In the water treatment world, credibility and proven compliance are the basis of every decision. If you don’t invest in showcasing your expertise, organizations may never consider your solutions.
That’s why you need to do content marketing for your water treatment companies. A well-organized piece of evergreen content can pull in qualified leads for years and build your credibility in sectors defined by drawn-out, competitive decision processes.
At Perceptric, we’re a content marketing agency that helps water treatment companies like yours create content that highlights safety and proven results. Our work is designed to help you attract industrial and municipal clients and position your solutions as dependable and compliant.
Based on my experience working for a wide variety of companies in the industry, I will share:
- What’s unique about content marketing for water treatment companies
- Our Knowledge-Narrative approach to content marketing
- How to do SEO content for water treatment companies
- How to do thought leadership content marketing for water treatment companies
Alright, let’s dive in!
Why does water treatment companies need content marketing?
Content marketing is the practice of informing and engaging potential customers through valuable digital content. The core idea is simple: teach, be open, build trust, and customers will naturally come to you when they’re ready to make a decision.
Online behavior has shifted, and today’s buyers prefer to research on their own before choosing a product or service. That’s why content marketing plays such a crucial role in digital customer acquisition: it supports people as they learn, compare, and build confidence, which gives them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
But do you really need content marketing? The answer is yes, very much so:
- More than any other industries, it’s incredibly important for content in water treatment companies to showcase expertise: Clients evaluating water treatment companies want safety and proven results, so your content should help them understand your methods and trust your solutions. Clear content also helps you rank better on Google.
- Your content should either solve problems or be memorable: Content should clarify the contamination, compliance, or efficiency problems water treatment companies work through, strengthening trust in your solutions. It can also express the environmental principles that shape your brand so buyers recall you more easily.
- Good content is the only thing that ranks on Google: If you don’t create exceptional content, it’s hard to compete with the big fish. AI-generated content may sound like a good solution to create content at scale, but over a long enough period of time, people notice that you’re using AI, and they’ll lose trust in you. Besides, AI can’t write original content. Only humans can.
My approach to doing content marketing for water treatment companies
I use a very simple approach to content marketing for water treatment companies (and for virtually any other industry that my clients are in). It is called the Knowledge – Narrative approach.
Put simply, it’s about creating two types of content:
- Knowledge content, which answers questions and solves problems that your potential clients have. This type of content is usually optimized for SEO.
- Narrative content, which is basically just thought leadership content that showcases the philosophy and unique insights/POV that your brand believes in thanks to your experience in the industry. This type of content is meant to establish your brand as the expert.
A combination of both approach gives you the best of both worlds.
- Knowledge content brings in new audiences through SEO. Publication content keeps that audience engaged by showing thought leadership and perspective.
- Knowledge content is algorithm-friendly because it satisfies Google’s need for structure, clarity, and depth. Publication content is audience-friendly because it satisfies the reader’s need for voice and authenticity.
For water treatment companies, my Knowledge-style content can be topics like how purification systems work and how water testing is done, while my Publication content can be thought leadership on sustainability and clean water and insights on regulatory changes.
Most effective content marketing types for water treatment companies
Content marketing for water treatment companies works best when it’s built on a strong story: a real belief, a real point of view, or a real problem you’re trying to solve.
When that foundation is solid, every content format becomes effective, because they’re all expressing the same core idea in different ways.
With that said, here is my opinion on the types of content that you can use:
| Content Type | Ease of Getting Started | Time to ROI | Best Fit For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short-form Blog Posts | Easy to write and publish. Great for quick wins and early traction. | Medium. Builds traffic over time, but can rank fast for long-tail keywords. | Brands needing fast educational content and SEO momentum. |
| Long-form Blog Posts | Harder to create. Requires depth, clarity, and expertise. | High long-term ROI. Ranks well, attracts high-intent traffic, builds authority. | Brands wanting strong SEO positioning and deep trust from readers. |
| Ebooks / PDFs | Medium difficulty. Requires structure and design, but highly doable. | High. Great for list-building and lead magnets with ongoing value. | Brands that need leads, gated content, or a strong reasons to subscribe. |
| Whitepapers | Hard. Requires expertise, research, and strong reasoning. | Very high for technical or regulated industries. Converts educated buyers. | B2B, technical markets, and companies selling high-ticket or complex products. |
| Short-form Videos | Easy to create today. Low production requirements. | Fast. Great reach with strong storytelling and consistency. | Brands with personality, compelling visuals, or educational angles. |
| Long-form Videos | Medium to hard. Requires planning, scripting, and editing. | Strong long-term ROI. Great for trust-building, demos, and depth. | Educators, experts, product-led companies, and brands needing explanation. |
| Case Studies | Medium. Requires customer coordination and storytelling. | Immediate to medium. High trust and high conversion impact. | Brands selling services, B2B tools, or anything high-ticket or relationship-based. |
| Infographics | Easy to medium. Requires design but delivers clarity fast. | Medium. Highly shareable and great for top-of-funnel visibility. | Brands with complex data, technical topics, or visual stories. |
| Thought Leadership Articles | Harder. Requires a strong point of view and real expertise. | High. Builds authority, recognition, and trust over time. | Executives, industry leaders, and brands shaping the direction of their category. |
Remember: all content types have potential, but you must be careful to not spread yourself too thin!
