When you’re targeting a niche market like manufacturing or the industrial sector, it can be difficult to keep your digital audience engaged with your posts. While many other sectors can take advantage of the latest social media trends to amass a general following, industrial companies oftentimes have a much more focused audience that they are targeting. These businesses are not concerned about gaining a large number of followers necessarily- they are instead concerned about the quality of their leads and building a positive reputation in their respective fields.

Even if your company isn’t aiming for explosive growth, it can admittedly be discouraging to work hard on a piece of content only for it to underperform.

If that sounds all too familiar to you, worry not- MFG Tribe is here to help! In today’s blog post we’re going to be sharing some of our top tools and tricks to help boost engagement on your brand’s industrial marketing content.

Ask & You Shall Receive: The Power of CTAs in Social Media Marketing

It’s easy to forget that an incredibly plain solution can sometimes be just as effective. That’s exactly the case when it comes to utilizing a Call to Action, also known as a CTA, in your digital content marketing.

You see and hear these CTAs everywhere, multiple times a day- “Call now!” “Request a quote today.” “Visit our website for more info.” “CLICK HERE!” The reason these callouts have remained prevalent for decades is simple: they work.

Some industrial companies shy away from utilizing CTAs for fear of sounding too pushy or too salesy. While this can be seen as polite at best, the truth is that being conservative about making a sale is just no way to make a sale. This isn’t to say that you should constantly bombard your customers, but you do have to be assertive to a degree. You can use a CTA to remind a customer that your products or services are just a call away. In many cases that small reminder is just what they need to take action to reach out to your company.

CTAs don’t have to be incredibly demanding either. In many cases they’re actually quite innocuous but still very effective. When it comes to increasing engagement on your posts, a simple request like “Comment your thoughts below ⬇” or “Share if you found this helpful! ?” can go a long way.

Need an extra hand with your social media marketing? MFG Tribe can help. Contact us today to get started.

Tried and True: Utilize a Targeted Digital Marketing Strategy

Even better in the manufacturing world is asking your audience to share their own experiences with industry-specific content and questions. To know your audience well enough to do this effectively, you have to be working with a targeted digital marketing strategy.

The idea here is that if you’re serving relevant content to the right people, they will be more likely to take interest in your posts and engage with them.

Although this sounds simple enough, be careful not to rush headfirst into making posts with CTAs thinking that you know everything about your audience. While you might know exactly what your audience is looking for, chances are that you don’t know exactly how they are looking for it- and that knowledge is integral to making sure that your content actually reaches them.

To learn more about your audience’s browsing and engagement habits, we recommend using data analysis tools on the social media websites of your choice. Take our favorite, LinkedIn, for example.

LinkedIn is equipped with built-in, free-to-use tools that allow users to analyze the performance of their own posts, or posts belonging to a page that they run. With these tools you can see which of your posts garner more engagement than others, find the common denominator between them, and integrate whatever that common denominator is into your future posts.

This can take some trial and error, especially when testing out new types of content. If you try something out and it doesn’t work how you expected, don’t worry- be flexible and pivot to the next thing.

It’s also helpful to study how your social media platform of choice works. There are many features you can integrate in your posts to optimize your reach. For example, LinkedIn recommends that each post have no more than 3 relevant hashtags to maximize visibility. Finding out these little tricks is as easy as running an online search for “how to optimize posts for <your social platform of choice>”. These sites make information like this readily available. Just make sure that you keep up with any algorithmic changes, as social media platforms are constantly evolving.

Think Small: Try Micro Content Marketing

While not all trends are well-suited to manufacturing and industrial companies, one current trend that has proven to be universally effective at increasing reach and engagement is micro content. Popularized by platforms like Vine and TikTok, short form video content has now found a home on all major social media platforms. This format allows businesses and industry professionals to share short clips of information that are easily digestible. Since short form video is currently experiencing explosive popularity, these posts are much more likely to be pushed by social media algorithms to reach a wider audience.

While LinkedIn has not yet introduced its own micro content feed like other platforms have (think Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts), short form videos are still very effective at boosting audience engagement. By working with such a short amount of time, micro content tends to be very focused in scope which makes it great for highlighting industry-specific topics. At MFG Tribe for example, we focus our micro content on industrial sales and manufacturing marketing. For our clients we produce micro content which focuses on the products or services they offer, how they address industry pain points, showcasing their unique production capabilities, and more.

Perhaps the best thing about micro content is that it’s relatively easy to make. A practice that we recommend is called content batching. When you batch content, you start by making a full length video. Then from that full length video, you can pull shorter clips to edit together for your micro content. Before you know it, what started as one piece of content will have multiplied into ten!

Don’t just guess where to cut- Work with an agency with a professional video team like MFG Tribe! We can make the most of your video content.

We hope you found these engagement tips to be helpful. If you did, be sure to give this article a share below on your platform of choice. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you on the next one!