Inbound Marketing Age

One of the many advantages of working in an open-plan office is the opportunity to bounce around B2B blog ideas with fellow inbound content writers.

And a frequent topic of conversation is how to finesse our blog titles so they're pertinent, attention grabbing and search-engine friendly.

Why business blog titles matter

While the bulk of our creative efforts goes into constructing the blog post itself, it's surprising how much attention we also need to pay to those first few words that our potential customers are going to see - our headline.

Featured snippets are becoming a growing area of focus within the competitive and constantly evolving world of search engine optimisation (SEO.)

And, according to HubSpot research, content that is selected to appear as a featured snippet can achieve double the click through rates of organic search results.

Well-crafted, purposeful and informative B2B blog posts are essential tools to help build your community and create the foundations for long-lasting relationships.

But in the midst of a demanding blogging schedule it can be easy to lose sight of why it is you're doing what you're doing; who you're doing it for and what it is you're looking to achieve.

In this blog post, we highlight five key questions that can help keep your content creation efforts on-task and on track.

Video continues to dominate the digital landscape - from its prevalence on company websites, social media and news sites to the popularity of online streaming services.

And according to research from Wyzowl in ‘The State of Video Marketing 2018,’ video has established itself as a highly-rated and successful medium for increasing traffic, engaging with B2B prospects and encouraging action.

Among the report’s key findings was the fact that eighty-one per cent of businesses have used video content as a marketing tool.

Of these, a substantial 97% of respondents said that video had helped them to increase user understanding of their product or service. And 76% confirmed that the use of video had helped them to increase sales.

Topic clusters are an essential content strategy tool to help you simplify your content creation and concentrate your efforts around the manufacturing subjects that matter most to your customers.

In this blog post, we explore how topic clusters work, why they’re so useful for your content strategy and how you can go about creating them.

Generating quality content, actively promoting it and keeping those creative juices flowing can be a challenge at the best of times.

The great news though is that your blogging strategy needn't feel like a chore if you keep a few simple and practical content creation ideas in mind.

Here are 12 strategies to help you produce relevant and engaging blog content that will delight your manufacturing prospects and keep them coming back for more

At the heart of a successful strategy for blogging for manufacturing is the ability to be able to write about often highly technical subjects in a way that communicates your expertise, but that remains fresh, accessible and enjoyable to read.

A key element of this process is to agree on a clear and consistent ‘tone of voice’ for your company or brand.

But what exactly is your tone of voice? 

And how can it help you to engage with your audience, increase rapport and better tell your story?

A successful manufacturing marketing strategy relies on creating and publishing relevant content that appeals to your “buyer persona” through the different stages of their buyer’s journey. 

So what exactly is content marketing? And how can you use it to build your brand, nurture relationships with your prospects and convert those leads into customers?

OK, so you’ve spent precious hours creating a rich resource of remarkable content for your manufacturing prospects.

You've shaped it to address the specific needs of your buyer personas and you've tailored it to suit the individual stages of their buyer’s journey.

But are you missing a crucial piece of the puzzle? These days it’s simply not enough to assume that, in amassing this wealth of fresh and high quality content, it will automatically find its way to your target audience.

In order to ensure that your content is seen by the right people, and as many of the right people as possible. you’ve also got to have a dedicated and consistent strategy for promoting it.

The way that we search online is evolving. And for many manufacturers, there's a growing realisation that the traditional, keyword-centric, SEO methods that we’ve typically used to drive our content creation efforts may not be delivering the same results that they once did.

So what’s changed? One answer lies in the intent of our online search queries.

When we ask a search engine a question we’re looking to solve a problem. But these days we’re also being increasingly more specific about what it is we want to know.

Video content has the power to be one of the best assets on your website.

From new product demonstrations to animated explainer videos, facility tours or customer testimonials, it’s a vibrant and engaging form of content that can enhance the customer experience, build brand awareness, encourage retention and generate leads.