by tradesmeninsights | Apr 13, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
Although everyone is focusing on social media, let’s not forget an old friend, e-mail marketing. Using social media as a partner, it will provide new avenues for engaging and sharing both current customers as well as prospects. Professional tradesmen are used to being contacted via e-mail, and more and more are getting into the social media arena. Let’s not let an opportunity go by to make your marketing message more impactful.
According to Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of a new report, Maximizing the E-mail/Social Media Connection, “Even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail.” According to Williamson, marketers must integrate efforts to maximize both social media and e-mail marketing. Here are 4 items for consideration:
- Multiply the sharing opportunities by linking e-mail messaging with social media messaging.
- Provide a broader platform for brand advocates; encourage the best customers to share with friends via social media.
- Shift the control to the consumer by providing multiple avenues to interact with a company.
- Use e-mail metrics such as response rate and conversions to enhance social ROI.
This trend seems to be already catching on according to a recent survey by StrongMail that stated 40% of business executives are already integrating these two and consider it one of their most important initiatives for 2010.
How are you planning on using these two marketing tools in your business?
If you like what you’ve read, pass it on to a friend.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 8, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing, Twitter
In our world of B-to-B and especially the world of manufacturing, Twitter, of all the social media tools, is probably the most misunderstood and therefore the most under utilized.
75 million people visited Twitter in January alone, over 23 million were from the US. According to Twitter, over 50 million tweets are sent daily.
Twitter is being talked about everywhere. People are drawn to it because of the buzz of its popularity, but the majority of people don’t understand its potential.
My primary objective for using Twitter has been to increase traffic to my blog. Twitter is now the leading traffic generator for Tradesmeninsights.
There are hundreds of tools that have been developed to enhance Twitter’s usefulness for marketing. The tool that is most helpful to me and the one I use most often to generate new business is called Social Oomph.
These are some of the Social Oomph features that I like and use:
- Manage multiple accounts from one dashboard (our agency’s as well as client’s Twitter accounts)
- Manage an unlimited number of blogs
- Upload your agency’s blog posts and URLs from an Excel spread sheet, in bulk, to Social Oomph
- Pre-set the date/time range for each post in minutes
- Automatically shorten post URLs through Bit.ly and track clicks
- Automate – follow those who follow you in Twitter
- Automate – unfollow those who don’t follow you in Twitter
- Purge and filter your Twitter account’s DM box
- Small monthly fee that is month-to-month, cancellable at any time (more than pays for itself for the time that it saves)
- Junior level people/interns can be easily trained to use this tool on behalf of the marketing departments
- You can also schedule your company’s blog posts to Facebook, just keep the repurpose level to only a few per day
For Twitter to have real value from a new business perspective for manufacturers, you must have a clear objective and follow a simple formula for use.
To reach my objective to my blog’s traffic and exposing it to a new but targeted audience, I’ve followed Angela Maiers 70-20-10 Twitter Engagement Formula.
70 to 80% of my “Twitter time” is spent sharing helpful information for manufacturers on how they can use social media as part of their overall marketing strategy… I do this in two ways:
First, I share lots of information from my online reading that I think will be of help to my audience. I’m able to use some tools such as TwitThis that I’ve placed in my browser bar. When I come across a good article that I think will be of help, all I have to do is click on TwitThis and automatically post the article title and tiny URL into my Twitter account.
Secondly, I also share the content from my Tradesmeninsights blog. I now have over 180 of my own blog posts regarding ways manufacturers can use social media. I’m able to use Social Oomph to expose these posts to new audiences.
I can easily schedule the date, time and recurrence of each post. With the volume of posts that I now have, I can publish a different post on Twitter every hour, seven days a week twenty-four hours a day without repetition. Older posts, that are still useful, have new life. The best posts are often re-tweeted and exposed to new networks of people.
Your Company’s Blog Posts: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you’ve written it, everybody has read it.
