Key Content Marketing Stats for Manufacturers in 2017
by MGB2B
The Content Marketing Institute recently released its annual report: 2017 Manufacturing Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends North America. And the results are promising for manufacturers this year. Many who were stuck are starting to find their way through the world of content marketing. And lots of manufacturers are starting to see results.
Here Are 6 Key Content Marketing Stats for Manufacturers — and What They Mean for Your Business:
- 85% of Manufacturing Marketers Are Using Content Marketing to Reach Their Prospects.
What that means for you: Content marketing may not be part of your marketing plan, but it is likely something your competitors are doing. If you are using content marketing, it’s important that you differentiate your content. The content you are producing should resonate with the audience but also reflect your brand’s strategic positioning in order to accomplish this.
- Of Those Who Don’t Use Content Marketing, 53% Plan to Do So Within the Next Year.
What that means for you: Again, if content marketing is not part of your marketing strategy, 2017 is the year to get it going. Your competitors are likely already on the content train.
- 92% of Content Marketers in the Manufacturing Sector Use Email to Distribute Content.
What that means for you: There are many ways to distribute content, but email is one of the most frequently used. What’s more, manufacturers in particular have success at getting their prospects to open their emails. So having an email program is a must, but it’s also important to know how to do it right. That includes everything from proper segmentation of your lists to intuitive design based on the user experience.
- 63% Proclaim SEM to Be the Most Effective Method for Promoting Content.
What that means for you: Along with email, Paid Search should be among your distribution tactics when you’re ready to put your content out there. It’s an effective way to get new leads — one that can be fine-tuned easily and quickly. You should also consider hiring an SEO Specialist or an agency that can help you with all aspects of Search Engine Marketing — both paid and organic.
- 82% Are Running Print Ads to Promote Their Content.
What that means for you: Advertising in Trade Publications is far from dead. In fact, there are many reasons why you should strengthen your relationship with your trade pub reps. Chief among them — you can score opportunities to promote your content digitally to their lists and drive new leads into your sales funnel.
- 69% of Manufacturers Who Do Content Marketing Attribute Their Success to Good Strategy.
What that means for you: A Content Strategy is one of the most important parts of a successful content program. If you’ve skipped this step, it’s a good idea to go back and make sure you have a plan before you start creating and distributing content in 2017. Make sure your Content Strategy is well-documented so you can measure its success at several points throughout the year.
As you prepare for 2017, Content Marketing is an essential tool to have in your arsenal. If you haven’t already, it’s time to surpass your competitors, and establish yourself as the authority in your industry.
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Email Marketing: What Manufacturers Are Missing
by MGB2B
In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s important to avoid email marketing mistakes. Email marketing is more than just a way to blast out new products and company news to your prospects; it is your company’s way of driving leads to your site and further along in your sales funnel.
For manufacturers, email marketing is a must, but it requires solid strategy, attention to detail, and good timing in order to be effective. Recently, IBM did a study on email marketing and its effectiveness for eighteen major industries, manufacturing among them. They focused on important benchmarks like unique open rates, bounce rates, and click-through rates. And the results might surprise you.
What’s Working for Manufacturers:
- Prospects Are Opening Your Emails. On the whole, the manufacturing industry has an average unique open rate of 25.9%. That’s higher than the Travel, Entertainment, Financial Services, and Retail Industries, just to name a few.
- Prospects Are Clicking Through to Your Site. If you’re like the majority of manufacturing companies, you have a unique CTR of around 3.5%. Again, this a solid showing, about smack in the middle of where other industries rank. That means you have good content that is relevant to whatever subject lines you’ve used.
What Manufacturers Need to Fix:
- The Bounce. Hard bounce rates for Manufacturers are higher than any other industry (1.59%). Manufacturing was the only industry with a bounce rate above one percent. It more than quadrupled industries like Retail (%0.285) and Real Estate (%0.315). A hard bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are sent which get rejected and are never received. This can be due to a typo, nonexistent email, updated email, etc. The number typically increases as time goes by if the errors aren’t fixed.
The study suggests that infrequency might be the root of the problem, and it very well may be a large part of the problem. So it’s a good idea to look at increasing the frequency of your emails. But there are a few other ways to lower your bounce rate:
- Keep Your Lists Updated: It is as important to update your lists as it is to send out emails. The longer you wait to update your list, the more changes need to be made. One way to avoid this altogether is to double opt-in your lists. This will ensure that your list is made up of quality leads who are interested in what you are selling.
- A Good Lead is the Best Lead: Leads are good. Good leads are great. It is important to make sure when searching for manufacturing leads that they are reliable and accurate. Purchasing a list of one thousand leads with three hundred errors and outdated prospects will hurt more in the long run than a list of five hundred top-notch leads. Quantity is important, but quality is even more important. It will be more cost-effective to enter only quality leads (preferably sorted into segments) than it will to buy a mass list and opt-out the bad ones.
