Category: Industrial Marketing Strategies

  • Industrial Content Reengineering for Improving WIIFM Relevance

    The challenge for many industrial marketers is making their content relevant to their prospects and customers. Industrial sales cycles are usually several months long and involve numerous people in different roles.

    Identifying where a prospect is on the buying cycle is sometimes difficult because there are long periods of silence with little to no online activity to track. It is not possible to automatically trigger content when there are no regular behavioral patterns to measure and score.

    Yet, these are qualified prospects so you can’t just discard them.

    One solution that I’ve found to work well is to reengineer your existing content to focus on answering the “What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?” question for each of the stakeholders involved in the industrial buying cycle.

    Why is industrial content reengineering important?

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  • Relevant Content Converts More Industrial Site Visitors into Sales Leads and Customers

    It is a known fact that for content to engage and convert, it must be relevant.

    Needless to say, industrial and B2B marketers are constantly looking to improve the relevance of their content but are not always successful, as recent studies have shown. This is true no matter where the content is used – Websites, email campaigns, webinars or marketing collateral.

    What does relevant content mean to site visitors who are engineering, manufacturing and industrial professionals?

    I’ve seen some unusual applications of online content. And I have used some of these tactics to help my industrial clients make their content more relevant in engaging with their target audience and converting more of them into qualified sales leads.

    Relevant content will and/or is… (more…)

  • Industrial Marketing Playbook – Actionable Digital Marketing Ideas for Manufacturers and Engineering Companies

    My company, Tiecas has just released a new free guide called “Industrial Marketing Playbook.”

    This playbook is not about marketing theories, it is based on our accumulated experience and expertise in marketing to your engineering, technical and industrial customers.

    IndustrialMarketing PlaybookIt is 15 pages that are packed with bite-sized, actionable digital marketing ideas to help you score more wins for both sales and marketing.

    Use it to map out your own plays for generating more high-quality leads, increasing sales and growing revenues.

    Content includes:

    • Understanding the industrial buy cycle
    • What inbound marketing with content will do for you
    • Web design for attracting more engineers and industrial professionals
    • Lead nurturing for better lead generation
    • How to feed your sales funnel with a business blog
    • Integrating social media into industrial marketing
    • Key benefits of marketing automation

    Download Industrial Marketing Playbook now >>

  • Engaging Content that Solves and Sells

    Good content marketers know that engaging marketing content moves the needle. It persuades readers to take an action and guides them along in their sales cycle in a logical manner.

    It is a balancing act to create content that solves problems for your readers (prospects and customers) without talking too much about your products and services. Product-centric sales pitches that are disguised as “how-to” content will turn off your audience and damage your credibility as a marketer.

    National Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE:NSM), a leader in power management technology and manufacturer of high-performance analog products, has done a fantastic job of using engaging content that helps it core audience of design engineers while generating $1.42 billion of sales in 2010.

    Their Website uses a simple tabbed interface to guide visitors quickly to the right section(s) based on what they want to do – learn, design, search/select or buy. Here’s a screenshot of the Home page with the Tools tab open (most of the valuable content is here).
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  • Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher, Act Like an Investor

    Thriving in today’s content-driven online marketing world, demands that you think like a publisher. That’s the battle cry among content marketers.

    Just as publishers start by learning everything about their target audience and what information they want, content marketers must realize it is not about them but about their customers.

    “Nobody cares about your products and services (except you)” was the title of a blog post written by David Meerman Scott (Author of the wildly successful book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and his new book Real-Time Marketing & PR) back in 2008.

    That mindset is even more important today if you don’t want to drown in the deluge of online content.

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  • 5 Most Popular Industrial Marketing Blog Posts from 2010

    We’re almost at the end of the year and you made it. Congratulations!

    2010 has been another tough year for the industrial sector but I’m encouraged by all the good news that I’ve heard throughout the year about a modest rebound in U.S. manufacturing.

    This is the time of the year when most of us tend to reflect upon the year that is coming to an end and look forward to the coming year with renewed hope.

    December is also a popular time for bands and musicians to release their “Best of” compilations, bloggers like to summarize their best posts and publishers publish their own “Top XX” lists.

    In keeping with that spirit, here are my five most popular industrial marketing blog posts from 2010. I’ve compiled these based on a combination of the traffic, time spent on the page etc. from my Google Analytics, the number of inbound links received, retweets and other social sharing.

    I hope you’ll get some value and practical help from reading or rereading these articles.

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  • B2B Lead Generation without Lead Nurturing is Doomed to Fail

    Here’s the shocking reality of B2B lead generation – 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales opportunities. (Source: Marketing Sherpa/ KnowledgeStorm). B2B marketing and lead generation experts point to a lack of lead nurturing as the primary cause of this poor performance.

    Why is lead nurturing important?

    It is a fact of life that the bulk of your site visitors and/or conversions from landing pages are not ready to buy now. This is because of the prevalent trend of industrial buyers using online resources to go deeper and deeper into their buying cycle before engaging with your sales people.

    Handing off these semi-qualified and not sales ready leads to sales before adequate lead nurturing only reinforces the impression that “marketing generates crappy leads.”

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  • 3 DiY SEO Mistakes to Avoid When Optimizing Industrial Websites

    I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend (here in the U.S.) with your family. Now, back to work.

    Attempting do-it-yourself (DiY) search engine optimization (SEO) is common among industrial companies since they tend to have dedicated IT departments. Can DiY SEO be just as effective as hiring an outside expert? Should IT be handling this task? Those are two very debatable questions but that is a topic for another post.

    Here I want to focus on the three most common SEO mistakes that I see when industrial clients contact me for Website optimization. May be I just answered my own questions, if you catch my drift. 😉

    Mistake #1: Lack of strategy and incomplete keyword research

    Most people know about the free Google’s Keyword Tool and use it to do their keyword research. So far so good.

    Where DiYers tend to go wrong in using this invaluable tool are:

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  • Dawning of the Age of Content Marketing in the Industrial Sector

    Manufacturers and industrial companies have a reputation of being slow to adopt new marketing strategies and techniques. If you are a B2B marketer who deals with engineering companies, you know how difficult it is to explain the true value of content marketing to upper management and the C-suite. As a result, many industrial companies remain in the dark about the power of content for inbound marketing.

    If you Google “definition of content marketing,” it will return 4,760 results. Obviously it means different things to different people.

    I went directly to the source, Joe Pulizzi, the man who literally wrote the book on content marketing (co-authored Get Content Get Customers) and the founder of the content matching site Junta42. His defines it as:

    Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business.

    By now it is well documented that the Internet has changed buyer behavior dramatically and permanently. Lead or demand generation is still the number one priority of industrial marketers and content is the fuel that drives this marketing engine these days. (more…)

  • Why More Engineers Ought to be in Sales and Marketing

    Think aligning sales and marketing is difficult? Think again.

    In most manufacturing and industrial companies, engineering, sales and marketing operate in their own silos, barely acknowledging each other’s existence. The disconnect is strong and distinct.

    As clichéd as this may sound, it seems Engineers are from Mars, Marketers are from Venus.

    I feel I am qualified to talk about this problem because I am an engineer who makes a living as an industrial marketer. I see and experience this problem first-hand with my engineering and manufacturing clients. One of the reasons I am retained is to bridge this gap between marketing and engineering.

    This misalignment is destructive and disruptive to the entire organization. The insults and accusations come hot and heavy from both sides of this great divide.

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