Several months ago we reviewed one of Emerson’s new ads that ran in Chemical Processing, “Chemical Processing Readex Research Response for Process Equipment Marketing Effectiveness.” It was a reader survey about the effectiveness of the ads that ran in the January 2016 issue. “Eye-catching ad but I can’t believe their claims.
When it comes to Internet Marketing the phrase “Content is King” is tossed around quite often, but when it comes to Internet Marketing, and especially Search Engine Optimization, it is important to remember that only the right content, the most relevant content to connect your business to your potential customer should reign supreme.
In considering how to streamline your site to attract visitors who match your several-to-many buyer personas, and when optimizing your site so that search providers can point these visitors your way, it is necessary to realize that there is no way that one or even a handful of pages could ever manage to cover all of this. Trying to gear even a forty-page site toward even one target audience, when so many possible keywords and long-tailed keywords are needed, will surely only result in a loss of keyword saturation per-page and hurt your search engine optimization.
In order to understand why that last bit is so incredibly-important, one must first know a little bit about both White Hat and Black Hat SEO.
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, and sometimes staying on top of it all can seem daunting, but when you think this work from a point of view outside that of a marketer, developer, or site owner, it all becomes much, much more simple:
The goal of the search engine is to connect users with the most useful, most precise, most specifically-targeted content to fit their needs. Site owners can benefit from this in that those who visit their site are more likely to be doing so intentionally, in search of related products, services, or solutions. Visitors also benefit from information relevant to the problem they are seeking to solve. These people may become return visitors or even customers, especially if they are brought to the correct page of the site to begin with, which is another important part of your site’s relationship with search providers.
Ideally, these visitors will land on that perfect page to encourage them to stay and read. If that content is informative and interesting, that content likely to be shared or bookmarked as a part of the visitor’s decision-making process. If that content does not offer valuable information, and does not give the visitor any feeling that they may be in the right place, the visitor will often return to the search provider and try other search results. You may never see them again, even if they were looking for services you offer.
Like visitors, search engines pick up on these things too. Search providers’ algorithms are streamlined more and more every day to help their users find what they are looking for, and avoid sites or pages that misrepresent or fail to represent what they have to offer. This is why you need to learn how to recognize and avoid Black-Hat SEO tactics.
Black-Hat SEO is very-easily recognized if you think of it: Black Hat SEO is any approach that seeks to trick or manipulate search providers.
White-Hat SEO is just as easy to sum up: White Hat SEO is about creating great content in order reward the right visitors, and minimize bounce rates.
Bounce rates help no one. High bounce rates will only serve to make your marketing a more frustrating process, and prevent you from fine-tuning your marketing machine to reward the ideal visitor for finding your site.
Good SEO, and a good inbound marketing strategy is all about quality links from search engines leading to quality content specialized for quality leads. Quality *and* quantity are essential toward good keyword saturation because good keyword saturation is no-longer just about a page or a post, but the entire content of a site or domain. Site-wide keyword saturation *and* content keyword saturation work together to bring a visitor to the right page of the right site.
Diagram: How to annoy with alt tags
Blogging is most beneficial from an SEO standpoint, not just in garnering shares and other relevant inbound-links to expand your authority, but in adding to the overall keyword density of your site. Adding to the keyword density of the site as a whole is much more effective than filling individual pages or posts with keywords. New posts also expand the site with fresh, unique content to be indexed, which search engines love.
If your site has 2000 original posts, and 1750 of those posts are somewhat-related to gardening equipment, your post on selecting the right tiller has a good chance of ranking well. If it is useful enough to be shared by a few individuals, it will rank even higher.
The Value of Unique ContentI stress original because unique content is very valuable to your SEO, but shared or duplicated content can have the opposite effect, and serves mostly to give authority to the website(s) of the originating source(s).
Have you ever searched for information and only found the same point of view over and over again in near-identical wording over a few hundred websites? Frustrating, isn’t it? In order to eliminate this frustration, those sites that are sharing information, white papers, and other content provided to them, are far less-likely to get good search placement. – and reword as you will, it will likely be recognized as duplicate content. Doing this only serves to boost the search authority of the originator. Sharing, in moderation can be beneficial to your site’s overall keyword density, if you don’t overdo it, and remember to only share content that has value for your visitors.
