Marketing The Manufacturing Industry: Q&A With Lincoln Electric’s Craig Coffey
When it comes to all things industrial, Craig Coffey has marketed them all. A career-long B2B marketer with extensive experience in the manufacturing, engineering, and professional services industries, Craig currently serves as the the U.S. Marketing Communications Manager for Lincoln Electric.
We connected with Craig at Content Marketing World 2014, after his stint sharing the stage with Chris Golec, Ahava Liebtag, and our CEO Allen Gannett for the panel session “The Future of Content Marketing: Predictions Uncovered.”
Read on for Craig’s take on the good, the bad, and the ugly of content marketing today — and learn which of his fellow manufacturing marketers he turns to to get inspired.
(And if you’re planning to return to Cleveland for Content Marketing World 2015, be sure to check out Craig’s “Guide to Cleveland Fun for CMW Attendees” series on LinkedIn. You’ll thank us!)
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Content Marketing means a lot of different things to different people. What does Content Marketing mean to you?
Craig Coffey: Content marketing is about creating context and accountability. It allows you to give somebody a reason to care about what you’re telling them about it. It’s selling, but it’s a different way of selling.
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What’s the biggest mistake you seen big brands make with content marketing?
Craig Coffey: I’d have to say either not understanding who the customer is and isn’t before putting content out, or not taking the time to track its results, and just kind of assuming that it did what it was intended to do.
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Name two brands that you think are killing it with content right now.
Craig Coffey: First, Owens-Illinois is awesome. Their Glass Is Life campaign is so cool.
Saga Shoffner is the architect of that content effort. Owens-Illinois is a glass container manufacturer founded in Toledo, Ohio. Saga Shoffner worked in Portland for Nike, and Owens-Illinois somehow talked her into moving to Toledo, and she’s done amazing things there. I’ve told her this. I’m stealing ideas from her and her team blindly on a daily basis. I think those guys are among the leading edge.
I think that Caterpillar also always does a nice job. I’m a huge Cat fan. I used to work for a Cat dealer, so I bleed yellow in addition to red.
GE is also really great with content. Everybody wishes they had GE’s budget. But I also think that, when pressed, GE doesn’t attribute revenue generation to content marketing. I think that’s a mistake. They don’t track that lead from inception to completion, through extremely long sales cycles.
I think they’d be pleasantly surprised if they did that, but they’re so bought into it and budgeted for that they just do good stuff, and expect that the good stuff will bloom.
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And finally — what’s your second-favorite breed of dog? (Besides Corgis, of course!)
Craig Coffey: The Border Collie. That’s a dog that I would love to have, knowing full well that I’ll never have one. You just can’t have herding dogs in a city environment. I don’t have the land for it, and I don’t like mowing lawns enough to get the land to have a Border Collie… but they are so beast.
If you liked this post, you might like our Q&A’s with Walmart’s Donata Maggipinto on “Serving The Customer With Content” or The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons on “Creating Context Around Cool Ideas.”
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
