by tradesmeninsights | Aug 13, 2015 | Events/Trade Shows
Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect at Sonnhalter
National Manufacturing Day, or MFG Day, is October 2nd, which may feel like a long way off from right now, but you should start planning today.
If you’re a manufacturer, you should plan an event. Not sure what type of an event to plan? There are a variety of options for hosting an event, ranging from full day tours and sessions to half day learning seminars, or even 1-hour presentations.
If you’re not a manufacturer, you should attend an event. You can find Manufacturing Day events in your area using this interactive map.
If you’re planning to host an event for MFG Day in October, here are a few tips to make it successful:
- Set goals for your event. Do you want to improve your company’s image in the community? Do you need to recruit new talent? Do you want to contribute to changing the image of manufacturing? Figure out what you want to accomplish with your event and then create your plan.
- Identify your target audience(s). Based on the needs of your organization, some potential audiences to invite include local technical school and high school administration, faculty and students; local and regional politicians; local and trade media; family and friends of your employees and/or the local community as a whole.
- Put together a simple agenda. Include time to introduce your company and tailor your event to the audience that you’re inviting.
- Plan informative and interactive activities. Facility tours, brief presentations on different roles and Q&A sessions are easy to arrange and are effective.
- Promote your event. Be sure to list your event with mfgday.com, use your network to promote, and personally invite your target audience and promote your event through your existing channels including on your website and social media.
Not available on October 2nd? No problem! Pick a day that works for you and invite the people you want to reach to an event.
The manufacturing sector still faces a myriad of misconceptions. Initiatives like MFG Day provide a great opportunity to dispel myths and shed some light on what the industry is really like.
Will you be hosting or attending an event for MFG Day?
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 12, 2015 | Marketing Trends
Today, we have a guest blog from Jessica Kane of Federal Steel Supply, Inc., discussing some of the new innovations expected to shape the future of the construction industry.
New angles are being used for the advancement of construction design that will most likely be widespread within the next 50 years. Designers and architects are implementing new trends that could very well be profitable in building spaces for new offices and living establishments. Here are just a few:
One Stop Design
One trend that is already in play is the single design model. A common practice in planning is having an architect create construction documents. They are then handed over to the contractors to be edited and executed. This entire process is now shifting to be done all in one place to save time and money. So, all the outlining, engineering and construction plans are set and submitted to be built directly afterward.
Sustainable and Efficient Solutions
Being energy efficient is a constant concern in construction. So when new buildings are going up, construction around the world has established new ideas on how to conserve. New facades have been used to produce energy through a solar collection and to provide a natural cooling system. For instance, a designer in Melbourne, Australia, has developed a system which includes an outer layer of a side of a building that contains solar panels that shift to collect energy from the sun and provides optimal shading. Another useful technique that has become a sustainable solution in providing energy is the innovation of utilizing the shade of building faces, as seen in Hamburg, Germany. A residential establishment has microalgae installed within glass panels that collects solar energy and creates heat through the process of photosynthesis. The panels can also be shifted in order to provide natural cooling to the building.
Large 3D Printed Structures
Constructing large structures using a 3D printer has been on the minds of the industry since its initial success in quickly building smaller housing units. Large structures are being composed by 3D printers, but only in part. The MIT Media Lab is finding that results from printing a large building are often rugged and contorted. The product is sanded down and filled with concrete to stabilize the structure. Through these new and innovative projects, engineers are adapting to new technologies for quick and economical production.
Drone Assistance
Building firms are using drones more frequently to help with inspections and material delivery. Drones can provide high accuracy inspections in hard-to-reach areas that can prove dangerous and costly if performed by a human. Drones help in collecting data, executing sophisticated design strategies and accurate data transmission needed by engineers. The construction of complex drones would become crucial in downtime reduction, because it would cause fewer accidents and enhance workflow speed at construction sites.
Adding on with Permanent Modular Construction
Permanent modular construction is the process of constructing buildings offsite (60-90 percent of the building) in a factory-controlled environment which is then moved to its final building site. While this exists now, more of this type of construction will become prominent as it becomes more sustainable and leaves less material waste, less site disturbance and provides more flexibility and reuse of materials. In addition, modular construction has an accelerated construction process due to its ability to have site work conducted simultaneously. Because modular construction is built offsite and needs to be transported to its final location, the quality of the building is higher than that of an on-site building, because it has to withstand transportation and installation requirements. Modular construction allows for add-ons later in the process. For example, instead of constructing a 100,000-square-foot building, you can build a 25,000-square-foot building and later make additions to increase the size. It’s this flexibility that makes it prime for a bright future in the construction industry.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 11, 2015 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
By Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect at Sonnhalter
Periscope, Meerkat, Hangouts, YouTube Live, etc. are all names that are appearing more and more in social media marketing news. Many in the B2T (and B2B) space may not even be familiar with those names, or have heard them and wonder what they are.
At the end of the day all of these apps and services do basically the same thing: Live video streaming.
The concept of livestream is by no means new, we’ve been doing live webinar and video conferences for years. The transition of livestreaming from desktop to mobile for more than just FaceTime and Skype is what’s making these services newsworthy.
Here are a few applications where live video streaming can be beneficial to your business:
1. Webinars
2. Meetings (for shareholders, employees, partners, etc.)
3. Large public announcements (product launches and large announcements)
4. Presentations
5. Virtual press conferences
6. Conferences
7. Live Q&A sessions
8. Focus groups
Obviously many of these applications are cross-functional. Livestreaming can be an effective way to get everyone in one place in a business or industry that can be geographically scattered.
The service you select for livestreaming depends on your needs and capabilities, including:
- Your audience size
- Equipment
- Mobile device capabilities
- Public vs. closed audience
- Interactivity needs
- Recording needs
I personally recommend recording anything you stream live, even if it’s a closed meeting. Keep a library of your videos for your own records, to share with anyone who missed the event, for later promotion on YouTube or Vimeo, to provide as a resource and for reference for various content development needs.
If you’re hosting webinars, services such as GoTo Webinar, WebEx and others are probably still the best option as they are primarily for screen sharing of presentations. For live Q&A events or virtual press conferences, Hangouts and YouTube live may be best, but apps like Meerkat and Periscope also work. Meerkat and Periscope can be great options for streaming presentations via mobile devices at an offsite location.
Regardless of the service you use to live stream, here are a few tips for an improved experience for your audience:
- Make sure audio is clear
- Keep the video device stable
- Start streaming before the event officially starts and end after the event ends
- Incorporate your livestream into your social media promotion
- Make sure users can easily access the stream
- Record for future use
Do you have experience with livestreaming? What tips would you share?
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 6, 2015 | Marketing Tips
By Robin Heike, Production Foreman at Sonnhalter
Promotional items can serve a variety of purposes such as adding the “rattle factor” to a direct mail marketing campaign or being a keepsake to commemorate an award.
From sourcing small items such as logoed sunglasses, to larger items like commemorative beer steins, here are a few tips to keep in mind next time you need to order a promotional item:
- Get quotes from 3-4 sources. Not only does this help you find the best price, but it gives you extra options if the first supplier or product falls through.
- Get a sample, even if you have to pay for it, prior to ordering. This will ensure you found the right source for the right item. No one wants to trash an order of 100, 1,000 or 10,000 promo items that arrive and are not what you expected.
- Get custom packaging if you’re shipping out a promotional mailing with breakables. No one wants to receive a broken item.
- Build in time for damaged or lost shipments. If possible, order extras. This is very important if you’re ordering from an overseas location.
- Probably the most important tip: Give yourself as much extra time as possible to account for any delays.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 5, 2015 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
Your Blog is a repository of helpful content that can effectively attract a large number of prospective customers.
Here are 5 simple steps and suggestions to improve your company’s blog as a major tool for fueling new business leads:
1. Creating
Each new blog post is a new opportunity for you to be found online by your best prospects. Some quick suggestions:
- Write to a specific target audience and provide answers to their advertising/marketing challenges.
- Write consistently: This is important to creating regular readership. Write at least 3 to 5 posts per week.
- Post should average 350 to 450 words and be pleasantly scannable to the eye. Break up long paragraphs, use bullet/numbered lists when possible. Highlight key words and thoughts.
- Write in the inverted pyramid style, lead with your conclusion. People read differently online than they do for print. They tend to scan much more.
- Identify and consistently use key words in your post title. You want to be able to dominate these words in Google search.
- Let your reading fuel your writing.
- Write 1 original post to every 4 to 5 resource posts. You’ll never be considered a thought leader without original content, but you won’t generate much traffic if all of your content is just your original thought. A balance of both needs to be provided through your blog.
- Write with an “evergreen” style that will have a long shelf-life and provide a great return on your time investment.
- Provide the “Readers Digest” version for your writers. Do the work on behalf of your readers and pull out the nuggets in simple language that is concise and easy to read.
2. Optimizing
- Carefully think through your blog’s heading. A “heading” is a stand-alone phrase that describes your blog’s content that appears below it. I usually advise clients to create a blog descriptor statement for the header that lets a reader and search engines know the purpose and intent of the content. Mine is “Marketing to the professional tradesman in the construction, industrial and MRO markets.”
- Be sure you own your domain. A person that still has “wordpress or blogspot” in their domain won’t be able to change blogging platforms without losing traffic.
- Be sure your site is indexed with Google. If your pages are not indexed, then Google is not crawling them.
- Build quality inbound links. There are lots of online business directories where you can just submit your URL, agency’s name and a description of your services. There are also many social media sites where you can simply build links to your site. Writing guest articles and posts and optimizing our press releases can build links. The best way however, is to produce valued content and create a blog that is a repository of helpful information for your target audience.
3. Promoting
- Make sure your content can be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, as well as social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon with Share buttons.
- Jumpstart traffic by repurposing your blog’s content through an email newsletter that is sent every other week. This is an easy thing to do. Since you already have the content and can create an email template that is reused, it will take literally minutes to prepare the newsletter and send.
- Build a sizable Twitter following that is targeted using TweetAdder and repurpose your blog content to your Twitter account using a program such as Social Oomph.
- Write guest posts; invite others to guest post for your blog.
- Comment on other blog posts and online articles, sites such as STAFDA or HVAC Professionals on LinkedIn, etc. Select those sites that are frequented by your target audience.
- Write content for searchability.
- Publish new blog content to your other social media accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Conduct your own primary research using your blog; generate links and traffic through press releases using your groups on LinkedIn.
- Be proactive in facilitating speaking opportunities by creating a Speakers Page for your blog; list the topics and titles that you can speak to. You can also provide links to your past speaking engagements through YouTube; post photos through your Flickr Photostream.
- Pull blog content together, expand SEO opportunities, creating Slideshare Presentations, Whitepapers, etc.
4. Converting
All of this activity isn’t worth the time investment if it doesn’t turn visitors into leads.
- Place your RSS Subscription Feed button above the fold, near the top of your blog’s homepage. Visitors who subscribe will automatically receive updates every time you publish a new post either through an RSS Reader or through their email inbox. I would suggest setting up an RSS feed through Feedburner.
- Also place a subscription for your email newsletter within your blog’s sidebar to create Opt-Ins from site visitors.
5. Measuring
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Fortunately, you can measure a lot online and continually hone your program.
- Review your blog site’s analytics daily to see what posts are generating the most traffic, what search terms are being used, where traffic is coming from, who is linking to you, links readers clicked on, page views, etc.
- Utilize your email newsletter analytics to improve open and click-through rates. Test the day of the week your email newsletter is sent, time-of-day and subject line copy.
- Create a first-step call-to-action for your readers to know how to initially engage you. This could be something similar to my Industry White Papers. Make it something simple and of value that doesn’t take a lot of consideration but does separate to qualified prospects from those that just want to glean what they can get from you for free.
- Use this suite of tools to analyze your marketing efforts:
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 29, 2015 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman at Sonnhalter
LinkedIn by far is the best tool for B-to-B users in my opinion. It’s easy to use and the networking options are almost limitless. I’ll assume most of you are on it, but when was the last time you refreshed it?
The 2015 Social Media industry report from Social Media Examiner said 88% of B-to-B companies use LinkedIn and 41% cite it was their most important platform.
Jeffrey Cohen from SocialmediaBtoB.com wrote an interesting article recently on ways you can refresh LinkedIn.
Here are some highlights:
- Review your company page – What, you don’t have one? Better get going on creating one. Keep it up to date with current news. Consider changing the images frequently during the year.
- Review results of posts – Track links that drive visitors to your blog or website so you can better understand what’s driving engagement.
- Add relevant showcase pages – Create topical pages of areas of interest to your customers. It’s a great way to segment your audiences and post content relevant to them.
- Employee lunch and learn – While we can’t force folks to promote the company, we can certainly encourage them to do so by buying them lunch to explain why and show them what they could do would be helpful. By providing them a standard 2 or 3 sentence description of the company, it will help search results for the company as well.
- Create a Slideshare deck for employee profiles – create a short deck describing your company. Your employees can add it to their profiles.
If you like this post, you may want to read:
LinkedIn Still Top Performer for B-to-B
How to use LinkedIn to Promote your Innovative Company
What are you Doing to Grow your LinkedIn Connections?
