The Many Hurdles of Industrial Content Marketing

As digital marketing becomes more and more par for the course in today’s interconnected world, strategies to reach audiences have to continually expand. Just take social media as an example; having a website isn’t nearly enough anymore. As your client demographics diversify, your marketing strategies may have to stretch between multiple sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and the list goes on. And that’s to say nothing of broadcast or paper advertising!

The problem is, many industrial manufacturers are expected to meet these developing marketing needs without receiving additional aid or department funds. So how does one do more… with effectively less? Let’s take a look at some of the hurdles that manufacturers now face in the content marketing world, and then discuss how to take those challenges head-on.

Part of the problem with trying to get budgeting for future marketing projects is, in short, the difficulty of trying to show measurable profits. Even though marketing naturally flows into sales, marketing and sales departments are different things – and if the sales department is doing poorly, that shouldn’t necessarily come back to bite the marketers. You need to not only have ways to measure final revenues, but also ways to measure lead generation. That’s why it’s vital for you to have not just content marketing, but digital content marketing. Digital systems that track your leads will help you make connections between each specific ad or piece of content that you create, and the customers that they each attract. Measurable R.O.I. means faster organizational buy-in on your next marketing campaign, so that you can afford more bandwidth for even more future strategies.

Another challenge you might be facing is the hurdle of trying to acquire new, qualified leads for your sales funnel month after month… especially since the demographics of your target audience and employees could very well be shifting as a new generation comes in. Once again, this is where the digital side of marketing comes in. The internet provides endless access to just about any audience you could desire; you just need to know which techniques to employ, depending on your target[s]. From pre-roll ads to a company instagram to regularly-posted tutorials, you can find different niches and use programs like Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce, and more to pull in your interested viewers.

Once you have gotten a handle on this digital marketing thing, you will more than likely have new customers coming in through all different platforms, from emails to ad campaigns, and that means trying to keep track multiple marketing systems. But you want to nurture your leads, not lose them in a jungle maze. Whichever of the above platforms you swear by, the best option at your disposal is not to pick only one and dispose of the others. You may not even have that option, depending on where your sources are coming from. Instead, organize the chaos by linking all of your programs together and integrating their data. Your jungle of interwoven pathways before will become a comprehensive, integrated network.

Either during the process of going digital or soon afterwards, every organization’s marketing department will eventually make two important discoveries. The first is that digital marketing is its own full-time job. It required training, expertise, bandwidth, and many, many hours of work. No matter how long you try to distribute it amongst your original marketing team at first, the PPC and the email marketing and the landing page management and the web design and the marketing automation and the CRM integration and other tasks are all so interdependent that you really can’t split them up between multiple people. You need one person (or even an entire team!) to keep track of everything and make sure all the details are in sync so that the big picture remains intact. But, then you will quickly make another discovery: digital marketing experts are hard to find!

In times like these, an agency with tried-and-true experience is the best way to go. So whether you want to focus on the marketing strategies or the digital management, it’s time to get your digital marketing in gear and reach out to the experts. Those hurdles aren’t going to jump themselves.