Unique content through blogging (and blogging regularly) will allow you to have focused, targeted information on your site for the many individuals that make up your many prospective customers and will allow you to boost the authority of your site for all of those individuals as a whole.
Blogging has become the most essential on-site tool for inbound marketing, and is a must for anyone whose business model depends on being found through search providers.
If you are interested in our services for blogging, articles, news releases, advertorials, other content services or custom-building a CMS/COS for your web site, please don’t hesitate to give us a call at 513.961.1174 or contact us through our contact page.
When Lohre and Associates began this project, Roto-Disc, Inc. had a standard HTML web site that they liked, as much as we did, for a number of good reasons:
It was however, as sites made years ago tend to be: static in size and format, with no mobile menus or even alternate mobile version, and no CMS or other way to dynamically-generate new content – all of which we know to be a problem today for these reasons:
Another need to consider was that Roto-Disc‘s Product line would soon be expanding. In addition to the Heavy-Duty Spherical Valves, Lighter-Weight Spherical Valves, Sanitary Spherical valves, Inflatable Seal Spherical Valves, Heavy-Duty Clean Flow Diverters, and Airlock/Double-Dump Valves Roto-Disc already had a new section for Flange Adaptors, Wedge Inserts, and Stub Adaptors that needed to fit into the current image-based menu. Soon Roto-Disc would need to also add Process Transitions, and Splitters/Convergers, as well as the Flange Adaptors to this small swatch of internet real-estate.
Wide-open: The site design is based on the Brochure, but made for web, driven by WordPress, with an image menu plugin for ease of editing the image-based menu.
An Additional Consideration: For Desktop users, the image links display an instruction when moused over, letting them know that clicking will open and close the submenu (though the submenu will go also away on its own when no longer in focus).
The benefits of using a plugin and not hard-coding this aspect: All of the above menu and Submenu items can be added, removed, or edited through the control panel.
Two Sticky Menus in motion: The Image menu slides up onto the header when the page is scrolled, and stays – leaving the most important items of both sets of navigation always at the top of the screen for easy access.
Not so sticky: On smaller-sized screens not quite small-enough for the mobile menu the image menu items switch size to fall into three rows of three icons. The menu no longer sticks at the top so that content can be seen when scrolling.
Large Tables: These charts do not seem like they will fit well on a smaller screen… especially not on mobile, not even in landscape aspect. What can be done?
AHA! Jquery to the rescue: By rotating the table header text 90% and re-scaling those cells accordingly, we have a LOT more space to work with when presenting these tables on mobile devices. No scrolling necessary. Some strategic line-breaking in the product number column and Viola!
The Mobile Menu: It seems as though the image menu has been lost… and that would be sad. … but we can do better!
Huzzah!: There is that image menu again, not lost afterall.
The “Open/Close” Instructions: They are pointless here, because you cannot mouseover on a tablet or other mobile device, but they won’t be seen for this reason. Plus: They are still handy if you like keeping your browser window very small.
Tricky: Submenus on an image menu in a mobile menu. I can’t think of any place I have seen this before – actually *many* aspects of this project were something completely new.
Falling in line: Divs and most tables break apart – images set themselves to fill the viewport, and horizontal content becomes vertical in order to keep images large enough to view, also keeping text from being crammed awkwardly on the smaller screen.
Below: You’ll notice the menu does not stick to the top in mobile view. Sticky menus on mobile, especially for sites with many pages, are not a good idea. If the menu extends beyond the viewport, and does not scroll – then the only part of the menu that can be accessed is the part at the top of the screen. This will leave visitors stuck and incredibly frustrated. You can in some cases make another scrollbar just for the navigation, but if it is not seen visitors will think they have arrived at a broken site and move on.
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(Set up a LinkedIn user group for your industry and populate it with educational material and application examples once a week. Every other week post the discussion as an announcement. Keep it strictly educational and don't compare your products to…
At that time conventional 3 ft. x 5 ft. rectangular screens were in operation. Two different models of the SWECO Vibrating Screen Separator are now in operation at the California Plant.
