by tradespeopleinsights | Feb 3, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
I’ve always said that I believe small businesses have the advantage in social media. Two of the most important reasons are that small business owners are passionate about what they do and can react quicker than larger corporations when responding to something online. That’s the beauty of social media—its success is based on building relationships. The reader doesn’t care if you are from a big corporation or an entrepreneur as long as they get good info.
I recently read a post on business.com on social media marketing to small businesses, that documented some of my beliefs. The report that surveyed over 1700 people showed that the way decision makers react and use social media varies from B-to-C and B-to-B companies. You can gain some good insights into the evolution of business social media usages by looking across industries to see the different levels of involvement.
A free download of the 40 page report is available, “Engaging Small Business Decision Makers Through Social Media.”
Here are some highlights:
- Smaller businesses (under 9 employees) aren’t engaged in Social Media in any meaningful way.
- Industry type has a major impact on the number of social media resources used for businesses.
- Most popular social media resources for small businesses are webinars, podcasts, user reviews of product or services, and profiles of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
- Speed and Convenience are two main reasons for using social media.
With the great growth rate of social media in general, can you imagine if all the small businesses started to embrace the technology what would happen? Most small businesses I come in contact with are contractors, and while some have started to embrace social, many either don’t understand it or don’t see the benefit in how it can help their business.
What kind of small business stories can you share on social media successes?
by tradespeopleinsights | Feb 2, 2010 | Uncategorized
My target audience is manufacturers who want to sell stuff to contractors and professional tradesmen.
Any of us who have been around this industry (no matter what field) know that the biggest challenge facing contractors is lack of qualified people. So long term if the professional tradesman goes away or certainly doesn’t keep up the current need, who are we going to sell our stuff to?According to The KiplingerLetter, there’s not a labor shortage but a dearth of talent.The Baby boomers who represent about 40% of the current work force is in the process of retiring. How are we going to replace these educated and skilled workers?
A friend of mine by the name of S.A. Habib writes a blog called Blue Collar Branding where he addresses several of these issues. He brought to my attention a recent interview on the Fox News Network of Joe Lamacchia who recently wrote a book named, Blue Collar and Proud of it.
High schools do a poor job letting kids know they have options other than going to college. I think manufacturers should step up to the plate, either individually or together with their trade associations, to start a grass roots campaign at the high school level to insure we have enough tradesmen moving forward, for everyone’s best interest. Kids should know that these jobs are in high demand, pay very well and won’t be shipped off shore.
What are some ways you think we could spread the message?
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 28, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
Kudos to the B-to-B marketers who have embraced social media. I recently read an article in eMarketer.com that I thought I’d share some highlights. Even though we are outnumbered and less experienced than our counterparts in B-to-C, we appear to be more active according to research from a 2009 benchmarking study from business.com.
Areas where we excel are in maintaining company-related profiles on social sites, microblogging and participating in 3rd party discussion sites.
The only areas where B-to-B lagged were on Facebook and MySpace. It was interesting to note that B-to-B users were more active in measuring things like web traffic, brand awareness and prospect lead quality and volume. Web traffic for both categories was the top metric .
Keep up the good work and let’s stay ahead of our counterparts in B-to-C.
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 27, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
Sometimes we take things for granted and can tend to become complacent when using tools like e-mail marketing. We think we know it all since we’ve been doing it for so long, but we may have lost sight of what made e-mail so successful in the past.
A recent post by Curtis Jackson, What are the top 10 e-mail marketing mistakes, got me thinking that we should all evaluate the processes we have in place regarding e-mails. Here are my 5 top things to avoid:
- No Strategy – When you first started using e-mails, didn’t you have a written strategy of what you wanted to accomplish and how you were going to measure it? How are you doing?
- List updates – When was the last time you updated your list? Have your open rates been increasing or decreasing? How about undeliverables? That brings us to the next point.
- Ignoring metrics – If you’re actively doing e-mail marketing, you have to be using some tool like Constant Contact to help you manage your programs. They have metric tools built in to see how successful the actual e-mail was (both in content and delivery).
- Missing an opportunity in your top line message – Chances are your message will be viewed in a preview pane. Make sure your top line message includes a link to a web-based version.
- Timing – Tuesday at 10 a.m. may not be the most opportune time to reach your audience. Test out different combinations to see what works best for your audience.
Those are my thoughts. What are you doing to ensure you are getting the most out of your e-mail marketing?
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 26, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Traditional Marketing
As most of you know by now, our marketing company works primarily with manufacturers who sell to the contractor marketplace. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the economy in 2009 wasn’t good to most contractors, especially those whose primary market was new construction.
To that end, we did phone interviews with 22 contractors across the country in the last quarter of 2009, primarily in the HVAC and plumbing markets, to get a better sense of how they are surviving and what’s on their minds. We chose these types of contractors because they not only do new construction, but also do service and replacement work which we thought would give us a better read on the consumer as a whole.
Here are some highlights:
- Contractor’s sales – Were off between 7 to 15%. Some were off as much as 25% and some (2) had actual sales increases in 2009.
- Commercial business – Started to come back late 3rd and early 4th quarters.
- Government stimulus package – Helped in increasing sales (more in HVAC than plumbing).
- Biggest concerns – Tight credit, finding qualified people and big government.
2010 – Most contractors are cautiously optimistic. They know they will have to work smarter in ’10, but believe the opportunities will be there from both new business as well as competitors going away.
A link to get a copy of the white paper will be sent to you when you sign up for my newsletter here.
by tradespeopleinsights | Jan 21, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
Small businesses must have been listening when it came to PSEO. According to data from WebVisible, search advertising has sharply increased in Q3 of ’09. According to a recent post on eMarketer.com, small business search spending by smaller companies was up 91% year over year. The average number of key words purchased was also up.
Other highlights from the study showed spending shifts among the key search engines with Google losing about 5% and Bing gaining almost 3%. Bing brought the small business owner the highest click through rates than any search engine. (Not a bad stat since they’ve only been around since June of this year.) Most click throughs went to the advertiser’s Web site and the fastest growing conversion action was video viewing.
Vertical Response cites that 45% of small businesses planned to up their spending next year.
So what are your plans?
