Media Usage Trends

 

We (Gardner Business Media) just completed our fourth annual Media Usage Survey to gain insights about media usage trends and buying behaviors of today's manufacturing technology buyer. I now follow with an overview and what findings mean for suppliers targeting this group.

 

Brand awareness remains the most influential factor impacting media usage and vendor selection. Industrial buyers rely on sources and suppliers that they recognize and trust. The influence of brand is most apparent when buyers review search results, select vendors and conduct research.

 

More than 70% of manufacturing buyers look for products or services at least once a week. The majority of manufacturing technology purchases are influenced by at least three people.  There is no significant increase in overall mobile use, but significant gains appear in laptop and tablet usage. Primary mobile use is email and web browsing as buyers prefer browsers to apps when accessing web content on mobile devices.

 

Social media adoption has increased somewhat for the third consecutive year.  However, the perception of its usefulness remains flat.  LinkedIn and YouTube are the most useful social media sites for manufacturing buyers.  Twitter and Facebook are blocked at nearly 20% of responding companies while LinkedIn and YouTube are the most open social sites.

 

The most influential criteria impacting a buyer's selection of a potential vendor is technology followed closely by service and reputation.  Buyers turn to peers, technical articles and tradeshows when forming a perception of prospective vendors. Still, process-related trade magazines delivered in print continue to be the top "push" media influence with buyers.

There Is A Role For Print

 

 

 

Yes, in the era of iPads and Apps, there is still a role for print.  As a B2B marketer, there is an opportunity here.  Here's why in my mind:

 

Getting Attention: Have you noticed how many fewer magazines you're getting in the mail these days? There's just less mail, so more attention is paid to each piece.

 

No Audience Development Costs: Publishers expend huge amounts of time and money qualifying subscribers.  Many times, publishers invest multiple dollars per subscriber for auditing purposes (BPA Statement).  They send direct mail, they call, they send email so that the magazine can report subscribers requesting the magazine. That's a cost marketers don't have to worry about.

 

Prospects Still Need To Ask Questions: We love the Internet because buyers can find answers to almost anything.  But where do we go to think about what questions we should be asking? The web is where we go to get answers but print is where we go to learn questions. The print vehicle is still the best medium for thinking outside the box to ask tough questions based on what your read. 

 

Print Still Excites People: The printed word is still perceived as more credible to many people than anything on the web. It goes to the old adage, "If someone invested enough to print and mail it, it must be important."

 

Customer Retention: Recent research studies highlight how print is still best for customer retention to build brand awareness.

 

Unplug: More and more people are actively choosing to unplug, or disconnect themselves from digital media. I'm dong this myself. I'm finding myself turning off my phone and email more to engage with printed material. 

 

 

 

 

Do You Need A Ping-Pong Marketing Plan?

 

 

Most marketers don't think about the interplay or ping-ponginess of the B2B buying process. Too many still have campaign mentalities.  We still care mostly about what we want  buyers to do...whether we're accommodating what they want, or not.  We still sit down to plan a campaign and focus on the deliverables. "Okay -- let's publish a couple of blog posts to drive registrants to a webinar, then we'll follow that with a white paper and a sales pitch. How many leads do you think we can generate for sales if we execute this program in Q2?"

 

Why don't we think about it like Ping-Pong?  There's a rhythm to Ping-Pong, a back-and-forth. Playing Ping-Pong is like having a conversation. And that is what your content should be designed to do. It doesn't mean that the campaign above won't work if rethought, but the problem is that it stops in its tracks when planned this way. It's a snippet of the conversation that will need to be held over a complex B2B buying process. As it stands, there's no connection to anything that comes before or after.

 

It's like having a conversation and suddenly, in mid-sentence, the other person gest a text, glances at his smartphone and steps away to deal with it, never returning and leaving you to wonder if you're really that boring. That's exactly how a campaign can treat prospective buyers.

