By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
When developing content, manufacturers may be concentrating on the wrong types, making the results less than desirable. Many focus on product brochures and slide presentations as they are easily available.
These may be low hanging fruit for development, but they’re also not delivering the results they want. According to a recent survey by the CMO Council, NetLine and Content ROI Center, brochures only delivered 9% great leads and slide presentations only 15%.
A recent article eMarketer.com talks about ways to improve performance on developing content.
Content pieces that weren’t “salesy” drew much better numbers. It’s not surprising that white papers, industry reports, videos and webcasts scored better.
This should serve as a wake-up call for all those manufacturers that are trying to make an impact on contractors and professional tradesmen. Get away from selling and start helping them solve their problems.
If you want to get noticed and build up your credibility, this is the way to do it. Chances are you already have many of the assets needed to do most of these tasks, from how-to videos to webinars talking about a specific topic. I know you’ve got the brain trusts inside your company to either create the white papers or do the videos; why not capitalize on their expertise?
We also need ways to measure the effectiveness of these tasks and try to link back leads to actual sales. Landing pages are a great way to start collecting data and nurturing campaigns will help them through the selling cycle.
Let’s face it, we all have limited time and budgets and we need to make the most out of both.
