It's the plight of an industrial marketer: over the course of a 12-18 month long buying cycle, you make contact with a whole host of influencers who read your content...who may or may not actually work in purchasing. By the time the RFQ comes in, the original project might be completely different... and your initial point of contact may be long gone! Meanwhile, the purchase somehow takes place, and Sales claims all the glory. How is a marketer supposed to make the business case for better content marketing?
Join Achinta Mitra, Founder and President of Tiecas, Inc, as he explains how, despite the long, grueling buying cycle, you can prove the ROI of your content marketing... and win (or keep!) buy-in from your higher-ups.
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Prove ROI and Make the Business Case for Industrial Content Marketing
1. Prove ROI and Make the Business Case for
Industrial Content Marketing
Achinta Mitra Hannah Flynn
With: Moderated by:
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equipping global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and
automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for
any buyer interaction. Powerful content intelligence and analytics enable
marketers to prove and improve their impact on the bottom line,
revealing what is really driving revenue and what needs to be adjusted.
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4. About Achinta Mitra
Achinta Mitra is the founder and President of Tiecas, Inc., a Houston-based industrial marketing and consulting
company that has been in business since 1987. He is a Mechanical Engineer with an MBA degree in Marketing.
He uses his 30+ years of hands-on experience working with manufacturers, distributors and engineering
companies to help them generate better quality leads that turn into sales opportunities. That’s why he calls himself
a Marketing Engineer.
Achinta provides practical insights and actionable marketing advice for industrial companies on his blog Industrial
Marketing Today. He has published over 300 articles, many of which focus on industrial content marketing.
About Hannah Flynn
Hannah attended The University of Chicago, where she majored in Environmental Studies with a concentration in
Economics and Policy. She now works with Aggregage in product management, social media strategy, and webinar
production for Product Management Today and B2B Marketing Zone.
5. 5
Summary of My Presentation
• Unique challenges of industrial content marketing
• Measuring ROI and making a business case
• Build your industrial content marketing strategy first
• Winning the engineer’s mindshare
• Working with technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
• “Post and Pray” is not an effective content marketing strategy
• Actionable Takeaways
6. 6
First Poll
• How many of you work in marketing (in-house or outside consultants)?
• How many are in management?
8. 8
Why is it so Challenging?
• Engineers are seeking information that is relevant to them and accurate
• It is not all about features and benefits
• Engineers span generations
• Engineers are busy
• Marketing doesn’t understand engineering challenges (Most common
accusation from Sales)
9. 9
Unique Challenges of Industrial Content Marketing
There are three key differences that you should be aware of:
• Long sales cycles (12 to 18 months is typical for custom-engineered
systems)
• Buying decisions are made by a committee (Many of the stakeholders remain
invisible and rarely interact with your content)
• The Specifier is different from the Functional Buyer (Manufacturers of parts
need their components “designed in” by an engineer before Purchasing can
issue a PO or an RFQ)
16. 16
Complexities of Measuring ROI Lead to Giving Up
• 44% of manufacturing content marketers report their organization measures
content marketing ROI
• 54% of manufacturing respondents say their teams are somewhat proficient
at using the metrics they’ve selected to monitor content marketing success
• 55% of manufacturing marketers characterize their organization’s overall
content marketing approach as moderately successful
(Source: Content Marketing Institute and IEEE/GlobalSpec)
18. 18
Show Indicators of Success
• Show conversion rate (How many visitors completed a desired action)
• Traffic from non branded keywords
• Top 30 search queries over the past 30 days
• Discuss Bounce Rate & Time on Site (Engagement)
• Organic Search Traffic vs Paid Traffic
• Talk about long tail keyword searches and their importance
24. 24
The Invisible Industrial Buyer
• 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done
digitally. (Source: Sirius Decisions)
• We now have self-educating buyers because
of the abundance of online resources
• Buyers will engage with your sale team only
when they are ready
• Internal “Gurus” are strong influencers but may
not interact with your content or sales people
• Long sales cycles with committees, not an
individual making the buy decision
26. 26
It’s Time to Shift Gears
• Mainly invisible customers
• Save time and money
• Build equity vs. pay rent
• Create strong relationships based on trust
• Control over the sales process has shifted
31. 31
Other Content Assets as Sales Enablers
• Parametric part number search applications
• Assessment tools, sizing programs and calculators
• Online tracking of legacy installations and managing spare parts inventory
• Cross reference and selection guides
• How-to videos and on-demand training modules
• Evaluation and engineering kits
• And the list goes on…
32. 32
Third Poll
• Do you work in-house Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) when creating
content?
40. 40
Sales People are NOT Obsolete
• Selling is helping (aka Solutions Selling)
• This requires a shift in the mindset from “what we have to sell” to “how can
we help our customers do what they want to do?”
• Your brand is what they say you are and not who you say you are
• Be prepared to engage with multiple stakeholders when you do get into a
conversation
• Be aware that different stakeholders have different needs and personal
agendas to satisfy
• Create your own internal evangelist to carry your message to stakeholders
that you may never meet
41. 41
Actionable Takeaways
• Take baby steps to validate your industrial content marketing roadmap
• Spend the time to develop a fully vetted and documented content marketing
strategy
• Leverage the knowledge of in-house Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
• Make your content more about them and less about you
• Get Sales involved from the get-go
• Analytics are powerful tools to prove ROI
• Use technology for proper attribution of Marketing’s contributions
• SEO must complement conversion optimization (CRO)
42. Q&A
Hannah Flynn
With: Moderated by:
President and Founder, Tiecas Inc.
Linkedin page: /in/achintamitra/
Twitter ID: @achintamitra
Website: industrialmarketingtoday.com
Achinta Mitra
Site editor, Product Management Today
Linkedin page: linkedin.com/in/hannahmflynn
Twitter ID: @prodmgmttoday
Email: hannah@aggregage.com
Website: productmanagementtoday.com
https://www.b2bmarketingzone.com/frs/10589069/prove-roi-and-make-the-business-case-for-industrial-content-marketing/email
