How to get the message out

We’ve talked about how to formulate your message and how to keep it consistent while still targeting it to appeal to specific audiences. Now what? How do you get your message out to the people who need to hear it? Here are a few ideas:

• Website/Blog

First of all, you should focus on your website and/or blog. This is where you can be totally in charge of your message without a filter. The goal of all the other online efforts is to drive traffic TO your website so people can see in detail who you are, what you sell, and, of course, find a way to do business with you—so utilizing your website to present the right message is paramount.

A lot of you might have gotten disenchanted with the idea of a “blog” because it seemed frivolous—so it might help to think of your blog as your NEWSROOM. If you’ve developed a new technology or you want to comment on something that’s happening in your industry, a blog post is a great place to start. You control the message, and you position yourself as a member of the thought leadership in your industry. And blog posts, because they are updates to your website content, are great for search engine optimization.

• LinkedIn/Social Media

These are also great channels for demonstrating thought leadership. Once you’ve done a blog post, you can share it on LinkedIn or your other selected social channels. (You should put some thought into which channels make sense for you—there are a ton of options depending on who you want to reach and what you want to say.) But remember that we’re basically talking about word-of-mouth. How many times have you said that word-of-mouth is your best marketing tool? Social media sharing is online word-of-mouth. People “like” you, they follow you, and they share interesting information about you.

• Email

Done right, email is still an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with your customers and employees—and people whom you want to become your customers and employees. A few quick tips about email marketing:

1. Update your database to make sure you are reaching the right people.
2. Don’t overdo it. If you email too much, people will unsubscribe.
3. Craft your messages in the way we talked about before. Be consistent with your brand and always keep in mind what matters to THE READER.

• ThomasNet and CTmrg

There are resources out there that are pulling together stories about how companies are contributing during the pandemic. People need this information, and ThomasNet and CTmrg are two websites that are curating those stories. Make sure they have your information AND that the information exists on your website or your blog so they can link back to it and drive traffic for you.

• Press Releases and Industry Publications

There is opportunity right now to get your message to a broader audience than you might think. If you are making NEWS, if you are doing something different than anyone else, if you have developed a new product or are doing something in a whole new way in the face of COVID-19, people want to know about that. That deserves a press release.

There are also many, many industry vertical publications out there that might be open to publishing articles about that kind of thing. Most of them are especially interested in success stories or case studies. What is a specific thing you did that solved a specific problem? These pieces can’t be in marketing-speak, but they are needed. Publications are looking for relevant content right now. Look through some of the industry publications you get—you probably get several of them, either in physical form or electronically. What kind of stories do they contain? Do you do similar things? Look for opportunities to share stories of what you are doing well.

We’ve talked about the importance of creating a segmented database and determining the “voice” of your different messages depending on the audience you are targeting. Now let’s discuss what is worth saying. This is probably the biggest challenge our clients face. What should we talk about?

To help them answer that question, we’ve found that interviewing them on a regular basis can be beneficial. Most of the time, the interview starts with a simple, “What’s new?”—and the response is usually, “Same old, same old.” That’s to be expected, but because we approach these interviews from an “outsider” perspective, we’re able to help the clients uncover topics that might be interesting to their audiences even if they aren’t so interesting to the clients themselves.

A 15-minute chat can often yield three or four great ideas to write about. If you don’t have access to someone from the outside to do interviews like these, have one of your employees do it. Just sit down and talk about what the business is up to, and you’ll probably find that the process will help you to formulate messaging.

It’s a common theme among manufacturers—they are so busy with day-to-day operations that they don’t realize that what they are doing can be really interesting to someone from the outside, particularly prospective customers. For example, maybe you just bought a brand-new piece of equipment and brought it online. Does it increase your capacity or give you a capability that you didn’t have before? Customers and prospects will want to know about that! Is it a great new technology? Employees and recruits might really get excited about it!

You also should think about what you are doing in relation to what’s happening in your industry or in the world at large. Since early spring, the focus of almost every aspect of our lives has been the pandemic. What did you do during this time? Did you focus on helping, like encouraging volunteering or making donations? For instance, several manufacturers in Berlin created a Local Lunchtime Challenge in which they purchased lunches for their employees from local restaurants. It demonstrated their appreciation to their workers, who were going above and beyond to keep the manufacturers going despite the overwhelming challenges, and it also funneled business to restaurants in the community. And by making it a “challenge” and sharing it, they encouraged as many companies as possible to join in. That is a great story!

If you can’t come up with a story from inside your business right now, you can always share other information that you find interesting. Look for articles about manufacturing, business ownership, COVID-19, or anything else that you find informative and helpful. Simply write a quick introduction about why you find the piece worthwhile and then share a link to it. People always appreciate good, practical stories that give them information they need.

So, when you set out to create a message to share with your network, look for something that falls into one of the three categories we’ve talked about:

• What are you working on?
• What is going on in the industry or the world? (e.g., COVID-19)
• What is something I’ve found interesting and helpful?