How to Run a Blog in an Industrial Company?

A blog remains one of the core elements of B2B content marketing. Companies use this format to educate their audience, attract valuable traffic to their website, gain customer trust, and effectively increase sales. How does this form of B2B marketing work in the manufacturing sector, and where to start with industrial blogging?

In this post, I will explain how to start running a blog for an industrial company – where to begin, what to pay attention to, and how to plan your work to achieve maximum results.

Why run a blog in the industrial sector?

The B2B sector, including the industrial industry, was until recently mainly seen as the domain of salespeople and traditional offline marketing activities, such as trade fairs or industry conferences. Research shows that this situation is now a thing of the past.

Depending on estimates, it is indicated that a recipient needs 6 to 9 interactions with a brand’s content before becoming a lead. What role does a company blog play in this process? According to Gartner, up to 30% of customers come into contact with a blog or supplier article before making a purchase. What makes a blog such an important place for communication with your clients?

Providing solutions to problems

What clients look for on blogs are usually solutions to their everyday problems. This applies not only to private life but also to professional life. If your post answers important questions and helps with a business task, you will become a trustworthy partner. It may sound clichéd, but this is the essence of B2B content marketing – providing solutions to your potential clients' problems while educating them about the services, solutions, or products you offer.

Confirming your expert knowledge

Providing valuable knowledge is an excellent opportunity to present yourself or your brand as an expert in a given field. This applies to both the company and individual employees. Therefore, a blog is an invaluable tool for building not only the company’s brand but also promoting the personal brands of your employees as experts in their field, which can complement your communication strategy on LinkedIn.

Building the brand and professional image of the company

B2B clients are looking for safe choices and trusted partners. Through regular posts, consistent visual identification, and up-to-date information, you present yourself as a responsible collaborator and “reliable company.” Therefore, it is worth noting that your company blog should be updated regularly and consistently, depending on the business's specifics and various factors, such as once a week or month. Consistent and coherent visual identification affects the perception of your brand. The currency and relevance of the content send a signal to your audience that these people know their stuff, and the company is professional.

Educating clients

Industrial products are often complex and technologically advanced devices or solutions. Before making a purchase, the client must gain basic knowledge about the product – its implementation, use, servicing, or maintenance. A blog in a manufacturing company is an excellent tool that allows them to gain this knowledge independently, in an accessible form. This will save your sales team’s time and ensure that clients who contact you are aware of what you can offer them, making their service a pleasure.

Allowing yourself to be found on the Internet

With appropriately created, optimized, and positioned content, you will allow clients searching for solutions in the industrial sector to find you. Many companies treat blogs as an “SEO machine,” focusing on robots instead of caring about the experience and knowledge of a living audience. Proper text optimization for search engines is, of course, important, but human recipients should come first. When they find your blog, they must gain useful knowledge and the conviction that they are dealing with a reliable supplier. Only then will they become ambassadors of your solution within their company.

If you want to see how a well-designed blog can fulfill all these functions, check out Dalmec Poland blog, the largest and most important Polish-language blog on industrial manipulators and material handling equipment.

Summarizing the benefits of running a company blog in the industrial sector, it is worth noting that they can be achieved through a professional blog with valuable articles that are friendly both to people and Google’s crawlers. What should you do to create such a blog? Where to start?

Blog in industry – before you start

Before you decide to run an industrial blog and start writing (or outsource text preparation to a copywriter or artificial intelligence), you should answer a few questions. They will help you avoid unthought-out steps, ad hoc actions, and, frankly, budget burning.

• Who is my client? – What companies are my target market? Which employees usually initiate a purchase or participate in the decision-making process? Creating an ideal client profile and Buyer Persona is a step that will be useful for the entire marketing of an industrial company, not just for running a blog.
  
  
• How do my clients buy? – The purchasing process is another area that requires careful and thorough reflection. At what stage of the purchase journey might my clients look for information online? Where will they seek this information? These elements will help determine what knowledge they need, at what point in their journey, and guide them step-by-step with appropriately tailored content sequences.
  
  
• What questions do they ask most often? – They Ask You Answer (TAYA) is one of the more effective methods of “inventing” topics to address on the blog. Do clients ask representatives about a specific issue? Are certain questions frequently repeated? Gather your experts' knowledge on the blog and save time for both parties by providing instant answers to questions when clients need them.
  
  
• What knowledge do they need in the purchasing process? – What should a client ordering your product, service, or solution be aware of? What should they know about the process that awaits them? What data about their requirements should they prepare and in what form? With appropriately tailored posts, mainly educated clients will reach your sales department.

Answering these questions will help you prepare an effective content strategy and move on to defining and creating topic clusters, making you or your company the primary source of information in a specific niche.