Twitter is more than a fad. It is a valuable marketing tool. Twitter tools such as Social Oomph make it priceless for generating traffic and new business leads.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 7, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
When you have lemons, make lemonade! I know most of the manufacturers that read me regularly pulled in their horns last year to ride out the uncertainty. There are a few, though, that have continued on and have made an impact on both the economy and their bottom line.
I’ve been trying to showcase some of these leaders over the past several months, and here is another one. Molex (Disclaimer: they are a client of ours), through its Woodhead brand, offers the broadest range of code-compliant electrical products designed to perform in harsh environments.
When the Government last year introduced the (ARRA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to focus on rebuilding roads, bridges and other infrastructures of the country, Molex came out with their own program, Rebuilding America Together. The target audiences were distributors and contractors in the commercial construction and utilities industries.
Their integrated plan included :
The good news is that they had the insight to do something when everything was tanking. The better news is it’s working. It created buzz at the distributor level and gave them something to talk about with the contractors. It gave the contractors incentives as well as fostering a theme of patriotism. It gave Molex increased sales.
That’s one more example of someone doing it right. I’d love to hear from you if you have other examples.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 6, 2010 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
We in the B-to-B world realize that digital is fast becoming a very acceptable vehicle which none of us a few years ago would have thought that it would have grown at such a fast pace. In our space, digital will have a role but I don’t believe it will catch up to the consumer side of things. While the enclosed study is primarily focused at the B-to-C side of things, it should be a gauge for us as to things come.
Outsell, which provides research and advisory services to the publishing and information industries, surveyed more than 1,000 US advertisers in December 2009 for its annual “Marketing and Advertising Study 2010.”
This marketing and ad spending study forecasts spending, share, and growth for five media types—online, events, print, TV/radio, and PR/other—and methods used within each, from social networking to mobile/wireless marketing.
In what it calls “an industry milestone crossover event,” US companies will spend more this year on digital and online advertising and marketing than on print for the first time ever.
“Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding. As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options,” said Chuck Richard, Vice President and Lead Analyst, Outsell.
Some nuggets from this report:
- Companies will spend 119.6 billion dollars on online and digital strategies and 111.5 billion dollars on newspaper and magazine advertisements and other print campaigns
- US spending on advertising and marketing projected to increase by 1.2 percent in 2010 to 368 billion dollars
- Spending on newspaper advertising expected to drop 8.2 percent to 27 billion dollars
- Spending on direct mail marketing campaigns could rise 2.7 percent to 24.4 billion dollars and spending on custom print publications would be 3.0 percent higher at 19.3 billion dollars
- Spending on print directories would fall 8.3 percent to 11.6 billion dollars
- Spending on print newsletters would be flat at 11.4 billion dollars
- Spending on television advertising was forecast to drop 6.5 percent to 59.6 billion dollars
- Print magazine advertising could be up 1.9 percent to $9.4 billion
- Methods generating the highest B2B ROI are topped by advertisers’ own websites, followed by conferences, exhibitions and trade shows; direct mail; search engine keywords; and e-marketing/e-newsletters
- B2B advertisers see cross-media marketing as most effective; 78% combine three or more major marketing methods
- 51 percent of B2B marketers rate Facebook as extremely or somewhat effective, followed by LinkedIn (45 percent), Twitter (35 percent) and MySpace (25 percent)
“2010 will not suddenly erase the painful memory of crumbling ad spending in 2009, but it will provide much closer to a flat year for several of the traditional media types,” Outsell said.
The entire 33 page report is available for download for a fee by clicking here
Other posts that might be of interest:
Social Media: Will be Focus of B-to-B Marketers in 2010
B-to-B Marketers: Social Networks Top Priority for 2010
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 1, 2010 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Guest post from Aylie Fifer, a Relationship Architect at Sonnhalter.
There is a revolution starting in the world of mobile marketing and it isn’t just for B2C – it is for everyone, including B2B. According to a recent article in Mobile Marketer, B-to-B mobile marketing will go from 26 million in 2009 to 106 million in 2014 according to Forrester Research.
