So you’ve realized that your old traditional and digital marketing business tactics just weren’t working, and you’ve taken steps to get your inbound marketing program off the ground.

Now what?

Well, now comes the hard part — you’ll need to create content that your prospects actually want to read. Don’t panic. While this can seem like a big undertaking, understanding the inbound marketing funnel can make this process a lot more manageable — not to mention a lot more effective. Let’s take a look.

As the digital world reshapes the industrial world, marketing budgets are on the rise. According to ENGINEERING.com's annual survey of engineering marketers, twice as many respondents reported that their budgets were growing rather than shrinking in 2017.

As industrial marketing budgets continue to rise, more funds are being allocated to the creation of content — in the form of blogs, eBooks, email campaigns, videos, webinars, infographics, and so on — as good content is at the core of any successful inbound marketing program. 

Like with any investment, the marketers and manufacturing companies that are making them want to ensure that they are receiving a positive return. We’ve outlined two major areas of return on investment (ROI) that illustrate the effectiveness of inbound marketing. 

Web pages are among the most important types of content in your inbound marketing arsenal. They serve as your company’s introduction to potential clients.

Making a good impression right out of the gate is key — you never get a second chance to make one, as my mother says — which is why I’m always surprised by the sheer volume of poorly put together web pages I come across in the industrial sector. 

To help give your web copy a bit of direction, here’s a breakdown of the main elements every page should have.

To make sales, you need to generate leads. Generating leads in today’s industrial business-to-business (B2B) market necessitates a digital approach, as more and more industrial buyers are choosing to educate themselves and make purchases online, as opposed to talking to sales representatives.

With an inbound marketing strategy, you can position yourself to catch that internet traffic and convert faceless users into valuable leads. It’s not enough to simply have a strategy, though — you need to have a good one, and each of its many components must be optimized for your audience.

Here are four tips to boost your content offerings and elevate them to irresistible lead generation machines.

The phrase “Content is king” has largely been dropped from the corporate lexicon — you hear it much less now than you did a year or even six months ago. Of course, this doesn’t make it any less true; content is still a foundational element of any inbound marketing scheme worth its salt.

If you’re thinking, Andrew, you’re a professional writer, you’re biased, well … you’re right. I am biased. That doesn’t make the phrase any less true, either. If a grocer told you “vegetables are good for you,” you wouldn’t respond that he’s biased and therefore his statement is untrue. Would you?

Luckily in this case, my bias carries with it some benefits.

When you are knee deep in content generation seven days a week, you tend to pick up on some things — things like the fact that not all content is created equal and even the most fool-proof content plans don’t work if the content isn’t spot on. 

Do you want spot on content? Of course you do. Let's take a look at three important characteristics:

If there’s one thing better than leads, it's leads from dream customers — those perfectly ideal potential clients with perfectly ideal potential orders. The problem is that dream customers probably seem more like unicorns or Bigfoot to you than actual, achievable contacts.

Your dream customer surely does exist. That said, I can’t offer any one secret trick for finding them, unfortunately. There is no magic bullet for hooking a dream customer, just as there are no magic creatures.

You’re probably asking: How do I find them, then? 

Well, it takes some work and a dedicated, well thought out plan, but it comes down to targeting. If you target your content the right way and to the right audiences — the audiences that your dream customers are in — you can start to pull in those big-ticket leads you want.

Throughout the holiday season, you probably saw a handful of end-of-year wrap-up blogs as well as some start-of-the-year prediction posts.

Well, now that 2017 is finally upon us and it’s time to get back to work, we wanted to bring you some actionable tips you could use to get a jump on turning it into your company’s biggest year yet.

Let’s take a look at some steps you can take right now to start generating better leads for your business.

You’ve likely heard it before, but we’ll say it again: Content is king.

Even in the manufacturing and industrial space — where relationships and word-of-mouth referrals kept companies going for so long — content marketing is the most effective way to drive high-quality leads and dream customers to your website.

Creating strong content and engaging prospects is so essential to businesses that there are numerous books, webinars and entire conferences dedicated to getting marketing and sales professionals from across the globe up to speed.

Content marketing can penetrate the internal politics of a potential customer and influence buyers at every stage of the buying cycle, so it's important to understand the essential elements that make up a successful strategy.

This isn't limited to the types of content or channels you use to promote — many other moving pieces like sales, traditional marketing tactics, and brand evangelists play into it. Everything works together, so it's time you connect the dots.

Let's jump right in: