by tradesmeninsights | Sep 9, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
I cringe when I hear someone say that phrase. Past actions will not ensure future success. Manufacturers who have this mindset are missing out on many opportunities. You literally need to think outside the box.
In today’s market, there are so many other options to consider. Some may not be appropriate for you, but you have to evaluate and pick the ones that might be useful for you. One basic change we all need to make is change how we reach out to potentials. If you’re trying to sell features/benefits to a prospect, you’re going to be disappointed.
Here are some tips to consider:
- Take a different approach – Instead of talking about you, help your customer solve a problem. Always answer the question from your customer’s perspective of “What’s in it for me?”
- Friendly website – If you count on your website as a way of selling your brand, come at it from a customer’s perspective and make sure that your site is responsive (have different versions for smart phones and tablets). Make it easy to find what they are looking for.
- Limited social media – Most manufacturers don’t need to utilize all the options that are available to you. You should focus on those areas that will bring you the most bang for the time you have. You already may have existing things like how-to videos (YouTube) or Power Point presentations (SlideShare) on the best way to solve a particular problem. If you’re in specific market segments, join and participate in the conversations (LinkedIn). If you have the resources, starting a blog would be an ideal way of setting you apart from your competitors and putting you out as an industry expert. Places like Facebook and Twitter, for the most part, are not ways to communicate with contractors and professional tradesman.
The key is to do something different, and as I’ve shown you here, in most cases you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You have valuable info and insights on how to solve your customer’s problems. Don’t keep to yourself – share it.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 27, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
The folks at the top got there, for the most part, because they know the industry and your customer base. Unfortunately, as they move up the corporate ladder, they spend less and less time with the customer and what’s really on their mind.
An interesting book Made to Stick by the Heath brothers talks about the “knowledge curse” of the C-S. Basically, it means that the better we get at generating new insights and solutions, the harder it gets for them to communicate those ideas clearly. In other words, once we know something, it’s hard to imagine everyone already knowing it and when we go on with the thought, we bypass an explanation and go on to make the point, thus losing the audience.
The key with blogging is giving people valuable info that can help them do their job. The challenge for most of us is how do we get that knowledge from between the ears of the big boys and into the hands of the actual user? So what can we do to help get the valuable info out of the C-Suite and yet make it understandable to our target audience? Here are a few tips:
- Narrow the focus of the article
- Give them only a few choices to write about
- Give them a deadline
- Be prepared to edit out buzz words and what I call corporate speak and put it in terms your audience will understand
- Edit for readability
So don’t give up on getting valuable info out of the corner office and into the hands of your customers.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 6, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing, Uncategorized
So everyone knows what content marketing is. But do we know how to get the best results out of it? I know I’ve been doing this for over three years now and have hardly touched the potential of what is available. I’ve been to webinars, seminars and summits on the subject and continue to learn new ways to capitalize on content marketing.
I recently read Joe Pulizzi’s book Epic Content Marketing. As usual, Joe does a great job explaining how to use and integrate into overall marketing plan.
This is a good book for the beginner or for those already engaged to reinforce the right way of doing things. It’s easy to read, has lots of examples, from defining your strategy to developing and managing content to marketing your stories, and I’m sure you’ll get tons of useful tips on how to get more out of your content marketing.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 5, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
We all work hard on developing content for your blog, but what happens after it’s posted? Yes, you optimize it for search and you use various social sites to promote it, but is that all?
Repurposing is taking an existing piece of content and communicating your ideas in different ways using different media (i.e. SlideShare, infographic, podcasts) to deliver the same message from several different angles. Not all content should be repurposed though. You should stick to your core message that’s not time sensitive.
I recently read a post by Darren Rowse, How to Repurpose Your Content and Why You Should Do It that gave great insights on not only Why but How to do it effectively.
Here are some of his key takeaways on doing it correctly:
- Choose your content carefully – make sure it’s central to your key messaging and is not time sensitive.
- Think carefully about the medium – some people like to read, others would prefer a podcast and yet others are drawn to infographics.
- Use a different angle – while the subject matter would be the same, there are several ways you can approach the subject.
Some other suggestions from Darren are:
- Spread out the repurposed content over a period of time to give the reader time to absorb it.
- Repurpose as you write original content.
- Utilize your archives. Check out what has had good response in the past and work with that.
- Keep it visual.
- Make sure to cross link back to original content.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 29, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
We hear a lot today about content marketing and how we all need to start producing more meaningful content to share. I’m OK with that, but most of us have the cart before the horse.
Instead of starting to develop content, we first do a content strategy. Lots of us do this by taking a look internally to see what content might already exist and identify topics and resources for future development.
But here’s where most of us stop—we don’t take a look at your competitors and see what they are doing. Doesn’t this make sense? If we were going to launch a new product, don’t we do our homework to see what’s already out there so we can figure out what to develop that will give us a competitive advantage?
I read a post by Danielle Terreri, Competitor Content Audits: Why & How to Vet Other Players in Your Industry that outlines steps you should take before finalizing your content strategy. Here are some highlights:
- Content – what are they doing, do they have a blog, how are they talking about themselves and the industry?
- Setup – what does it look like, how are they promoting it?
- Blog – does it have a consistent theme, how often are they posting, what kind of topics are they writing about?
- Evaluation – are they solving problems for their audience, where do you see opportunities for your company?
So bottom line is to avoid the ready, fire, aim strategy, vet your competitors and identify things you can do that would add value to your target audience.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 23, 2014 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
When we think of utilizing social media in the marketing mix, SlideShare is probably the most overlooked and underutilized tool. There are over 60 million unique visitors a month to SlideShare sites with over 215 million page views.
Users are not only looking for good content, but also shared insights and SlideShare gives you a platform for both. Plus, you get the added bonus of using the other social media tools to promote your Power Points.
Lots of marketing departments, even if you tell them how great a tool it is, their push back very often is we don’t have time to develop one. My position is that between sales, marketing and the C suite, there are plenty of Power Points already existing that highlight and focus on issues that help differentiate you and help set you up as an industry expert. Here are some places to look:
- Industry or association speeches that a C suite executive have given regarding an important issue or trend and their position on it.
- Presentations to key customers on ways you can help solve their problems.
- General positioning Power Point on what makes you different.
- Distributor-focused Power Point that talk about ways you support them.
- Contractor-focused Power Point of the tools available to them from you to help them do their job.
- New products with features and benefits.
I recently read an article by David Waring in Social Media Examiner –7 Ways to Use SlideShare for Your Business, that I found to be very useful. He gives tips and examples on things as basic as creating well-designed slides, to how to work to get high rankings with key words and phrases by using key words in the file name and tag names. He also gives you tips on how to grab attention using how-to guides and list titles.
The long and short of it is if you haven’t tried it, you have nothing to lose. You may be surprised what kind of views and leads you may get. I’d like to know your thoughts after you’ve tried it.
