Creating customer-centric content for manufacturing marketing is no small feat. Unlike other industries, manufacturers face long and complex sales cycles, often involving multiple stakeholders—from engineers to procurement teams to C-suite executives—each with unique priorities. The challenge doesn’t end there. Manufacturing marketers must also produce content that resonates across every stage of the buyer’s journey, from initial awareness to the final purchase decision.
According to the 2023 Manufacturing Content Marketing Report by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 62% of manufacturers identify creating content for different stages of the buyer’s journey as a top challenge. This statistic underscores the struggle many businesses face in aligning their marketing efforts with the nuanced needs of industrial buyers.
I’ll explore five key considerations for creating customer-centric industrial content in this blog. From aligning content with buyer personas to leveraging the power of Generative AI, this guide will help you navigate the unique challenges of manufacturing content marketing.
While these insights are designed to get you started, achieving success often requires a deeper, strategic approach. That’s where my industrial marketing agency, Tiecas, and I can help. With decades of experience crafting effective manufacturing marketing strategies, we understand what it takes to deliver measurable results.
Today’s informed manufacturing buyers expect more than generic marketing messages. They seek solutions tailored to their unique challenges, and this is where customer-centric content becomes a game-changer.
Consider this: 60% of B2B buyers can and may finalize purchase decisions based solely on digital content (SellersCommerce). Moreover, 55% of buyers rely more on content to make decisions now than in previous years (ExpertMarket).
These statistics highlight a clear trend: buyers prioritize content that addresses their specific needs, making customer-focused content a must-have for manufacturing marketers.
The success of your manufacturing content marketing strategy hinges on how well you understand your audience. This isn’t just about knowing their job titles; it’s about diving deeper into their unique roles, responsibilities, and pain points. For example, engineers typically look beyond product specifications. They need proof of concept—evidence that your solutions work under real-world operating conditions. This could include:
According to the 2024 Content Trends & Planning Guide by NetLine, engineering and manufacturing professionals consume content in diverse formats, including white papers, eBooks, and infographics. The same report highlights that 12% of content consumers in manufacturing and production represent engineering, while 14% work in manufacturing operations. These insights reinforce the need for targeted, format-specific content that resonates with your audience’s preferences.
But engineers aren’t the only audience. Procurement teams often prioritize cost-effectiveness and supply chain efficiency, while decision-makers at the executive level focus on ROI and long-term value. To effectively reach all these personas, you must map your content to the buyer’s journey stages:
Manufacturing marketers often struggle to achieve this level of alignment due to the complexity of their audience. That’s why a strategic approach is critical. By mapping content to personas and journey stages, you ensure that every touchpoint addresses a specific need or challenge, driving engagement and trust.
For a tailored roadmap that aligns your manufacturing marketing strategy with these critical buyer personas and stages, explore our Manufacturing Marketing Strategy service.
In manufacturing, the sales cycle is rarely linear. It often involves multiple stakeholders, each with their own priorities and decision-making criteria and evolving buyer needs over time. Add to that the complexity of extended timelines, and it’s easy to see why a one-size-fits-all content approach fails. Without a strategic framework, even well-crafted content can miss the mark.
A robust content marketing strategy aligns your marketing efforts with the complexities of your buyer’s journey, ensuring your messaging remains consistent, relevant, and effective.
If you’re struggling to create a roadmap tailored to your unique challenges, explore our Manufacturing Marketing Strategy service. With decades of experience in industrial marketing, Tiecas can help you build a strategy that delivers measurable results.
For industrial buyers, trust is built on a foundation of technical accuracy and a deep understanding of their challenges. Engineers, for instance, expect content that goes beyond surface-level marketing fluff—they need detailed insights that address their specific pain points while demonstrating your expertise. The same holds true for other stakeholders, such as procurement teams and executives, who require tailored messaging that aligns with their priorities.
The Challenge: Producing content that bridges the gap between technical complexity and customer relevance. This means:
Why Relevance Matters: Irrelevant or overly generic content fails to resonate and can damage credibility, industrial buyers are quick to dismiss materials that don’t demonstrate a clear understanding of their unique requirements and challenges.
This is where the expertise of technical writers who understand manufacturing comes into play. Unlike generalist writers, they can create content that:
At Tiecas, we specialize in Industrial Content Creation that balances technical accuracy with customer relevance. Whether it’s technical articles, white papers, or case studies, we help you deliver content that engages your audience and builds confidence in your brand.
Generative AI has transformed how marketers approach content creation, offering speed and efficiency that were once unimaginable. For manufacturing marketing, AI tools can assist with:
However, while AI excels in efficiency, it has clear limitations when it comes to creating industrial content that resonates with your industrial and technical audience.
To make the most of Generative AI, you need human expertise to refine its outputs. This involves fact-checking, adding industry-specific insights, and ensuring the final content is both technically accurate and aligned with buyer needs. As I’ve written in my earlier blogs on Generative AI for Industrial SEO Strategy and Industrial Content Creation and Content Marketing, AI is a powerful tool—but it’s not a substitute for human expertise.
Here’s a telling statistic from Gartner Marketing Predictions: AI will reduce brand visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By 2028, brands’ organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more as people embrace GenAI-powered search.
The evidence: Search Generative Experience (SGE), a GenAI Q&A form, takes the top organic position in over 90% of popular search queries, and almost half of consumers prefer SGE over traditional search results. The Gartner Digital IQ Index also identified that brands experienced a 9.5% decline in organic site traffic this year.
At Tiecas, we combine the efficiency of AI with decades of industrial marketing experience to deliver high-quality, customer-centric content.
Creating industrial content is only part of the equation. You need to track its performance and refine your approach based on data to ensure it drives measurable results. Industrial buyers expect relevant and timely content at each stage of their journey, making performance measurement a critical part of your manufacturing content marketing strategy.
Content plays a crucial role in engaging top-of-the-funnel Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and guiding them toward becoming Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). By nurturing leads with personalized and relevant content, you enable your sales team to have more productive conversations with better-informed prospects and more likely to convert. This approach can significantly improve win rates while aligning marketing and sales efforts.
Key Metrics to Track:
While tools like Google Analytics provide valuable insights, they may not be sufficient for tracking the full buyer’s journey. A Marketing Automation (MA) platform enables you to:
Refining content performance isn’t just about fixing underperforming pieces but also optimizing what works.
At Tiecas, we help manufacturers refine their content marketing strategies by using data to drive decisions and marketing automation to enhance lead tracking and nurturing. Our Industrial Content Marketing service ensures your content consistently delivers results across the buyer’s journey.
Creating customer-centric content for manufacturing marketing is a challenge, but you don’t have to face it alone. At Tiecas, we bring decades of experience in industrial marketing to help manufacturers like you overcome these hurdles and achieve measurable results.
Whether you need a comprehensive content marketing strategy, technical content creation, or a lead nurturing program to drive conversions, we’re here to help.
Explore our core services:
Let’s start a conversation if you’re ready to elevate your content marketing with data-driven insights and lead nurturing strategies.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.