If your budget is in the nine figures, it’s a lot easier to run 2 podcasts, a video channel, a blog, and a magazine. But when you’re just starting out, focus on ONE channel that you believe to be able to deliver the best result, and double down when it starts gaining traction.
How to plan for content marketing in water treatment companies?
Most water treatment companies believe content marketing is just putting articles on their website. However, these are often built from basic water science rather than real systems or compliance knowledge.
So before you launch your content marketing campaign for water treatment companies, here’s what I recomend:
- Laser-focus into one content marketing channel and do it very well. Trying to manage too many channels at once leads to diluted effort and mediocre output. You’re better off mastering the channels that matter most.
- Start your content marketing strategy by targeting potential customers who are close to buying. Do not focus your content on simple definition queries like “What is [XYZ]?”. Those readers are too early to convert. Go after the searches tied to pain points and decisions instead.
- Have a distribution strategy for every piece of content. Many water treatment companies create educational content and rely on chance for visibility. For content to work, you need intentional distribution — through LinkedIn, email, or search.
1. Do audience research
Before you write content, make sure to conduct a good audience research. Audience research is simply the process of gathering and analyzing information about the people you want to reach with your marketing. It’s understanding your target audience’s motivations, pain points, and behaviors.
There are a lot of ways that you can do audience research to inform your content marketing activities:
- Talk to your Sales team — Yes, Sales people are literally in the trenches, so they know A LOT about your customers and what audience you attract. If you don’t talk to Sales to extract insights, you’re probably missing out.
- Social media discovery — Go to the social media channels and check out the posts and creators your audience follows to understand what they care about.
- Competitor analysis — Analyze competitors’ content, SEO, reviews, and digital presence to learn what resonates with your shared audience.
- Communities & forums — Lurk in Subreddits and online groups to hear unfiltered discussions and real pain points that people in your niche has. Reddit is especially useful because it has every communities imaginable on the planet, so you’ll probably find some subreddits talking about your field.
- Surveys & polls — Run short surveys or social polls to gather direct feedback at scale.
- Customer & prospect interviews — Talk directly with customers and ICPs to understand motivations and how they describe their problems.
- Search intent analysis — Study keywords, SERPs, and “People Also Ask” results to map what people are actually trying to solve.
- Website & content analytics — Use analytics and heatmaps to see how users behave on your site and what content truly performs.
2. Do keyword research
Once you have insights, it’s time to start keyword research. This should inform your content creation activities later.
A lot of content marketers in water treatment companies start their content strategies by starting off at the “top” of the marketing funnel. In other words, they target people who are only looking for definition of a concept, not people actively looking for a solution. This often means creating broad, brand-awareness pieces on basics like “what is water treatment” or “how do filtration systems work.”
Anyone could be doing research on those generic terms. A grandma, a 10-year-old kid, a random college guy. it doesn’t necessarily guarantee they could become your customer.
Instead, you need to create content at the Bottom-of-the-funnel. That’s where the money lies. People searching for those terms usually know they are having a problem and are actively looking for a solution.
I categorize BOFU keywords into 3 major groups:
- Listicle Keywords – These are roundup-style searches like “Top 10 companies for [niche].” These attract users actively comparing options and help introduce your product/services as one of the contenders.
- Pain Point Keywords – These keywords are the real problems your audience is trying to solve, like “how to fix X” or “why Y happens.” Write a stellar article showing how to solve it, positioning you subtly as the ultimate choice to solve those problems. You can mine those keywords in forums and niche industry communities.
- Lead Magnet Keywords – Target people looking for resources with phrases like “free template for X” or “downloadable guide to Y.” These are great for capturing leads in exchange for helpful content. Build assets that directly match these needs.
