Well lets think about this logically -
1. How much did you/would you spend on a brochure/literature? – £10K per year? £20K? £30K? More?
2. How much do you spend on a sales rep including salary, car, expenses? £50K per year? £60K? More?
3. How much did you/would you spend on a national exhibition? A shell scheme for £10K? A space only site at £100K – plus, plus, plus?
Now if you have a website then you don’t need a brochure - and if you think that you do for customers that do not like the internet ( we are talking about technology company customers, but there are some who don’t get on with computers ) then you can easily print one from your website - and the website should at least be up to date, unlike a brochure or manual which goes out of date the day before it is printed!
Well your website and blog are not sales people but they do manage to do a whole lot of things that sales people do – and they do it 24/7/365 - coupled to PR reaching a couple of hundred or more publications and Social Media reaching hundreds or thousands of customers and prospects, they do a lot lot more than your best people ever could on their own.
And with the right approach to photography, graphic illustrations and video demonstrations your website and blog can between them do most of what you normally achieve at an exhibition – with the exception of shaking the customers hand and offering a drink.
Don’t get me wrong the personal touch is very important – I have personally sold £1M pa on commission and know well that people still buy from people – and I’ve yet to meet a website that can negotiate, research a client application or respond to a customers emergency problem - but let’s understand the sales function is expensive and lets get things in proportion – your other marketing/sales/promotion tools should have a budget in proportion to their value.
So now - how much should you spend on your web/blog sites?
Are you spending £10Kpa – roughly the minimum cost of a catalogue?
Are you spending £50Kpa – the minimum cost of sales rep?
Or are you spending £100K plus?
The internet and our ability to use websites to substitute for these other sales tools has enabled businesses around the world to hugely cut costs, survive, protect profits and to do much more with less resources – but you should still be spending appropriately and not penny pinching on these valuable internet based tools.
So how much are you spending on your website/blog – enough?
I have heard a lot recently about the value of adding video to your website home page – as you know I have been keen on clients using video for at least a couple of years – for its intrinsic value as a good way to get information across – although as you see we don’t have it – but some really useful videos are in the pipeline as soon as I can face the camera!
Now it seems Google has caught up and I found this this blog piece http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html which gives SEO figures to show you have about a 50 times better chance of your website getting to page 1 with a video than without.
That’s the sort of odds I like:^)
Interesting too that the “advanced” SEO he talks about are exactly the sort of things we are doing all the time!
Following the success of our early 2011 program of seminars, registrations are invited at www.id-marketing.co.uk/free-seminar-registration for a free seminar on 23rd September on the subject of “Industrial PR and Social Media Marketing”. We are delighted that these free seminars are proving so successful for the delegates, since all seem to go away with a much better insight into the roles of PR and Social Media in the industrial marketplace – which is very different from the mainstream perception – and since we are an active and experienced company we are passing on what we actually do and what we know works – not just a theoretical training.
The seminar will cover the basics of Industrial PR and how to do it for yourself – press relations vs. public relations, keywords, directories, printed and internet media, press releases, features, building a database, web profiling, with “hands on” exercises. Other topics will be Marketing for Industrial SMEs – building a cost effective Promotional Pyramid – blogs, newsletters, website SEO, video, advertising, exhibitions and social media – with a guest Social Media Manager from our associate Lesley Whiteman Social Media Agency.
We believe that PR is cheaper and more effective than ever, PR is the cheapest promotion a company will ever do and that based on a solid foundation of PR a company can build the other major elements of online marketing, content marketing, social media, exhibitions and advertising into a worthwhile long-term investment that will protect a company through the downs and leverage growth in the ups of the economic cycle.
One day free PR seminars are planned for September and October 2011 at a quiet relaxing venue near our offices in Bedfordshire, with complementary networking lunch and free car parking. To register for the September seminar please go to www.id-marketing.co.uk/free-seminar-registration
For some time there has been a question about east-west balance – which is to say “what will happen to the eastern economies when the west cannot afford to buy so much?”
