The web provides today’s readers with so much content covering many different industries. Among the more useful and educational types are engineering guides. Guides, by definition, are documents that offer information, instructions, and advice. They are handbooks used by both students and professionals in their studies and jobs. As an industrial company, you can develop and publish engineering guides for your own target audience. According to research, 51% of marketers use guides as a branch of their content marketing scheme.
Image Source: Content Marketing Institute
Despite being low on the ranking among other types of content, guides place third as sources for securing leads, as seen in the following infographic from the same survey.
Image Source: Content Marketing Institute
If you are unsure if it’s worth the time and money to create engineering guides for your customers, below are a few potential benefits worth considering:
1. Engineering guides drive traffic to your website.
Like most content on any blog, engineering guides that are published on your website can help drive traffic as long as they are optimized for search engines. The more high-quality and informative your guides are, the higher the chances of ranking on page one. Additionally, when you design articles around this search engine optimization (SEO) you get it in front of a larger subset of your target audience. Properly optimized engineering guides will rank highly in keyword searches and therefore acquire that much-needed traffic to increase brand awareness and visibility.
Industrial marketers will also note that while high-quality content takes time to write, ranking on search engines takes even longer. That said, marketers must remember to be consistent. You need to regularly publish high-quality posts in order to boost your overall site ranking and get onto the first page of major search engines like Google and Yahoo.
2. Engineering guides increase brand trust and credibility.
Consistently publishing high-quality engineering guides can help build trust and credibility in your brand. Credibility is your perceived trustworthiness and is directly related to the audience’s perception of your brand’s competence and values. As a brand, you can establish it by building and maintaining a good reputation among users and by showcasing your expertise through your content.
When you publish valuable guides, your readers know that they can turn to you for answers. It illuminates you as both a decision-maker and a reliable resource. Over time, you will become a brand that they can count on, do business with, and even align their own goals with. Below are some ways to build your credibility through your engineering guides:
- Be competent. Leverage and develop expertise in your field. Show how you can analyze a situation and develop potential solutions with your technical guides.
- Be consistent. The message you are sending out with your guides should be consistent with how you want to be remembered as a business. It needs to be aligned with the values and techniques you cultivate as a brand.
- Be authentic. When you write and develop your engineering guides, remember that your content needs to be genuine. It must be based on a solid technical foundation, and this fact should be reflected in your guides.
- Be transparent. When writing your engineering guides, be transparent with your sources and the basis of your information. Guides can and should include references and even quote the results of surveys from which your data was sourced.
3. Engineering guides serve as proof of your authority.
Engineers trust only those who have strong authority in their field. This is a fact you can use to your advantage. Guides are technical by nature and publishing one is an exercise in proving your brand’s authority over technical subject matters. Being the authority within a particular field of engineering will help you attract new potential clients and eventually convert them into buyers.
Building your brand’s authority takes time. Below are some ways to help build your brand authority with content such as engineering guides:
- Create a content strategy. Building authority will be hard if you don’t strategically plan out your content. Brainstorm a list of ideas with your team, conduct thorough keyword research, and generate a schedule on which to promote each piece.
- Help others by sharing what you know. As an expert in the engineering field, sharing your knowledge is essential to building an authoritative reputation. You can showcase your expertise by committing it to write and publishing in the form of guides or other content.
- Target industry-related keywords with long-form content. Content with over 1,500 words works best for SEO purposes. Following word counts of this caliber should be included in your strategy when planning your guides.
- Focus on a few specific topics. To build authority, you don’t need to showcase knowledge on a wide range of topics. Focus instead on a few central pillars within your niche and your authority will grow.
4. Engineering guides help increase your email list.
Marketers can choose to publish their engineering guides on their technical blogs or convert them into PDF format ebooks. The latter can be included in your blog’s resource archives or can be considered valuable resources alongside your engineering case studies and white papers. When used as downloadable resources, well-developed technical guides can be employed as freebies for email sign-ups. People love getting valuable resources for free.
You can use pop-ups and calls-to-action to encourage your engineering readers to subscribe to your newsletters. The engineering guides can then be used as email drip courses that you can send out on a predetermined schedule to keep readers interested. The more informational your engineering guides are, the more attention you’ll get, and the more subscribers will filter in. Remember that the members of your email list are your leads and they can be converted into buying customers in the future if managed properly.
With the wide variety of content available on the internet today, it is important to find the correct types to produce and distribute. Technical guides, when optimized and promoted properly, can be leveraged by industrial companies. Aside from driving traffic to your website, engineering guides help increase brand trust and credibility, serve as proof of authority, and help expand a company’s email list for sales conversion. If you need help producing high-quality engineering guides for your brand, get in touch today.
