Industrial Marketing Content that Helps Buyers

It is very common to find marketing content from manufacturers and industrial companies that is all about how great their products are or that their technology is innovative. Sellers may be too close to the forest to see the trees and firmly believe their marketing content is helpful to their buyers.

Buyers can easily find information about your products and that of your competition from their online research. So ask yourself this question, “Is my industrial marketing content really helping my buyers make a more informed decision and is it moving them closer them to a RFQ?”

I suspect most of you already know the answer otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing and reading the same objections to content marketing from so many manufacturers and industrial companies. They know the “why” but are having a difficult time figuring out “how” publishing content will help them sell more of their industrial products.

IMO, the key to content marketing success is relevance. Sounds simple but it is not an easy task to put yourself in your buyers’ shoes and think from their perspective. Sooner or later you’ll slip back into talking about you and your products. The truth is that your buyers don’t care about you, they only care about what you can do for them (See my post, “Industrial Content Reengineering for Improving WIIFM Relevance”)

Here are some marketing content ideas for helping your buyers move closer to the procurement stage of the industrial buy cycle.

• Online product configurators
• “How to Order” part number builder
• Parametric part number search application
• Valve sizing programs
• Online maintenance data management, tracking legacy installation and managing spare parts inventory
• 2D CAD Drawings and 3D CAD Models
• Online interactive and real-time design tools
• Cross reference guides
• Evaluation and engineering kits

I am not minimizing the value of more conventional marketing content such as product data sheets, application notes, case studies, whitepapers and blog posts to name just a few. They are very good for engaging with prospects and leads that are at the top and the middle of the sales funnel. (See Use Content Marketing to Manage Industrial Sales Funnels and Creating Digital Content for Industrial Marketing).

The marketing content ideas I have listed here are best suited for the late stages of the buying cycle to move industrial buyers closer to specifying your products in their BOMs and RFQs.

Download my 7 Content Marketing Tactics for Marketing Industrial Products white paper to learn more about how you can use industrial content marketing tactics to engage your prospects and move them forward in their buying cycle.

Do you use any of the industrial content marketing applications mentioned here? Please add to my list with your own content ideas.