by tradesmeninsights | Mar 20, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
There are several sites out there that help the homeowner find qualified tradesmen. We have a guest post today from LocalTraders and although their focus is on the local trades, some of their ideas are not bad ones for manufacturers to consider as well. Enjoy.
Having an insight into how your competitors work is the key to gaining an advantage in the trade industry, after all with the economy struggling, every advantage counts. Using your competitor may seem like a devious way to boost business but trust me you have to beat your competition in order to reap the rewards. Beating your competition however doesn’t necessarily mean being ruthless, instead making friends and gaining common ground could be your key to success…
Embrace the Competition
Firstly identify your competitors and get to know more about them. Focus on understanding your competitor’s strategy and their target customer; during the analysis, look for similarities and differences between your strategy and theirs. Not only will understanding, embracing and almost making friends (or at least becoming acquainted) with your main competitors mean you can take advantage of parts of their strategy that you may have overlooked but it will also give you an insight and a base to build upwards, developing their principles to take the lead.
The Joint Venture
For many it takes a strong stomach to team up with competitors and purposely share your customer base but partnering up with competitors can mean a mutually beneficial end. A joint venture may mean worrying less about sales but it will serve your customer base with ultimate value and give them the firm impression that they are getting the best possible service meaning a higher chance of future business as well as a very happy customer. An example of a joint venture that is particularly prevalent in the trade industry is the sharing of related services. Your competitor may just offer a slightly different service or the missing link for finishing a job for a client so use each other to profit in the long run and gain customer support.
Learn from Their Mistakes
This is another way to make the right decisions for your company based on your competitor’s experiences so follow them closely and learn from them. One of the main ways you can learn from your competitor is by watching out for price changes and looking out for your ‘window of opportunity’. Many customers will want a more cost-effective deal, especially in these difficult economic times, so be on hand to profit from competitor price increases with the right communication and marketing materials, you may just gain a few more customers!
This article was written by LocalTraders, the market leaders in home improvement solutions. Their easy-to-use enquiry system connects customers looking for high quality services with the local trade professionals who can provide them.
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 6, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
You can’t turn around today and not hear the words “content marketing.” You would have thought that someone had discovered the holy grail! Content marketing isn’t anything new, it’s just called something else. There can be arguments for both I suppose, but I feel the primary role of content marketing is to position yourself to have an advantage and sell something!
Why do people do business with you? It probably has something to do with your having something they find useful and need. It also probably has something to do with them finding you helpful, informative and an all-around good guy. They can count on you for troubleshooting or advice on best practices. Now I haven’t mentioned the term content marketing, but don’t you think that’s what you’ve been doing all along? Now they call it something different.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and known as the Godfather of Content Marketing, describes it “as a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable actions.”
Content Marketing should be helping you in some way to move a prospect down a sales funnel. I’m not saying they need to be hard selling but you need to able to satisfy a need of a prospect in order for them to take the next step. Always answer the question – WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? If a prospect can’t easily answer that question, there will be no next steps.
Chris Brogan, in a guest post on Copyblogger, Why content marketing is not branding, highlights why the end game in any content marketing efforts have to be helping someone make a decision of some kind. He goes on to say that marketing and sales are not evil and that content marketing, if done correctly, will give the advantage in the long run.
What do you think content marketing is and how are you using it?
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 5, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
Manufacturers are trying different ways to get and stay in front of the professional tradesman, and your website is probably one of the first places they will look for info. Is it mobile friendly?
I recently read a post by one of my mentors, Michael Gass, on ways to test your site that I thought I’d share with you. Good info.
In preparation for new business opportunities, it is important that your company’s website be mobile ready.
The number of smartphones in use worldwide has now broken the 1 billion mark, according to Strategy Analytics. Only 15% of companies have a mobile optimized site even though Google estimates that there will be more Web traffic via mobile, than through PCs this year. According to a survey conducted for Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience.
You’ll want prospects to have an easy experience learning about your agency or accessing your agency’s blog content via their mobile device.
Here’s a collection of best practices, white papers and case studies for your review and to help get you started:
There’s nothing like first hand experience so check out your company’s website on your mobile device. Sig Ueland, contributing editor for Practical Ecommerce, pulled together a list of 19 tools for testing your site’s mobile readiness. You can use any of these following 12 for free:
- Gomez
- MobiReady
- W3C mobileOK Checker
- GoMoMeter
- iPhone Tester
- iPad Peek
- Screenfly
- Mobile Phone Emulator
- The Responsinator
- Matt Kersley’s Responsive Design Testing
- Opera Mini Simulator
- iPhoney
You can make your agency’s website mobile ready until you can create the mobilized version of the site.
