How Precast Concrete Producers Choose Topics for Content Marketing Efforts

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is creating, publishing, and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent material to connect with a specific audience. Channels you can utilize for your content marketing efforts include blog posts (website and social media), videos (website and social media), and eNewsletters (email).

Why Should Precast Concrete Producers Care about Content Marketing?

The primary goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action by building trust, establishing authority, and fostering relationships. In short, smart content marketing allows you to cement yourself as an expert in the highly competitive precast concrete industry. When your competitors only want to sell their products, your commitment to creating informed, educated buyers will make you your market’s “go-to” resource and create customers for life.

Which Content Marketing Strategy Does Aster Brands Use?

Aster Brands employs the “They Ask, You Answer” (or TAYA) content marketing strategy. TAYA suggests building content around the answers to questions often asked about your products and services. Our content is guided by several core principles promoted by TAYA, including:

• Good Fit / Bad Fit – We highlight when Aster Brands solutions are the right choice but are willing to concede when they’re not. An example of this is a comparison of wet cast concrete and dry cast concrete. We’ve produced multiple pieces highlighting where these materials work best… and when they may not fit as well.
• Price Talk – Your product pricing is dynamic, so when Aster Brands creates pricing content, we focus on factors that influence pricing, project budgeting, and pricing processes. This helps prospective customers come to you with a better understanding of why your products are priced the way they are.
• Disarmament – You might be surprised that we prioritize mentioning when our products might not be best for the potential customer. No precast product is perfect, and conceding when ours might not be the customer’s best option builds trust and our reputation.
• Secret Sauce – We do things differently. We discuss what differentiates Aster Brands’ products and support resources from those of your competitors.
• Comparisons – Potential customers love to compare, so we compare our solutions to others’ alternatives without bias.
• Show It — We use more than words to showcase our solutions, relying increasingly on video content to tell impactful stories. If a topic or question is suggested that doesn’t check one or more of the above boxes, we pass on it. Don’t just answer a question because it’s easy. Be intentional when deciding what to spend your valuable time on.

How Do We Select Questions We Answer with Content Marketing?

Choosing your content marketing topics isn’t rocket surgery. It isn’t even brain science. We go straight to our prospective customers for their questions, doing so through the following channels:

• Our engineering team. They receive plenty of technical questions we answer for architects and wall designers.
• Our business consultants. The BCs get great questions from potential clients and project owners.
• Our social media channels. Social media is a two-way street. If you’re not paying attention to what your followers are saying or asking, you should be.
• Our producer-partners. You are closer to the customers than anyone else, so we’d be silly not to prioritize answering the questions you’re asking! Your content doesn’t have to answer a question that’s never been asked, but it should seek to answer every question as transparently and comprehensively as possible.

How Can You Choose Your Content Topics?

How you choose your content topics doesn’t need to deviate much from our preferred methods. At the very least, consider using the following:

• Customer touch points. This includes your sales team (if applicable), social media channels, and reviews.
• Industry and competitor websites. What are your competitors talking about? What trends or issues is the industry experiencing right now?
• Online listening utilities. Free resources like www.answerthepublic.com are available. ATP listens to autocomplete data from search engines like Google, then quickly generates every handy phrase and question people are asking around your keyword. Just visit their website and input “retaining wall” or “patio” to see the types of questions people ask online.

If you’re struggling for inspiration, spend some time in our brands’ Knowledge Hubs, where we house all our content marketing materials. Feel free to use what we’ve created as a foundation for your piece.

One final bit of advice. When you create your content, make sure it’s YOUR content. Make it relevant to your market and your customers. We refer to this as “customizing and localizing,” and it’s key to ensuring search engines present your content to the right folks. Check out our helpful bit of content marketing article How to Customize and Localize Aster Brands Content for Your Market for tips on doing this effectively.