Manufacturing Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2023

The most common challenge faced by manufacturing marketers is creating content that is suitable for different stages of the buyer's journey. Other common challenges include developing consistency in measurement, and capitalizing on video and storytelling, which are seen as areas of opportunity in 2023. To gain expert insights, several manufacturing marketing professionals were interviewed about their experiences and advice. It is recommended that sales teams connect with customers for interviews, as they can share their pain points and journey decision factors. This can provide valuable information for creating targeted content. Greg Mischio, founder of Winbound, suggests that manufacturing marketers create a "digital twin" content representation of their sales team in order to align sales and marketing. According to a study, 44% of manufacturing marketers who used content marketing in the last 12 months did so in order to generate sales/revenue. Other goals achieved by manufacturing marketers using content marketing are creating brand awareness and increasing brand popularity. Mischio claims that the days of finger-pointing and operating in silos are over and that there is no middle ground-- either sales and marketing align or the company will decline. This report found that 90% of manufacturing marketers used videos in the last 12 months and that these marketers feel that videos produced the best results for their content marketing over the last year. Additionally, the report found that 80% of manufacturing marketers say their organization will invest/continue to invest in video in 2023. This makes video the most frequently cited area of content marketing investment (as it was in the previous year). Other areas of content marketing investment that were mentioned include: owned-media assets (69%), social media/community building (67%), paid media (61%), and events – digital, in-person, hybrid (58%). These days, 96% of engineers and technical buyers report watching videos for work-related purposes on a weekly basis – and the younger they are, the more time they spend doing so. According to Wendy Covey of TREW Marketing, the smartest marketers know how to make the most of the content they have, in order to save time and money. And Jennifer Watson of Context Communications adds that you can get even more mileage out of your video content by “upcycling” it – for example, by curating audiograms, editing together different pieces, and creating longer videos. The sky’s the limit! Manufacturing is a great industry to use storytelling to connect with customers and prospects. Case studies, stories about how things are made, and stories about the people who work in the companies can all help to provide context and humanize the experience of working with you. For more information on how manufacturing marketers are approaching content marketing, check out the Manufacturing Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2023 report.

(source: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/manufacturing-content-marketing-challenges-research)