by tradesmeninsights | Jul 2, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
So you’re creating content and are using both traditional as well as social media to get the word out. The key question is, what are you trying to accomplish? Have you set goals and identified the appropriate target market you want to go after?
A recent article by Heidi Cohen, 53 Actionable Content Marketing Metrics caught my eye. Her metrics support your content marketing goals.
- Build your brand
- Attract new prospects
- Increase customer engagement
- Improve search
- Build thought leadership
- Increase leads
- Drive sales
- Increase customer loyalty
- Reduce costs
She gives clear action items we all can use. Hopefully these will help all of us get more out of content marketing.
by tradesmeninsights | Jun 25, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
Content marketing is not a new phenomena. It used to be called “information” that helped set you apart from your competitors. The name might have changed, but we all know great content can make or break you in the B-to-B world.
Unless you have a product/service that no one else has, you’re going to have to differentiate it from the hoards of competitors who are vying for the same sale. So what do you have to do to set yourself apart? According to Robert Rose in a recent post in the Content Marketing Institute, your content must be remarkable!
According to Robert, there is no “try,” you either evolve or fail. That’s a scary statement at the onset, but let’s consider how we go to market. For those of you who’ve been around for a while (no matter what business you’re in), I bet none of you would say you’re doing business the same way you did 10 years ago. I’d bet most would say the same statement holds true for five years ago.
So we are evolving both in what we sell and how we sell it and that’s why it’s so important to have a differentiating story to tell your prospects. This point of difference needs to be communicated across all channels of communication to your targets.
So what’s your point of view?
Robert states that “only the combination of advancing questions, meaningful insight and applied creativity will drive value from data both big and small.”
Here are three basic questions he says you need to ask yourself:
- Why is content important to your customers?
- What value will they derive from it?
- How will it differentiate us?
Lots for us to think about. How would you answer the questions?
by tradesmeninsights | Jun 18, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
Over the past several years, marketers have been focusing more of their efforts (both time and money) on social media.
Especially in the manufacturing B-to-B space, social certainly has a place to help set you up as an expert in your field of expertise, but it won’t replace more traditional ways of communicating like email. If you really want a tradesman to read something from you, which would you use, social media or email? I’d be willing to bet email.
Let’s face it, the life blood of your business (both existing and potential) lies in the quality of your database. The question is, how do you increase the size and quality of that database and what’s the best way to use it? By using traditional methods like trade shows, PR and direct mail along with social tools like YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook and Twitter, you can start identifying potential customers and start gathering email addresses for your database.
Think about this – if you go to sign up for a new social site, what’s one of the first things you have to give them? Your email! Even they know the best way to communicate is using this tool.
Consider some of these facts:
- The fact of the matter is folks respond better to emails than they do to social channels
- Email also lets you personalize your message
- They are checked more often than social sites
- It’s easier to sell through email than social sites
I listened to a podcast recently on socialmediaexaminer.com where they interviewed DJ Waldow the co-author of The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing. He shares his thoughts on how to use social to support your email activities. I’d recommend you take the time to listen.
by tradesmeninsights | Jun 4, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
Are you looking for ways to get in front of tradesmen? If you’re a manufacturer and don’t have anything on YouTube, you’re missing a great opportunity. What better way to show a customer or prospect how to use your product, highlight features and benefits or even have a customer testimonial.
Next to Google (who by the way owns YouTube), YouTube is the highest searched. The numbers are staggering:
- YouTube has 1 Billion unique visitors each month and sees four billion video views every day.
- 1 hour of video is uploaded every second – that’s 60 hours a minute!
- Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years) watching video.
- integrated into Google Results.
When considering content, here are some suggestions. Tell the story first and don’t worry about the length. Shorter is always better and you should focus on the first 15 seconds. If you get their attention, you have a better chance of them viewing the entire video. They need to determine up front that the video will help them. When telling a story, your goals are:
- Engage the customer
- Educate the customer
- Make points of differentiation
- Entertain customers
- Be different
Rich Brooks in Social Media Explorer explored ways to maximize your YouTube presence. Here are some of the highlights:
- Create compelling content – Address the needs of your customers.
- Make it findable – both in and out of YouTube. Your Title, Description and Tags are important.
- Brand your channel – Create a custom background that goes along with your branding . Use “Player View” as your layout and select autoplay feature.
- Post a bulletin and alert your friends and subscribers – Create a link and put it on your home pages.
- Leverage other social media platforms – Blog about it, Tweet it, post it on Facebook and submit it to StumbleUpon.
