Manufacturing Marketers Report Success with Content Marketing: Survey

 

The Content Marketing Institute released a survey of manufacturing marketers last week. The headline result is that 59% of manufacturing marketers report more success with content marketing than a year ago.

  

This is undeniably good news for these marketers, and there are a number of reasons for it.

 82% of respondents said that one reason for better performance of content marketing was that they are creating higher quality content more efficiently. More marketers now seem to understand that simply producing great volumes of content is not good enough – the content they produce has to be great to cut through the clutter and get attention.

Marketers reported other changes that had an impact on their increasing success, including:

• Better strategy development – 69%
• Content marketing becoming a greater priority – 62%
• Spending more time on content marketing – 57%
• Content distribution (better targeting and identification of what works) – 49%

That last point, content distribution, bears further scrutiny.  The manufacturing marketers who responded to the survey said that they used an average of five different channels for distributing their content, starting with email, but also including social media and print magazines.

 

Frankly, I’m surprised by how many manufacturing marketers are using print to distribute their content.  This result is not consistent with our research on engineering marketers earlier this year that indicated that 70% of marketers were reducing their investments in print.

This apparent conflict sent us back to our research to compare the results of manufacturers to other engineering marketers. As you can see from the chart below, manufacturers were less likely to be reducing their investments in print and more likely to be increasing their print spending than other engineering marketers.  That said, the overwhelming result in this survey was still a reduction in print spending by all marketers, manufacturers included.

 

 

Despite this difference in findings as compared to our research, I found this report from CMI to be a useful contribution to the body of knowledge about content marketing for manufacturers. I hope you find it worthwhile too.

John