Are you struggling to think of relevant content ideas for your business? If so, you’re in the right place. As a marketing manager, you’re probably already aware how important coming up with engaging content can be for the engineering industry. But sometimes, it can be hard to know where to start when planning a new campaign. If you really want to start coming up with content ideas that sell, these tips could be for you.
First things first – if you really want to promote your services effectively, you need content people want. That means you need article ideas that people are either already searching for or are highly-likely to click through and read.
The best place to start when looking for more of the content people want is with your own articles. That’s right, have a look at the data from your past blog posts and see which are performing the best for you. Which are getting the most hits from search engines, the most shares on social media and importantly – which are leading to the most sales.
If you haven’t got this data at your fingertips, you should have. Most CRM and analytics software should present all of this and more in an easy-to-read manner. You can’t know what content is really working for your business unless you’ve got the cold, hard data to prove it. Getting all of your marketing methods integrated with the right CRM software should help you analyse existing marketing campaigns with ease. But it’s also going to help you plan future ones – and that’s what we’re looking at right now.
So when you work out what’s popular – you probably want to create some more content just like that. Don’t simply re-hash old ideas, though. Work out what people want and give them more of it, in more detail if you can. When you can start working out exactly what people want from your content, you can create articles that are far more compelling, far easier to rank for and far more likely to get shared.
Aside from getting bogged down in the metrics of your site, you can also simply talk to your customers and ask them on a personal level if they’ve got any problems they need a solution to, or to simply get an idea for the sort of content they’d like to see more of. You can do this the next time you meet them, lift the phone, or if you have a mailing list then why not shoot out a quick survey.
That’s the thing with creating compelling content these days. When you hit the sweet spot, you’ll get your visitors to do the marketing legwork for you – by sharing your posts to even more potential customers. That’s why so many businesses are looking for overnight viral sensations. If you can create content people want to tell their friends about, those friends could become your customers despite having never heard of you a few hours before.
So once you’ve worked out what people want, create compelling content that’s easy to share on social media. It’s a hugely powerful marketing tool that you’d be foolish to ignore.
To come up with great content ideas that people want to share more and more, you might want to think outside the box a little. A great blog post is wonderful, but you shouldn’t stop there. Try coming up with a behind the scenes video. Head out onto your shop floor and interview some of your engineers. People like to see what’s going on behind the scenes in a busy workplace, and they also like to see a personal touch.
If you can show people who you are and what you’re good at – they could be more likely to share and ultimately more likely to do business with you. That’s why these sorts of videos work so well. Not to mention that the search engines love video content these days.
Aside from simply looking at how your older content has performed, you’ll want to do some extensive keyword research to find out exactly what people are looking for in your industry. There are a number of free tools you can use to help you do this, as well as simply using Google’s Adwords system.
Enter some specific engineering terms that are important to your business and you should start seeing examples of terms people are searching for. Try creating content that answers questions or solves problems for some of the most-searched terms in your specific field or industry. That’s the sort of content that’s going to gain traction on search engines and hopefully lead to more customers for you.
When you actually create your content, whether it’s a blog post or some other medium – you need to explain the benefits that you and your business bring clearly. You might not want to be too “salesy” in the bulk of the article copy, but you need to give a clear and compelling reason for all your readers to want to do business with you.
You can’t assume they’re going to know the benefits and expertise your business brings unless you tell them clearly. Sometimes, it can be a fine balance between a pushy sales-pitch and a compelling call-to-action, but you need to work on the latter more than the former.
Hopefully, these tips have been enough to get you started and given you a few key pointers when coming up with the best content ideas for your business. There’s a big difference between good content and great content – and you need the best to promote your engineering business effectively.
If you’re still unsure how to come up with great content ideas for your engineering audience, then get in touch with us today.
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