If you have a WordPress site, you can use plugins like MobilePress and Mippin which will automatically enable mobile users on your website to access a mobile version of it. Until the mobile version of Fuel Lines has been developed, I’m using another WordPress plugin called WPtouch to mobilize this site. There are also a number of online services such as Mobilize Today that will have your website ready for mobile in a matter of minutes.
Click on the following link for Sig’s complete list and description of each: 19 Tools to Test your Site for Mobile Devices
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 26, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
In the B-to-B world, most sales are not immediate. The longer selling cycles for most industrial/contractor purchases involve more than one person and selling cycles can go from months to years.
So B-to-B marketers need to be patient. I believe Marketing should be the ones who nurture the leads through, and when ready, transition to sales to close the deal.
I think marketing, if the right processes are in place, is in a better position to move them through the process. Effective nurturing is a series of content-relevant info for each stage of the buying process.
Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.
B-to-B companies shouldn’t be worried about quantity but quality of leads. According to Albertson Performance Group, quality lead nurturing can lead to 70% more sales. According to them, nurturing will:
- decrease selling cycles
- increase profit margins
- lessen the competition
- decrease price pressure
- get more referrals
Nurturing is the right way to show ROI on marketing efforts.
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 20, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
One of the biggest challenges for Manufacturers is trying to identify both their customers as well as potentials. It may seem strange to you that most Manufacturers who sell through various distribution channels don’t know who their ultimate customers are.
Distributors as a rule are very protective of “their” customers. Unless you need them to register for a warranty, you need other ways to entice them to give up their contact info. Some of the ways Manufacturers generate names are through trade shows, end-user calls, traditional advertising/PR and social media. You can have customer loyalty and other value-added programs.
The challenge is once you have all of these contacts, what/how do you manage them? That’s where database marketing comes in. This tool can help you segment your audiences into customers, potentials, different markets or applications. Then you can target the message which will increase the potential of folks reading and reacting to it.
Your message to a current user of your product should talk more about applications/performance data while the message to a potential new customer might be more features/benefits of a product or an end-user testimonial from one of their peers.
Your end goal from a customer viewpoint is to build a relationship with them and communicate with them on a regular basis. This will help you in identifying other areas you might help them with, and the more you know about what they do, the better you can offer them ideal solutions to help them.
The bottom line is you’re communicating with them, helping them solve their problems – you are building a customer retention model. If Contractors know, like and trust you, not only will they continue to buy from you, but will become your advocates on the street. They also will be a great source of market intelligence.
Database marketing in my opinion is one of the most important tools in our marketing tool box.
If you like this article, you might want to read:
How Does your Marketing Department Hand Off Leads to Sales?
5 Ways For Manufacturers To Improve E-mail Marketing to Tradesmen
E-mail Marketing for Industrial Marketers: Common Mistakes to Avoid
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 19, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
Blah, Blah, Blah. Is this what people hear when you give your 30-second elevator pitch that explains why your firm is different?
Recently I had to identify and vet potential web developers for several major projects for a client. After doing so and narrowing the field to four, we lined up a day for them to present themselves so we could evaluate them at the end of the day while everything was fresh in our minds.
What surprised me is that three out of the four firms used words like synergy, cutting edge, optimize and best practices to describe their business side. What are best practices anyway? When it came to back-end software terms, most of us other than the IT people didn’t have a clue.
The point I’m trying to make is instead of trying to impress people with big words, talk to them like human beings. I wonder if people actually listen to what they’re saying. You just don’t have normal conversations with other folks talking like that.
You want to engage people and to do that you need to act human.
Getting back to my web project. It came down to two firms who differentiated themselves by not talking about themselves, but instead talking about the client’s issues and how they might be able to help. They interacted by acting human. The firm that eventually won the business was because the client felt at ease with them and liked the way they thought about how to solve the problem.
Ironically all four of these firms had the technical competency to do the job, but for some it got lost in the translation.
Think about that next time you’re on a new business pitch. Be yourself, be human. (more…)
There are several sites out there that help the homeowner find qualified tradesmen. We have a guest post today from LocalTraders and although their focus is on the local trades, some of their ideas are not bad ones for manufacturers to consider as well. Enjoy.