 

Stick with me to think about it:

 

Buyer: I wonder what my peers are doing to solve problem X?

 

Marketer: This blog post talks about six different ways people are dealing with problem X.

 

Buyer: That was great information. Oh, look, they're having a webinar with more examples.  Think

            I'll sign up.

 

Marketer: Thanks for attending our webinar.  Here's a link to replay.

 

Buyer: I was there. I don't need to see it again. What else have you got?

 

Marketer: Silence.

 

Buyer: Hmm. Those examples got me thinking, but I wonder if there are any industry best practices

            emerging about problem X?

 

Marketer: Silence.

 

Buyer: Where'd they go?

 

Salesperson: Since you attended our webinar, we thought you might need a demo of our solution. Got

                     30 minutes?

 

Buyer: What? I'm not sure this will work in our situation.  I need to talk to David and Harvey and

            Sam.

 

Salesperson: I just sent you an email about a demo, thought I'd leave a voicemail too.  Want a demo?

 

Buyer: I wonder who the experts are who can help me learn more about dealing with problem X?

            Maybe I'll try a search on Twitter for X...

 

Marketer: Silence.

 

You may be shaking your head about these exchanges, but this is what so many B2B marketing campaigns look like. The problem with a "campaign mindset" is that marketers are missing the Ping to go with the Pong. And your buyer prospects are very aware of the lapse.

 

But not to worry.  They won't be waiting on you to fix that issue. They've already moved on to someone else who is more helpful and concerned about what they want and need over the long term. Someone who's dedicated to playing the game all the way through.

 

It's one thing to map content to the buying process. It's quite another to plan for the Ping-Pong scenarios that will keep the ball in the air. 

 

What new considerations are you adding to your content strategy to account for the back-and-forth of extended conversation that won't abruptly leave your prospects hanging?

Source: Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions

 

 

Why So Many Companies Get Branding Wrong

 

A brand is the only corporate asset that, managed properly, will never depreciate. Think about it: patents expire, software ages, buildings crumble, roofs leak and machines break.  But a well-managed brand can increase in value year after year.

 

Despite this unique characteristic, brand is often misunderstood. It seems soft and fuzzy. It's often incorrectly defined. And, at least historically, it hasn't been a hard, measurable metric like sales, market share, stock price or price/earnings ratio that can be tracked on a spreadsheet or reported to the board. But neglecting a brand is both naïve and shortsighted.

 

In some ways branding is a victim of semantics. Call it "reputation" and nobody would ever argue that it's anything less that critical. All companies are careful to avoid doing anything that would harm their reputations.  But management teams commonly underachieve in the application of reputation management best practices...in a word, branding.

 

Too many business leaders believe branding is a discipline that lives in the marketing department. But it's much broader than that. Branding includes everything a company does, from the logo, to the way it handles customer complaints, to whether personnel keep their shirts tucked in. It's easy to limit perspective of branding to the verbal and visual expressions a company puts into the marketplace, but there isn't anything that anybody within an organization does (or fails to do) that doesn't affect how your company is perceived.

 

Effective branding improves the visibility of and respect for a product, service or company. It attracts attention and drives sales. It also enhances margins, as customers are willing to pay more for products and services from companies they know and trust.

 

It's easy to think about branding just in terms of the latest-and-greatest social media platform, viral video or smartphone app. Doing so means missing the fundamental principles of the discipline that go well beyond the trendy and transient. It's not like mathematics, engineering or accounting, in which there are rules or regulations to be followed. Instead, there are a significant number of commonsense, sometimes counterintuitive truths based on how real humans interact in the real world that can make a significant impact on any business.

 

Resource: Steve McKee

The Cost Of Dirty Data

 Bogus leads and misinformation in a database can have an adverse effect on your marketing efforts. After all, how many Mickey Mouse's and I.P. Freelys are there in the world?

