by tradesmeninsights | Feb 7, 2012 | Marketing Trends, Traditional Marketing
Moving forward in 2012, is mobile media going to be part of your overall marketing strategy?
According to a recent survey by the Association of Strategic Marketing (ASM), 2011 Trends in Mobile Marketing, 58% of respondents indicated that they were not using mobile marketing.
As a matter of fact, mobile seems to rank somewhere in the middle of overall marketing practices behind email (which ironically is number one) and SEO. The 42% that do use mobile in their marketing plans are optimizing their websites and emails and are beginning to use QR codes.
If you like this post you might like:
Is Mobile Marketing the Best Way to Reach the Professional Tradesman?
What Are You Doing to Reach the Young Professional Tradesman?
The Mobile Marketing Trends Study was created to allow marketing folks to see what similar organizations were doing. Some highlights of mobile marketing goals include:
- Sales/revenue – 33%
- Product service info – 25%
- Customer retention – 15%
- Lead nurturing – 11%
- Customer opt-in – 10%
- Alert reminders – 6%
For those of us in the B-to-B space, and especially for those of us trying to reach the professional tradesman, mobile should be a part of your marketing plan.
Not sure where to start? The easiest place to start is to optimize your website for mobile. Secondly, consider sending mobile-optimized emails.
The key is to make a plan and do something, monitor the response and do something else. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe mobile is going away, and there are many opportunities to reach our target audiences.
by tradesmeninsights | Jan 27, 2010 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
Sometimes we take things for granted and can tend to become complacent when using tools like e-mail marketing. We think we know it all since we’ve been doing it for so long, but we may have lost sight of what made e-mail so successful in the past.
A recent post by Curtis Jackson, What are the top 10 e-mail marketing mistakes, got me thinking that we should all evaluate the processes we have in place regarding e-mails. Here are my 5 top things to avoid:
- No Strategy – When you first started using e-mails, didn’t you have a written strategy of what you wanted to accomplish and how you were going to measure it? How are you doing?
- List updates – When was the last time you updated your list? Have your open rates been increasing or decreasing? How about undeliverables? That brings us to the next point.
- Ignoring metrics – If you’re actively doing e-mail marketing, you have to be using some tool like Constant Contact to help you manage your programs. They have metric tools built in to see how successful the actual e-mail was (both in content and delivery).
- Missing an opportunity in your top line message – Chances are your message will be viewed in a preview pane. Make sure your top line message includes a link to a web-based version.
- Timing – Tuesday at 10 a.m. may not be the most opportune time to reach your audience. Test out different combinations to see what works best for your audience.
Those are my thoughts. What are you doing to ensure you are getting the most out of your e-mail marketing?
by tradesmeninsights | Dec 16, 2009 | Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Manufacturers should not lose site that videos are a powerful informational tool when it comes to building credibility with contractors. Consider if you will that next to Google Search, the next highest search is YouTube. That alone should tell you something.
From case studies, testimonials and training, to new product info, videos are a unique way of telling your story and add another dimension to the story by engaging the viewer. According to eMarketer.com, rich media ads with video had a higher dwell rate than those without, and almost double the dwell time.
This translates into fewer impressions needed for the same results.
by tradesmeninsights | Sep 2, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Everyone in the manufacturing sector is feeling the pressure from around them to get in on this social media phenomenon. So you open a LinkedIn account, set up Twitter and even get a Facebook page set up. Wow, that was easy, now all I have to do is to wait until somebody finds me. Unfortunately, this scenario is much truer than one would like to think. Social media is no different than any other marketing program you have. You have to have a strategy in place before you go and start implementing it. You need to determine why you’re on the social media scene before you implement the how. Here are some helpful hints:
- What’s your point? Do you want to build awareness, build loyalty or generate new leads?
- What’s your point of differentiation? You have to define a niche or specialty.
- Do some research into how your target audience uses Social. You may find contractors use Facebook more to try to promote their local business or maybe it’s Twitter. Do you know?
- How will you determine whether your social program will be successful? You need to determine expectations before starting a program.
Jason Baer wrote a great post recently, Develop a social media strategy in 7 steps, that you might find interesting reading.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 21, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
Social media has dominated the news lately, and many marketers are considering moving out of traditional e-mail programs and focusing more on social. My advice to them is that neither one is the answer by itself, especially when it comes to reaching professional tradesmen who are slower to jump on the social bandwagon.
Social elements are just more tools marketing can use to gain attention and begin a dialog. Until social media came along, a good e-mail campaign only had their web site to fall back on for support. Social media complements e-mail efforts. B-to-B marketers who want to stay on top of their game must learn how to make them work together.
Here are 4 tips to get the best out of both worlds:
- Create ONE strategy – Create the objective and then see how each element can help you meet those objectives. By working towards one goal, you’ll be much more effective in the long run.
- Create content simultaneously – You need to make sure messages are coordinated (and are using the same voice) and are working together and not against each other. You don’t want to be duplicating content.
- Utilize sites like Facebook and LinkedIn – These and other sites allow groups to their group members. Make sure when sending messages to these groups to target your message.
- Use e-mail to give them something special whether it’s a sneak preview of a new product, a discount on a current one or some scoop about an upcoming company event or trade show activity. Then make it easy for them to share. Encourage them to share the news with their friends on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Make the most out of your marketing program by making the elements work together.
I’d like to hear what you’re doing to maximize your efforts using social and e-mails.
Here are some other posts that might be of interest to you:
7 Ways to Combine Social Media with E-mail to Reach the Professional Tradesman
Stay Up on New Trends But Don’t Forget Old Friends
