STRATEGY #86: Digital Advertising

Digital advertising is experiencing fantastic growth—even in industrial marketing strongholds. An IDC forecast shows that Internet advertising will grow from 10% of all media this year to 13.6% by 2011 as Internet ad spending grows to $106.6 billion worldwide. Don’t discount the advantages of digital advertising.

Engage Your Audience
While they still have their place, static print ads are not as effective as digital media in engaging audiences in a two-way dialog. Even more importantly, digital advertising can be engineered to obtain information about the audience. This mined data is a valuable commodity you can use to guide and influence sales and marketing initiatives, fueling your sales organization and message customization. 

Extend Traditional Marketing Strategies
Targeting—Run segmented campaigns using messages individualized to the interests of each targeted group. 
Branding—Enhance established product and corporate identities with animation, video and other visually stimulating tactics within your ad.
Retention—Optimize customer response and retention by linking your digital ad audience with your website or microsites.
Relevance—Cultivate a positive audience response by making your advertising a favorable interruption that pre-empts audience needs by being exceedingly relevant.

All this is possible because the medium itself can collect and analyze customer behavior. It’s also important to employ technologies that enhance the visibility, portability and impact of your message on a variety of devices and in various settings. 

A new advertising paradigm is here that can rapidly enhance your marketing efforts through the participation of your audience. And customers will always be attracted to messages that are not only highly relevant to job success, but also interactively intriguing. The time to engage is now.

STRATEGY #369 — Email Programs

In a recent survey of engineers and other industrial professionals, GlobalSpec reported more than 50% of respondents spend six or more business hours on-line weekly. They’re looking for suppliers, product specs, research and to purchase. Are they finding your products?

Implementing a fully planned and well-managed Email Program is one more critical tool for your marketing arsenal. Use it to boost traffic by linking to your website or push timely information out to your markets. Retain and keep customers informed. Capture and develop valuable leads. Increase sales and raise brand awareness. It’s more immediate and affordable than print, but to work, it needs to be done well.

Hints

• Keep content focused, compelling and relevant
• Include dynamic graphics, optimized for viewing on multiple sources from computer screens to handheld devices
• Manage lists faithfully
• Segment your audience to target content for optimum results
• Insure timely delivery
• Track results and apply them to future emails

Planning is Key
Truly effective email campaigns are seldom formed and executed overnight. When managed as a targeted program integrated with your overall marketing plan, results will follow.

When preparing an annual email calendar, take into account:

• Internal production and marketing plans
• Industry and vertical market events
• Seasons/holidays
• Purchasing cycles of various customer markets
• Customer/prospect behavior
• Customer preferences

Plan frequency and topics per market segment. Content can range from product features and project profiles to a president’s message, special events, training, etc. Keep content short, powerful and direct, always driving your audience to a microsite (See Strategy 777) or sales contact. Now execute it faithfully.

Email programs can not stand alone. But they are a vital tool in the mission to capture, cultivate and secure new customers and grow sales. Infiltrate now.

Next time…Strategy #86 offers an engaging opportunity.

STRATEGY #37 — Animation & Illustration

Whether you’re launching a great new product or trying to broaden the application of an existing one, the fact is—industrial products and processes are complicated. Technical sheets have their place, but often, it takes seeing for customers to believe and understand. That’s when animation and illustration can be a silver bullet in your marketing arsenal.

Get the Picture

These marketing tools are now more effective than ever. The challenge is in finding the right combination of talent—an engineering mind that quickly understands your product and can guide a creative talent that can execute it accurately and effectively. High impact illustrations and animations don’t have to take a big chunk out of your marketing budget any more. We know.

The Power of Illustration

• Use in print or digital formats to jump start sales with pre-production modeling.
• Enhance marketing efforts with cross sections, cutaways and exploded views highlighting key features and hidden details.

• If a picture is worth a thousand words, a technical illustration may just make the sale.

The Power of Animation

• Demonstrate functionality, manufacturing, installation or maintenance. Add music or narration.
• Help customers absorb large amounts of data quicker and easier.
• Feature on microsites, CDs, trade shows, presentations and other venues to draw prospects in with a more memorable message.

When your product’s key features are not visible...when the process is so new or complicated that real-life demonstration is just not feasible...when you want to get the attention of your target audience to jump start the sales cycle or stir up demand, peppering your marketing plan with quality illustrations and animation nets powerful results.

Strategy #369 is up next—a program you will not want to miss!

STRATEGY #777 — MICROSITES

Shorten sales cycles by helping customers and prospects cut through the information clutter with focused, targeted information streams. The best way to start is with a microsite.

We know, your corporate website is great. But its purpose is so far reaching and multifaceted that targeted brand messages can get lost. Don’t force customers to hunt around and drill down to the nether regions of your site to get the specifics on a product, line or service. Most won’t bother.

Opt for Transparency

A microsite is a SMALL, self-contained website (one page or a small cluster of pages) separate from your company’s primary site. It has it’s own distinct URL. Content is very tight, focused and brand-centric—usually presenting a single product, product line, service, event or promotion. It could be a temporary site, for the duration of a promotion, or it could be a permanent addition to your web presence, linking to your main website.

Consider the Advantages:

• Microsites help you optimize keywords and promote keyword-rich content. This can boost your rank on search engines bringing in more prospects seeking your products or services.
• Use your advertising, direct mail and other promotional media to drive customers to your microsite, giving them easy access to targeted information.
• Their smaller size makes them quicker and easier for customers to navigate and locate desired info.
• This focused information stream is more cohesive than a corporate site which boosts branding and helps drive sales.
• Microsites can be changed or updated quickly and easily according to changing market needs.
• They can be your most dedicated sales rep, working 24/7.

Microsites provide a solid, versatile foundation for targeted information streams that cut through the clutter. Check out a couple of microsites we designed and built for two of our clients. Just click on the URL links to access the sites directly.

Be sure to come back in a couple of days, Strategy #37 will be illustrative!

Finding the Right Balance

As you move into the electronic/social media world to market your latest product, here’s a word of caution: Don’t neglect print for direct marketing.

Current research of third-party opt-ins reveals that e-mail reaches only 30–40% of the total b-to-b audience. But with snail mail, you can hit every target audience member’s mailbox with a message that will get reviewed before it hits the circular file.

Consider:

• In direct marketing, target audience coverage is everything. There are currently almost two-and-a-half times as many b-to-b prospect snail mail lists as there are e-mail lists available for rental. You can reach almost three times as many prospects with snail mail over email.
• Buyers can't read your e-mail if they're not online at work. Plant managers and engineers, health professionals, field service technicians, contractors and many other businesspeople are on their feet or out of the office all day. While more and more professionals are gaining access to their email on-the-go via mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones, this is still a growing trend...not the norm.

A special case…be sure to work around the presidential election clutter between now and November. Both physical and electronic mailboxes are going to be clogged with political messages. Consider delaying a really important introduction until the new year, and then do it right, with a healthy print component to augment that electronic blast.

Yes, our world is turning digital. But we’re still in transition. It’s not time to abandon print yet...and it may never be. When it comes to direct marketing, it’s important to find a good balance. Making the most of both mediums should optimize your impact and results.

Don