In this economy, the leading B2B marketers have re-prioritized the mix of initiatives they pursue. This fast-paced presentation covers 'What's In' and 'What's Out' of the toolbox of successful B2B marketers in our troubled economy.
Thank you, Sarah. What we're going to talk about today, real quickly in just a few minutes, is what's out and what's in relative to marketing for electronic component companies in today's environment. Marketing is still important, despite all the people who are grabbing at our budget as companies strive to cut costs and get more profitable. One of the best quotes that I've seen over the years is this one from Network World. And you can see it's from almost 10 years ago.
It makes such a great point so simply, that: "History is littered with the corpses of great products that lost out to inferior ones." And the reason is that companies often fail to get the word out to the right people, or have trouble convincing potential customers.
And that's all marketing. That's why some with great technology win, and some companies with great technologies don't.
So marketing is very much still needed. The question is, what tactics should we be using, given the realities of the current economic environment?
A few things are definitely out, based on our work with several dozen electronic component companies over the last year, and research that we've been conducting and reviewing over the past year. Clearly companies are cutting things like trade shows and mass advertising: print, radio.
Companies are really shifting and changing their orientation from broadcasting, literally shouting, to very much narrowcasting. And rather than just marketing using the broad array of tactics we've always used, companies that are smart are much more focused on marketing to a specific target market.
So traditional methods are, as a result, giving way to online methods of marketing and getting the word out, which allow much tighter focus on a specific audience. Other things that are going out the window are the expense of printing.
If you're not already, it's very standard to put all your selling materials online, on our website, not just for your customers, but also for your salespeople. They can grab them as they need it and you're not wasting any money spending or distributing things that aren't going to be used immediately.
Online display ads, random investment in Google pay per click advertising, is out the window. As are branding campaigns that are feel good but can't be measured and can't be tied to spurring revenue.
What's in, now that these economic times are upon us? One thing is clearly you've got to be measuring ROI. CEOs are insisting that marketing departments measure all marketing spending. They're just reminding us that if you can't measure it, it's probably not working for you.
Now we have a lot of choices of what we can be measuring, whether it's awareness, qualified leads, increases in conversions, increases in sales. Your ability to capture this information, of course, depends on your information systems. And we'll be talking about that more in some separate talks in this series.
The key thing here is to ensure that marketing spending is supporting your sales objectives. So feel good objectives are definitely out, but specific sales numbers that we need to his this month, this quarter, this year, and working back from those, that's definitely in.
So the focus of marketing activities has got to be advancing the selling process. If there's a specific target market or a specific geography that you company is trying to achieve a specific sales objective in, that's where you need to be focusing marketing activities.
One company that I'm working with actually picked four specific geographies to focus new marketing efforts on, rather than trying to apply them globally. They said, let's try these things in a couple of different geographies and see what works. What works we'll roll out, and what doesn't, we'll stop.
But we won't have spent the money to take these new ideas globally. So of course, they're measuring and reporting everything.
Another thing that's in is very much the concept of sharpening your message. You've got to make sure that everyone on your external team knows what we call the four essential questions of marketing. Who are we? What do we do? Who do we want to do it for? That's who's our target audience. And why should they choose us?
That's really our marketing strategy. Why are people going to choose us rather than the other guys? And it's really up to the marketing team to make sure that the story is clear and in writing, so that everyone understands it and everyone is delivering it consistently.
So when we meet a prospect, we know the message that's being delivered by the website, by the customer service team, by the selling team, regardless of who's delivering the message.
Another thing that's in is and we heard it earlier in the mention of target marketing. You've got to narrow your focus. Companies are realizing that odds of improved ROI are much better if they're focusing on specific targets that make sense.
And suggestions for those are, number one, current customers. If you can find projects within your current customers or sister divisions of your current customers to sell to, the sales cycle is going to be a lot shorter than starting with somebody who doesn't know your company, doesn't know your reputation.
