4 Manufacturing Marketing Trends in 2015

1. Blogging

As a manufacturing company, you are the expert and thought leader about your products, so why not share this knowledge within your industry? While blogging isn’t new for 2015, it’s becoming increasingly important for manufacturing companies to get into this space. If you aren’t doing it yet, odds are your competitor is. As Google comes out with new ways of ranking, search engine optimization continues to morph. Staying relevant with fresh content will help with your company’s overall SEO strategy. 

While blogging might sound like a daunting task, these 5 ideas for creating content will make blogging seem like a walk in the park.

2 . Twist on Tradeshows – Interactive

Chances are, there are annual trade shows that you attend without question. But are they really worth it? When budget time comes around this year, consider if the booth space you’re paying for is actually benefiting your company. Can you downsize and put your marketing dollars towards something that will give you more bang for you buck? What are you getting out of the show currently? It’s 2015 – you should consider going more interactive at these shows. Tradeshows + Marketing Automation = a match made in heaven. 

Here are a few ideas to get more creative at your annual tradeshow: 

Reach Out

You know those people you interacted with during last year's tradeshow? Reach out to them prior to this year's. Let them know your booth number or ask them if they’d be interested in setting up a sit down meeting at your booth. This can be either a phone call or an email, but be sure to make it personalized. 

Reallocate Budget

Consider purchasing lists of attendees from the show (if available). This would allow you to lead into the show with a drip campaign, slowly letting them know what types of exciting things they can expect to see at your booth. Try setting up some meeting time with these people through a form submission. 

Relevant Contact Information

Create a way to collect attendees' contact information at the show. While a lot of shows include a badge scanner for a fee, you should try doing this in a more interactive way. By including a quick form on a touch screen, you’ll allow people to give more information about themselves and what they’re interested in than you could gather in the badge scanner. This will help for show follow up. 

Follow Up

Once the show is over, give a few days for people to travel back home and get settled. Take those lists you gathered from your custom form and then segment them into multiple lists so you can create additional drip campaigns for each segment. Again, make it personalized! 

Don’t Forget Social Media

Make sure to find the hashtag the show is promoting and use that in your social posts. Send out exciting posts that are relevant to what is going on at your booth. If you are doing a demo, tweet about it beforehand and ask people to join you at a specific time.  

3. Video Content

For manufacturing companies, video content is becoming an essential part of marketing strategies. Here are some examples of different types of videos manufacturers are doing: 

• How-to’s
• Product demo’s 
• Customer interviews for case studies or testimonials 
• Real life examples of customers using the product 
• Product reviews 
• Shop floor tours
• Company overview
• Culture overview 
• New product releases 
• Webinars

There is a time and place for a highly produced video (which can be pricey), but for many of the above examples, you don’t necessarily have to hire a video crew to create them. Consider a vlog series (video blog) with one or multiple types of video. 

Video is not going away, if anything it’s becoming more prominent.  Social media channels have fully embraced video. According to a study done by Content Marketing Institute, 81% of manufacturing marketers use YouTube to distribute content. 

4. LinkedIn Groups

If you are unsure that Facebook is right for you, and you don’t really see anything you post in Twitter “trending” on the web, you might find that LinkedIn is the answer for your business. You very well might already have a LinkedIn company page, but you might not know about the great conversations happening in LinkedIn groups and how you can contribute. Here are a few tips about publishing content in LinkedIn groups: 

Know the Rules

Understand what kind of content is acceptable to post. Each group can do things differently, some have group moderators that make sure content is relevant before it gets published.

Active Members

You want to make sure you aren’t wasting your time in a group that people aren’t engaging in. Look for groups that are relevant to the topics you will be posting about that also have a lot of user interaction to ensure your content is getting found by the right people. 

Be Unique

Post unique content into the various groups you are a member of. If you are in multiple groups, odds are there are also other people in the same groups as well. Make sure you are not just copying the same message into a number of groups. 

Engage With Members

When people comment on a post that you've published, it is important to engage with them. Even if they might not agree with your post, thank them for their comment and address it in a very professional way. After all, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. 

Be sure not to make these social media mistakes many manufacturers make.