Wondering what topic clusters are? In short, it’s a modern approach to SEO that involves choosing topics in which you want to become an expert recognized by users and search engines. By creating a certain number of interrelated posts, you can achieve much better results than by focusing on mechanically placing keywords in texts.

With a strategic approach, you will choose topics that meet your audience’s needs and easily prepare a multi-month publishing plan. Of course, you do not have to carry out all these activities alone. A suitable marketing agency specializing in industrial content marketing will help you create buyer personas, map customer journeys, and develop a very specific blogging plan.

How to run a blog in the manufacturing sector? Best practices

Once you know who and at what stage of the purchase journey your content should reach, it’s worth preparing the entire blog process. I deliberately use the word process. Running a company blog is a continuous task and ongoing work – requiring regularity. What should you do to handle it and create high-quality content without distracting your employees from their primary tasks?

1. Create a plan and define topic clusters – if you approach developing a blogging strategy seriously, indicating topics in which you should specialize shouldn’t be a problem. It’s worth preparing a set of article topics and links between them in advance. Some Marketing Automation tools, such as SEO tools in HubSpot, also help plan content.
   
   
2. Create processes – To publish regularly, enthusiasm is not enough; it is necessary to develop processes and plan work. How often should you publish posts? How far in advance should the text be prepared? Who will provide the information, who will write the text, who will edit it, who will prepare the illustrations, who will approve the content, and who will publish the article? The process of creating a blog post can be multi-stage, involving text preparation, visual elements, publication, and, importantly, content promotion – because without reaching the right audience, the whole “game” isn’t worth it.
   
   
3. Engage experts – a blog feeds on expert knowledge. If you want to provide clients with information that isn’t a patchwork of other websites and give them real value, you should engage specialists in your company in content creation, not just Chat GPT. It may seem like a significant obstacle. It’s worth knowing that the ways of involving engineers, specialists, or salespeople in preparing texts are diverse and don’t have to be burdensome for them. To avoid such a burden, it’s worth understanding which forms of content creation suit your experts best. Here, an experienced agency or copywriter can help by adapting the cooperation form to your team’s capabilities.
   
   
4. Focus on close cooperation – a popular way to run a blog is to outsource this task to an external marketing agency. This is a good solution, provided it meets a few basic criteria. A responsible copywriter/marketer shouldn’t propose preparing content entirely without your involvement. Regardless of their level of specialization in industrial marketing, they will need knowledge about your company, solutions, and clients. Therefore, blogging is a process where the writer should remain in close cooperation with your employees to maintain authenticity and the spirit of your brand while conveying reliable knowledge.
   
   
5. Take care of UX and UI – valuable content also needs an appropriate form that makes reading accessible and non-tiring for the user. Therefore, make sure to include visual elements, such as a suitably chosen title illustration and illustrations within the text. A wall of text is often an insurmountable obstacle for the reader, so it’s worth considering infographics, videos, or banners that break up the text. A scroll bar, clear link descriptions, and suggestions for further articles will facilitate navigation and keep the reader on the blog longer. Most importantly, the blog should be clean and accessible, so make sure to have an appropriate font, space between paragraphs, and reduce various types of distractions.

What to pay attention to?

In summary, make sure:

1. Do you know who you want to talk to and how to reach them?
2. Are your contents truly expert-level? And not just pretending to be?
3. Are your articles relevant and up-to-date?
4. Is the language used on your blog consistent with that used by your clients?
5. Does your blog have the right structure, is it readable, clear, and inviting to spend more time on?
6. Have you taken care of all your content recipients, both living and virtual?
7. Does your plan allow for the proper diversity of content and formats while maintaining regular publication?
8. Do you have enough strength, resources, and competence to ensure that the proverbial steam doesn’t go to waste?

Marketing for industry. What else is worth knowing?

You already know what to pay attention to when approaching a blog strategically. You know you need to remember various factors and a range of details. You know that without proper promotion – even in your social media channels – the whole endeavor might, bluntly speaking, not be worthwhile. But do you realize that a blog is a crucial element of a marketing strategy, but still just an element?

Don’t forget that to expand your reach, it’s worth inviting guest experts or collaborating with other brands. And most importantly, remember to diversify formats. Not everyone is a reading enthusiast. Some recipients will undoubtedly prefer to watch a video about your solution or listen to a podcast where you describe, with examples, the results achieved by a company implementing your solutions. It’s worth catering to them as well.

Are you ready to conquer the blogosphere with your company’s expert blog? Or maybe you’re looking for someone to help you with this task? At Grow Poland, we successfully create content and run company blogs – including in the industrial sector. Contact us and see how easy it is to become a thought leader in your field!