Report: Manufacturing Marketers Find Success with Content Marketing

Content marketing is growing in popularity as a tactic to achieving strategic objectives, but how are certain industries integrating it?

To learn more about the manufacturing sector in particular, the Content Marketing Institute teamed up with Marketing Profs and IEEE GlobalSpec to conduct the “Manufacturing Content Marketing: 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America” report.

The vast majority of respondents (86 percent) stated that their companies utilize content marketing. A little more than half (57 percent) have small (or one-person) marketing/content marketing teams that serve their entire organization. Approximately 58 percent of respondents said they still outsource at least one content marketing activity.

When it comes to outsourcing tasks, most respondents (49 percent) claimed that they outsource content creation. This includes writers, designers, and video production.

The results showed that 46 percent of manufacturing companies are still in the “young/first steps” of content marketing maturity. About 30 percent are in the “adolescent phase,” and 22 percent are in the “mature/sophisticated phase.”

Nearly 60 percent of respondents indicate their overall content marketing success has increased in the last year. However, most manufacturing marketers (74 percent) are working without a documented strategy in place. One-third of those (27 percent) are planning to develop a documented content marketing strategy in the coming year.

Content Marketing and Digital Maturity

Previous research shows that marketers across all industries have grown interested in improving their digital maturity.

The “Running on Experience: 2017 Digital Marketing Report” from Adobe discovered that 38 percent of marketers are investing in all areas of digital maturity, such as structure, people, processes, and tools. This is an increase from 28 percent who said the same in 2016.

Almost all marketers (95 percent) intend to grow their digital maturity in the coming months by investing in some or all of its key pillars (structure, processes, tools and people).