Content marketing is a central topic in most of my recent conversations with industrial companies. agree that SEO is a very important goal of content marketing; after all, your website needs to be found by the right people when they are searching for industrial products and services that you provide. However, your industrial marketing content must do a lot more than just SEO. Things begin to get very complicated when industrial companies realize that there is much more to content marketing than just publishing content for search engines. Now What?”. MORE >>

Skyline’s recent webinar, “Social Media for Trade Show Promotions,” was full of great ideas. Presented by Skyline Sales and Marketing Trainer Nik Fradgley and Director of Lead Generation and Industry Relations Michael Thimmesch, the webinar included the results of a study of which social media sites were best practice for use pre-trade show, during the show, and post-trade show. It turns out YouTube is great for all phases of trade show promotion. Update Facebook company page live from show (automate by forwarding Tweets to FB). Tweet. MORE >>

B2B companies are spending more of their marketing budgets on channels such as trade shows, Website design, management and optimization and e-mail marketing. The trend holds true across the board even though the mix may be different depending on the size of a B2B company. Smaller companies, those with less than 100 employees, tend to spend more on digital marketing tactics like Website design, e-mail marketing as well as traditional outbound marketing channels like direct mail. Not surprisingly, they tend to spend less on trade shows. See chart for details. MORE >>

The Upstream Oil & Gas industry, also referred to as the exploration and production (E&P) sector, has a reputation of being very conservative and conventional. Even though the companies that operate in this sector are well-known global brands, they are not exactly forward thinking online marketers who use business blogs and social media regularly. However, these companies are no slouches when it comes to using the power of blogging and social media to talk about a politically and emotionally charged topic like hydraulic fracturing. Twitter: Tweets with #shale. MORE >>

You could use some of these findings to validate your own industrial marketing strategy and/or find some new ideas to fine-tune it for the remainder of 2012. Do these statistics and findings match what manufacturers and industrial companies are reporting? According to their Trends in Industrial Marketing 2012, it is a close match with some differences. In the chart below, I have added green arrows next to the traditional marketing tactics that are still popular (top 10) within the industrial sector. Click on each chart to see a larger image. MORE >>