Content Marketing in the Engineering Industry

Step 1: Understand Who You Are & Who You Serve

Far too many companies skip right over this step because they feel like they've already defined the "who" and "what" of being in business. However, this fundamental step won't just help inform your content strategy, but it also serves as a tool for new hires so they know how they should represent your brand.

Before you dig into the upcoming steps, make sure you:

• Define at least one customer persona. Researching your audience and identifying at least one consumer persona.
• Build a brand book. A brand book is a reference tool you'll be able to show anyone (writer, marketer, etc.) so that they can quickly get up-to-speed on your company, what you value, and how they should represent you.
• Bring it all together. There's no better time to check your brand book against your customer persona(s) and make sure that who you want your brand to be represents what your customers are looking for.

This is a good exercise for companies new and old alike and it will inform your strategy from here forward, so make sure you dig into the insights and demographics available to you.

Step 2: Identify Your Platforms

With an understanding of your audience and how they prefer to consume information, you can identify the platforms that will be valuable to your brand. Most every brand will choose to have a blog on their own website, and you might choose to add additional resources as well, such as a knowledge base or section where readers can download papers and other documents.

As a brand, it's also important that you work a social media presence into your strategy. Most B2B companies start with LinkedIn while most B2C companies start with Facebook. The fact is, there's no right or wrong answer that fits everyone. You should reference your understanding of your audience to determine where you need to be.

Your goals will also determine where your brand should establish a presence. For instance, even a B2C company that primarily posts on Facebook should establish a LinkedIn presence if they also hope to attract future job applicants. Consider all of your target personas when choosing your platforms and allow those personas to inform the content you post on each platform.

Step 3: Determine Your Media Types

While content marketing is largely made up of written content, don't think that your brand is in any way limited to Tweets and blog posts. In fact, adding video content and other forms of media into your strategy can further build brand authority, boost shareability, and get you more backlinks.

Popular types of content include:

• Articles and blog posts
• eBooks and white papers
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Online courses
• Live webinars
• Infographics

While it's not always possible, deciding on a healthy mix of these media types will help you reach and engage your audience across platforms. If you're on a tight budget, focus on producing short-form written content (like articles and blog posts) to get your strategy going.

Step 4: Schedule Your Content

Once you know where you're posting and what you're posting, you have two of the three components necessary to complete this step. Now you just need the third component, which is how often you'll post. As with which platforms you choose, there's no one-size-fits-all number for how often you should post content.

How frequently you publish will depend on how active your audience is and, of course, the time and money you have budgeted for content creation. The old adage, "quality over quantity" should certainly be at the front of your mind. Once you know how much content you can produce, it's time to assemble a content calendar.

Your content calendar is basically a schedule that helps you organize what you're posting, where you're posting it, and when. Ideally, you'll lay out a schedule for a full calendar year (January through December) so that you can account for any seasonal content changes or topics. Don't worry about filling in the slots in the schedule just yet, that's for the next step.

Step 5: Fill Your Calendar

With your content schedule in hand, your content calendar is finally coming together. The last step is to fill up all those empty slots with specific content ideas and topics. For most businesses, this feels like the most daunting part. After all, it can seem like quite a chore to sit down and brainstorm a year's worth of ideas, but the good news is: You don't have to.

Most businesses only fill up their content calendar a few months at a time. Plus, you don't need to pull your ideas out of thin air — nor should you try. Your next task is to perform some in-depth keyword research so that you can understand exactly what your audience is searching for. These keywords will inform the core of your content strategy.

When you base your content strategy around keywords, you'll set yourself up for growth in organic traffic and an overall boost to your site's SEO. You'll also make sure that you're hitting on your audience's key questions and concerns. However, you can't take a cookie-cutter approach and base all your content around keywords.

If looking at the previous examples proved anything, it's that engineering firms big and small should be putting their values and backstory front-and-center. So, besides content that hits on the keywords you identify in your research, you should also take your audience behind-the-scenes with content that explores who your company is, how it came to be, and what it's like working for you and with you.

All of this can sound a bit intimidating, but it's easier if you have talented writers standing by to help.