Industrial Blogs

  • Purpose Driven Industrial Blogging

    Industrial bloggingWhen I talk to manufacturers and industrial companies about blogging, which is practically every day, I can’t help but notice that these people do understand that blogging is a key component of good industrial content marketing.

    What I find lacking most often is a clear understanding of purpose driven benefits from blogging. This gap prevents them from fully harnessing the power of blogs to boost industrial lead generation and drive sales.

    Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of industrial blogging.

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Marketers at industrial companies understand the importance of organic SEO. They realize that their sites and blogs need to be at the top of search engine rankings in order for their target audience to find them. The problem is their entire focus is on search engines, trying to find the latest “trick” to beating Google and other search engines.

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  • Blogging Still Lagging in Industrial Marketing

    Compared to most B2B marketers, blogging still plays a minor role for most manufacturing and industrial companies. Look at these charts from two different surveys to illustrate my point.

    The first chart is from the survey – Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ fourth annual B2B Content Marketing: 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America.

    B2B Content Marketing Tactics Usage

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  • Priming Industrial Websites for Content Marketing

    Many of my industrial clients are starting to plan and budget for 2014. High on their list of priorities is redesigning their industrial websites. A welcome change in these discussions is that redesigns are now driven by the needs of inbound marketing with content rather than just a cosmetic facelift to the site.

    Manufacturers and industrial companies are more willing to accept the fact that their customers and prospects are interacting with them differently and this change in buyer behavior is permanent. They’ve seen how expensive traditional outbound marketing tactics are and how difficult it is to track results from those efforts.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that one should abandon outbound marketing. However, the balance has definitely shifted more towards online digital marketing for industrial companies.

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  • Industrial Blogging Lessons Learned from Working with Technical SMEs

    Industrial Blogging Lessons Learned from Working with Technical SMEs

    My clients often ask me to write posts for their industrial blogs. This requires me to work very closely with engineers and technical SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on a daily basis for creating content. I have learned some important lessons about blogging that are specific to this technical and industrial audience.

    • Editorial calendar: This may sound like content marketing 101 but let me tell you why it is so important for industrial blogs. At a recent discovery meeting, I received little to no response when I asked a group of engineers about their customers’ challenges that we could blog about. I was expected to do the industry research and come back with a list of topics. Ideas for blog posts just flowed after I presented my findings. I kid you not; I now have weekly blogging topics lined up until the second week of November for this manufacturing client.
    • SME Interviews: I have found it a lot easier to write technical blog posts if I start by interviewing SMEs. I have to do my homework and come prepared with a list of intelligent questions to ask. Engineers can spot a novice quickly and they are not particularly patient with people trying to interview them about a topic that the interviewer knows very little about.
    • Be a ruthless editor: Writing copy based on interviews is one thing but the skill that I find most useful is editing. It takes time and understanding of the subject matter to publish blog posts that are compelling stories that educate and engage readers. One caveat I have discovered is that there is a fine balance between being a marketer and a technical content editor. What may sound geeky to a marketer may be just the right content for a technical audience.
    • Become an SEO expert: You’ve got to learn most everything there is to know about keyword research, on-page SEO and internal linking with keyword-rich anchor text. There is no point in publishing a bunch of unoptimized blog posts that your target audience will never find in search engines. SEO and social marketing skills are what separate a content marketing expert from a copywriter.
    • Add a touch of humor: This one is a myth buster. Contrary to popular belief, engineers do have a sense of humor and appreciate wit. Just don’t go overboard and try to be too clever and cutesy. Clever wordsmithing will only take you so far if your content lacks technical accuracy and substance.

    For more on this topic, you may want to read my earlier post, “How to Coax Content Out of Engineers.”

    As a Mechanical Engineer myself, I find it easier to interact with technical SMEs but I still have to go in there prepared to get my job done. I know I couldn’t just wing it after all these years and having written hundreds of industrial blog posts.

    What has been your experience interacting with technical SMEs for writing blog posts and creating content for industrial marketing?