Let’s say I am doing content marketing for a water treatment company called WriteMeContent, who provides reverse osmosis systems, here are the keywords I’m targeting for them:
- Listicle Keywords: best water treatment companies, top filtration providers, best industrial water solutions
- Pain Point Keywords: how to improve water quality, why systems clog, how to reduce contamination
- Lead Magnet Keywords: water testing checklist, filtration system guide, maintenance planner
Once you’ve tapped out the pain-point and bottom-of-funnel keywords, you can move upward in the funnel and begin producing MOFU and TOFU content.
Further reading: B2B content marketing strategy checklist
How to write SEO content for water treatment companies?
SEO content is amazing because it brings in consistent, evergreen traffic (and conversion) as long as you write content that genuinely resonates. Although it’s a relatively long-term game, the compound rewards are totally worth it!
My advice when choosing SEO as one of the content marketing channels for water treatment companies is that you should build the most scientifically grounded, reliability-focused resource online.
When someone Googles something, they’re hoping the answer comes from a person who’s lived it, not just read about it. That’s why content shaped by real human experience often performs strongest.
But it might just as well be an AI-generated draft that’s factually sound and double-checked by a human. Google has openly said it isn’t concerned about whether a human or an AI wrote the content (at least for now). And if you bring real experience to the table, readers with expertise can always tell.
And when you actually write good content:
- Readers stay on your page for longer (which boosts SEO)
- Readers share your content to their coworkers and make discussions (which affects final buying decision)
- Readers remember your brand, and will return to consume more content from you (more traffic!)
- Readers are interested enough to check your products and services (which also affects their buying decision)
Here are the steps I would do to write the best piece of content:
- Open an incognito window and Google the keyword to figure out the search intent. In other words, what types of pages are showing up in the top three results? Deep-dive into that page. I usually check the depth of those top articles (and where I can beat them).
- Next, build an outline with clear H1, H2, H3, and H4 headings. The H1 is your main title, the H2s are your primary sections, and everything below that becomes supporting subheadings.
- Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to research additional keywords to work into your article and guide your on-page SEO.
- Then write your content. If your outline is solid, all you need to do is fill in each section. And make sure your intro pulls people in.
Here are some best practices I apply for writing SEO content:
- Keep your H1 title tag under 60 characters, ideally in the 56–58 range to avoid truncation and keep the headline tight.
- Write a meta description under 155 characters and include your exact target keyword somewhere in the copy for clarity and relevance.
- Set your URL slug to the exact keyword. Most CMSs auto-generate the slug from your full title, which is rarely ideal. Always edit it so the slug is clean, short, and keyword-only. I still can’t believe how often this has to be repeated to content teams.
- Use JPGs for images that don’t need transparency, and keep them under ~100 KB. Compress them or convert PNGs to JPGs using online tools. If they’re still too large, resize them. On Mac you go to Preview → Tools → Adjust Size → set width to ~1280 or ~1080 and let the height scale automatically.
- Add ALT tags to every image. This is essential for accessibility and helps screen readers describe visual elements to users with impaired vision.
- Save your thumbnail image as a JPG and name the file using your exact target keyword. This boosts your chances of appearing in Google Image Search. The same applies to every image you upload: use descriptive filenames, not random strings. File naming plays a bigger role in image search than most people realize.
For water treatment companies in particular, here are some of my recommendations:
- When you explain water treatment processes using simple diagrams, facility managers finally understand what they’re evaluating.
- Contaminant-specific troubleshooting guides attract steady search traffic from operators.
How to write thought leadership content for water treatment companies
Thought leadership emerges when your ideas and your communication style work together, whether you’re writing or speaking. When you hit that balance well, you rise above competitors and earn the trust of your audience.
But here’s the thing: thought leadership doesn’t depend on being disruptive or contrarian. You don’t have to force a controversial angle. Often, a thorough dive into a small but meaningful subject reveals unique insights people appreciate.
For example, here’s a thought leadership post from Noah Greenberg, CEO at Stacker. He’s just expressing his ideas in a very simple, even casual fashion, and yes, I would say that it is a piece of LinkedIn thought leadership content:
The problem is that in most companies the founders and senior leaders are sitting on a goldmine of sharp opinions, but almost none of it ever gets written down. These ideas stay locked in their head. Without a system to extract that knowledge and turn it into clear, compelling content, the company never actually produces real thought leadership.
Your in-house marketing team, unfortunately, are just executors, not subject matter experts. They can package the ideas, polish the writing, and publish the content. But they’re not the ones shaping the industry. They didn’t found the company. They aren’t defining the strategy. They didn’t build the product.
