Industrial Marketing Today

FEBRUARY 24, 2012

Every manufacturing or industrial company that I talk to wants more leads. However, there is a serious disconnect between sales and marketing when it comes to defining a qualified lead. Recently, a manufacturing client retained me to help them improve their industrial lead generation program. This is not a new problem.

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Industrial Marketing Today

APRIL 21, 2010

How does one generate high quality, educated leads, not just site visitors on a marketing budget that is less than 1% of the projected revenue? Over the past six months, their website traffic is up 89%, their free download program is up over 200% and they’ve generated over 1,500 leads. All I can say is WOW!

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Industrial Marketing Today

AUGUST 27, 2012

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to it as digital marketing in this post and state that content is what drives this engine for generating qualified leads and creating sales opportunities. This has worked great in the past but the Internet and digital marketing have changed how that process works today.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 7, 2010

Organizations are spending considerable amounts of time and money on tracking and measuring lead generation metrics. Organizations are spending considerable amounts of time and money on tracking and measuring lead generation metrics. However, the role of B2B marketers is changing and evolving more into revenue generation.

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Industrial Marketing Today

APRIL 15, 2011

For a while now, manufacturers have been using online searchable product catalogs to generate new leads and sales. Downloadable CAD files have played a major role in components and parts being designed in – a key and necessary step in the industrial buying process. Now that’s truly relevant and engaging content.

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Industrial Marketing Today

OCTOBER 1, 2011

They agree it helps them get found in search engines early and often, drives hordes of traffic to their site and fills the top of their funnel with qualified leads at a lower cost per lead. I know how strange that might sound, but for most companies, leads mean more work and very little to show for it.

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Industrial Marketing Today

OCTOBER 21, 2010

If you believe everything you read (and lately there’s been a lot) about marketing automation, you’d think it is the killer app to solve all your lead generation problems. Then there are scores of B2B marketers who swear by inbound marketing as the path to lead generation nirvana. It scored 8.6 on a scale of one to ten.

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Industrial Marketing Today

JULY 23, 2010

It takes extensive knowledge, expertise, experience and a lot of detailed work in order for your website to be ranked high for specific keywords and phrases in Google and other major search engines. According to Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings , “The solution is for all business owners to insist on SEO right from the start.

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Industrial Marketing Today

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

The chart below shows the variety of content used at different stages of the industrial buy cycle (Source: Understanding the Industrial Buy Cycle: How to Align Your Marketing with Your Customers’ Buying Process from GlobalSpec). Scoring or qualifying your site visitors is largely dependent on their behavior.

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Industrial Marketing Today

JUNE 5, 2012

After doing all the heavy lifting of SEO to drive traffic, site visitors reach a dead end because there has been no thought given to converting that traffic into leads. Answer – Create higher value content. Your process is more of a direct route, one that requires being “speced in” or “designed in” to generate an RFQ and/or sale.

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Industrial Marketing Today

AUGUST 20, 2010

Anything you can do to help them find the right information quicker will score big with engineers. Offer engineering kits with a full range of standard values with free refills to help the electronics design engineer evaluate his designs without having to go to multiple sources. Design wins lead to production volume orders.

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Industrial Marketing Today

AUGUST 17, 2010

To deepen and strengthen this relationship, marketers (and sales) must optimize the “return on time spent” by increasing the value received through each touchpoint. You need to have a process in place for your content optimization to evolve over time. It is not just optimizing words within your marketing content.

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Industrial Marketing Today

AUGUST 1, 2012

Business as usual is not working – referrals are trickling in, if at all and the pipeline of leads is running dry. In desperation, they start looking for a quick “Band-Aid” fix for their lead generation problems while spending as little as possible since budgets are tight or non-existent. Measure, refine and repeat.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 7, 2012

In my last post, I talked about using content to convert website traffic into leads and customers. Manufacturers and industrial companies cannot be content with just publishing content, their content marketing needs to drive the sales process. See Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher, Act Like an Investor ).

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 26, 2010

The problem becomes more acute for the industrial sector because the industrial buy cycle can be a long and complex process that often involves multiple decision makers. Without a clear understanding of the stages, it is difficult to align your marketing content with your customer’s decision-making process.

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Industrial Marketing Today

AUGUST 3, 2010

For an eCommerce site that is easy, it is typically the value of transaction per visit. Some B2B marketers are using more sophisticated ROI measurement tools to track activities over the entire life cycle of a lead. These metrics are all linked to 10 stages in Sopheon’s sales process.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 5, 2010

Your prospects are at different stages of their decision making process when they visit your site. Convert prospects into leads – a prospect that has made an inquiry or responded to an offer is now a lead. Your sales team must report to marketing and put these leads back into the hopper for nurturing.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 14, 2010

Valve sizing programs – these are great and easy to use tools for any manufacturer of valves for chemical, hydrocarbon and industrial process, power, water and wastewater industries. The best example of an expertise blog that I know of is the Emerson Process Experts blog moderated by Jim Cahill. Try polls and surveys to gather data.

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Industrial Marketing Today

SEPTEMBER 17, 2012

For the past six years, more than two thirds of manufacturers and industrial companies have said that lead generation or customer acquisition is their top marketing priority according to the latest industrial marketing survey released by GlobalSpec. How will digital marketing improve your sales process without being disruptive?