  • Guest Blogging: An Important Strategy of Industrial Marketing

    I’m sure by now you’ve heard about all the great benefits of blogging as a cornerstone of your content marketing. However, one aspect of this industrial marketing strategy that doesn’t get much attention is guest blogging. There are unique benefits of guest blog posts that deliver powerful marketing ROI.

    In the past, many SEO experts pushed publishing guest articles and blog posts for the sole purpose of generating inbound links with keyword-rich anchor texts. This SEO or content marketing strategy relied heavily on quantity over quality of links. Google’s war on content farms has pretty much rendered this tactic useless. Don’t get me wrong, quality inbound links still matter in SEO.

    IMO, there are three bigger benefits of guest blogging. They are:

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  • Content Marketing Challenges for Industrial Distributors

    Industrial distributors face a unique set of challenges when it comes to content marketing. These companies have traditionally depended on the depth and breadth of their line cards to highlight their strengths and sell industrial products.

    In the past, their marketing content came straight from the manufacturers they represented. You will find the exact same product content on sites of various distributors serving a particular industry. They’ve never had to create and publish their own content before.

    The problem is republishing the same manufacturer’s content won’t help your SEO or add any value for your customers and neither will it help to differentiate one industrial distributor from another.

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  • Add a Blog to Jump Start Industrial Websites

    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:

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  • Why Industrial News Releases Make Good Blog Posts

    Press or news releases about industrial products have been and still are very popular. They work because the content is mainly about features that help engineers specify these industrial products.

    In the past, manufacturers used them primarily in traditional print media like an industry-specific tabloid. People sent back a completed reader service or bingo card and leads were generated that way. Of course, those days are long gone. Today, you are more likely to see a URL like http://ogpe.hotims.com or http://powereng.hotims.com printed at the end of the news release.

    Since industrial companies struggle with content, I think one way to overcome the problem is to take a traditional marketing tactic like a news release and turn it into a blog post for use in digital marketing.

    What I’m suggesting here is not to copy word-for-word from your old product releases but to expand on them and create new blog posts. Instead of listing product features and specifications, your blog posts can add a lot more information, which will be more educational rather than a blatant sales pitch.

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  • What You Should Know Before Developing Industrial Blog Sites

    At this time of the year, many industrial companies are getting ready for their annual budget planning meetings. If you are one of them, a redesign of your industrial website may also be part of those discussions.

    Blog sites have become a very popular choice with many manufacturers and industrial companies since content plays such an important role in today’s digital marketing programs. These dynamic sites combine static webpages with a blog to give you the best of both worlds – fresh content and functionality. See my post, “Build Industrial Websites as Dynamic Blog Sites” for advantages of blog sites.

    The thing that worries me though is that in my conversations with some of these industrial companies, I find that they want to discuss their choice of Content Management System (CMS) with me. In my opinion, that is not what you should be focusing on.

    As the Owner/President/CEO, your input should be in shaping the content marketing strategy. Focus on the kind of content you need that will attract the most qualified traffic to your site and convert those visitors into customers. Help the site designer build the functionalities that your site visitors want. Leave the choice of the CMS to the web developer, be it in-house or outsourced.

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  • Is Blogging Right for Every Industrial Company?

    The fact that you found this industrial marketing blog and are reading my post, tells me that you have asked yourself that very question and are curious about the answer. There are literally millions of articles written on why you should be blogging and they are easy to find in Google. I see no point in rehashing the same ideas here.

    Instead, let me share my experiences in helping manufacturers, engineering and industrial companies launch successful blogs, produce results from them and in some instances, flat out advised them not to start one.

    In this post, I’ll talk about some of the more difficult questions you should be asking yourself before jumping on the blogging bandwagon. Otherwise, you may be joining the ranks of countless other industrial blogs that were launched with a great deal of enthusiasm and expectations but were abandoned after only a few months.

    Let’s dig a little deeper to understand what it really takes to achieve the four major benefits of blogging.

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