Every now and again a technology comes along that is a total game changer for humanity and shifts the paradigm of the world we live in. Harnessing electricity. The Assembly line. The Internet. The iPhone. With the recent influx of smart phones and smart phone technology, we are seeing a whole new world – the world of mobile marketing.
Two-thirds of the world’s population has a mobile phone subscription—4 billion people—and by the end of 2010 there will be 5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide, according to some estimates. And a majority of these phones are now moving to the smart phone platform. From the Apple iPhone to the Motorola Droid to Blackberrys…the trend for mobile is to go to a smart phone or lose market share.
As a result of this new use by consumers, no longer are we capturing people in context – the trade magazine, the TV show – not to say that these mediums are dead, but we now are faced with thinking differently. With smart phone usage on the rise, people check it at different parts of their day – not just at work or at home – but several different parts of their day. This has shifted the traditional approach to marketing as now we are faced with catching people’s attention throughout the day.
I would argue that advertising to your target and catching them at a time of day when they might not being thinking about work makes the message resonate even stronger because it IS out of context. For instance, if a carpenter goes out over the weekend and sees an ad through his phone about a certain type of tool, this stands out to him because it is unexpected – he is out socially and may not be in “work mode.”
People have become more immune to advertising, so one way to catch their attention – and make your brand stand out in their minds – is to catch them when they AREN’T thinking about work, and to do it in an entertaining way.
Mobile advertising has furthered this push and while I am a firm believer in a good segmentation strategy, it is also true that everyone is a consumer. When people hang up their clothes at the end of a hard day, they turn off their work mode and begin the “home” mode. Thus, I would argue that you can’t just segment into demographics or ethnographics, you now need an added dimension – what I call parallel-ographics.
You live your life in parallels – you may talk to your husband (or your wife) during the day and realize that you need to pick up diapers so you pick up your smart phone and you search for a coupon. In your work day, you are a plant manager, but through the use of mobile, you just dipped into your parallel life – that of mother and wife. And while you are at the store after work hours picking up those diapers, you get an email from work and you are instantly transferred into your parallel life – that of plant manager. Your context shifts constantly and instead of having separate times for work and home, this use of mobile and smart phones has made us increasingly blur that line and we run our work and home lives as parallels instead of separate.
As a salesperson for a B2B company, you may be able to show a product demo from your phone when you are out socializing and happen to meet a potential customer. The lines between social and work life have become even more blurred with the onset of mobile. Think of mobile as your portal to the Internet and the beyond – where you might have in the past only done on a laptop computer, you can now access – at any time – on a smart phone.
The onset of mobile marketing means that you never fully turn off your roles throughout your day, which changes the way a marketer catches you and keeps your interest. And as a marketer, to attack this new paradigm of living, you have to approach it from a parallel-ographic standpoint – knowing that the message needs to appear in multiple places, at multiple times and that yes, everyone is a consumer.
What are your thoughts on mobile marketing? Do you think it will be the next big thing?
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 31, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Unless you live under a rock, everyone knows about social media at least in broad terms. Social media holds a tremendous amount of potential for businesses looking to grow. Many companies, in an effort to get started, jump right in, and while that’s not the end of the world, I think if they really want social media to have a positive impact on their business, they should consider the following:
- Set clear goals – Too many people are ready, fire, aim! They are so interested in the “how” of social instead of the “why.” What are you trying to do, brand build, increase the number of leads, use as a customer service tool? Just like any other marketing exercise, you need to have a plan.
- Human capital – Once the goals are in writing, do you have the people power needed to accomplish the task?
- Content – Do we or can we produce enough “good” content to sustain a social media program?
- Current web site – Is it social media ready? I don’t mean putting up logos saying follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Is there a reason for customers or potentials to return to your site? Have you set up a forum or industry update button?
- Incorporate it throughout the buying process – Remember where these new leads came from (social) and that they expect the same type of access and interaction throughout the process. Besides, you as a marketer would probably like to know which leads you handed off to sales were actually converted into new business.
If you follow these five steps, you’ll be off on the right direction.
What things could you add to the list?
