What follows is not a comprehensive plan, but a few things to consider when planning your approach so you're more likely to come up with an ROI that you believe in and can base future decisions on.

1. Determine the goals of your campaign first

Any time you want to measure something, you need to know what your goals actually are. Are you after brand awareness? Qualified leads? Greater engagement with potential prospects early in their buying process? Referrals from current customers?

Calculating a return on investment is about placing a monetary value on a desired goal. For maximum learning you need to know what that goal is ahead of time. This will also give you a chance to determine baseline values and compare ROI to traditional methods if you are so inclined.

Another reason to figure this out ahead of time is that the tools you use to measure results may also be different depending on your goals. And that's not even getting into which social media channels are most appropriate for your goals, which is a whole different topic.

2. Decide on the individual or team who will be the primary resource

This may seem to be an odd tip for success in measuring return on investment, but it will make the process simpler. If you know who is supposed to be doing the work and are tracking their time and efforts, then you have a more solid idea of the investment the company has made.

It also allows you to better determine whether more or less resources should be used the next time. These numbers will, of course, be more meaningful if you are also tracking the hourly investments into other types of projects and daily tasks.

3. Treat social media as one more aspect of your current efforts

Social media tools are still just tools, even as the fax machine was once considered something strange and new. If you currently measure time spent on technical service calls, then add in time spent looking for and answering comments on online platforms, such as engineers' forums. If you currently track your public relations efforts by giving point values to different types of mentions in the press then you can expand your points chart.

Whatever method you are using to measure other responses to marketing efforts, such as the difference between speaking at a tradeshow while maintaining a fully staffed booth versus just visiting with a handful of your sales force, may be something you can translate into the online arena.

4. Use click tracking to determine which links attract attention

The action of clicking on a link can be one of the easiest things to track online. There are services that will shorten your complicated web page name and also track who clicks on it. There are ways to set up the links you are using in other publications so that the analytics software on your website can tell who clicked on it without using an outside service. Custom solutions can also be built depending on your needs.

You can often use this information as part of getting the bigger picture. Depending on your goals you might be interested in figuring out which social media platforms bring in the most traffic, at what times of the day, and what exactly those visitors do when they arrive at your landing page. 

5. Find out if you need advanced measurement tools.

There are so many free or easily accessed ways available to measure web analytics that it is easy to say we can move forward into social media with the measurement tools that we already have. Sometimes this is true.

However, if you want a certain level of detail in measuring incoming actions based on your efforts or more sophisticated filtering abilities when determining where your companies and products have been mentioned, then you may need customized software. The latter is especially true if you want to integrate answers on social media platforms with your CRM efforts. 

Review of Social Media ROI Success Stories

These tips were developed after reading the MarketingProfs special report - Social Media ROI Success Stories: How 11 companies - like OfficeMax, Nissan, BMC and Microsoft - are listening, engaging, and measuring. Unfortunately, none of the examples are in the industrial market, although about half are B2B.

The report may inspire some different ideas for you anyway. It includes a annotated list of various analytics solutions available as tools to gather the raw data needed to calculate an ROI and ends with a few pointed questions to focus your thoughts. In between, each case study reports on the challenge, solution, results, and a few business lessons learned by the company involved. 

Marketing Profs Case Study Collection

This post is one of a series that looks at social media through the lens of the collections of case studies published by MarketingProfs. Each report, including Social Media ROI Success Stories, is available for $49 individually, or you can get free access to all ofthem as only one of the many features of a Pro Membership, which is $235 a year. I recommend the membership and purchased my own last summer. You should also know that if you click on the links in this post and make a purchase, then I receive a sales commission. 

Then you might want to consider including an outreach to this important audience in your content marketing strategy. And since ACT Inc recently completed a study analyzing the on-the-job duties of manufacturing supervisors, you now know what they're most likely to be interested in.

Key Duties and Content Questions

Manufacturing supervisors spend significant time monitoring existing efforts for safety, quality, and work processes.

- Can you discuss safety standards in your industry? Perhaps you can pull together best practices or ways to automate and improve the monitoring processes.

Manufacturing supervisors spend time being the expert.

- Can you deepen their knowledge up and down the value chain of their industry? Where does this piece come from and why is this aspect of the environment changing? This is an area where you'll be looking at knowledge they might not need every day.

Manufacturing supervisors spend time managing production.

