Using Content Marketing For A Powdered Metal Company

We all want to generate more leads, prospects and sales, right? Whether you are a manufacturer, rural tourism promoter, service provider or non-profit, you are all looking for more leads, prospects and sales. Your sale may be a donation or an actual exchange of money for goods/services. The bottom line is, you want to generate more leads and prospects that convert to sales.

Over the past few weeks I've primarily focused my posts around content marketing and how it can be used to generate more leads. Today, I want to run through a fictional example of how a manufacturer might use content marketing to generate leads, prospects and sales. The B2B world is a great place to use content marketing because we are all looking for great information to help us do our jobs better, make better buying decisions and ultimately help grow our businesses.

Short Overview Of Our Fictional Manufacturer

In our example, we will operate as p80 Sintered Metals, a manufacturer of powdered metal parts for a variety of industries including automotive, lawn and garden and food service. Here are some example products:

From Phoenix Sintered Metals, Inc.'s website.

Some of our major competitive advantages include:

• The ability to be your complete powdered metal supplier, without having to have multiple vendors.
• Press sizes from 6 - 825 tons allowing manufacturing of parts as small as triggers in a gun and as large as snowmobile transmission gears
• Unlike competitors, we can mold longer parts
• Dedicated to using the most efficient press size to maximize our clients' cost savings
• Sintering furnaces capable of up to 2400 degrees F (1315 degrees C)
• 2ndary operations such as machining, sizing, tumbling, assembly, variety of surface treatments

Some Powdered Metal Content Marketing Examples

As we've said before, there are a ton of options for content marketing, but the truly effective (lead generating) examples are ultra-helpful to potential buyers and provide them with information that will help THEM succeed. That's a really important aspect of content marketing. It's not about you. It's about helping your potential buyers so you are front of mind when they are ready to buy.

Some examples of content we could provide on our sintered metal manufacturing website:

• eBook - Increasing The Quality Of Your Product and Your Margin
• Checklist - 6 Important Steps To Compete In A Price-Driven Market
• Resource Kit - Getting The Most Accurate Quote The 1st Time
• eBook - 10 Most Common Material Selection Mistakes

Each of these pieces of content should not exist on their own. They should be used to fuel your blog, social media and email marketing. There are undoubtedly little nuggets of information in each of those pieces of content that would make great social media status updates that include links to a landing page to download the full content, in exchange for their email address. Then, you have permission to market to this lead on an ongoing basis and hopefully move them down the funnel into a qualified lead and customer.

Calls To Action

Having these pieces of content to bait in new leads is half the battle. The other half of the battle is strategically placing call-outs or calls to action on your website, blog, social media sites and emails to ensure you are getting a stream of new leads that see and download the content. Ideally, you will follow up with these leads over time and share additional value with them. When they are ready to buy, you will be top of mind.

Schedule Out The Release Of Each Content Asset

I listed 4 major pieces of content above which would mean you could release 1 a quarter. It would be better to have 1 a month or at least 1 every 2 months. This keeps the content coffers full and gives those leads you're generating something else to consume. It will also give you plenty of assets to test with over the course of a year.

If there is a theme or series to your major content marketing assets, be sure to pre-promote the upcoming content so the current leads know that they should be on the lookout for the next valuable resource you'll be sharing with them.

The Sky Is The Limit

In this powdered metal company example, I just scratched the surface with topics that you can provide value in. A full strategy would produce much better content ideas focused on generating sintered metal leads. As I said above, we all want to generate more leads, prospects and sales. Today's buyers start with the internet. You'd better be positioned to provide value to visitors of your web properties.