Personally I think it will be a bit bumpy but these things have a way of finding their own equilibrium and that the Chinese and Indian consumers will pick up the slack where the USA and Europe drop off. So when we cannot afford to buy from China we will find that we can once again afford to make things ourselves – we are already strong in specialist niche and local/regional markets and the re-balancing of the forces of east-west trade will also provide an opportunity for UK manufacturing to sell to the eastern countries if we are prepared to take it. Indeed China in particular is likely to positively encourage it as they find a need to reduce their own export/import inbalance.
I found this recently which makes interesting reading.
I have been talking quite a lot about the difference between Public Relations for B2C and Press Relations for industrial B2B companies – so it was good the other day to get a comparible perspective in the form of this link.
Also of course may I refer you to previous items in this blog plus our main website.
I hear that job creation in the private sector is running ahead of job losses in the public sector ( here ) and we ourselves know companies in the manufacturing area who are growing 20 to 40% and have been doing so for the past year.
Meanwhile in the East there is a notable growth in wealth and China ( as has been historically the case ) is once again beginning to have problems supplying its own people with food and goods and even experiencing some credit problems.
Here in the UK we now have relatively low-cost components and raw materials with low-cost labour – compared to previous times when manufacturing was 25% of GDP – now it is half that we are coming up from the bottom of the cycle, and could well yet see a new flowering of UK industrial growth based on enterprise and innovation in spite of recent stalling in the process.
With the Eurozone pre-occupied with balancing one economy against another and the USA simply getting further and further into debt, they are both likely to meet the need for structural change in their manufacturing industries. The UK has already done this and is well positioned to take advantage of new industries in green engineering and a new balance of wealth and power in the global marketplace.
Our old connections around the globe may yet serve us well – given that we have not really offended anybody in recent years and that British engineering retains a strong reputation for quality. If only we could get the support of government expenditure on major projects being sourced in the UK we could well help to pull the country out its economic malaise more quickly.
The connections between mainstream economy, e.g. retail and financial sectors, and the manufacturing sectors, are somewhat flexible and indirect to the point that their growth cycles are completely out of step. Once again the mainstream economy has dragged down the manufacturing industries and again manufacturing is one of the engines pulling the country out of recession. This makes the job harder but without the dips we would not have the ups! So let us look forward to an extended growth cycle for UK manufacturing in the next few years and remember the hard learned lessons of how to market ourselves through the whole of the cycle so as to best take advantage of the upturns and best survive the downturns.
Professional marketing in the industrial marketplace has never been cheaper, more extensive or more possible. There is simply no reason not to benefit from simple, cost-effective promotion either bought in or done in-house – click here to see how.
Like it or not, if you have a presence on the internet, you have a global presence – I know that Google is becoming regional – but your material is still available to any English speaker that cares to search.
This may be a pest if you really don’t want to sell outside the UK but for most businesses it is a chance to reach new markets at no extra cost. How cool is that? And with a little extra effort you can access all the internet media of the English speaking world as well as much of the rest such as Scandinavia and the Middle East that uses English as a language of convenience for business.
Check out cost effective B2B internet PR here.
PR integrates – a company PR program is at its best when used in an integrated way with other promotional activities. It is really a question of getting the balance right:
- without PR no balance
- with only PR no balance
- with PR, website, newsletters, advertising etc then a balance can be achieved that meets the information needs of potential customers and existing customers while enabling the client company to focus on its core business of supply. It is simply a matter of recognising that information transfer via its marketing activities forms a vital part of any customer service package.
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An old chestnut that keeps coming up is the idea that it is possible to identify the origin of a sales enquiry which led to an order. This is a search for a single promotional action which if only we could identify and repeat it would lead to 100% promotional efficiency – in short a magic bullet for sales.
To mix my metaphors, it is like the holy grail – unreal and unobtainable even in these days of information technology – we simply end up drowning in data. But as we know each sale results from many points of contact and each buying process is dependant upon different criteria, so I believe we would be better off searching for the patterns of actions that most often lead to success and becoming skilful in negotiating them to our hoped for endpoint.
See how we do this – and how we can answer other questions on PR and on Blogs and Social Media.
Basically a P.R. brief is background information together with notes about the approach or direction of your marketing “message”. So this could include technical data, brochures, website addresses, photos, diagrams, sales profile, application possibilities, what does it do, for whom, how does it do it, why would they want it?
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