Content clutter is a serious concern for any marketer. The idea that your best planned and designed content meant to onboard and delight your target audience is being lost in an endless sea of blog posts, newsletters, automated campaigns, etc. etc. should send a shudder down the spine of even the most successful marketers.
While our prospects in the engineering marketing space no doubt suffer from more content than they have time to process, us marketers truly have it infinitely worse. As the flagbearers of content marketing we haven’t been shy to dedicate countless keystrokes to documenting our activities, trumpeting our successes, and offering our thoughts as to where marketing is headed next. The sea we fear for our prospects is rather a Waterworld for ourselves.
The goal of this week’s post is to act as a life-preserver for all the marketers working in the engineering space wanting to regularly grow their marketing knowledge, but find themselves too busy to sift through all the content out there.
To that end, here’s our list of the marketing luminaries and content curators you should be following to cut through your own content clutter and make easier your regular reading of cutting edge marketing content.
Joe Pulizzi (and the rest of the team at the Content Marketing Institute)
The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) is one of the web’s go-to places for marketing advice and research. Why they make the list over other sources like the Hubspot Blog, Moz, SearchEngineLand, etc. is that unlike other generalists they devote more time to specific industries that engineering marketers care about. For example, Joe publishes an annual report examining the state of content marketing in the manufacturing world.
(Joe Pulizzi - image courtesy of joepulizzi.com)
Another reason Joe and his team makes the list is they do an excellent job at curating their content and delivering it via email at a schedule you specify. Even if you don’t have the time to read each email as it comes in, you’ll still benefit from being on their email list. I can’t count the number of times I learned something incredibly valuable because I took the time to go through a content roundup that was sent to me a few weeks prior. Had I only been frequenting their site I would have missed out on so much insightful and actionable content.
You can Follow CMI on Twitter @CMIContent and Joe @JoePulizzi. You can also find all their social channels at contentmarketinginstitute.com and joepulizzi.com
ThomasNet RPM Blog
We’re big fans of the work done by the ThomasNet RPM team. They do a great job taking hot button marketing topics and examining them through the lens of industrial marketing. It also helps that they’re incredibly numbers focused in their writing, backing up their claims with hard data that they’ve either taken the time to thoroughly research or developed themselves.
(ThomasNet RPM Blog - image courtesy of rpm.thomasnet.com)
A unique aspect of the ThomasNet brand is its longevity and the advantages that provides. You’ll be hard pressed to find content marketing focused agencies that have been around more than a decade. ThomasNet RPM grew organically out of Thomas’ core business which has been around for 120 years as of next year. All that knowledge transferred over. Industry knowledge, customer pain points, the psychology of the industries they work with, all that comes from the long-standing relationships ThomasNet has built over many decades, and it helps them in producing top-tier content.
You can find the ThomasNet RPM blog and all their social feeds on their site. You can also follow RPM's founder Shawn Fitzgerald on Twitter @sfitzgerald9.
Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers
Sean’s my personal lighthouse. The guy is a prodigious tweeter and just about everything he tweets is so relevant to my marketing work I feel guilty when I don’t have time to read what he’s sent out. In fact, if you look at my phone’s photo albums you’ll find a folder of screenshots I took on the fly of tweets I intend to go back to as soon as I can – I’d retweet all of his stuff, but I wouldn’t want to flood the feeds of my non-marketing friends.
(Sean Ellis - image courtesy of growthhackers.com)
What I like most about what Sean sends out is it’s a distilled and vetted slice of the GrowthHacker Community. I don’t have to scroll through a bunch of post and test out articles to find one that is both interesting and relevant. Rather, I have someone whose built his entire brand around helping marketers (REALLY businesses) succeed give me regular updates that I know will be worth my time. Another great thing about Sean’s feed is that he does a great job of balancing high-level thinking pieces with How-to’s and guides, so whether you’re a senior marketer, someone executing campaigns, or somewhere in between, you’re going to find value in paying attention to him.
Follow Shawn at the aforementioned prodigious Twitter account @SeanEllis or find him on his website growthhackers.com.
Achinta Mitra of Industrial Marketing Today
Achinta’s been working as a consultant in the world of engineering for 25+ years helping manufacturers and industrial companies navigate the difficult world of technical marketing to no-nonsense engineers. Separating himself from most marketers in our space is the fact that Achinta was an engineer first and then transitioned into the world of marketing giving him a unique perspective.
(Achinta Mitra - image courtesy of industrialmarketingtoday.com)
The monthly blog posts he puts out are awesome for a number of reasons. One, there’s no clutter from him. You don’t have to worry about being inundated with content you may not want or have time to read, it’s a post every 20 to 60 days depending on what his schedule is like. Secondly, because the rate of content production is slower the quality is a lot higher than what you’ll get elsewhere. Achinta doesn’t post until he’s found a topic that he can really sink his teeth into. Third, Achinta is working in the weeds with firms trying to get their marketing on-course, so he’s intimately familiar with the problems industrial marketers are facing and speaks to those challenges. Finally, because he’s both a mechanical engineer and a marketer the analysis you’ll get is unlike anything you’re going to find anywhere else.
You can read Achinta's blog at www.industrialmarketingtoday.com. He's also very active on social media, so be sure to check out all his social feeds located in the top right corner of the homepage.
Avinash Kaushik – You Know, the Google Guy...but also of Occam's Razor
I really love Avinash’s blog Occam’s Razor. The guy lives and breaths data and Web Analytics, the lifeblood of the digital marketing world. He also is committed to improving outcomes for both us marketers and our prospects/customers. For example, his See-Think-Do-Care framework is the foundation for a customer focused approach to web analytics. Prior to this seminal work, more digital marketers than we care to admit thought of visitors as a collection of CTRs and bounce rates, while it’s still a problem its much less of one thanks to this one post alone.
(Avinash Kaushik - image courtesy of searchengineland.com)
Another great aspect of Avinash’s blog is he doesn’t shy away from the most complex concepts and ideas. For example, in a recent blog post, he cautioned his readers that what he was going to address would take time to process. Instead of just reading the whole post in one go, he asked his readers to come back each day and then go over the previous examples and then just one more. That’s it. Who else has the gall to do that?
It’s not always easy reading and I have to re-read things so they’ll sink in from time-to-time, but it’s worth it. Avinash’s stuff is the kind of writing that when you drop an Avinash truth-bomb in a meeting people take note.
Dive into Avinash's world at the Occam's Razor blog. His social feeds are on the right hand navigation bar if you'd rather get your info from him that way.
So that’s my list of who you should be paying attention to in the world of engineering marketing. It’s impossible to list off everyone I think is worthwhile to follow, but this will get you started. And hey, if you’ve made it this far hopefully you’ll think this blog deserves to be on the list. If you think so, you can subscribe for our weekly updates below under the comment section or at the top of this page.
I’d love to hear who you think should have been on the list, so please let me know in the comments, on our social feeds, or you can always drop me an email.
Until next time,
Andrew