You don't have trust built up. You may not even be set up as a vendor in their system.
Another thing that companies are doing that's really smart is focusing on best performing markets. In some cases this is aerospace, defense, military. There are some high end things high end computing, high end storage that are working real well for several companies that we're involved with as well.
Those tend to be recession resistant markets because the projects they're all involved in are so long term that companies have to keep spending. They can't cut or things won't come to pass when they need them to a few years down the line.
Another thing that companies are doing is focusing on their marketing methods almost as a product portfolio. Every year you may cut some products from your portfolio, the ones that aren't strong performers.
And companies are doing the same thing with marketing methods, in tallying which are the ones that work best. If you don't have that data in your company, then it's not real difficult to get this kind of information.
I mean, get a short list of customers who came on board recently, and just call them and ask them a few questions. How'd you hear about us? And why'd you decide to go with us? And ask them, how can we be easier to do business with?
Very quickly, after making just four or five calls, you'll be a lot smarter about what you need to be doing to attract more people to your company and your company's products.
And then just implement the suggestions that make sense. In a follow up talk in this series, we'll be talking about how to decide which tactics make sense. But asking the customers, particularly the ones that recently came on board, is going to be a huge help to you in setting a direction for what you need to do.
Another thing that's in, clearly, is doing more online. It's less expensive. It's much more targeted. Here are a few suggestions of what companies are doing.
Number one is tune up your website, but not so much in the feel good, change the graphics variety. But it's tied back to something we said earlier, which is the messaging.
Make sure your message is sharp on the home page. We see a lot of websites that make sense to people inside the company, but don't make instant sense about what the value proposition is to people who haven't visited the company site before.
So you want to be answering those four questions, and make sure that everyone who visits your site can quickly tell from your home page, "What do you guys do? And why should I choose you instead of the other fellows that I'm considering."
Another thing is, do more search engine optimization. You're probably doing it already, but do even more of it. Make sure you're using the right keywords, the right keywords spelt wrong. And be adding content constantly if you're not already.
Smart companies that we work with have somebody who focuses on this, adding content, consistently that's meaningful to the target audience and keyword rich.
Also, if you haven't already done it, have a little campaign to get all of your partners and distributors and rep firms linking back to your site, to be building your page rank with Google and other search engines.
What's shown in the little graphic at the lower right hand corner is just a little "contact us" box that one of our clients put on every page of their website. And it really increased the number of people shooting them questions sometimes about things that weren't immediately related to what they did.
But they made it so easy for people to just type a question, say "Here's my phone number. Here's my email address. Get back to me with the answer." And they found they were doing feasibility analysis for people they never met before, and it lead to some very promising engagements, quite a few of which turned into nice business pops.
Also, invest in online events webinars like this. We see trade associations and companies doing this a lot more. It's an inexpensive way to reach out to your clients. The ones who are interested can join in. And you can quickly get in, get out, share some useful information, remind them who you are.
Same with email marketing. As long as your sending as something to a permission based list where you're sharing useful information and doing it in a brief, concise format there's nothing wrong with that. And it'll be a reminder of who you are and what you do, and that you're out there and available when they are ready to spend money.
A lot of companies are also testing web 2.0 sorts of things. Testing Facebook and YouTube, posting videos. Those are getting a lot of use, particularly in the area of application.
How do you actually use this product? So I would definitely encourage you to make some videos for things that you do. Post them on YouTube, post on your site, and make it available to people because it's certainly becoming the way people are learning about products and learning to use products.
Next time in this series, as alluded a couple of times, we're going to talk in a separate talk about how to define specific marketing goals in a world where CEOs are demanding that VPs and Directors of Marketing measure everything that they're doing and report those results.
We'll talk about how to set those goals. And we'll also talk about how to decide what tactics are best in your situation.
So that's what we brought for this talk, and I'm going to turn this back to Sarah now, and say thank you very much for joining us. And we'll look forward to next time.