- Can you help increase their ability to troubleshoot? One option might be a newsletter on problem solving techniques with a feature story each issue that describes an odd problem one of your other readers solved. 

Manufacturing supervisors spend time in managing interpersonal relationships.

- Can you create articles directed towards applying management techniques specifically to the manufacturing environment? Simply stating your target audience and pulling your examples from their experiences can increase your credibility even if the material itself is not new to a management expert.

Advantages of Knowing Your Audience

What will work best for your company will depend on exactly what you are selling. Different offerings will relate best to different aspects of these key duties. Ultimately, if you can connect your expertise to information designed to make the lives of your target audience easier and make them more productive and more likely to get recognition from their own managers, then you will have a valuable attractor.

And, as is the premise of content marketing, if they're coming to you for this information, you'll be first on their list for someone to come to for the actual purchase of whatever it is you are selling.  The manufacturing supervisor who trusts your information is more likely to be in your corner when the company is considering your product or service.

People are using social media platforms to talk about ball bearings.

If there is room to become a social media leader in the ball bearing industry, there is room to become a leader in your industry - Matt Dickman from technomarketer

He found this out through basic testing when he made a presentation about using social media and one of the audience members kept frowning, thinking it wasn't relevant to him.

People are using social media platforms to talk about industry conferences.

The World of Concrete conference uses a variety of social media tools to communicate with their audience in commercial construction. And that audience uses those tools enough themselves that they started WoC's Facebook fan page, not WoC.

One excellent source of additional examples and information is Social Media B2B, a blog that explores the impact of social media on B2B companies.

Three relevant examples:

• Dupont using video to increase general brand awareness
• Indium Corporation blogging effectively on semi-conductors and more
• Steel company with mixed results, plus the follow-up direct interview

You might also want to check out Kipp's post on 10 Signs Your B2B Company Isn't Ready for Social Media and 5 Cases when Social Media Isn't Right for B2B.

If your company falls into one of these categories then it doesn't mean you can't use content marketing techniques. It just means you need to take a different approach to keeping on the minds of your prospects and customers. Custom published magazines and newsletters were around long before the internet.

Guest Posting is Writing For Others

In guest posting you write (or have your ghost-blogger write for you) a post for another blog. It will be published under your name and usually with a small bio at the end where you can link back to your blog. In a way, it's like authoring an article to be published in a relevant trade magazine, which is a technique you may have used in the past.

You should not need to pay for the privilege of guest posting nor should you expect payment. You are giving the host blogger a piece of great content to share with their readers that they do not have to write and in return you are receiving access to those readers, who you hope will soon become your readers.

The Strategic Side of Guest Posting

Since the primary goal of guest posting is to attract readers who you hope will become prospects and customers, it is not generally appropriate to approach a direct competitor. Now if you both have areas where your product lines do not overlap and want to swap posts discussing those, maybe, but, in general, they're probably not going to want their readers to know about you.

So you will need to identify blogs by suppliers and customers. Blogs that are kept by trade publications or research firms might also welcome a guest post. Look for both corporate blogs and blogs by individuals that have a passion for something that relates to the products or services you offer the manufacturing community. Even related hobby blogs can be useful, since others who share that hobby could be employed within your target market. For maximum effect, you will want to vary which blogs you guest post to.

The Tactical Side of Guest Posting

Read the blog first. Think of a topic that you can present in a style that would fit with the posts that are already there. For example, most blogs are not going to want you to talk directly about your products or put in a sales pitch. Most bloggers want something that will interest their audience more broadly, but still reflects your unique perspective. 

If there are currently no guest posts on the blog then you may want to spend some time relationship building first. Leave useful and relevant comments. Strike up a conversation via email. Then offer up a post. Depending on the situation, you can also offer to swap guest posts.

If there are guest posts on the blog then you may be able to email the request to start with. Just remember to focus on how the content you will provide will benefit them and their audience, not just you. Relationship building first is still a good approach to take, of course. Remember that you are probably getting more of the exchange than they are. 

More on Guest Posting

These four articles from Problogger go into more detail. They are primarily intended for blogging entrepreneur's but the majority of the advice applies:

• Finding New Readers for Your Blog with Guest Posting
• How to Be a Good Guest Blogger
• Do You Make These Mistakes in Guest Posting?
• How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog

An Invitation

Would you like to write a guest post to be published on Leading with Content?

