Attract high-quality prospects by producing high-quality marketing content.

I’ll admit, it’s difficult for B2B marketers to produce consistent, quality industrial marketing content that appeals to their prospects.

Deadlines are often missed, events are overlooked and marketers are left scrambling for content, particularly in self-described “unsexy” industries. My colleague, Bob Parina, recently published a great post that offers a solution to the above problems.

One of the greatest challenges we currently face in industrial marketing is not where to publish our message, but what to say.

A fair number of industrial businesses feel that what they do is boring. Their concern is having something interesting to say over a period of time.

The challenge is creating interesting information, delivered consistently over time in multiple media.

Trade publications have faced this challenge since well before the internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye – finding something interesting to say month after month about fasteners, fertilizer, tires, concrete or any industrial product. Their solution is a tool which we can also use for our purposes to generate and track ideas – the editorial calendar.

Jayson DeMers, writing for Forbes, offers the following insights:
Setting up your editorial calendar isn’t difficult. A basic Excel sheet or Microsoft Word Table will do the trick. At a minimum, it should contain the following information:

• Date
• Writer or content producer responsible for drafting the piece
• Working title
• Your target keywords
• Content format (e.g. blog post, white paper, etc.)
• Call to action
• Status

Strategically, a marketing plan should be in place and your target markets should be identified.The editorial calendar is a tactical tool. It organizes the overall effort and applies the most important additional element to your plan – time. A plan without deadlines is nothing more than good intentions. Applying specific dates for specific events drives your entire industrial marketing program.

In today’s message heavy world, to have any chance of success requires participation in all relevant media – internet, social and traditional. Your industrial marketing effort must be delivered consistently at a frequency appropriate for each platform; from monthly down to daily. Let your editorial calendar drive your program to your marketing goals.

I highly recommend developing even a basic content marketing editorial calendar so that you don’t overlook any holidays, important industry conferences or even local events that you may want to base content around. Such a calendar promotes accountability and serves as a source of inspiration for even the worst cases of industrial marketing writer’s block.

Photo credit: Dan Moyle