What are you doing to leverage your YouTube videos?
by tradesmeninsights | May 30, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Mile Free, Director of Industry Research and Technology for the Precision Machined Products Association, is posting today with advice for connecting on social media. Miles blogs regularly on PMPA’s blog, Speaking of Precision.
As tradesmen, advertising used to be pretty easy to figure out. A yellow pages ad in the local phone book, small display advertisements in the newspaper and maybe some classified advertisements in the weekly as well. Near a big city? Maybe you would have bit the bullet for a display ad in their yellow pages too. As a customer, in the old days, that’s how I would have found you…
So who uses a phone book these days?
Who still has a land line phone?
How many folks with smartphones walk around carrying a phone book?
My latest phone book is still on the front porch
That’s a trick question. While no one is carrying a phone book, the fact is that when they need to find something, they go search for it. On their smart phone or web device. How easy are you to find on search? For what kind of things are you on Google’s page one?
I’m not suggesting that you need to pay for advertisements on Google to get to page one, but if you use social media tools correctly, you can be found on Google for the services that you provide, and that your customers want.
While I am a staff director for a trade association of precision machining companies, the lessons I learned about how to increase visibility in online search are just as applicable to tradesmen to build your credibility, and thus your visibility online.
Here are 5 steps to increasing your online visibility:
- Make sure that your website covers the products and services that you provide. Having an up-to-date website with photos is key to engaging your potential customers and audience. Think of it as your online showroom. Make it look like a showroom, a place where people would like to shop. Nice photos on your website and in your blog get you found on Google too.
- Create a blog to share your expertise. It will only take an hour or two a week to create some modest posts about your specialty, or show pictures and discuss a job you just completed, or why you should use a professional to do ____. Share it on both your business and personal Facebook pages.
- Use LinkedIn Groups and Facebook to increase your credibility in Google and other search engines. LinkedIn Groups are where you can post your blog posts as news items to get wider viewership. As Google finds your content on places other than your blog and website, it boosts your trust factor and credibility. Find them for your trade, your customers and your locale. Facebook provides a great way to have a conversation with your “natural market”- the folks you already know- and gives them material to help generate word of mouth. Even Twitter can have a role in your tradesman marketing.
- Repurpose what you already have. If you already have a sales brochure, repost sections of it as stand-alone blog content. Take photos from your jobs completed book, repost them telling a bit about the back story- How by doing it with your approach, you saved the owner $XXX in time or dollars. Or why these materials instead of XYZ…
- Share your expertise. Keeping your expertise hidden doesn’t help anyone. “3 things that can go wrong when you pour Liquid Fire ™ down your toilets instead of getting professional help” may just save someone’s eyesight, as well as help people think about what is really important when trying to solve their problem.
You are an expert. You don’t have to tell anyone why you use 1-1/4” fasteners instead of the 1” ones …but what’s the harm in pointing out that as a professional you use the right fastener for the job, as opposed to just buying the cheapest ones down at the depot store? And then showing them a photo of a job you had to fix because the other guy didn’t use the right fastener?
As you share more and more of your wisdom and experience online, if you tag it properly, you will soon discover that Google has put you on page one for some of products and services in your area that you offer. Because you blogged about them with credibility. And it happened without an ad buy- because to Google, you have become the credible expert in your area.
by tradesmeninsights | May 15, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
One of the challenges we face all the time in helping manufacturers get into the social media space is to get them to think outside their traditional feature/benefit mentality. Feature-based articles on your products aren’t going to work in this space.
I recently read a post by Jeffrey Cohen in Social Media BtoB called 10 Ideas to Make a Boring B2B Social Media Post Captivating. He hit the nail on the head when he said customers and prospects want solutions to their problems. They don’t want to hear about your products in a sales pitch. Here are some highlights from the post that I found to be interesting, and if you try them, your readership will surely increase.
- Use key words in your headline – Use words that a customer would be looking for to solve his problem.
- Use adjectives in the headline – descriptive words will pique the reader’s attention and want them to read on.
- Don’t talk about your products – that’s what websites are for. Use this space to solve problems and establish yourself as an expert in the field.
- Solve problem – use how-to posts or share a customer story of how you helped them solve a problem.
- Use video – this is a powerful way of telling your story. Video tends to capture someone’s attention in a different way than the written word.
The key here is to work smart not hard. If you’re going to invest the time into blogging, then let’s try to get the most out of it.
I’d be curious to hear what you’re doing to get better results with your posts.