- When You See Bounces…BOUNCE: As soon as a bounce comes across your desk, get rid of it. This is the most crucial part in lowering the hard bounce rate. If you send out ten thousand emails and your bounce rate is one percent, that’s 100 leads you need to delete. This lowers your bounce rate and increases your unique open and click-to-open rates, driving them into the sales funnel, where you can nurture them and eventually convert them into customers.
How Manufacturers Can Find a Voice That Works in 8 Steps
by MGB2B
You are not a robot. Neither are your colleagues. Not most of them, anyway. So why would you want your company to sound like one? It’s time for you to find the right manufacturer brand voice. And use it everywhere.
The question you might be asking is: where do I start?
You start with a little research. Maybe you’ve done some already. But if you haven’t, there’s no need to freak out. It’s something you can gather fairly easily, using either your marketing staff or an outside agency to help you. The most important part of the research you’re about to do is simple: talk to your current customers. Your customers are your brand. The things they like about you, the reasons they’ve stuck with you for months or years or even decades, and how you have helped them overcome challenges – that is what the research is going to unearth.
This is information you may think you know already. But chances are, you only know part of it. And if the voice you are using on your current website, blog, social media, and sales tools is too dry or mechanical, you are not using your understanding of your customers in the best way possible. Because just like you, your customers are people. They may be steeped in your industry jargon, or they might be on the periphery, but your customers – and your prospects – no matter what their level, need to understand and relate to what you are saying. This is how you drive people into and through your sales funnel.
Here’s an 8-step plan to help manufacturers find their voice, and stick with it. If you are working on a new, overarching marketing plan, it’s a process that you don’t want to skip!
- Interview Key Staff. Assign an outside person or agency to talk to your staff about who you are. While your customers will be the predominant driving factor in creating your voice, your people will also have a role. You need to find out anonymously (so they feel comfortable talking) how they perceive the brand. What works, what doesn’t, and how they would describe what makes your company so great to a friend.
- Interview Your Best Customers. Your core users know you the best. They like you. What do they like? Why are they loyal? They can tell you what differentiates you from your competitors better than anyone else. Maybe they think you are more authentic. Maybe they think you are more buttoned-up and professional. Those things will determine what kind of voice you have more than anything else.
- Look at the Results. Have your marketing team and/or agency work through the resulting information to determine where there is agreement from most or all of the respondents. You’ll find out a lot about your company that perhaps you’ve never heard or seen in writing before.
- Develop Buyer Personas. You can’t have a voice if you don’t know who you’re talking to. Developing buyer personas will help you to figure out the voice of your brand, and how to alter it slightly, depending on which of your target audiences you might be addressing. For instance, the persona for a 30-something purchasing agent in the Northeast will be markedly different from the persona for a 50-something engineer in the Midwest. Your voice will likely have to change for communications targeted at each specific vertical.
- Create a Positioning & Messaging Document. Your research won’t just help you determine your personas; it will also help you determine a positioning statement, an elevator speech, and fleshed out language that might appear on your website and collateral pieces. This is perhaps the most important part, for every marketing material you create from here on out should be based on what comes out of this document. It’s essentially your brand bible.
- Roll Out Your New Voice to the Team. Once you have your bible exactly where you want it to be and you know the voice of your brand, it’s time to spread the good news to your colleagues. This is an often-overlooked step in the process, but it is an essential part. Everyone needs to be singing from the same song sheet, or it won’t work. You’ll have 20 different brand voices instead of one. Each sales person needs to know your elevator speech – he or she can revise slightly based on their own style, but the brand’s voice has to come through to the new audience. And it’s not just about the sales team. It’s about every single person in your organization. The way Jeanie from accounting talks about the company at a family BBQ or the way Joe the Operations Supervisor answers the question he gets at the weekly poker game: Where do you work, again?
- Give Good Content. What you say is just as important as how you say it. When it comes to content and monthly emails, make sure that you are being helpful, offering an opinion, or possibly even entertaining. Insights, tips, expert opinions on current industry events – this type of content helps you both establish authority and sound like someone who can be trusted. Your audience prefers this over a hard sell every time. A CEO is interested in learning how you can help him cut costs more than he is interested in the product itself. So are the director-level staff that answer to him.
- Honor thy Google. Google is constantly coming up with new algorithms that weed out impersonators and reward authentic companies. You need to be ready for it as you work on your company’s SEO. Readability is a key factor that Google takes into account when determining your credibility as a company. Simple is usually better. So as you develop your brand voice, stay away from advanced vocabulary as much as possible. The simpler and more conversational you are, the more authentic a brand you are perceived to be and the higher you rank in a search.
Some of these steps are easier than others. If you don’t have a marketing team that has time to conduct interviews, a dedicated content team, or an in-house SEO expert, you might need to make a few new hires or talk to a strategic marketing agency (or a little of both) to get things going. Finding your voice and developing content that embodies it is essential. It helps B2B brands stand out against competitors as technology, marketing, and the economy continue to evolve. If you get these 8 steps right, your company will be well ahead of the competition.
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