Tl;dr - Traditional content marketing was built on articles that answered prospects' buying questions and helped them find you when they searched Google. That's increasingly difficult. So, our content marketing must shift in a couple of important ways. First, to provide content that they can consume passively, in audio and video or scrollable social. Second, provide helpful and broad business benefit, information and insight (vs. content largely focused on decision stage questions and topics.) This means pre-awareness content, and it requires you to assemble a faculty of experts who contribute insights you help make available through your marketing channels.
It's Time to Update Your Content Marketing Framework for Today's Buyers and Markets
Manufacturing marketing is changing.
Ten years ago a company could conduct simple SEO research, write 700 word blog posts with some reasonable optimization, publish them, and see an impact on their rankings.
Although rankings have always been a zero-sum game, most competitors weren't active or effective, so a few posts and landing pages could yield a top-ten ranking. Google also primarily served organic search results, with a few paid links below.
It was relatively easy to get clicked because there wasn't much competition for industrial-related terms.
When a prospect hit your site, it was relatively easy to convert them to a lead. Forms and downloadable offers were a novelty. People were happy to participate.
Shoot, back then, it was even relatively easy to reach them for a conversation to follow up on a form submission!
Content marketing was a fresh and exciting opportunity for marketers and buyers. People were thrilled to be able to search and find info. They'd stop, read it, and then dig deeper.
You know it's different now.
The volume of content, the sophistication of SEO, number of competitors, and changes in search engine behavior (providing answers now rather than links) mean that today:
- ranking decay is rapid, and the resources required to maintain, much less increase, rankings are significantly increased
- nearly 60% of searches don't result in any click1
- buyers are overwhelmed by content, and they're much less likely to engage with traditional written content unless they're well into the decision phase of their buying journey
There's still an important role for content. Companies can impact rankings with careful work and consistent effort. And content plays an important role in sales enablement and in the consideration and decision phases of a buying journey. Following Marcus Sheridan's They Ask; You Answer methodology still has merit.
But for long-sell cycle, big ticket complex sales like capital equipment, we have to change the way we use digital channels for manufacturing marketing in response to these changes.
Changing Buying Habits and Content Consumption
All these background changes mean that buyers now engage with different kinds of content, in different formats. (Read more here - Navigating a Scary Shift in Industrial Content Marketing)
The short version is this:
- you must create content that prospects consume as "edutainment" - either passively while they do other things (like exercise, drive, wash dishes, cut the grass, etc.) and or scrollable content for social media platforms (mostly LinkedIn)
- The content must be over-indexed on "pre-awareness" topics. In other words, you must provide entertaining, broad, substantive information to help them do their jobs better.
This is more than just answering the questions they usually ask when buying. It's now critical that we establish a relationship and build trust long before they consider a purchase much less compare vendors.
That means we can't just talk about our stuff (what they might eventually buy) but instead need to provide meaningful insights into various aspects of their job and environment.
It's easy to say we need to create pre-awareness content. It's hard to do. And it's tough for companies who traditionally see their buyers through the narrow lense of the stuff they sell them.
That means we must create a new framework for thinking about industrial content marketing.
That's what the KUUUL™ Content Marketing Framework provides.
The KUUUL Content Marketing Framework for Manufacturing Marketing
Traditional content marketing focused on content for three stages of the buying journey.
- Decision content - why to pick one vendor or another
- Consideration content - how to compare options vs. the status quo
- Awareness content - do you have this problem?
They all played a role and can continue to - with the big caveat that you're much less likely to have big organic search wins, as noted above.
But increasingly pre-awareness content is the middleware helps to build trust and relationships over time and in aggregate.
Recent research found that 71% of the time, buyers ultimately select the vendor who was initially at the top of their short list2 - in other words, the company they thought they'd buy from before they talked to anyone normally won the deal.
That results from building trust and familiarity with them early on; before they're trying to quantify or solve any problem, much less something specific to your solution.
That requires pre-awareness content, requiring us to think about topics much more broadly than we normally have.
That's where the KUUUL content marketing framework comes in.
KUUUL is "Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns Learning." In other words, using the KUUUL content marketing framework helps us to think of our prospects' worlds from their perspective.
Instead of answering the questions they likely have about buying our product, we shift to thinking about the questions they should be asking about their business, and their prospects' and customers' businesses. This means we need to expand our aperture and understanding significantly.
If you run a machinery business like many of my clients, that means examples of industrial marketing topics could include:
- recruiting and retaining skilled talent
- optimizing ERP systems
- ingredient and materials trends
- energy costs
- inventory management best practices
- employee benefits topics
- improving working conditions
- shelf life
- logistics & supply chain (e.g. reducing product damage in transit)
- downtime insurance
- tax credit and grant programs to support investment in training and facilities
- preventative maintenance trends
- sustainability
and countless other topics!
Some will relate tangentially to what your machines do. Many will be COMPLETELY unrelated. Some will be of interest to many people, much of the time. Some will only interest a few and only in particular circumstances.
But in aggregate, they'll provide a resource for your prospects and customers that will resonate and provide them with thought-provoking ideas that will occasionally help them materially improve their business. You and your company will build trust and relevance.
But how do we provide substantive and insightful information on topics that are well outside of our area of expertise? Through partnerships and guest experts.
This is a natural fit when you consider the types of content that we need to create. Scrollable social, video, audio and podcast content suits this framework well.
You can find experts who are delighted to share their insights with your audience (and who can help you reach their audience for broader content distribution) by seeking out:
- authors
- podcasters
- experts from adjacent technology companies
- leaders of businesses in these other disciplines
- trade association experts
- customer and prospects
- leaders of successful companies
- think tank analysts
- and more
You may not even know what your prospects KUUUL topics and problems are, but if you find the right guests for webinars, events, guest articles, videos, LinkedIn Live sessions and more, you'll gradually uncover stumble across the topics, creating a body of helpful information for your prospects in the process.
A Faculty of Experts - Collaborative Industrial Content Marketing
You need to build a team of experts who are happy to leverage your infrastructure and programs to share their insights with your audience. They'll become like visiting faculty for your audience (prospects and customers.)
Each of the lessons will be accessible (and searchable) for prospects who happen to be wrestling with specific problems, and all the lessons will gradually build value for your prospects.
Successful manufacturing marketing is increasingly about helping prospects gradually improve their business - and that means passively consumable, pre-awareness content.
You can't do that on your own, and you can't do it by accident. The KUUUL Content marketing Framework provides a set of guidelines to help you proactively build a valuable industry resource and attract large audiences.
Then, when it's time for them to consider your solutions, you'll already be a trusted, valued resource.
1 - SparkToro 2024 Zero-Click research
2 - Pavilion's 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect, Year of the Brand Crisis
