The author:
The safety marketing crisis
What marketing crisis? The short answer: there’s a surplus of “functional” safety content which makes it very difficult for new companies to utilize this style of long form content to drive sales.
What in the hell do you mean by that?
Glad you asked. “Functional” safety content refers to the technical aspects of safety, i.e. how to properly apply a regulation to your workplace.
Most well established safety businesses will have some sort digital repository of blogs in subjects that pertain to their business, think of a PPE distributor with a blog repository that focuses on 1910.28 (fall protection in general industry). This works to their benefit because when a field safety person is looking up a certain regulation or question they have that pertains to general industry fall protection, there’s a chance the distributors blog will appear in their query results.
Back to that “crisis”
Historically google has favored long form blogs and preferentially ranks blog pages over other pages. As marketers have realized this, functional safety content has become more manufactured over time, all resembling a similar format and blending together.
There’s only so much functional safety content we can create
The crux of the crisis is that there is a limit to how much functional content we can make on each OSHA reg. How many times can we recreate the same article on fall arrest vs fall restraint?
Over the next several years I believe we will see a shift in where marketers choose to focus their time. Blogs are not off the table by any means, but another article on fall arrest vs fall restrain is not going to peak the interest of readers. The better alternative would be to provide a strong, even polarizing opinion that challenges traditional beliefs held by the safety community.
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