GlobalSpec White Paper review — ‘Taking a strategic approach to digital media: How to develop a strategy, create a budget and measure ROI.’

We’re big fans of GlobalSpec’s regular educational white papers on industrial marketing strategy. And they’re a terrific resource along with ThomasNet’s similar white papers. Here at Lohre & Associates we are advocates for our clients’ marketing situations. Often our thinking doesn’t mesh with the commonly held beliefs for general industrial marketing. That’s just the point: There really isn’t such a thing as general industrial marketing rules of thumb. We think that GlobalSpec and ThomsNet’s suggestions apply best to a company like Grainger or Motion. They are general in nature, industrial in focus, have a substantial web presence and sell lower-cost general industrial products to just about every sector. Our clients range from selling one-of-a-kind machine tools worth millions of dollars to inexpensive industrial products quickly found and sold on the internet. But those inexpensive industrial products are also unique that there’s no general media that can help them improve their sales. They’d be better off hiring another salesperson to take calls and quickly turn quotes around. So here’s our take on the top five trends in comparison to GlobalSpec’s:

1. Why multi-channel digital media is a myth. You can only afford to market to the channel your customers hangout at.
2. The top four channels engineers use are associates, previous vendors, industrial directories and search engines
3. For large industrial purchases, engineers still contact manufacturers before the end of the discovery stage
4. The majority of marketing budget still goes to sales persons
5. The biggest trend is to measure results