Content Marketing Outlook Specifically For Manufacturers Released For 2019

By Bill King

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) recently produced its Manufacturing Content Marketing 2019 – Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report. Sponsored by IEEE GlobalSpec, the report presents the findings from 146 respondents to the ninth annual CMI/MarketingProfs content marketing survey who indicated that their organization is involved in for-profit manufacturing and has been using content marketing for at least one year.  Although the respondents represent manufacturers across a full range of industries, I think it highlights many of the trends and challenges with content marketing we see in the water and wastewater space.

For example, the report ranks the unique challenges manufacturing content marketers face. Sixty eight percent of respondents ranked Creating content that appeals to multi-level roles within the target audience(s) as a challenge along with Communicating complex content (60%), Accessing subject matter experts in order to create specialized content (50%) and Overcoming traditional marketing and sales mindset (50%). All of which are prevalent challenges in the water and wastewater industry that B2BrandWater has aimed to address over the last few years.  

Interestingly, only 2% of the content marketers surveyed said that the content marketing challenges they face in representing manufacturers are the same as those faced by content marketers in non-manufacturing industries. On the surface, this is a staggeringly low number but conversations with many water and wastewater equipment manufacturers bear witness to this. Think of how fruitless your corporate Facebook efforts have been, compared to the direct-to-consumer channel that arguably wouldn’t exist without social media. Marketing for manufacturers is very different.

In another indication of how content marketing is maturing in the manufacturing space, the split between those manufacturers now measuring content marketing ROI (44%) and those that don’t (45%) is even (11% were unsure if they did or not). This is a growing development that we are also seeing in the water and wastewater industry. As the millennial generation replace the retiring baby boomers in our marketing ranks, we’re seeing a band of digital natives who have grown up focused on likes, retweets, followers and other performance metrics. Marketing without performance analytics is completely foreign to these professionals. This should make business owners very happy in assisting them to allocate data-driven marketing budgets more effectively. The trick for business owners will be holding marketers to more than vanity metrics and creating the key performance indicators (KPIs) which track what will really make a difference to top-line growth.

And as with all manufacturers, the KPI that has always mattered (however allusive it has proven to be) remains marketing activity tied to sales revenue. There are so many factors in the complex world of B2B sales that make this difficult to track and yet, 40% of survey respondents indicated that their content marketing efforts over the last 12 months have generated sales/revenue.

For other highlights, including marketing budget expectations for content marketing and how manufacturers are distributing their content, access the report here.

Image credit: "Report Key," GotCredit © 2015, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/