On Nov 4th – the day before Guy Fawkes day we will be running our last free Industrial PR and Social Media seminar. These 2011 seminars have been a great success with those attending taking away new information and ideas to enhance their businesses – so we have decided that next year we will charge – probably £200 per head and that means Nov 4th will be the last opportunity to attend for free.
Testemonials include:
“We found the session interesting and thoroughly thought provoking. Whilst I believe our company’s marketing effort is comprehensive, the session certainly opened our eyes to more possibilities especially in the field of digital marketing. We look forward to engaging with Ian and his team to realise the full potential of our efforts.”
“Possibly the best three hours training I have had in a very long time. Helped to focus on what can be done free or at reasonable cost, how to get the maximum benefit from minimum effort and convinced a sceptic of the need to use social media.”
“The seminar was conducted in a very relaxed style with plenty of time and encouragement for questions. Being a comparative novice in some of the subject matter I was delighted to learn new things and have to restrain my enthusiasm to experiment with what I have been shown but hope to put it to good use very soon. The small group enabled networking opportunities and an open forum to learn from each other. The venue choice was excellent and refreshments most appreciated. I had a thoroughly enjoyable and educational day, thank you.”
“Thank you for an incredibly useful and informative day! We have already begun to brainstorm how we can incorporate your advice into our overall marketing plan. The information that we gained from this seminar is invaluable and I would highly recommend it!”
Click here to register for your place at the Nov 4th free seminar and learn about Industrial PR and Social Media.
I am often amused by people’s fascination with getting themselves on page one of organic searches – as an agency we have never tried to achieve this – rather it has beeen a pleasant and surprising side effect of what we consider as “just doing the job right”.
To the point where we have clients with from 100 to over 200 keyword searches that we check 3 monthly and find them on page 1 of organic searches for anything from 50 to 100 of them. It is quite a buzz to put in an industry relevant search term and find our client on page one 5 times - the client is pleased too!
There seems to be confusion over what is important and what we are trying to achieve – yes it is great to get your own website high up the listings – but there are a number of other considerations:
1. 3rd party listings gained through PR, Content Marketing and Social Media will get listed much more easily and more quickly because the directories and journals are more valued than a single manufacturers site – and their listing for you will still take people to you. Such listings will also keep out your competition. We frequently find our clients listings appearing on page 1 a number of times eg 3, 4 or 5 times for a single search string. These listings seem to get picked up very quickly and to stay relevant for many months.
2. Your blog is likely to get higher value than your website if you are keeping it active – not only does a blog get picked up quickly it can be quite a stable listing.
3. Your website can get up the listings supported by the value accrued from your total activity and traffic. Once there it is usually quite stable if you maintain your online activity.
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!
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.