When creating thought leadership content for water treatment companies, you have several options:
- Ideas rooted in your company’s origin story and the problem you set out to solve
- Ideas shaped by your strategic positioning and worldview
- Insights drawn from the actual nuance of what you build or deliver
- Strong opinions informed by years in the industry
- Proprietary data and patterns no one else sees
- Case studies that reveal details only insiders would know
So here’s how I’ll do thought leadership content marketing for water treatment companies:
- Find your story: Almost every water treatment company starts because founders saw unsafe, outdated, or inefficient systems firsthand. They built solutions to ensure water quality actually met the standards. That’s their disruption story. Interview the founders and tell that story. Lay out the pain points that led them to start their company, and explain the unique solution they developed to solve those problems.
- Find smart people with unique insights: Sometimes it’s just the reality is that most companies don’t have that “groundbreaking” story. However, they usually have smart people in the company. In water treatment, engineers know the chemical interactions, contamination patterns, and process variations that influence water quality at a granular level. Engage with them, and interview them to write an insightful piece of content. You’ll be surprised at how much content can be produced simply by talking to experts in the team.
- Produce proprietary data: In water treatment, engineers want efficiency data, contaminant patterns, and system performance metrics — yet few companies analyze or share this. They rely on those who publish it. Sharing your own data establishes technical authority.
How to distribute your content?
After you produce content, you can’t expect people to find it by themselves. SEO naturally brings in traffic, of course, but you must be proactive about content distribution too.
Here are some of my favorite content distribution channels for water treatment companies:
- Your company blog: Always start here. Link your articles together to take visitors from one page to another. For example, in a generic How-to article, try linking it to your thought leadership content. That helps siphoning some traffic from an high-discoverability page (thanks to SEO) to a low-discoverability page (thought leadership).
- Newsletters: A newsletter is the BEST way to distribute content. In the beginning, building an email list can take a lot of time and effort, but over time, it becomes a powerful owned channel for promotional content. Some of the good newsletter platforms I recommend are beehiiv, MailerLite, Kit, and Substack.
- Social media: LinkedIn is usually the best platforms for water treatment companies content distribution. Simply break your articles into smaller snippets and share it on social media. However, you need to share it on personal accounts rather than company pages (people don’t really read information from a Company page).
Choosing the content marketing agency for water treatment companies
Okay, since I’m writing this article, this is going to be quite a self-promo. But Perceptric is born out of my deep understanding of what’s lacking in the way content marketing is done in many water treatment companies. I saw how:
- Pain point 1: Content team is too disconnected from the Sales team to effectively collaborate and create content that really drives Sales.
- Pain point 2: Content team doesn’t focus enough on Bottom-of-the-funnel queries and topics that drive revenue. They chase entry-level keywords that may bring in tons of traffic (but none of them have the pain point that your products/services are solving).
- Pain point 3: Content writers tend to have not enough subject matter knowledge to write content for such a highly technical field.
That’s why I create Perceptric to solve those pain points for content teams in water treatment companies. We’re committed to crafting exceptional content that rises above the noise.
Here’s how I do content marketing differently:
- I use the Knowledge – Narrative approach to balance between SEO and thought leadership content
- I focus on creating content for the bottom-of-the-funnel that answers very specific pain points that your customers are having.
- I also help you build thought-leader/opinion content pieces (sourced from experts in your field) that reflects what your brand believes in. Content marketing, at the highest level, becomes brand building itself.
- Finally, I help you distribute those content pieces by repurposing them into formats suitable for social media
If you’re looking for a content marketing partner who genuinely gets what it means to do marketing for water treatment companies, I’d love to help!
Water treatment marketing Frequently Asked Question
1. Why is content marketing important for water treatment companies?
Content marketing helps water treatment companies explain compliance, filtration performance, and process design in simple terms. Clear insights earn trust with engineers and facility managers.
2. What’s the biggest mistake water treatment companies make with content?
Many water treatment companies publish sustainability messages but ignore high-intent topics around compliance, contaminants, and system performance. Start technical.
3. How should water treatment companies measure content marketing?
Beyond traffic and engagement, {Industry keywords} should track sales-related outcomes rather than vanity metrics like traffic. This includes:
- Number of leads generated
- Deals/conversions attributed to content
- Deals/conversions influenced by articles
4. What type of content works best for water treatment companies?
For water treatment companies, start with BOFU searches like “industrial wastewater treatment system.” Build environmental and compliance content afterward.
