You are currently viewing Industrial Marketing 101: Creating Viral Content

Industrial Marketing 101: Creating Viral Content

Marketers are chasing that elusive “viral” post to help their brand take off. What can you do to get a head start?

Creating articles, stories and images – content – is the industrial marketing fuel that powers social and internet media. In our annual marketing survey, one of the frustrations our respondents frequently reported was difficulty in finding time to create compelling content.

Anyone who blogs or produces regular website content – whether it be a blog, white papers or infographics – dreams of the day when their content goes viral. For industrial marketers who (they themselves believe) work in “unsexy” industries, “viral” isn’t realistic.

But, the following advice from SocialMouths will certainly help you come up with topics your readers will find interesting – even when you have a terrible case of writer’s block.

The best marketing is about producing content and resources that don’t look like marketing at all. They are things that help your consumer. That’s it. End of story.

So if your focus is on making your brand look awesome, you will come across as self-promotional and your content will read like a traditional advertisement.

Your content should not be about your company or your brand. Your blog should not contain articles that only talk about your brand. Instead, your focus should always be on your target consumers. Think about what kind of content, topics and resources they would seek out and read.

Once in a while it’s okay to share the latest news pertaining to your brand such as a new product release. Just make it interesting and make sure that you don’t share a lot of this type of content.

Instead of writing content that is centered around your brand, write content that is centered around the needs of your target consumers and current customers.

Ask yourself the following questions and see if each one sparks a content idea or post topic.

  1. What type of blogs would my consumers be attracted to?
  2. What pain points do they experience that I can solve with content?
  3. What is the age demographic of most of my consumers? (Based on this, think of what social media channels they may or may not be part of)
  4. Is there a difficult part of the buying process that I can make easier with advice and tips?
  5. Go on sites like Quora and G+ groups and see what kinds of questions people are asking about the niche your brand falls into. Use these questions as topics for posts and white papers.

By focusing on writing content that your consumers are reading, your brand just looks awesome by default.