Map Your Competitive Differentiation: What Can You Own?

by ISURUS, guest blogger

Differentiating your product or brand boils down to two simple questions. 1) What are your customer’s needs and buying criteria? And, 2) which of these can your product/brand own?

Most marketers and strategists do a good job on Step 1: They generally know their customer’s needs and buying criteria—the set of capabilities, brand traits, and outcomes that drive purchase decisions. This is the right first step. It identifies many key factors that influence vendor selection. But that initial list can be misleading and lack actionability. Here’s why.

  1. Competitors hold an advantage on some of the dimensions important to customers and it will be challenging and costly to compete on those criteria.
  2. Some of the customer’s most important buying criteria are threshold conditions and you cannot differentiate on table-stakes requirements.

Consider these examples. (more…)

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2021 State of Marketing to Engineers …Top 5 Key Findings

by Matt Sonnhalter, Vision Architect

GlobalSpec recently released their latest annual “State of Marketing to Engineers” Report. In addition to measuring the usage and success of various marketing tactics, this year’s report also includes specific questions about the pandemic and its effect on engineers as well as emerging trends of virtual events.

Here are the Top 5 key findings I found interesting after reading the report.

1) Supplier/vendor websites #1 source for new trends and products

With trade shows cancelled for most of 2020, it’s no surprise engineers turned directly to suppliers/vendors for relevant and timely information.

2) Engineers find value from virtual events, but even more so from webinars

In general, our manufacturer clients did not see a lot of value, from an exhibitor standpoint, with 2020 virtual events targeting the “contractor” audience, but it’s nice to hear some positive news from virtual events targeting “engineers.”

3) Online content supports over 50% of the buyer’s journey

This percentage continues to increase every year, so having a well-thought out and planned content strategy is never more important for marketers trying to reach the engineering audience.

4) Videos and podcasts grow in adoption

Videos continue to be a key marketing tactic for engineers; this was the first year podcasts were measured and over half listen to them on a regular basis…will be interesting to see where this number goes in future reports.

5) Be wary of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Professional networks and LinkedIn are by far the preferred social media channels for engineers.

What marketing tactics are you finding successful for the engineering audience?

Link to full report: https://www2.globalspec.com/2021_report_stateofmarketingtoengineers

 

 

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3 Areas To Tackle Now For Bottom Line Impact

This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com.

Several years ago, an Ohio-based specialty metal business made the decision not to charge for freight costs, even though their products were extremely heavy. The rationale? None of their competitors were charging, so they couldn’t either.

In reality, this company was No. 1 in the industry, so all those competitors were actually just following their lead. When the company realized what was going on, it had the opportunity to change the policy for its entire industry.

And so it did—collecting more than $1 million in additional revenues.

Smart companies know pricing strategy isn’t just about the price on the invoice. To have an immediate impact on your bottom line without formally raising prices, here are three areas to tackle first.

1. Freight Costs

If you’ve been operating for decades, your freight policies have probably been in place just as long. Maybe you don’t charge for freight at all, or fees are the same across all territories—or you charge the same as you did 50 years ago even though shipping rates have risen dramatically.

To start, ask yourself: (more…)

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Help Impact the Future of Manufacturing: 2020 Ohio Manufacturing Survey

Today we have a guest post from MAGNET (The Manufacturing and Growth Advocacy Network) organization that has a mission for helping manufacturers grow and compete in Northeast Ohio, especially the 98% of startup to medium-sized manufacturers that drive our economy. MAGNET rolls up its sleeves to provide hands-on support ranging from new product design to operations and brings education and business together to create tomorrow’s manufacturers. 

MAGNET needs your help. By taking 20 minutes to complete its survey before the end of the year, you can help impact future legislative decisions, offerings and services, as well as use the survey results to help your own organization.

At MAGNET, we’re inspired to drive regional impact by supporting small- to medium-sized manufacturing companies in areas of product design and development, process innovation and automation, operational excellence and engagement, and more. 

But for us to supply you with the right services at MAGNET, it’s imperative that we gain insight into the current Northeast Ohio manufacturing landscape. That’s where the survey comes in.

