In 2017 marketing for industrial companies is moving to online from offline. This is not a new trend.
The problem is that most industrial and manufacturing companies have spent years building up their offline collateral. They have tons of brochures, case studies and other hard-copy pieces that are just gathering dust. This is a great source of low hanging fruit that we see for industrial marketing.
One of my favorite phrases in inbound marketing is recycle. You need to be able to take a piece of content that you have developed to hand out at a trade show, or for a salesperson to give to a prospect, and make it valuable online.
However, there are pitfalls here. Sure you can just take a pdf of the content and put it on your website. However, that is not the most efficient strategy. Let’s take a look at how you can maximize your strategy for online marketing.
Step One: You need an overall strategy of what you want this project to accomplish. What is the goal that you want to achieve with this project? Is this to bring in new leads? Is it to help conversion on the site? Is it to launch your overall industrial inbound strategy?
Step Two: Find out what content is still effective. I used to work for a company that had a room full of old content. The problem was that most of these brochures and case studies were so outdated they were more suited to kindling instead of recycling.
But there were odd gems here and there within the pages that you could recycle. We decided to work with our sales staff and engineering to decide what is still worthwhile. The question was how can we transform it?
Step Three: How will you turn these old pieces of content? Now, you need to triage the old content you have.
I would suggest three separate piles. 
Garbage: This is our kindling as mentioned earlier. This is the easiest. Toss it.
Semi-Useful: We can take this and steal parts of it to make something. Maybe an infographic. Maybe we combine with other content to turn it into something else. Or maybe we can use this for a blog. This step will require the most work.
Almost Perfect: This information just needs to be updated and transferred to digital. This requires the second most amount of work but is the low hanging fruit.
If you would like to try a different sortation tactic you can sort by content type as well.
Interested in learning what you can do with your new content? Maybe start an inbound campaign. Get our checklist here.