In the recently released Manufacturing Content Marketing 2020 report, there are many areas where manufacturers have made positive strides in their marketing efforts. Some highlights include:
All good and encouraging news. Content marketing is working for manufacturers.
Along with the successes, industry reports can be equally as valuable, or more so, in pointing out improvement opportunities. You can peel back the layers of these reports to see what the group may be missing out on.
And in the 2020 report, there are several areas in the content creation and distribution section that standout as opportunity areas that could be exploited by savvy marketers for their benefit.
They are as follows…
After all, your loyal customers would also like to know about and be offered new product versions, upgrades or accessories. But if you’re primarily spending content resources on acquiring new customers, chances are you’re spending more on new customer acquisition costs than you need to and missing out on deeper sales opportunities.
Surprisingly, however, the report found that 71% of all content created by manufacturing marketers went towards top-of-funnel and mid-funnel purposes of generating awareness and consideration. Only 10% of all content was created for post-sale goals such as loyalty, retention, and brand advocacy.
If your business model values repeat sales, up-sells, referral sales, and customer retention you’ll want to focus more on this opportunity area. It may just give you a leg up on the competition.
Here are some content and program ideas to spark your interest and creativity in bottom of funnel marketing initiatives:
Survey respondents were asked which content types are the highest performing for their organization in specific categories. Their top response for each is as follows:
| To Build Brand Awareness | To Secure Leads | To Nurture Leads | To Convert Leads |
| Social Media Content (36%) | In-Person Events (24%) | Email Newsletters (31%) | In-Person Events (33%) |
What’s interesting about this is the fact that in-person events are a high-performing content category to secure and convert leads in the manufacturing sector. The report doesn’t give us more than this to go on except that 65% of manufacturing marketers say they’ve used in-person events as a content type in the last 12 months. Additionally, it was reported 43% used “speaking/events” as an organic content distribution channel.
Clearly, there’s an opportunity here for manufacturing to generate content for in-person events. By taking a broader view of content marketing to include not just digital marketing, but also printed materials, tradeshow displays, seminars, workshops, speaking/events and the like, manufacturing marketers stand to capture and convert more leads than ever before.
The third opportunity area for manufacturers to consider falls in the metrics and goals section of the 2020 report:
That’s the bad news. The good news is manufacturing marketers are tracking content performance in the following top five metric categories:
Yet in light of all this commendable tracking activity, 64% say they don’t track or know if they track ROI of their content marketing. So let’s dive into how to get started with tracking the ROI of your content marketing initiatives.
Content Marketing ROI
A measure of how much revenue is gained after subtracting your costs for creating and distributing content.
Measuring your ROI is arguably the most important content marketing success measurement because it’s directly tied to revenue. You should consider measuring the ROI of each area of content in your content marketing and distribution tactical execution.
Start with the big picture in mind. As discussed in the article, Digital Marketing for Manufacturers: Improve Leads, Sales, and Retention, there are four major areas in a template approach:
All of the content creation and distribution costs that go into attracting, converting and closing are then subtracted from the revenue gained to measure your ROI acquisition metric. Likewise, the costs associated with the bottom of funnel activities to delight existing customers can be used to determine the ROI of customer retention and loyalty derived revenue.
Once you have organized your content creation and distribution costs in each key area, you’re then ready to formulate the ROI. Here’s a formula by Convince and Convert to help you calculate ROI like a pro:
Example: $20,000 Revenue Gained - $8,000 Investment = $12,000 / $8,000 = 150% ROI
Not only will tracking content marketing ROI help you measure the overall success of your efforts, but it will also give you insights into what’s working and what you can improve or substitute to grow revenues.
Which opportunities will you focus on in 2020? Will you create more content for the bottom of the funnel or in support of in-person events? Are you interested in learning how to better measure your content marketing ROI?
Whether you’re intent on taking advantage of these opportunity areas or you’re looking to get out of the blocks with content marketing creation and distribution for 2020, email yourself the free ebook: Digital Marketing for Manufacturers. It’s full of helpful tips and strategies you won’t want to be without.