by tradesmeninsights | Oct 24, 2013 | Marketing Tips
Today we have a post from PR Engineer Rachel Kerstetter sharing some thoughts on business cards.
When I first started at Sonnhalter, the day that I was issued my own business cards was a good day. It was exciting to have new cards with my shiny new title, but a comment made by a fellow PR professional lead me to wonder if business cards still matter.
Last fall, I was volunteering at an event for students and was placed at a table with another PR professional. At the end of the lunch, I gave the students my card and encouraged them to connect with me on LinkedIn. The other professional said, “I never bring cards anywhere with me since anyone can just find me on LinkedIn anyway.”
Her comments got me thinking about my business cards and wondering if they were still valuable. My observations and experiences over the past year have brought me to the conclusion that business cards are still relevant.
Business cards:
- Enforce your branding, with your logo, corporate colors, tagline and job title.
Sonnhalter’s branding is apparent on our business cards
- Make you easy to find by spelling out your contact information, and in my case, my long last name.
- Stick around. Often your card will find its way into someone’s pocket, and at the end of the day your card will end up being added to their existing business card collection.
- Get shared. How many times have you been asked for another card because someone gave away the only one you had given them? How many times has a friend or colleague handed you someone’s card and recommended you check them out?
One small piece of cardstock can go pretty far in beginning professional relationships.
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 23, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Traditional Marketing
I think everyone realizes by now that mobile is the fastest growing segment of the business. While the biggest impact is on the retail markets, B-to-B usage continues to grow. So should you have an app? The answer to that is, will your app give value and help your targeted user with practical things? If yes, then you’d better get rolling.
comScore data shows that 63% of mobile commerce happens via a smartphone. Don’t take these retail numbers for granted. From a B-to-B perspective, giants like Amazon are leading the way in this category. That means that a consumer can buy a book as easily as a hydraulic fitting using a smartphone.
So the questions you have to ask yourself are this: do I have a mobile website, and if I do, is it optimized for smartphones and tablets? If not, you need to get a responsive designed site sooner than later. But just because you’ve built an app doesn’t mean people will come.
I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, 21 Ways to Promote Your Mobile App that gives you quick ideas on how to promote. Here are some highlights:
- Promote your app on your website
- Promote your app on your mobile site
- Get your app in iOS and Android app stores
- Use it in self promotion from emails to QR codes in print and digital ads
- Promote it on your business cards and email signature
Let’s not waste an opportunity.
If you like this post, you may want to read:
Mobile Marketing to the Professional Tradesman – What are you Doing?
Things to Consider When Using Mobile to Reach the Professional Tradesman.
Is Your Website Mobile Ready for the Professional Tradesman?
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 22, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
Hopefully we all are using landing pages to both identify and segment new business leads. But are we just dumping content or are we using creative ways to cross sell, up sell to convert leads into sales? ioninteractive.com has a white paper that gives creative ways to maximize the use of landing pages to distribute your content marketing gems.
They bring home the fact that there is a fair exchange for content. In other words, is the perceived value of what they are getting worth giving up some contact info to you?
They cover ways to maximize content on your blogs, white papers, webinars, slide decks and infographics. Some highlights include:
- Blogs – give them a reason to do something else once they are on your blog. Give them something of value for free if they sign up. Give them a reason to sign into your database for future info (get them in the nurturing cycle).
- White Papers – most are gated which might restrict the number of sign-ins. Test a non-gated version, but put some call to actions within the paper for comparison chart, industry study, etc. that they would have to register in order to download. See which one generates more. The ungated will certainly bring in more numbers, but most of us are looking for quality not quantity so you’ll have to evaluate what might work best for you. You might want to also concert doing some teaser-type ads/emails that would include a top 10 list with a link to the white paper.
- Webinars – after the fact, what are you doing with the recorded version? Are you promoting it with links to either the webcast itself or to the companion slides? Are you including social links for them to share? Test a gated vs. ungated model to see which one generates more interest.
- Slides – utilize SlideShare to post the slides with links to the actual webinar (gated). Again, include social links for sharing.
- Infographics – visual always gets attention. Make sure there are several links to social, QR code and subscribe button so they have options of both staying in touch as well as sharing.
