How to make your industrial website more than just a catalog of products

I spend a lot of time poking around manufacturing-related websites.   This includes companies that are making products, but also companies who are trying to sell to the companies that are making products.  One thing that has become very clear to me:  Most manufacturers’ websites fall short.

Some manufacturers are good at presenting their products on their website, providing pricing, and sometimes even sharing ordering or detailed distributor information.  But very few manufacturers unlock the great amount of knowledge that’s present in their employees and provide this information to potential customers through their site.  They’re makers, not marketers.  They’re engineers, not communicators.

Whether your company is a small manufacturer of commodity products, or if you’re a huge global maker of highly specialized goods, you need to figure out how to produce content.  When done properly, online content is a differentiator, a competitive advantage, and a tool for winning and retaining business.  Your company is an expert at what it does – so why not show the market how smart you are?

There are dozens of ways to get into content marketing, but some of the easiest can be started by a small company with very little effort.  For a larger manufacturer, a more coordinated strategy is probably necessary, to ensure the information is distributed consistently and your different divisions or departments aren’t talking over each other.

A few ideas to get you started:

1.  Start a blog.
Begin slowly at first, until you develop a consistent frequency and voice.  Then once you get going, you can launch a promotion strategy to ensure your blog is seen by the right people.  There are hundreds of tutorials on the web that can teach you how to use a blog for establishing your company as a thought leader.  One word of advice: Don’t just blog about your company’s new products or when you do something newsworthy.  That misses the point.  People skip those blogs, so you’re just wasting your time.  You should be blogging about topics and issues that matter to your customers.

2.  Use Twitter.
If you don’t have the time or discipline to do a blog the right way, a Twitter presence can help you get a simple voice into the market.  (Of course Twitter can complement a blogging strategy nicely too.)  It’s now relatively easy to embed your Twitter feed into your company’s website, so you can offer your tweets to anyone who comes to your site.  The drawback is Twitter’s 140 character limit – which is great for sharing relevant web links with your audience and distributing a few simple thoughts.  But anything more deep will require a different medium.

3.  Write white papers.
This is fairly familiar territory to many industrial companies.  When done correctly, they can be a great vehicle for thought leadership.  However, make sure the tone is correct.  If the white paper is nothing more than a veiled sales pitch for your new product, it will have limited effectiveness.

4.  Try some video.
Thanks to sites like YouTube, web video is being made more simple every day.  There are different levels of sophistication to web video – and each requires an increasing level of skill.  Any beginner can get a Flip video camera, shoot a video, and upload it to YouTube.  It won’t look polished or super professional, but depending on your target audience, it could do the trick for making your company appear smart, nimble, and accessible.

5.  Get a freelancer.
This is a great option for larger companies that have knowledge embedded within a big group of distributed people within their organization.  If you have 50 or 500 experts in your company, it’s often unrealistic to teach all of them how to blog and to develop a cohesive blogging strategy.  But if you find a freelancer who is well-versed in bringing information to an industrial audience, they can tap into the springs of knowledge in your company and pull out the best pieces, then develop it into a consistent voice that can make its way to your market.

In conclusion:
No matter which of these approaches you choose, remember that the key isn’t the production quality or the presentation -- it’s the content.  Of course you don’t want to put something into the market that makes your company look completely unprofessional.  However, an audience will excuse a simple looking blog or a video with relatively low production value if the content is relevant and engaging.  Craigslist is an perfect example of this principle.  It’s one of the most popular sites on the web, but it’s far from the nicest looking.  It’s the valuable content that makes you a market leader.