The Marketing Maven: Industrial Marketing Blog & B2B Marketing Tips

4 + 4 Ways to Fire Up Your Marketing

Find out how to make your marketing work toward your success:

Move In. Get closer to your sales team and listen in on the conversations they’re having with prospects and clients – it’s more important than ever. Find out what they are facing and consider how your marketing plans need to adjust to what you’ve learned.

Spell It Out. Refine your 2009 marketing plans for the challenging economic climate. Be certain that you’ve identified measurable goals and adopt a strategy that can produce results for your company.

Change It Over. Fit your messaging to the times. Rewrite your offer messaging to focus around product and service benefits – it’s most important during a difficult economy. Rather than highlighting what your product does or how it does it – write about what problem it solves or how it will save money or resources.

Check Around. Make sure your current marketing efforts are proving results. If you’re unsure, now is the best time to find out. Ensuring that your marketing tactics are measurable is vital to proving the success of your marketing initiatives.

Read the next 4 ways - 8 Ways to Fire Up Your Marketing in a Difficult Economy.

How to Make Your Trade Show Presence a Success

If you’re planning on exhibiting at trade shows this year you’re obviously going to want to get the most return on your trade show investment, especially in these uncertain economic times.

So how do you do this? The first rule of ensuring a successful trade show appearance is to promote your presence effectively. If you're trying to reach out to an audience of industrial professionals, that means promoting your trade show presence online - where this audience is proven to be spending much of their time.

Try some of these online promotion tactics that appeal to the industrial audience, who we already know are spending a good deal of their time online:

Your company Web site: Announce your trade show presence on all key pages of your Web site, and include your booth number, the show dates, location, link to the trade show Web site, and any promotions or incentives you are offering booth visitors.

e-mail marketing. If you publish a regular e-newsletter, promote your trade show appearance there, and make sure you link back to a page on your Web site with all the details. Even better, send a dedicated marketing e-mail that concerns only the trade show. That way your message will be stronger and won't get lost among other content in your e-newsletter.

Online banner ads. Online banner ads offer great exposure and the ability to get your message seen where your target audience is – provided you choose relevant sites to advertise on.

e-Newsletters. Promote your trade show appearance in e-newsletters that reach your target audience. It’s a good way to get a lot of bang for your buck.

No matter where you promote your trade show presence online, be sure to give your audience a reason to visit your booth. Whether you have exciting new products to demonstrate, a prize giveaway, news to announce, or a special guest at your booth, let people know that your booth is the place to be.

The second half to a successful trade show is capitalizing on all the contacts you made while there. To read more about the best practices for adding business contacts to your e-mail program that you acquired from trade shows, read B to B online's article on the subject and make sure all your promotion efforts have not been wasted.

Five Reasons to add e-Newsletters in 2009

Industrial marketers looking to stretch every dollar in their marketing budget and invest in effective and measurable marketing programs should add e-newsletter sponsorships to their marketing mix in 2009. E-newsletter advertisements are a perfect complement to your e-mail marketing efforts.

Here are five reasons why e-newsletters are a smart marketing choice in 2009.

How to Write a Winning Case Study

A compelling customer case study is a powerful sales and marketing tool. It provides a third party endorsement of your products and services that can help sway prospects into becoming customers. It can be posted to your Web site to provide relevant information to site visitors, used as a lead generator or to pitch a story idea to the media. What’s more, by following an efficient process, generating case studies does not have to be costly or time consuming.

It’s a Good Time to Reach Out to New Markets

For companies struggling to compete and keep revenues flowing during this economic downturn, here’s an idea you may want to consider: reach out to new markets. It may seem a counter-intuitive strategy at a time when many companies are retracting, but expanding to new markets might not require a significant investment and can make good business sense:

• Your products and services may be a good fit for industries that are still doing well during the recession
• If you market primarily to struggling industries, you may be able to re-allocate budget to more viable industries
• You may be able to re-purpose existing sales materials for new  markets

Research Potential Markets
When planning expansion to new markets, the first thing to consider is which markets are the best fit for your products and services. According to the GlobalSpec Economic Outlook Survey of engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial professionals conducted in January 2009, some industry sectors are weathering the economic slowdown better than others. Automotive, semiconductor & electrical components, and computer, systems & peripherals are hardest hit by current economic condi¬tions, while biotechnology/pharmaceuticals, utilities/energy, aerospace/defense, along with packaging machinery and medical equipment/instrumentation are the least impacted.

Your products and services may be a good fit for these or other more viable industries. However, you’ll want to perform some additional market research before reaching out to any new markets. You can engage in both direct and indirect market research without incurring a lot of costs.

Here are some ideas on how you can conduct direct market research:

Misumi Gives Kudos to GlobalSpec in BtoB Media Business

Thanks to GlobalSpec customer Patrick Esposito, Marketing Director at Misumi USA,for his comments in the BtoB Media Business article Taking the Leads.

The article speaks about Misumi's review of its overall marketing plan which resulted in cutting print advertising and other marketing programs except for GlobalSpec.  According to Esposito, "We found we were underutilizing GlobalSpec.  I've more or less doubled my leads since early December."

The rest of the article goes on to talk about how many traditional media companies are trying to focus more on online lead generation - something GlobalSpec has been doing since 1996.

Changes in the World of Marketing From Larry Bailin

Yesterday I listened to Larry Bailin, author of Mommy, Where do Customers Come From? and CEO of Single Throw internet marketing company, speak about changes in the world of marketing. 

Larry is a great speaker - engaging, provoking and entertaining. I haven't read his book but if it follows his speaking style it should be a great read. 

A few things from the talk caught my attention: 

• We are at the end of a decade. What worked at the beginning of the decade won't work in the next
• Stand out or stand aside and be part of the noise.
• No one remembers a great creative Web site.

As far as social media, Bailin had this to share: 

• MySpace has lost the race
• One in five has a Facebook page
• 35+ age market is fastest growing segment on Facebook
• Businesses are moving to Facebook in droves

Application of Twitter for B2B Marketing

Twitter is all over main stream media.  Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, appeared on the Colbert Report this month.  I happened to catch Regis and Kelly and Ellen talking about twitter.  My local NBC news affiliate just started running ads promoting their twitter presence.  Twitter is another social media phenomenon that is here to stay. 

What is twitter?  It is microblogging.  On twitter you can answer the simple question, What are you doing? in 140 characters or less.  If you don't like to write this might be the tool for you.  These short updates are posted to your profile or blog and sent out to your followers - people who care about what you are doing. 

What I am interested in is how twitter can be applied to B2B marketing.  Here are a few examples of companies in the industrial space using twitter:

• Anguil Environmental Systems  http://www.twitter.com/OxidizerSystems
• Balluff   http://www.twitter.com/BalluffSensors
• SolidWorks   http://www.twitter.com/SolidWorks
• WasteCorp Pumps  http://www.twitter.com/wastecorp

You can use your twitter page to promote your press releases, presence at tradeshows, white papers, videos and product releases. 

If you know of other B2B twitter feeds in the industrial space please share.   Given twitter's popularity and growth this will become another viable marketing vehicle for B2B. 

                    

Important considerations for page titles in regards to optimization

Optimizing title pages can help Web sites rank higher in search engine queries, but what should you do if the keyword or phrase being targeted has both singular and plural terms such as "Industrial Automation Consultant" vs. "Industrial Automation Consultants"?

Michael Gray who has been active in web development and website management for over ten years and is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land. In his article How To Optimize Your Page Titles For Singular & Plural Terms he provides some tips on creating titles and changing the order of words in a sentence to include both singular and plural versions of a keyword in order to optimize pages for ranking in search results.