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.
While PR includes link building, it is very much more in that it puts information people want to read in the places where they want to read it. Engineers/buyers do not want to read every manufacturers’ website for information on new products or applications – they simply want basic information in the journals/ezines that cover their industry interests – then if they need more info they will go to a manufacturer’s site. This is where the SEO part kicks in in ensuring that enquirers get the right information in their searches and can navigate easily when they get to your site.
See here how online activities can develop SEO.
Websites who publish client catalogues for free a tempting offer – but a good way to lose customers? They effectively shunt enquirers into a cul-de-sac where they struggle to find advice from a large pdf file then give up before ever contacting the client. Also while this keeps enquirers on the journal site it means that customers can be led into making their – negative – buying decision without even being observed as interested customers on the client website – they go completely off the horizon with no chance of follow up or even a chance to provide them with the information they wanted.
If you have plenty of customers and are too busy to talk to enquirers then fine but if you want to talk to customers about their requirements then I don’t think this remote catalogue hosting is a helpful way to go. The same is true for data sheets – if a customer wants technical detail then to be sure it is correct and up to date they should get it from the client and preferably with an opportunity to discuss by e-mail or phone or even face to face! Useful perhaps for short leaflets on specific product ranges which encourage the enquirer to contact the client direct.
Click here to see how other ways of online marketing can help promote your products
A lot! When I started we posted a story with a black and white picture to a few magazines and hoped the phone would ring 4 months later – there was a 3 month editorial cycle. Then journals introduced colour and “bingo cards” so now we could see where enquiries came from. Then the internet arrived and we sent material to online sites and after a year or so clients told us they were getting more leads from the internet than from printed media. However, now no-one could tell what lead came from where since the enquiry did not necessarily come on a “bingo” card. Now they came by phone and e-mail as well, with no particular provenance.
At last, after a few more years we can at least get referral stats, viewing stats, website traffic and even discern client listings for important keywords – plus we can tie up the whole lot with a client blog and links from newsletters etc. Where we once had huge annual directories we now have huge web directories updated daily. We have many years worth of searchable archived journals and whole spectrum of editorial content styles.
We no longer use the post for anything and at least on the internet the publishing cycle time is almost zero – but we still have to hope the phone will ring – or the e-mail will arrive.
Doing the job properly – at the end of the day the whole industrial PR process – with or without search engines – is about getting genuine information to places where it can reach serious potential users/buyers. These are willing buyers – if they don’t buy then their business will not exist, but they must buy knowledgeably. Do that job right and it is worth doing from everybody’s perspective.
Search engines in their own way are only trying to facilitate the same process – so we are all working toward the same end – there is no need to try to manipulate the search engines – do the job properly and they will put an enquirer together with the information they are seeking. Although it does help to be able to think like a customer and to set up ones information and it’s distribution to fit that enquiry process i.e. understand the information that is important to a customer, how they may go about finding it, what form they may find it easiest to digest and how to make their life easy in progressing their enquiry. This is not “rocket science” but it does require a measure of knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, flexibility, balance and judgment – sound like any PR agency you know?
The creation of easily digested information regarding products and services. By presenting genuine information in a quickly assimilated way we are helping engineers to stay up-to date with developments and trends so that they can quickly solve problems in design or production. This presents a wider profile of possibilities and helps optimise the innovation cycle.
Dissemination to enable it to be easily found – build a better mousetrap and people will NOT beat a path to your door – unless they actually need a mousetrap and know about yours! This is a genuine need – by putting our information where it can easily be found we are serving that need. People sometimes need to be told that a) mousetraps exist, b) some mousetraps are different/better/cheaper than others and which is which. A whole range of media publications have grown up to serve this need on a wider basis from the national press to Google, to a plethora of very small but very targeted publications.
