How to Write the Perfect Content Brief for Manufacturing SEO Content

Content writers, no matter how good they are, aren’t mind readers.

And in manufacturing there is a second problem: the person writing the article, whether an agency writer, a freelancer or your own marketing colleague, has usually never stood next to the laser, the press brake or the coating line.

When you assign them an article, there is no guarantee you will get the piece you had in mind, unless you give them everything you want and don’t want to see in it, plus the technical facts they cannot invent.

You do that with a clear, comprehensive content brief that guides their work and gets you the right technical article on the first try.

Read on to learn how to write the perfect content brief for the next article on your manufacturing website.

Leave No Room for Guesswork

The purpose of a content brief is to guide the writer and make their job as easy as possible.

To do that, the brief should contain all the information the writer needs to produce the article you want.

There should be no room left for improvisation or guesswork. With technical content, guesswork is not just a quality problem; a guessed tolerance or a wrong material designation in a published article costs you credibility with the engineers you are trying to reach.

That is the guiding principle behind every other tip in this article.

And from experience, we can tell you it works. Thorough briefs make writers happy and help them do their best work.

So how much information is enough?

According to research, marketers include several pointers in their briefs to make it more likely that the article fits their needs and is good enough to publish.

Four or five pieces of information are widely considered the minimum. Six or seven is not off the mark either, and for technical content we would go further.

What ends up in the brief is up to you, but in general it should answer these questions:

• What is the topic of the article?
• From which angle should it be approached?
• What do we want to achieve with it?
• Who is it for: the design engineer, the purchasing manager or the quality manager?
• How long should it be?
• Which facts from our production must be in it, and who can the writer ask?

We will cover each of these in the following sections. For now, suffice it to say that a good brief is rich with information and leaves the writer with little doubt.

Use a Simple Format for Your Briefs

The content of the brief isn’t the only thing that matters to the writer. The format matters too.

Best practice is a simple, repeatable format that makes the key information easy to find.

Your briefs will always contain the same categories of information, so it makes little sense to write them as full sentences and blocks of text. That obscures important details, and you will forget things.

A much better way is to label each key part of the brief. For a manufacturing article, the labels look something like this:

• Title:
• Keyword:
• Target audience:
• Target word count:
• Goal and CTA:
• Technical inputs (machine specs, materials, tolerances, photos to use):
• Subject-matter expert to contact:

What we are proposing is that you create a template for all your content briefs.

You can have one general template, or one per process or product line, so it carries the metadata that always applies: the service page to link to, the certifications to mention, the machine park.

There are many tools for creating and sharing the template. If you work with an internal team, your project management or documentation software will do. Here is a template built in Miro:

Documentation software like Confluence is equally suited to the task:

Both are good choices. For simplicity, though, we recommend a plain Google Doc. It is a format anyone can open instantly, whether it is your internal writer, a freelancer, or the engineer you ask to check the numbers.

Here is a segment of one of our own brief templates, made in Google Docs:

Remember, writers need accessible information and scannable briefs that tell them everything at a glance. Make their job easier with a simple, repeatable format.

Share the Headline, Keyword, Word Count and Target Audience

The headline, keyword, word count and target audience are information no brief should be without.

Without them, the writer can produce an article that differs wildly from what you had in mind. Let’s look at each one.

Article Headline

The topic is most often expressed as the title of the article. A well-crafted title tells the writer exactly what the assignment is.

If you tell a writer “write an article about laser cutting”, they can do it in a million ways: the history of the technology, a comparison with plasma, a guide to tolerances, a description of your machines.

Compare that with these titles:

• Laser Cutting Tolerances: What to Expect by Material and Thickness
• How to Prepare a DXF File for Laser Cutting (Checklist)
• Laser Cutting vs. Plasma Cutting: Which Is Right for Your Parts?

Each one defines the angle, the format and the reader. That is why a focused, descriptive headline matters so much.

If you can’t think of a good title, give the writer a detailed description of what you want covered instead. They will match your angle and propose the title themselves.

Target Keyword

The keyword is the focal point of the article, the phrase you want it to rank for on Google.

It can, and almost always should, appear in the title.

Writers need the keyword because it is the starting point of their research and because it tells them which phrasing to use: “laser cutting tolerances”, not “precision of laser processing”. If your buyers search in German, give the writer the German term and its translation, for example “Laserschneiden Toleranzen” (laser cutting tolerances).

Without the keyword, the writer may produce a good article that will never bring you a single visitor.

Desired Word Count

Different marketers have different preferences on length, and if you work with freelancers there is also the budget, since longer articles cost more.

Quality should always matter more than word count. That is why the best practice is to give a range rather than an exact number, so the writer has room to cover the topic properly. For instance:

Target word count: 2,000–2,500 words for a technical guide; 800–1,500 words for a service or capability page

This tells the writer how deep to go without making them worry about hitting an exact figure.

Target Audience

Quality content speaks to one type of reader and solves one specific problem they have.

So make sure the writer knows who they are addressing and from which angle. On a manufacturing website that usually means one of three people:

• The design engineer, who wants design rules, tolerances, materials and process limits.
• The purchasing manager, who wants lead times, batch sizes, certifications, supply risk and how to compare suppliers.
• The quality manager, who wants traceability, measurement reports, material certificates and audit readiness.