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Industrial Marketing Today

JUNE 3, 2010

Six months later, very little traffic, even fewer leads and no sales > The new web site sucks, hasn’t done anything for our business. Interview them and then connect all the dots to develop compelling content that will move the visitor and/or the prospect in their decision making process.

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Industrial Marketing Today

JUNE 12, 2010

We can only provide prices after a formal RFQ process 5. You can’t surround the conversation with value and branding. Search This Site Browse Industrial Marketing Topics B2B E-Mail Marketing B2B Lead Generation B2B Marketing Collateral B2B Marketing Videos B2B Media Planning Content Marketing Industrial Marketing & Web 2.0

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Industrial Marketing Today

JULY 29, 2010

Also see a very interesting post from Junta42, “Engage and Inspire Employees First, Customers Second.” ) Because of the longer cycles and the complexities of B2B and industrial sales, marketers find it very difficult to associate leads to specific marketing content. Unfortunately, the answer is a big NO.

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Industrial Marketing Today

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010

Home Marketing Matters About Contact B2B Marketing Store Company Website Content Auditing and Mapping it to the Industrial Buy Cycle by Achinta Mitra on September 3, 2010 in B2B Lead Generation , Content Marketing , Industrial Marketing Strategies , Integrated Industrial Marketing These days it is popular to say “Content is marketing currency.”

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 21, 2010

It has to be a value exchange for people to give up their contact information to you. I’d add that B2B blogs which provide individual contact information of the bloggers or experts referenced in the posts can lead to new sales opportunities. That is a very good way to generate a qualified lead from your blog.

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Industrial Marketing Today

APRIL 3, 2011

Building strong customer relationships is probably a close second only to lead generation for most manufacturers and industrial companies. It makes perfect sense then to put a good deal of effort into nurturing new leads and building strong relationships in order to convert them into loyal customers.

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Industrial Marketing Today

APRIL 14, 2012

My first clue was trade magazines had started charging an extra fee for submitting color separated negatives instead of electronic files. In 1998, I landed our first paying gig designing a Website for a process heater manufacturer. I began to explore Websites and the Internet on a 2400 bps Modem on a dial-up connection using AOL.

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Industrial Marketing Today

APRIL 30, 2010

Marketers need to create a process for content planning that helps them maximize the return from their investments in developing the content resources that fuel their online marketing programs. Designing content for 1X use is wasteful. This guide will walk you through each step involved in creating a roadmap for a successful business Website.

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Industrial Marketing Today

OCTOBER 2, 2010

Are you interested in lead generation, lead nurturing and/or building authority and brand awareness? Select only those that will help you optimize your nurturing campaigns and accurately gauge where the prospect is in their decision making process. WHY : Why are you sending out this email campaign?

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 3, 2010

One way or another, you want it to be an integral part of your industrial marketing efforts in generating leads and driving sales. You want your business blog to become the hub that attracts traffic, establishes your credibility and ultimately, moves those readers forward in their decision making process and become paying customers.

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Industrial Marketing Today

JULY 6, 2010

He explains it very well by saying, “Thus, for every feature about my company, the product that we use, the equipment that we operate or the process that we follow when completing work, I must transition the featured aspect into a believable benefit to the customer. According to Brad, the most important piece of the puzzle is the transition.

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Industrial Marketing Today

NOVEMBER 5, 2010

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, TI is a global company that develops analog, digital signal processing, RF and DLP® semiconductor technologies used in consumer and industrial electronics products. The focus definitely was on what their target audience needed and not just exploiting social media in an effort to generate more leads and sales.

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Industrial Marketing Today

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

Manufacturing marketers do understand the value of a business blog for thought leadership, search engine optimization (SEO), lead generation and community building but proving its ROI has been a challenge. Exhibit #1: Emerson Process Management Experts. Exhibit #2: Indium Corporation Blogs.

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Industrial Marketing Today

OCTOBER 10, 2011

The other half of the equation has to do with converting that traffic into prospects and qualified leads. Search engines and SEO will drive traffic to your industrial site but it is your site’s content that must convert it into qualified leads. Both parts of that equation are equally important.”. Her statement is spot on!

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Industrial Marketing Today

JUNE 17, 2011

It is not because marketers and decision-makers in these organizations don’t understand the value of inbound marketing but implementing an effective content marketing strategy is proving to be quite a challenge for them. Scenario #2: The industrial company is 100% dependent on its inside/outside sales team for leads and sales.

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Industrial Marketing Today

JULY 1, 2010

These findings were consistent across most B2B industries with complex, multi-touch buying processes. Sales experience far outweighs other factors such as company brand impact, produce/service delivery and value to price ratio. The table below shows results from the study that shows what sales reps do wrong to turn off B2B customers.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MARCH 11, 2011

It is not possible to automatically trigger content when there are no regular behavioral patterns to measure and score. Here is a possible scenario for a manufacturer of in-line PD flowmeters that sells primarily to the hydrocarbon, industrial and food processing industries. Flow rate charts, dimensional drawings and CAD files.

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Industrial Marketing Today

MAY 11, 2011

The intent of this post is not to come up with a definitive definition of thought leadership but to recognize its value in marketing engineering services. Back in 2007, I had attended a presentation made by Jim Cahill of Emerson Process Experts. This in turn delivers tangible benefits (leads, contracts, projects etc.)

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