How to Write a Blog Post for Your Manufacturing Business

How to Write a Blog Post for Your Manufacturing Business

Each month we’ll be featuring a blog post from our friends at MAGNET (Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network). MAGNET’s mission is to support, educate and champion manufacturing in Ohio with the goal of transforming the region’s economy into a powerful, global player. You can visit MAGNET online at manufacturingsuccess.org.

Remember the feeling of being assigned an essay in school, when you knew what you needed to write about, but didn’t know where to start or couldn’t find the right words to string together? Blog writing can elicit those same feelings, with the added pressure of having to work within the confines of SEO, brand and purpose. Ya, blog writing can be intimidating.

But, great blogs can lend huge credibility to your business and areas of expertise. Further, blogging is a low-cost way to connect with existing, new and potential customers; offers a quick, valuable source of social media content; and builds your brand. Ultimately, your blogs can share how much you know about your manufacturing field and put you ahead of a competitor who’s not blogging.

Recently, someone who is not a marketer asked me how to write a blog and if I could document the process. I immediately realized that anyone in business could benefit from understanding the full process. Subject matter experts in manufacturing need to position themselves as industry leaders and provide educational, thought-leadership content to their current and potential customers. 

Here is the process I use when I write blogs for myself, my organization or clients.

  1. Brainstorm a list of potential topics.
  2. Organize those topics by top of funnel (awareness/educational), middle of funnel (consideration) or bottom of funnel (conversion/sales) content. This will help you create a balance of content to nurture leads along the buyer process, which will then keep them loyal and become your advocates.
  3. Identify keywords that you or your company want to rank for in a Google search and include those in the blog (optimizing it for SEO). These keywords are best identified by using a tool that can tell you what the most popular searches are for your industry or what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
  4. Make sure the topic you select is relevant for your audience.
  5. I do some online research to see what’s already out there; sometimes, that helps me focus my topic further.
  6. Some people do an outline, though I don’t. I just do a rough draft and then move things around. Back to the idea of a college essay, it has an intro, body and conclusion or a beginning, middle and end.
  7. Make the language conversational and engaging. Show “personality.”
  8. Keep sentences and paragraphs short.
  9. Often, I interview someone for the blog by either emailing them questions. Sometimes we’ll have a phone or zoom chat, and I’ll taking notes if they are the subject matter expert or can provide a quote for my blog that will lend it credibility.
  10. Create a headline that makes people want to read it. Often that is things like 10 tips, 5 ways, 3 things you can do.
  11. If the blog is longer than a paragraph or two, I usually write subheads to break it up into digestible bites and so people can scan and see an outline of what’s covered. You also can make phrases that are important bold, so it is easily scannable.
  12. People love lists; so, I usually use a bulleted or numbered list (see: this blog). That also makes it scannable and user friendly.
  13. As for length, search engines like long form copy, which is about 1,500-2,000 words. But minimum wordcount should be 400 to 500; otherwise, Google actually penalizes you for thin content.
  14. Check grammar!
  15. Use an engaging image that catches attention and use video when you can.
  16. Cite sources if you use outside info.
  17. Put a call to action at the end. What do you want them to do? How do you capture them?
  18. Promote it on social media.

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How to Improve Your Company’s Blog

How to Improve Your Company’s Blog

by Kylie Stanley, Public Relations Technician

In the manufacturing arena where competition is fierce, some companies have turned to blogs as a way to increase brand awareness, become a thought leader in their space, increase their web traffic and generate leads.

In a recent post from ThomasNet called, “13 Ways to Improve Your Manufacturing Blog,” it helps businesses to recognize ways to improve within blog platforms.

Here are the key highlights:

  • Write With Your Buyer Personas In Mind – When creating blog content, remember who your audience is. By establishing your audience, you can make customized content towards them.
  • Use Images & Visual Elements – Enhance your story by using pictures to help break up text and keep readers engaged. Images can play an important part in increasing the reading time on your blog.
  • Link To External Sources, And Your Own Content! – Help your readers through the story by providing credibility. This helps with your brand’s trust and can drive readers to conversion pages, which can boost SEO.
  • Establish A Frequency To Posting Your Blogs – Make sure you’re committing to the blog by frequently posting. One way to keep up with posting is to create a content calendar and lay out all the blogs you’re doing in a month.
  • Ensure Your Blogs Have A Strong Word Count – Posts under 300 words are not recommended for SEO, and when your SEO isn’t strong, consumers can’t find you online. At the same time, don’t post a blog with 2,500 words of “awful” as people will not read it.

Blogs can help to achieve your business goals and build trust between you and the consumer. Follow the rules above and check out the rest in their article to learn how to improve your blog.

How will you improve your blog posts?

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How Effective is Your Social Media Strategy in Reaching the Professional Tradesman?

By Andrew Poulsen, Content Engineer, Sonnhalter

Social media has been an essential cog in every consumer brand’s marketing machine for more than a decade, but manufacturers in the trade industries have been slow to embrace the many marketing advantages that come with social media. I believe this comes from the perception that social media had originally only targeted the younger generations, and with the average age of the professional tradesmen skewing higher and higher, these manufacturers felt more comfortable using more traditional methods with their marketing dollars.

However, with Facebook and Twitter both grossing hundreds of millions of users, it quickly became clear that almost any brand had customers and prospective customers on these platforms. While many companies in the trades have adapted and are actively using Facebook and Twitter to connect and engage with its audience, there are plenty of other digital and social platforms whose features can be useful to companies in these industries. And with only so much time, effort and money available, brands should examine all of these platforms and their potential and effectiveness in reaching the professional tradesman.

Here is a rundown of some of the most popular social and digital tools out there, how they help reach the professional tradesman and how well they do it.

Facebook

Despite its well-documented PR hiccups, Facebook still casts a wider net than any other social media network…for now. Facebook has more than two billion users, and there are more than 65 million businesses using Facebook Pages. Because of the sheer volume of users, every company should be on Facebook to regularly promote new products, announce trade show appearances, share positive media coverage and company news, etc. (more…)

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Blogs and Forums for the Professional Tradesman

There are around 505 million blogs in the world today and not all are created equal.

So, how do you identify and communicate with the right blogs and forums to get in front of professional tradesmen? The first question to ask yourself is: are your products or services applicable to your end users using social media? If the answer is “yes,” then your goal should be to do comprehensive research to identify the right communities, monitor them and jump in and get involved in the conversations. As you get involved in these conversations on social media, keep this in mind:

  • Your brand can be affected positively or negatively. You don’t control the message.
  • Your brand depends on the “loyalists” who are passionate about your brand.
  • Key blogs or social media sites are authored by thought leaders from your industry.
  • Social media demands transparency, so be honest in your engagement.

 

Here are a few sites that may be of interest to brands attempting to reach and interact with the professional tradesman:

(more…)

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