Using a 48” diameter SWECO Separator the company now screens barite ore weighing approximately 180 pounds per cubic foot at the rate of 10 tons per hour output at minus 10 mesh fraction. The separation is performed on a 6 mesh stainless steel wire cloth (opening of .1318 inches, 3360 microns) and a 10 mesh stainless steel cloth (opening of .0742 inches, 2000 microns). The desired product is taken at minus 10 mesh.
Barium oxide grinding material is fed through a SWECO single-deck unit at the rate of 2 tons per hour. The separation is made on a 40 mesh stainless steel cloth (opening of .0185 inches, 400 microns). The plus 40 mesh fraction is desired.
A single deck unit with dust cover is used to screen lamp black for consumption within the California Plant. A single deck SWECO Unit with 20 mesh stainless steel cloth (opening of .0340 inches, 841 microns) is used and the minus 20 mesh is the desired product used in a closed circuit with mill.
The SWECO Vibrating Screens Separator are gyratory in principle in that the material is tumbled around, across and vertically on a horizontal screen cloth. More than one cloth can be “decked” one above the other. The cloth is mounted especially on tension rings which in turn can be rotated 45 to 90 degrees at intervals. The company thus extends screen cloth life considerably.
See SWECO at the 2016 International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE), http://ippexpo.com/. January 26-28, 2016, Atlanta, GA, Booth 7948.
This post was originally posted in SWECO’s LinkedIn Group, SWECO Screeners, Sifters and Separators, strictly an application forum for industrial screeners, sifters and separators. It has over fifty members from around the world. We promote membership with inexpensive LinkedIn ads directed to the over 8,000 LinkedIn members with job titles that fit our audience. Visit the group to learn more.
Process Equipment Marketing is more like high level consulting rather than selling a simple industrial product like a fork lift or truck. The cost is usually higher and an ongoing partnership between the customer and the manufacturer needs to be part of the relationship.
One of the challenges I often hear from companies is this: “We know what new business activities we should be doing. We just don’t do them consistently.” Many times a company that knows it’s ideal customer doesn’t have the resources to make the cold calls needed to get through to the manufacturing engineer. This is where the internet can go to work. The internet can be your 24/7 technical sales person.
And that makes a lot of sense. New business involves lots of unglamorous and, frankly, unenjoyable activities. Stuff like: sales meetings, staying in touch with prospects, and applying just the right “nudge” to prospects who are making a buying decision.
In addition to being not a lot of fun, many new business programs are pretty disorganized: leads falling through the cracks, missed hand offs between sales team members and details from prior conversations lost or incomplete. But even if you did have it, trying to touch base exactly when needed (when the chief engineer goes back to researching esoteric keyword phrases to find a solution to a value added problem).
So if new business is unenjoyable and disorganized, is it any surprise that companies aren’t executing their plans consistently?
This post lays out a few ways that companies can build a process for new sales that’s organized and consistent. We can promise that this will make new business your favorite thing to do, it will help you execute and get better results. And that’s pretty fun.
1. Create a Plan
First things first: you need an overarching plan for new business. Before you invest in tactics, content, technology or anything else, create a plan. New business strategy and planning is a blog post all its own and there are lots of great resources out there to help you on this front, so I’m not going to dig into the details on this topic. Typically a plan is, “We need customers we can partner with, ones we can add value to the equation. We don’t want to compete on price.”
When you work with your customers, you help them build a manufacturing strategy and a plan before you start going into system plan and equipment. Your marketing plan is very similar.
In the internet world you need to do new business activities each week, several times per week. The purpose of this is to consciously choose your highest priority leads, opportunities and activities for the week and execute those.
2. Get a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (and Use It)
Leads: In an average month you probably come across a handful of new potential prospects. For instance, you come across an interesting company when reading an article, or a colleague at a networking event mentions a thought leader who you should get in touch with, or you discover a promising organization while doing a Google search. You need a place to park these leads while you research or reach out to them. Your CRM process should have a central place where you can store new leads while you’re in process of qualifying them.