I am interested in additional perspectives from those of you in a manufacturing or chemical company doing marketing or even if you are in a related business where manufacturers are your customers. I'd also be interested in hearing how the online marketing techniques of other companies in the industry have affected your purchasing decisions. Just contact me with an idea and we'll talk about it from there.

Tactical Goals

The beginning and end are still about strategy. The first section discusses how inbound marketing is a response to changes in the way customers shop. The final section brings people into the equation, both inside and outside your company, so you're not doing all the individual tasks yourself.

Getting Found by Prospects

The bulk of Inbound Marketing is about getting found through specific techniques such as blogging, search engines, and social media. It covers these in sufficient detail that you can get started without other resources, although each topic could, of course, have been expanded on into their own book. The foundation that supports all of these tactics is the creation and publication of remarkable content valuable to your target audience.

Converting Prospects to Customers

The book distills this process down to three principles, going into more detail about how to actually accomplish each one. Their viewpoint is that creating customers consists of:

• converting casual visitors into leads by using compelling calls to action on an easy to navigate website.
• converting targeted prospects into leads by building specific and single-minded landing pages with simple but effective forms to gather email addresses.
• converting leads into customers by sorting them based on their value and nurturing them over time with content.

Others Viewpoints

You might also enjoy seeing the review by Chris Brogan (co-author of Trust Agents) and the 10 Key Insights that Ben Yoskovitz pulled from the book.

What happens next depends on the approach your sales force takes.

Will the salesman push the latest and greatest to reach his sales goals?

Will he ask questions and help solve your prospect's problems?

Connect or Disconnect

Is your salesforce prepared to build on the trust and expectations that your content marketing strategy has built up in your prospect's mind?

Have they been reading the blog posts, custom magazines, and email newsletters? Even better, were they contributing ideas for what the people they call on would like to see?

And it's not just the sales force. Is there continuity between what your social media and inbound content marketing and the brochures, white papers, and other marketing communications that you've always done?

Reputation Construction and Deconstruction

Most content marketing techniques are designed to provide valuable information to the customer or potential customer while proving your trustworthiness and expertise.

For maximum effectiveness, and to avoid losing customers through gaps in perception, the techniques need to be part of an overall strategy that crosses business functions.

Do you have any stories of succes or room for improvement in this area?

The same sorting process can apply when you're not talking directly about your products but pursuing a content marketing strategy.

Examples of Matching

Some high-level topics will be of interest to your current customers and your prospects alike because they apply the entire industry or industry segment that you sell into, but you might express them in different ways.

Articles that focus on solving a specific problem of which your offering is one possible solution will be more attractive to prospects who are in the beginning of their research process, but still reassuring to the engineer farther along in the sales funnel.

Detailed case studies which have a take away point that can be applied to other systems may be read by those initial prospects, but will carry more value to the one nearly ready to purchase.

Information on how best to use your systems and maintain them and how these relate to bigger issues  might first be targeted towards your current customers, but the bigger picture portion could be of interest to prospects, either from a solution point of view or simply as assurance that you know what you're doing.

So how do you put this idea into action? There are two main options.

Separating Your Content by Audience

This is probably what you and your salesforce are already doing in person with other communications. People who have certain needs get certain information.

You can segment your email list in combination with a customer service management program so that certain customers only receive certain articles, newsletters, and offers. Or, more simply, when your prospects become customers you can start sending them your custom magazine as a benefit.

This approach allows you to take the same basic valuable information and tailor it to your audience, perhaps going into more or less detail. It also allows you to specify what your call to action will be based on what a segment of your audience will be interested in.

Wide Accessibility but Targeted Calls to Action

However, not all forms of content can work this way, especially if you are making information available online. Anyone can read blog posts, for example, or download one of the white papers or webinars you list in your online library.

Just because the information is freely accessible doesn't mean it will be of the same value to prospects and customers at different points in the sales cycle. You can identify which segment will be most likely to pay attention to the information and put in a call to action targeted to that segment.

Another option is to put in multiple choices or calls to action where the reader selects what they want next. This goes against the current prevailing wisdom that simplicity and reduction in choices is more effective at getting an action to be taken, but might still work in your industry or publication. If the idea appeals, then test it out.