Their white paper is easy to read and gives you great ideas on how to get more from existing content. You can download it here.
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 17, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools
Today we have a guest blog post by Sandy Bucher, Media Engineer at Sonnhalter, sharing advice on how to reach the key people for your message.
If you are a manufacturer and want to reach a certain job title in a particular industry, in a particular market you want to focus on, targeted demographic inserts are another option to the standard print ad and are offered by most publications. Inserts can be one sheet, two-sided and are printed on heavier stock than the publication uses, but can also be a postcard or even a multi-page brochure. The inserts can be bound into, or glued into the publication, depending on the publication’s specifications.
Why inserts?
The purpose of using a targeted demographic insert is that a company can select just those readers they want the message to reach, and the publication will send it only to those selected, rather than sending it to the entire circulation. For an example, if you only want to reach the engineers or the plant operations people, you select just those titles. The cost for placing a targeted demographic insert is generally less than placing a full-run advertisement because you’re reaching fewer people. But you also have to consider the cost of printing the insert. If you’re using a one-page, two-sided insert, remember it’s like placing two ads (you get two pages, more real estate), so that may validate the expense of doing an insert.
Get noticed.
A targeted insert will get noticed. The paper stock is usually different than the paper stock the publication uses, so when flipping through the magazine, the magazine will naturally open to the insert, making the reader stop to see why the magazine keeps opening to that particular section of the magazine. A client of ours that uses the demographic inserts had someone call to voice his displeasure because the magazine kept opening to their insert and he was getting frustrated. But that’s what you want…you want to get noticed and the insert did exactly that for our client.
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 16, 2013 | Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends
We all have an end game hopefully on both generating and converting leads. What are the critical factors that you’re looking for?
I recently read in MarketingProfs highlights of a recent study by Business.com surveying 500 active pay-per-lead advertisers that identified what’s important to them. Some are obvious while others are nice to haves but almost impossible to get. Here are some highlights of what marketers want:
- Know the purchasing horizon time line
- Know the size of their business (# of employees)
Further, here are some things they find useful of leads that are generated from content marketing:
- Whitepaper leads
- Webinar leads
- Sponsored emails
- Case studies
- Product feature guides
Are you capitalizing on these types of content marketing? If not, maybe you should consider it.
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 15, 2013 | Uncategorized
I’ve discussed this in previous posts how there are other options besides a 4-year college degree and the debt that comes with it when choosing a career path. Today, discussing salary comparisons, we have a guest post from Miles Free, Director of Technology and Industry Research for PMPA (Precision Machined Products Association).
Many people think that the choice of where they went to school is an important factor in their post graduation earnings.
A report from Georgetown University shows that the choice of major has a much greater influence on those earnings.
We thought that we would show how the average wage of a skilled machinist compares to those earnings – without the 4+ years of college and the debt most graduates build up while at school.
Our figures for the skilled machinist were taken from our latest Shop Hourly Employee Wage Report and represent the annual straight time hourly earnings for a setup qualified multiple spindle, rotary transfer, Swiss type, or multi axis CNC turning/machining center operator.
The machinist earnings are a low estimate, frankly, because many machinists are scheduled overtime.
The college major earnings data was posted by Planet Money on the NPR site. It was originally prepared by the authors of the Georgetown study.
Average earnings of setup qualified precision machinists exceed those of lowest earning college majors – without the college loans to repay.
We were well served by our college degree, eventually. The problem was, when we graduated, we were making more in manufacturing than our degree would earn us in an entry level position in our field.
If you have the passion for academics and a 4+ year university program, that’s great.
But if you know that you really aren’t “scholarship” material, and you’d rather be doing exciting work than writing papers and piling up student debt, we think it will be worth your time to investigate a career in precision machining – or any other craft like electrician, mechatronics, welding, tool and die making, robotics…
Successful completion of high school math algebra, geometry, trig is all that is needed to be able to do the math for precision machining.
We’d love to help you start your well paying career.
More information:
Career overview
Career benefits
Career training
P.S. I interviewed a member CEO today: Their machinists averaged $50,000 last year, plus top-of-the-line medical, vacation, holidays, personal days, uniforms, plus company paid training and more…You should really give serious thought to gaining a skill rather than a degree.