Contacts: Once you’ve qualified a lead as a good prospect or partner, you need an organized way to keep in touch with them. That may involve “one-to-many” communication like newsletters or nurture campaigns, or “one-to-one” communication like personalized emails or phone calls. For each contact that you’ve qualified it’s important to have them categorized (or “segmented”) based on criteria like their industry, and their quality/potential. You probably have hundreds or thousands of contacts in your database: to create a personalized outreach plan for each is impossible. So we identify a few segments and then create an outreach plan for each. This allows for efficiency and organization.
Opportunities: Opportunities are the active deals that you’re working on. An Opportunity involves a specific piece of work: a project or a concept, and generally goes through a standard set of steps (for instance: initial meeting, proposal, negotiation, and close). A CRM can give you an overview of all the potential business on the table to ensure you’re proactively moving all of them towards wins, and to find trends in process after the fact.
Clients: Do you have a plan for keeping in touch with existing and former customers, and cultivating new business opportunities? Remember, new business doesn’t just mean new customers. A good start for your wear or replacement parts business list but those influencers in the company might not be the new process systems engineer.
Activities: Your CRM should provide you a dashboard of all your current activities. All your new business TODO’s in a single place.
Before you worry about automation, advanced metrics or new technology, get the fundamentals right: a simple system for managing your leads, contacts, opportunities, clients and new business activities.
3. Translate Your Goals Into Simple Metrics
What’s your primary goal for the year?
When you create your new business plan, you’ll of course spend time defining or refining your goals. Another smart technique is to define some simple business metrics to make sure your new business activities are on track to reach those goals.
For example, let’s say your goal is to grow revenue by 5% this year and start working with new OEMs.
The next step would be to answer these questions: How many new customers would you need to increase revenue by 5%? And how many well-qualified prospects do you need to land a new customer?
Let’s say the answer to those two questions are 2 and 10, respectively. Assuming you don’t lose any existing customers, you’ll need about 20 new well-qualified leads to reach your goal. Obviously this isn’t an exact science, but it’s extremely valuable to give you a general benchmark for the number of new prospects (or leads, or opportunities, or whatever) that your new business activities need to be generating.
If your analysis says you need 20 qualified leads to hit your goal, but you’re currently only generating 1 or 2 a year, you’ll need to adjust your new business efforts to achieve your objectives.
4. There’s marketing and there’s customer relationships
There are a few truths about new business: relationships are king, timing is everything, consistency is important, deals don’t close themselves/selling is required. Another key point about new business is this: You can’t keep in touch with everyone.
Sure, you can add as many resources as you like to media, trade shows and internet marketing, but when it comes to the One-to-One high-touch, personalized communications that are critical for new business, there’s a limited number of prospects you can keep in touch with.
Every company should have their “Top-20″ (or Top-12, 15, 18, whatever) list of ideal prospects that they proactively keep in touch with on a monthly (or more frequent) basis. We want to stress the importance of breaking down your overarching priorities into weekly priorities. If your goal is to keep in touch with everyone your Top-20 list once a month, that’s about 5 personalized contacts per week (or one per day). When you build that into your weekly or daily game plan that’s how you develop consistency.
5. Let the odds work in your favor
This decade is about marketing automation.
The purpose of marketing automation is to take work off the plate of the leadership so they can do the new business work that only they can do: building relationships and closing business. It’s a big topic that deserves more space than we can provide here, but there are a few questions you could ask to start thinking about the sales enablement process that you need:
What Is the Work That only I Can Do?: What are the new business activities that only I – the owner – can do effectively? What other new business activities am I doing that marketing automation could do (e.g. assigning tasks, integrating systems, recording notes/ entering data, searching through Sent mail, sending boilerplate emails, etc.)?
What Can I Delegate?: Who else in the company (or outside of the company) could take over the non-required tasks listed above? Is there someone in the company who can be responsible for marketing automation (i.e. a single person who is responsible for making sure the systems work, the data is up to date, the activities are getting done, the process is being followed)? This doesn’t need to be someone’s full time job, and it doesn’t need to be a senior person in the company. For instance, there could a junior sales person who has an interest and aptitude for process/systems work who would be great for the role of managing the CRM and sales enablement.