One Customer with Different Positions

Remember that today's customer for one offering is tomorrow's prospect for another. Whichever approach you take you want to continue being the source of valuable industry information and the vendor they turn to when something changes.

Engineering Professionals Use the Net for Work

One year ago 83% of the 233 engineering, technical, industrial, and manufacturing professions surveyed by GlobalSpec revealed that they had downloaded information related to their work for immediate use or for future reference and 68% had printed out articles.

Some of the information they were looking for

• 80% wanted to find components, equipment, services, and suppliers
• 75% needed instruction manuals
• 55% were seeking technical application ideas
• 50% participated in training, workshops, and seminars

And these weren't a once in a while uses that prompted them to check off the box on the survey either. 56% of the engineers spent at least 6 hours a week on the internet for work related purposes.

These manufacturing professionals are looking for information online and they could be finding yours.

Maximizing Your Influence on Being Found

Contact Information

88% said they have contacted a supplier after visiting their website. For this to work you need to have contact information clearly available on your site. If you use a generic email, you need to make sure it is checked regularly and the leads are followed-up on.

Printer-Friendly Articles and Blog Posts

Any content you have on your website can be printed, even if it takes cutting and pasting the text into another program. But this isn't what you want.

You want the information to have your name on it so that months from now when the engineer finds it in her files she will look your company up again.

If you provide a link to a printer-friendly version of the article, then you control what that version looks like. It can be set up to automatically include a box with contact information and your website, for example.

Consider adding a link for emailing the article for the same reason - to make it easy for your contact information to be spread along with your information.

More Branding for Larger Pieces

White papers, reports, and anything that you provide in a pdf format should also be branded. Yes, you may require an email opt-in for the document to be downloaded in the first place, but you don't really know how far it will be shared from there, either by email or in hard-copy.

Each page should include your company name and website, in case portions are clipped.

The front or end is a good opportunity to place a page with more detail on what your company does. This isn't a marketing brochure, so trying to sell directly is unnecessary. Instead you are supplementing your helpful information by revealing where the engineer can find more information.

More Survey Results

I'm looking forward to the updated version to see if usage trends have changed, but in the meantime the data from the third quarter of 2008 points the way. Download the full report for yourself over at Globalspec, along with some other interesting research pieces. You will need to submit your email and other information.

In this free online site and e-book each basic concept is evaluated and the highlights presented on a single page:

• description
• a cool tool for doing this
• not so hot for doing that
• example(s)
• 3 key points for usage
• bonus links

If you have five minutes then at least go and check on the methods you are already using.

If you have more time, then it's worth taking a look at each possible method in the Content Marketing Playbook more carefully.

Don't forget to pause a moment to see how the are using this free (no opt-in required!) information as part of their own content marketing strategy.

Some will be part of your company's experience, others you will glean from your customers, and others you can get by reading trade magazines and wider publications, online and off.

And sometimes you will be able to make use of research done by companies that specialize in gathering and analyzing such information. You, or someone else in your company, may already be using these resources to set strategy, and you can get even more use from them by looking at them as sources of ideas for content.

Market Research Companies

There are a host of firms that issue reports on the state of different industries that you can purchase. Prices and level of detail vary from source to source. A quick search turned up these four companies:

• Market Research.com
• Research and Markets
• Mindbranch
• Report Buyer

Another example is Hoovers. They serve primarily as a directory of companies and people, but also have broad industry reports for less expensive prices. A quick overview and one actionable tip are provided for free.

ThomasNet

ThomasNet's mission is to connect industry. You may already be using the Thomas Register, directory of vendors and suppliers, but they also have:

• basic need-to-know guides
• a white paper library
• Industry Market Trends blog, updated daily

in addition to various forums, catalogs, and tools designed to improve your interaction with information. Most of their information is freely available.

Aberdeen Group

Aberdeen Group's about page says their research focuses on the "global technology-driven value chain" but the information they offer fits a very broad definition of that phrase, as their research channels include areas as varied as human resources and product innovation.

You can read short Analyst Insights and access the most recent of their longer reports for free, as long as you register with the site. You will need to pay to access earlier reports that might be of interest to you.

What makes Aberdeen a great resource is that they are less concerned with an individual industry and more interested in the issues that span multiple industries.

Suggest More Specialists

Are you familiar with more places to go for higher level research? Do you have examples of how you used this type of information within your content marketing?