by tradesmeninsights | Feb 15, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Uncategorized
A recent survey of business people by Forbes in October of 2010 cited that a majority (60%) would watch a video before reading text on the same web page. 75% of executives said they watched work-related videos on business sites at least once a week with more than half doing the same on YouTube.
The study shows that video can be a highly effective tool in getting your message across.
So the question is, are you utilizing video to help you sell on the web?
If you like this post, you may like:
Make Videos Part of your Direct Marketing Plans to Professional Tradesmen.
Online Video Marketing: a Great Way to Educate Professional Tradesmen
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 3, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
Most of you attend trade shows, and if you’re on the manufacturing end of things, you have booths. Trade shows are not an inexpensive proposition and you really want to get the most out of them. To that end, I’ve asked a friend of mine, Vince Tricomi from PFI Displays, to give us some hints on how to improve your ROI without spending any money.
Here are the suggestions:
With the start of trade show season, many companies find themselves examining how they can revitalize their trade show exhibit ROI without depleting their marketing budget.
1. Do Your Pre-Show Homework:
▪ Analyze last year’s “A-Level” leads, and get a list of this year’s attendees.
▪ Have your sales team start calling weeks before the show to schedule in-booth appointments.
▪ Consider other types of outreach, from social media to direct mail.
2. Strut Your Stuff:
▪ Volunteer as an expert for the educational seminars at your trade show. You won’t be “selling” your company, but you will be building your credibility with the audience.
3. Improve Your “Boothmanship:”
▪ Consider the body language of you and your staff.
▪ Avoid matching outfits that make attendees feel like they’re walking into a used car lot.
▪ Ban the use of cell phones in your booth space (that’s right, BAN them!)
▪ Practice an “elevator pitch” and make sure everyone working the trade show knows, understands and can communicate your company’s USP.
4. Social Media is Your Friend:
▪ Use it to extend the show by building interest before, during and after.
▪ Special promotions during the show are a great way to drive additional foot traffic to your exhibit.
▪ Typically, show organizers have a hashtag for the show. See who’s using the hashtag and interact to let the audience know you’re there.
5. Post-Show MEASUREMENT:
▪ This is the most important AND most overlooked way to radically increase your exhibit ROI. If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t, how can you evolve your trade show program?
▪ Within two weeks of the show’s end, gather all the company’s stake holders and discuss best and worst practices and what to target for next year.
We’ll talk in the future about setting measurable goals for each of your trade shows. Suffice to say, there are many more trade show metrics for success than just the quantity of badges scanned at your reception counter.
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 2, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
You need great content to keep your readers coming back. And you need to shake it up a bit by using things like a YouTube video or Podcast of you interviewing someone of relevance to your industry.
People like a good news story, and an interview format fits the ticket just fine. Imagine if you could interview an industry expert, the president of a major trade association, or the executive director of one of the leading buying groups in your market segment. Wouldn’t you think your customers would like to hear what they are thinking and saying? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get an industry scoop”?
I recently read an article by Ryan Malone in SocialMediaExaminer.com titled: 11 Ways to Improve Your Posts with Interviews that I thought was very interesting. The 5 top questions I got out of the article were:
- What are the 3 biggest benefits to your target audience and why?
- What are the top questions asked by your customers?
- If you had a list of best kept secrets (resources like websites, books, coaches), who would you recommend and why?
- What tips can you recommend that you’d only share with a close friend?
- Looking out 3-5 years, beyond the obvious trends, what do you think will be a game changer?
Have you had success using interviewing? If so, I’d like to hear from you.
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by tradesmeninsights | Feb 1, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Sales and marketing departments usually don’t do a good job communicating with each other, and when you add in a new tool (social media), there is even a bigger disconnect. Salepeople often have little exposure and experience with social and tend to shy away from it.
The reality is social media can open up conversations with both existing customers as well as new ones, and bottom line is if the sales department would realize the potential. I recently read a post by Karlie Justus, More Ways to Connect B2B Sales Teams with Social Media that got me thinking. Here are some thoughts from me on how Karlie’s ideas would be relavant to our market in bridging the gap between Marketing and Sales.
- Create Social Media Updates – Show the salesforce what’s in it for them. Ways to engage customers and potentials.It could be just what’s needed to start a conversation. Explain to them why you’re doing a blog and what kinds of things you’re posting on Facebook and Twitter.
- Show Them How Important it is For Them to Be Involved – If they understand what marketing is trying to do for them, they can help you build customer/prospect lists from things like their weekly call reports. Who knows better what types of things a customer wants other than the sales person? They can tell you what types of products they’re looking at, what market they are in, and a host of other valuable marketing insights that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Make them more comfortable by giving them a handout with talking points on the back that they can share with customers. They can ask them to start reading your blog, go to your forum to talk to other customers. You can even get them talking about LinkedIn and get them connected with each other. Once they understand the potential power of social, they will be one of your best resources for data.
