Some say manufacturing is one of those “dull and boring” industries that are impossible to make interesting for readers. It gets lumped in with financial services and insurance as something with no zing. What they forget is that, to the target customer, these industries are not boring at all. In fact, manufacturing is of very great interest to those who are in the market for those particular services.
In other words, if you have done your research, you already have a built-in audience. Now all you have to do is provide the blog.
Develop a Targeted Blogging Strategy
As with any content, it is critical to understand who your ideal customer is. Without knowing specifically who to write to all your blog posts for, your blog will be too general and vague to hold the interest of those you hope to convert to customers.
Building a Persona
A persona is a detailed description of your ideal buyer. It contains much more than basic demographic information. It also includes information about your ideal buyer’s position within the company, problem to be solved and why it needs to be solved now, and a list of influencers, decision makers, and activities that impact that buyer’s decision making process.
If you have more than one type of ideal buyer you must create a separate persona for each. And here’s a little trick: name the persona and write to it as if it was someone sitting across from you. This personalizes your posts making them more conversational sounding and highly readable.
Content Branching
The thought of creating a certain amount of posts per week over the next twelve months can make you catatonic. Treat this like any other large project and take it a step at a time. You’ll be surprised at how far you have gotten by the end.
Content branching is a method of starting on the surface and digging your way downwards.
- Determine 6 to 8 content themes that match the most common concerns raised by customers.
- Plan foundational materials for each theme. These will be large scale content pieces on the order of an industry report, a book, or a set of interviews with experts in your industry.
- Take each foundational piece and break it into smaller posts, videos, and other content to build out more in-depth content.
By the time the three steps are completed you should have more than enough to create a year’s worth of posts.
Develop an Editorial Calendar
This is the framework for publishing all that content at the proper time. This calendar will keep you and your team on top of content development, production and publishing so you don’t get behind.
Measure
You still need to know if your blog is doing its job. The only way to do that is to collect actionable metrics that can show you how your content is performing and give you clues to improve it.
Examples:
- Leads generated
- Conversion rates
- Lead to customer ratio
- Traffic to lead ratio
- Top 10 posts
- Bottom 10 posts
As you gain experience you will be able to make predictions about performance and start trying to reach goals rather than simply measure raw numbers. You will also be able to identify the most meaningful metrics for each phase of your campaigns.
Develop Content
You already know the themes you will explore. Now you take each theme and identify resources associated with it.
- Arrange for interviews with influencers and experts.
- Analyze the latest industry reports for trends impacting your customers.
- Run surveys and report results.
- Create how-to and list posts.
Your blog can be a way to discover those topics that really strike a chord with customers. Take the most popular posts and use them as the basis for other content from white papers to individual tweets.
Another route to content creation is to curate content. Content curation is the act of finding interesting materials about your industry and writing either an introduction to the piece or an explanation of how the information can be used in your business. A related post to curation is the wrap-up where you look at news of the past week or month and providing an intro to the article and a link to continue reading.
One secret to finding content ideas is to read content. There are many industry websites with the type of information you can use to develop your posts from:
You should make a habit of visiting these resources on a regular basis to keep up with industry news. Make it easy by setting up an RSS feed for each blog you want to follow.
Develop Promotional Pathways
You don’t want to publish content and then let it sit there waiting for readers to find it. Introduce it in venues where your ideal buyers spend their time online. You should have accounts and pages set up on the major social networks and become active in industry groups and communities.
Each time you publish a blog article you should post your article to the social networks, groups and forums. By promoting your content you make it more likely to be read and easier to share. Aside from offering social sharing buttons directly on your blog, each post can have yet another pathway to the audience through sharing across and within networks.
Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the big four publishing arenas but you can also submit articles to curated websites. As the number of posts grows you can begin building longer content from related posts, create landing pages to particularly popular posts and continue to share older posts on social media.