Take a topic like “how to reduce the cost of machined parts”. Written for the design engineer, it is about design changes: simpler geometry, standard radii, looser tolerances where they don’t matter. Written for the purchasing manager, it is about batch sizes, framework agreements and supplier selection. Same keyword, two completely different articles.

With the audience defined, the writer knows the level of expertise to expect from the reader and what the reader needs from the content, which makes a focused, valuable article far more likely.

Mention the Content’s Goals

You can achieve a lot with content, but not every goal in a single article.

Trying to do so confuses both the writer and the reader. So decide in advance what the specific goal of the article is, and put it in the brief so the writer can lead the reader towards that action.

A few goal examples for a manufacturer:

• Sending an RFQ with a drawing attached
• Downloading the design guide for the process
• Booking a call with an engineer
• Visiting the service page for the process the article discusses
• Reading more of your technical content

If you want a quality article, give the writer one or two goals to work into it, not five.

With the goal in mind, the writer can act on it. For an article on laser cutting tolerances, that might be a natural mention of your capability with a link to the service page (“if your parts need ±0.1 mm on 10 mm steel, this is what our fibre laser delivers”) and an RFQ prompt after the tolerance table.

They can also work in internal links to related guides and reference projects, so the reader explores more of your site and stays longer.

A good writer knows how to help you reach your goals. But they can’t do it unless they know what the goals are, which is why they belong in the brief.

Note Which Elements You Want to See in the Article

Every writer has their own style. But every piece of content on your site should reflect your company and include the elements you consider vital.

So be conscious of those elements and put them in the brief. Here are ours.

The elements that make technical content convincing, relatable and engaging are:

• Quotes from experts: your own engineers, your machine and material suppliers, customers
• Research and data: standards, studies, and numbers from your own production
• Images: photos of real parts and machines, drawings, tables, diagrams
• Examples: verified reference projects and industry cases

We consider this so important that we coined the term QRIES (pronounced curious) for these elements.

We make sure writers know these elements should be woven into the arguments of the article. That keeps every piece on-brand and as close to your voice as possible.

For a manufacturer, two of these elements need extra help from you. A writer can find research and general examples on their own, but they cannot invent your maximum sheet thickness, your achievable tolerances or your lead times, and they cannot take a photo of your machine.

So the brief should include a section of technical inputs: the machine specifications, materials, tolerances and certifications the article must state correctly, a folder of photos the writer may use, and the name of the engineer they can call with questions. Fifteen minutes of that engineer’s time saves a week of revisions.

Long story short: figure out the elements of your own style, add the facts only you can supply, and put both in the brief.

Propose an Outline

To make sure the writer structures the article in the best possible way, propose an outline in the brief.

An outline makes the writer’s job much easier and increases the chance that the article performs on the search results page.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it is quite easy with the skyscraper method.

Google the topic and look at the top-ranking results. For “laser cutting tolerances”, you will typically find design guides from on-demand platforms, a few machine builders’ pages and one or two job shops.

Once you find a high-ranking article that matches your intent, use its heading structure as the role model for your own outline.

Then use the other articles on the results page to make the outline unique and to add the sections your role model is missing: a tolerance table by material, the effect of part size and nesting, what tighter tolerances cost, and an FAQ from the “People also ask” box.

And presto, the outline is done and ready for the brief. We describe this process in detail in our guide to content research for manufacturers.

The great thing about this method is that it is quick, and the outline you end up with has a proven track record with readers and with Google.

All the writer has to do is bring a fresh perspective, your data and your photos, and write a better article than the role model. Just like that, they are very likely to deliver something that gets results.

Provide Information About What Not to Include

Certain things harm the performance of an article, the reader’s experience, or your credibility with buyers. Mention the elements you don’t want when you write the brief.

This matters because undesirable elements are not universal, and the writer will not instinctively know to leave something out.

Here are ours for manufacturing content.

• No stock photos. The picture of engineers in hard hats pointing at a laptop adds no educational value, and every engineer recognises it as filler. We use photos of real parts and machines, drawings and charts instead.
• No invented specifications. If a number is not in the technical inputs and the engineer hasn’t confirmed it, it doesn’t go in the article. This is the single most important rule for a manufacturer’s brief.
• No claims about capabilities you don’t have and no lead-time promises that production hasn’t approved.
• No brochure language. “Leading provider of innovative metal solutions” tells the reader nothing; “laser cutting of steel up to 25 mm” does.
• No memes, puns or personal anecdotes that take away from the seriousness of the topic.

Many content creators don’t have these rules, so a writer coming from consumer or software content will not apply them unless you say so.

Bottom line: in content marketing, what you don’t say can be as important as what you do say. If you have a firm stance on what you don’t want in your articles, put it in the brief. Otherwise, the writer will not know.

Conclusion

Writers need information and guidance to do their best work, and in manufacturing they also need the facts and the expert that only you can provide.

A detailed content brief increases your chances of getting the article you wanted on the first try, and it makes the writer’s job much easier.

Good briefs are how you secure excellent technical content and keep a good working relationship with your writers. Apply the lessons from this guide, combine them with our SEO content creation tips for manufacturing companies, and start producing content worthy of the engineers who read it.