- Educate the Sales Team with Hands-On Training – Give them practical and personal examples and once they are more comfortable with it offer to help them set up their own pages. Don’t expect total buy in. You don’t normally get that with anything you introduce. But if you can get half the salesforce to embrace and understand the benefits of social, then you’ve won a battle.
- Track Leads and Give Them Monthly Updates – Hopefully you have some sort of CRM in place to track traditional leads like trade shows, PR and print ads. Add social as another line item so the salesforce can see what kind of activities social is generating. Give them monthly updates (high level) of what social is doing for the company. Ask them what they might want to see. Do they want to see blog visitors by geographic location? Would they like to know which pages on your website are getting the most hits from Social?
These are some ideas that might help you engage sales in the social media scene. I’d love to hear success stories from the field. Care to share?
by tradesmeninsights | Jan 27, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
So you want to build a relationship with the professional tradesmen. In order to do that, you need to be in front of them on a consistent basis. What I like about e-newsletters is that they are relatively easy to assemble, easy to deliver and it allows your customers to read it on their time line, and hopefully if they find something of interest, they will pass the newsletter on. Besides, we’re sure he checks his e-mail every day and might miss or misplace a traditional paper one.
Realistically you don’t have the time to visit him several times a month, and truth be known, he doesn’t want to see you that often! So how do you and your brand stay in front of him on a regular basis? A newsletter would be a great vehicle to build credibility and visibility for your brand, not only to your customers, but to potentials as well.
Newsletters today aren’t like what they used to be 10 years ago. I’d suggest you consider an electronic newsletter using one of the many services like Emma and Constant Contact to maintain your lists and your newsletter programs. They have several templates to choose from if you don’t want to design your own. They also can tell you how many were opened and by whom, and if they clicked through and how much time they spent on the site. You also can embed links into your newsletter, and if people are interested in learning more, they can click.
Here are some thoughts on why I think you should consider doing an e-newsletter and what you should do to make sure they are successful:
- Make Them Educational – keep the sales pitch for when you meet them face to face. Give them info that will benefit them. How they might improve their business. What’s happening in the industry or key associations. What trends should they be watching for? Yes, you can put in a small bit of self promo, but I’d suggest to keep it to a minimum.
- Make Them Easy to Read – seems pretty evident but sometimes you can go overboard. Keep the article short and to the point, and if you have appropriate links to other articles, by all means put them in. Keep them entertaining. Remember you want to engage your reader.
- Put Them Out on a Regular Basis – I suggest monthly, but in some cases it could be more often. You want people to look forward to your newsletter. Don’t think you need to have a set amount in each newsletter. Don’t invent things or postpone sending it out if you feel you don’t have “X” amount of things to share.
- Get Both Sales and Marketing Involved in Content – your sales force is in the trenches each day and can give you plenty of issues to talk about. Get them engaged so they can talk it up (they also can help you build your lists).
For those of you who have blogs, you should be putting out monthly an e-newsletter of the top 5 posts from last month. Just another way to touch the folks that follow you regularly. Those are some of my thoughts on newsletters. I’d like to hear about your successes.
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by tradesmeninsights | Jan 19, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Social media is the “new thing,” everybody is doing it, maybe I should too! Sound familiar?
Don’t do it because everyone else is doing it; do it because it makes sense as part of your overall marketing plan. If I said it once, I said it a million times, social media isn’t a silver bullet! Social media should have a plan just like any other program.
I recently read an article by Clement Yeung in Social Media Examiner, How to Get the M.O.S.T. From Your Social Media Marketing that highlights steps we all can take to get the M.O.S.T. out of social media. Here are some highlights:
M. Marketing Intelligence. Do your research. Who do you want to reach? Use tools like forums, key word searches and Google trends to see what’s out there.
O. Set your objectives. Sowhat do you want to accomplish? Become a thought leader? Improve SEO?
S. Strategy. Create a social media strategy with a plan of action.
T. Tactics. Do you want to build a branded blog site or just create an online presence?
Once you establish a plan, then identify the social tools you should use to reach your audience. Go where they are whether that will be Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. Interact with them and start building relationships. If you have a blog, start driving them there versus your website.
If you apply the same disciplines to social as you do to other programs, you will be successful.
If you like this post, you may want to read:
Are you Using a Blog to Reach the Professional Tradesmen?
Have you Started a Company Blog? Maybe you Should.
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