About the Ohio Manufacturing Survey

This year’s survey is your opportunity to impact how key stakeholders across manufacturing make decisions for our industry’s future. By giving us 20 minutes of your time, you can:

  • Impact how legislators and key stakeholders make future decisions
  • Shape the offerings and services of manufacturing support organizations
  • Use the results to benchmark how you compare to other Ohio manufacturers

And as a thank you for your time and responses, you’ll get the following upon submission:

  • Your choice of any one of 12 different business books
  • FREE admission to one of our report rollout events—Cleveland, Akron, or Canton in February 2020
  • $5 to Harvest for Hunger donation made by our sponsors for every response

The survey deadline is December 31, 2019. This survey is limited to businesses that produce physical goods, with production locations in Ohio.

Make Your Manufacturing Voice Heard

Every response creates a more powerful view of the state of manufacturing in Ohio. Submit your responses to the 2020 Ohio Manufacturing Survey.

Want to read another guest post from MAGNET?

Manufacturers: Avoid These Three Frequent Failures of a Product Launch

 

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How Can Manufacturers Get the Most Out of Their Marketing?

By Matt Sonnhalter, Vision Architect, Sonnhalter

Being able to accurately show how well your efforts impacted a company’s bottom line is one of the biggest challenges marketing teams face every year. For years, the easiest indicator of a marketing team’s success was measured mostly in sales and lead generation. But with the rise of content marketing, influencer relations and social media in marketing plans, it’s sometimes difficult to accurately quantify exactly how all these tactics improve ROI. Regardless of where you stand on the value of these tactics, even the most stubborn skeptics will need to face the reality that content marketing, social media and other tactics for the digital age are here to stay. Unfortunately, most marketing budgets have yet to catch up with the financial and personnel resources necessary to successfully utilize these tactics.

Many of these challenges and concerns were addressed in IEEE GlobalSpec’s “Trends in Industrial Marketing Survey,” which surveyed 326 marketing and sales professionals in the industrial sector on marketing trends within the engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial communities. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the survey:

  1. Breakthroughs in marketing analytics have made it easier to calculate the ROI of a company’s marketing efforts.

“Marketers are under steady pressure to demonstrate ROI for their marketing programs. The need to improve ROI is one of the top challenges industrial marketers face. To meet this challenge, marketers use leads as their number one measure of success. But generating high-quality leads for sales is also one of the top marketing challenges. This may sound like a vicious cycle, and some marketers would agree, but the point is that measurement matters. Other measures of success include customer acquisition and sales attributed to marketing campaigns. Marketing automation software, which can improve tracking and measurement capabilities, is used by only 37 percent of industrial marketers.” (more…)

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Pricing Challenge: Actual Versus Plan

This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com.

Welcome back to INSIGHT2PROFIT’s 2019 Pricing Challenge! Each article covers a common pricing challenge faced by businesses and provide some tips to help improve your profitability.

 

Now that we’re about halfway through 2019, let’s talk about the plan you set for the year. How have you performed thus far relative to your plan?

If your performance hasn’t matched your financial projections for this first part of the year, what happened?  Maybe you’ve looked at your financial reports, and you see that your customer or product mix isn’t what you were expecting, or that you have been impacted by tariffs, and your profitability has suffered because of it.

That’s a start – having a rough idea of the shortfall – but you need to get to the root causes. Has a shift in your mix driven down margin rates? Are you falling short of plan due to a volume slowdown, or are pricing shortfalls eroding your revenue growth? How does that vary by market segment or by salesperson?

Analyzing the gap down to the customer-SKU level can yield clear, actionable intelligence about your problem. Well-run businesses have a strategy, and the budget is the road map to execute it. Planning at the same level of granularity as your sales allows for a healthier understanding of what’s happening within your business, why, and how to act. By having a detailed budget, you are creating a source of accountability for your team and a path for success for your business.

Accurate revenue planning and measurement is tough to do, but it’s one of our specialties. Every engagement includes strategy, a client-specific model, a detailed plan and road map to execute it, and measurement to achieve the set goals. All while leveraging our DRIVE technology platform.

To learn more about how your company can improve results for the remainder of 2019, schedule a time to talk to one of our profit experts today.

What’s your pricing challenge? Talking about pricing challenge, with tariffs ever present in the news, you may want to download our 3 Steps to Navigating Tariffs Guide.

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