What Are The Handoffs Between Me and My Team?: Once you know the roles and responsibilities, it’s important to define the process for how people will execute their tasks and communicate. How will lead/prospect/opportunity ownership be assigned among the team? How will tasks be passed between team members? What are the criteria for qualifying a lead? What happens when the lead is qualified? What are the stages of your sales process and how are opportunities moved from one stage to the next? An effective new business process doesn’t just get the company more new business, it also takes work off the company executive’s plate.
New business efforts often fall short because of lack of consistency. It’s the classic story: Company A diligently keeps in touch with a Prospect for a few months, Company A loses track of Prospect for 6 months, Company A gets back in touch with Prospect only to find that Prospect just hired Company B. That’s no fun.
The companies that are able execute their new business program consistently over time have built processes to ensure that activities are planned out, prioritized, organized, delegated and measured. The process doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be clear and followed by everyone at the company. 2016 is just around the corner. Make it the year that you achieve the new business results you know you can.
Inspired by a post in RSW/US, Agency Client Relationship Experts, Agency New Business Insights guest post by Brian Shea, founder of Shea Consulting, Advertising agency new business development is very similar to expensive process equipment purchases.
Thanks to Target Marketing
B-to-B marketers always want their own examples of marketing success, says Joel Book, principal of marketing insights for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Speaking during the company conference, Dreamforce, he chose Volvo Construction Equipment North America as the perfect example to highlight, full-screen, in a movie theater at Westfield San Francisco Centre.
“Everything is focused on the customer,” he says of the “innovator” that’s brought in $100 million in sales of new and used equipment during each of the past five years using its cross-channel digital program.
Challenge: Nurture and convert leads.
Solution: Cross-channel marketing.
Results:
Book’s session on Sept. 16, “How Smart Brands Use Digital Marketing to Acquire, Engage and Retain,” shows how Volvo CE extends its brand promise across all channels.
“All marketing is not just direct marketing, all marketing is now cross-channel,” he says. “We don’t know through which channel our buyer is going to engage with us. It could be via social media, it could be online, it could be in-store. What we do know is this: Every channel matters. Every channel has an influence on the customer.”
Volvo CE uses SEO and social media (Twitter, Facebook and its YouTube channel) to drive site traffic, with all site visitors being invited to sign up for its monthly newsletter. (Another option, the newsletter for used equipment, runs bimonthly.)
Facebook is the No. 1 social media lead generator, Book says.
“Everything is focused on driving traffic to the website.”
For example, specifically using Facebook Custom Audiences, Volvo CE targeted American and Canadian aficionados of its competitors’ brands who look like Volvo CE’s best customers and are 23 and older. Volvo CE’s Facebook ad got nearly 300,000 ad impressions. From there, 9,485 clicked and 27 became direct sales-qualified leads for the high-priced products. At more than $2,000 per lead, that was a 30 percent reduction in cost per lead. The campaign additionally prompted new email subscriptions and drove downloads of the Volvo CE Insider app.
Leads then head through Dun & Bradstreet’s data overlay for cleansing, Book says, before they’re placed in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with [the] CRM system enables Volvo sales reps to track leads, manage opportunities,” reads his presentation slide. A sales representative with one of the 130 dealers gets the Salesforce lead report. The rep then sends a personalized “thank you” email to the buyer. All of that happens within 24 hours.
“The linchpin of Volvo’s digital marketing strategy is what they do through email,” Book says.
Email is the top lead generator and converter, and is industry-specific.
“The reason I say that Volvo has doubled-down on email — and this is a trend across a lot of different successful brands, gang,” Book says, “[is] five out of 10 B-to-B marketers say email is their single-best channel for generating leads.”
Curbside Recycling Isn’t Enough for Sustainability
Some industry watchers say Google is a modern day “Emperor’s New Clothes” story. Everyone is so worried they will look stupid; they don’t see the hypocrisy of AdWords. Here are ten reasons why. We’re forced to use AdWords because our clients want to come up on top of a Google search no matter what. We try to encourage improving the page content, but that’s more difficult than just paying for AdWords. That’s even what American Express says in its book, “When Everything Clicks: Your Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising.”
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:
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