Industrial Marketing Notes

Why are Webinars so disappointing?

2011-10-20T04:51:00.000-07:00

Every day my email inbox is filled with offers for me to attend webinars. When I first learned about webinars I thought, "Wow, what a great way to communicate with your customers or potential customers." However, after having attended several webinars over the past year or so, I'm disappointed. I have yet to attend a webinar that made me think, "Wow! Good to know!"

The topic headlines are so promising, but because anyone can put on a webinar, the quality of delivery is generally average to poor. Not everyone has a good speaking voice and the voice is just so important when no one can actually see you speaking. The ums and ahs are magnified when you can only hear a speaker and not see his body language.

The presentation material is equally boring. This is the Internet after all so why am I watching static Power Point presentations with bulleted items? I want to see some action. Obviously webinars about software have the advantage of showing the presenter's computer screen and he or she can move the cursor to demonstrate features. Other topics are more difficult to demonstrate, but at least add some interesting graphics, animations to demonstrate how a product might look or how it works, even some cartoons for a little levity might be in order when talking about business concepts and services.

I have not given up hope on webinars. I still believe that a properly prepared and presented webinar can be a wonderful tool for a business to connect with clients and/or prospects. A digital media specialist and/or voice coach may be able to assist you with this if you're considering offering webinars in your industry. I love a good webinar, hope I get to attend one soon.

Site Visitors: Buyers, Sellers or Competitors?

2010-12-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

We're a marketing company that works with other marketing executives at our client companies. As such, we marketers are all about the numbers - we love the Internet for this reason. Recently, one of our clients was inquiring about referrers from a specific online directory. He would be meeting with a representative from this directory and was wondering if his money is being well-spent for this listing.

The client told the rep over the phone that he hadn't seen many referrals from this directory and the rep responded with a claim that the listing had sent several visitors to their website. So the client called us to verify this information before meeting with the rep. Now this is where it gets interesting...

Yes, the directory was responsible for an average of 30 visitors/month to the client's website, but upon closer inspection (we use Pardot's Visitor ID to identify website visitors), there were few, if any, potential customers among these visitors. Most were "unidentifiable" meaning that their IP address could not be matched to a database of company IP addresses. (Larger companies with dedicated T1 lines have their own IP addresses and are the easiest to identify. Smaller companies or individuals are much more difficult.)

Now, the rep's selling point would be that those 30 are "qualified buyers" (not sure why he would assume they're qualified) but the data speaks for itself. Many sales and marketing executives use online directories as prospecting tools. Competitors often visit their competitor's sites to learn more about their product offerings. The numbers alone just aren't enough to say what's working and what isn't - you need to look at the WHO is coming to your site and the orders or leads being generated from your site to get the whole picture and, when you get all excited about those thousands of site visitors last month, keep in mind that some were sellers, some were competitors, some may have even been spammers.

PPC Doesn't Work....

2010-11-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

We hear that a lot from companies who have tried to manage their own Paid Placement Campaigns. The complaints are either that they didn't get anything from it or they got lots of visitors, but no increase in sales. Once they allow Web-Kare to take over running their campaigns they are generally stunned by the successful results.

Here are some tips you can consider to run a more successful campaign for your company:

TARGET QUALITY NOT QUANTITY: That means buying keyword phrases that are most apt to convert to sales, running your ads at times when your audience is most apt to see them and limiting your geographical reach to areas that you actually service.

RESEARCH, RESEARCH & RESEARCH SOME MORE: This is where an outside company excels because they have a different perspective on the market. Don't just research the keywords for quantity and price - go to Google and enter the phrases and see what comes up. Are the majority of results (both paid and organic) dead-on to what you're offering? We once had a client that insisted we buy "SEM" for his campaign. In his mind SEM meant Scanning Electron Microscope. We had a difficult time convincing him that it had other meanings like Search Engine Marketing. Ultimately we put the keyword into his campaign simply to prove our point. It was removed after the first month we tried it when he saw the results for himself.

TEST, TEST, TEST: Test your ads, test your landing pages, test your keyword phrases. Marketing is all about testing and refining.

REVIEW YOUR CAMPAIGN DATA: This is one of the most important aspects that advertisers tend to ignore. Often the mindset for PPC is to "set it and forget it." Check out your campaign data and scrutinize keyword phrases with a lot of traffic but a low click-thru-rate (CTR). This is a red flag that this phrase requires further refining - clearly those coming to your site on that phrase are not finding what they were looking for.

Outsourcing your campaign management gives you an advantage to work with someone who sees results from more than just your campaign. Trends are more obvious to the professional campaign management team because they spot it over many clients - especially when they specialize on specific clients, like the industrial market.

Until next week, have a great Thanksgiving everyone from all of us at Web-Kare.

Social Media is not the Silver Bullet

2010-11-19T05:11:00.000-08:00

Given all the hype these days about social media, one would think that it was the silver bullet to success on the Internet. First of all, there is no cookie-cutter blueprint that works for all industries and businesses. Each one is different based on the market they serve. The broader the target market, the better the results of social media marketing.

Consumer companies that don't rely on customers visiting their website can benefit from a Facebook page, but keep in mind that they need to address both positive and negative comments about their products in full view of the public. Industrial accounts don't work that way. Often industries have non-disclosure statements and certainly they are shy about sharing their company's product specs with potential competitors. So let's forget about Facebook for industrial accounts at this point in time.

LinkedIn is a sort of Facebook for businesses. If you sell products or services that can be used by almost any business such as financial products, freelance photography or design, then you might get some good leads here. On the other hand, if you sell primarily to OEM's, the chances that you'll connect with the person who makes the buying decision for your product is slim (but not impossible).

There are a few personal forms of social media that you can add to your website, if it's appropriate for your site: online forums and blogs. Forums can be a creative way to enhance your service or support team and work best with technical products or software. Blogs can replace your newsletter. The benefit of both of these is that people need to register to post to them and this can help you build a prospecting list.

By now, you've probably realized what all of my clients have realized: this all takes time to monitor. If you decide that social media is a MUST for your company, be sure to allocate the resources to manage it.