Fabtech Expo Recap

Rachel Kerstetter, PR Engineer, Sonnhalter

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I had the opportunity to attend the Fabtech Expo in Atlanta last week. It was my second year at the show and I am continually impressed by the immensity of this industry. The expo brought together more than 27,000 attendees and 1,400 exhibitors covering more than 500,000 square feet of the Georgia World Congress Center.

Fabtech kicked off on Veterans Day and it couldn’t have been more fitting since Workshops for Warriors was selected as the recipient of the Fabtech Cares campaign. Workshops for Warriors is a wonderful organization that I had the pleasure of writing about last year in Production Machining magazine. Workshops for Warriors, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to training, certifying, and placing veterans in manufacturing careers.

It’s no secret that manufacturers are looking for new sources of talent. At the same time, many former members of our armed forces are looking for work. Workshops for Warriors combines these efforts, giving American veterans and wounded warriors the skills U.S. manufacturing employers need. Veterans who are transitioning back to civilian life provide a vastly untapped talent pool of hardworking and disciplined talent for the manufacturing industry. Fabtech hosted a panel on the first day of the show on bridging the skills gap with veterans. You can see the progress of the fundraiser (and donate) here.

Reshoring of manufacturing was definitely another popular topic. The Day One keynote actually came from Cindi Marsilgio, the VP for U.S. Manufacturing at Wal-Mart. The company has pledged to buy $250 billion of products made in the USA over ten years to encourage the creation of U.S. jobs. (You can read more about the keynote and Day One highlights on Fabtech’s blog.) When walking the show and helping out in various booths, I heard the question, “Where are your products made?” Many purchasing professionals in attendance were seeking domestically produced products to us in their own operations.

Day Two of Fabtech kicked off with four-time Super Bowl champion and Vietnam War veteran, Ricky Bleier, presenting on how attendees can be the best that they can be. Later in the day a panel was held on the industry’s outlook. You can see video and other highlights from Day Two on Fabtech’s blog.

Although I headed back to chilly Cleveland at the end of Day Two, the final day of the show was also packed with a presentation from  Google for Work’s Head of Manufacturing, Mike Walton on transforming manufacturing for the digital age. This is a very popular topic, especially with the rise of 3D printing, robotics and digital design capabilities. You can check out some video from the presentation here.

Did you attend Fabtech? What did you think of the show?

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What’s a #Hashtag? And 5 Ways to Use Them in Marketing

Today we have a post from Rachel Kerstetter, Sonnhalter’s PR Engineer, answering one of the questions she’s frequently asked and sharing some tips on how to use hashtags.

The basic mechanics of making a hashtag include putting a pound sign (#) in front of a word, phrase, acronym or combination of characters (but not punctuation).

But beyond calling attention to the words in a tweet, post or whatever, hashtags allow you to join into a more broad conversation. Hashtags have become a standard part of online conversation and stretch across many social platforms. Hashtags originated on Twitter and very recently Facebook added hashtag capabilities to the platform, but you can also use hashtags on: Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and newcomer Vine.

There are many ways to use hashtags, but they all boil down to participating in public conversation. Here are some common ways to use hashtags in marketing communications:

  1. Promote engagement during events. Whether your event is online or offline, it will have a presence. When you create your own hashtag (and publically identify it) you can then monitor and interact with the conversation around your event. Most conferences, trade shows, webinars and other events announce the “official” hashtag, put it on publicity materials and have a designated person using it. Mostly this happens on Twitter but permeates into other social media use.
  2. Host or take part in a Twitter chat. Twitter chats are a simple way to have a conversation with multiple people on the same topic. Chats are traditionally an hour and have a prescribed hashtag. Most chats happen weekly at the same time and center around a prepared set of questions, due to their growing popularity services have been created to help you participate more easily, for example Tweetchat is a Twitter application to organized the tweets on a hashtag and shows them in real time, allowing you to tweet in the action and pause the conversation to catch up.
  3. Run and follow a marketing campaign. If you have a campaign that will get people talking, adding a hashtag to it isn’t a bad idea. Often you’ll find ads that have hashtags to see more online.
  4. Contests. Hashtag-powered contests work the best for photos but can also be used for sharing experiences or answering a question. Just ask your fans/followers to post their entry using your hashtag.
  5. Research. See what people are saying or posting about a topic, brand, event or anything by searching hashtags. If you see a relevant topic hashtagged on your own feed, click it to see what else is being said.

If you still aren’t sure you’re ready to use hashtags, at least get your feet wet by identifying them when you see them and find out how they’re being used.

What are some ways that you’ve seen hashtags incorporated into marketing plans?

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Major Trends in the B-to-B Space According to Google

Since Google touches us all, it’s good to get some trends from “Big Brother” especially when it relates to the B-to-B markets. emarketer.com recently had an interview with Mike Miller, director of business and industrial markets at Google, and some new market research they just completed.

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Here are some highlights that we, as B-to-B marketers, should consider:

  • Search – Still big and this should be no surprise. Internet usage among the B-to-B sector jumped from 71% to 88% over the last year.  Even more enlightening is when asked about how they used search to research business purposes; there was a 23% increase over last year from 67% to 90%.
  • Videos – More companies in the B-to-B space are creating videos. They range from how-to videos to thought leadership topics. Here’s an interesting stat – the C suite indexes very high on using videos to find info.
  • Digital marketing to reinforce the sales force By the time a B-to-B purchaser actually engages with a company or sales rep, they’re 57% of the way through the decision process.

So with all our marketing challenges, hopefully these will give you some insight on what you might want to focus your efforts on.

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Social Media, How Can Tradesmen Connect?

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

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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…
  5. 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.

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How Are You Using Social Media to Find and Engage Your Target Audience?

Do you know where your customers and prospects are spending their time online? Wouldn’t that be an important part of an overall social media strategy to find and engage them?
share of total time spent on internetIf trends continue, social networks will soon surpass internet portals like AOL and Yahoo!

I recently read an article by Phil Mershon in Social Media Examiner that highlighted five ways to use market research intelligence on how consumers behave on social media networks. Although the article is focused more on the consumer side of things, he brings out some points that us in the B-to-B world should take notice of.

Here are some highlights:

  • Know where your customers spend their time – Over 21% of internet users spent their time on social networking sites. Do you know where your customers and prospects are spending their time? One way is to ask your current customer base where they find meaningful content.
  • Develop content that is relevant to your reader – Content is king and if you want to stand out in the crowd, you need to become a good source for not only product info, but for industry issues. Remember, content isn’t about you but how you can help your customer or prospect.
  • Take video seriously – Next to Google, YouTube is the most searched site. Video views have increased 43% and currently over 100 million videos are viewed daily. What are you doing to tell your story and points of differentiation?
  • Consider the role of Mobile – 8% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and that content is easy to consume and respond to.

Using key words and investigating sources on the internet, you can find places where your customers and prospects are spending time. Get there and start engaging them.

If you like this post you may like:

Why a Mobile Strategy is so Important in Reaching the Professional Tradesmen

2012 Trends of Smartphones and Tablets

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