The manufacturing industry has big opportunities to improve its content marketing strategies — while also reaping the rewards that come with a well-executed content strategy — according to a report released by the Content Marketing Institute and co-sponsored by 6sense.
According to a survey of manufacturers:
- Seventy-one percent of those surveyed indicated that content marketing has become even more important to their business in the past year
- Only around one-third of manufacturers have a documented content marketing strategy
The report highlights the challenges manufacturers face with their strategies, solutions for those top challenges, insights into average spend on the strategy, and more.
Read ‘Manufacturing Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends’
Let’s take a closer look at the challenges detailed in the report.
The Challenges Manufacturers Face with Content Marketing
The top challenges cited in the report include:
- Creating enough content to align to the entire buying journey
- Aligning sales and marketing toward the same content goals
- Overcoming silos within the organization
Those three challenges were each chosen by over half of those surveyed.
Overcoming those challenges requires building open lines of communication not only among sales, marketing and your broader manufacturing organization, but also between you and your customers.
When your content marketer taps into the real experiences of your customers, it becomes much easier to create content for the entire buying journey.
The Benefits of Content Marketing for Manufacturers
In the report, respondents indicated the following benefits of their content marketing efforts:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Establishing trust with their target audiences
- Educating readers
- Growing relationships with existing customers
- Generating demand and new leads
The CMI’s report makes it clear that content marketing is a viable and winning strategy for manufacturers producing tangible benefits, but that content marketers continue to face challenges that limit their ability to capture value for their organizations.