 

You need to know the truth, no matter how painful it is. You need to know what all this junk email is actually costing you, alongside a calculated view on clean data to finally master the situation.  So go ahead, pull the proverbial curtain back, and take a long hard look at the cost of dirty data.

 

Minimally, a marketing contact (lead) includes email address, company name, first and last name and perhaps a job title.  Leads/contacts may be gathered from trade shows, outside lists, web events, etc. Online generated leads often lack mailing address, phone or other helpful data.

 

$1 per contact should be a reference point. Mass contacts may be as low as 50-60 cents per record while those generated at trade shows and special events can cost anywhere from $50 - $200 each. In B2B marketing, a greater scope of information for each contact, especially company segmentation and targeted information, is required to drive higher results. Poor targeting reduces response  and increased campaign cost.

 

The more information known about the prospect, the better for segmentations and marketing automation. Extremely granular targeting relies on data points to drive better results.  Typical targeting segments are geography, industry, revenues and employee size.  Better targeting yields higher email open rates, click-through rates, and more landing page conversions because messaging and campaigns are likely to be more relevant to the specific audience. 

 

Data quality goes downhill rapidly.  According to research from Marketing Sharpa, 2.1% of contacts go bad each month.  After a year, 25.1% of contacts at minimum are not valid. Invalid contacts may not be flagged as bad because auto-responder information isn't updating your database. Duplicate records are often created, especially if sales people also enter lists into your CRM.

 

Some clean their list by emailing it. Bad idea. Acquired lists are notorious for including "spam trap" emails created to identify companies emailing without permission. Bouncing emails signal the feedback loop that you are a reckless mailer.  Hitting spam trap emails signals you are a spammer and may cause all your email to be undeliverable. Mailing to bad records negatively affects future mailings. Low relevance, generic messages often have low open rates, low click-through rates, and high unsubscribes, which also affects your sender reputation. Without enriched data points, only generic messages can be mailed, and show poor response, which affects future deliverability.

 

Next time more about precision targeting.

 

 

Don’t Just Think ‘Lead’ Generation; Think ‘Need’ Generation

 

Article From: Production Machining, AJ Sweatt, principal from AJ Sweatt Logic & Communications

 

A mistake I often see in companies that serve manufacturing or industrial markets is in the system for managing “leads.” It’s not entirely a mistake, per se, but more of an overreliance on the system at the expense of customers. 

This approach almost immediately renders the prospect or customer as a number to conform with protocol. It creates the impression that the primary concern of the company is gettin’ the dough and moving on to the ‘next one.’ It minimizes the problems a prospect is trying to solve, while elevating the company’s bargaining position. And we rationalize this as just how business is done.

How many relationships—business or otherwise—are sustained or even last after a beginning like that? Maybe some. But I’ve seen far more partnerships fail under the weight of this system than those that were built on loyalty. 

To understand the point, think about this: Imagine the last time you were on the phone with your cable company, power company, or another service provider, trying to resolve an issue. We’ve all experienced the frustrations from dealing with automated systems and bureaucracy. How many conversations have we all had, lamenting the crumbling of our entire society and culture, based on our loss of basic customer service and social skills?

I’ve had these conversations, and many, many times with company owners and marketing cats. They share your (our) frustrations when bumping up against the cold, hard truths of relationships built on a lead rather than a need. They get just as angry and frustrated as we all do in those situations. And then they return to their jobs of demanding or sustaining the same type of system in their own companies that frustrates their own customer base in the same ways.

A customer isn’t a lead to be harvested, but a person serving something that needs help to grow. Yet, a lead-based system can permeate an entire organization, where overworked and misdirected resources follow flowcharts or standard practices to build revenue rather than loyalty. Consider this: Does your company promote a system that serves leads rather than needs by passing the responsibility of gathering the customer’s problems and challenges to sales or applications engineers for engagement, costing time?

Does your company promote a system that serves leads rather than needs by passing basic contact information down the line and counts this as success? Does your company not bother to follow up with the customer, even if the company doesn’t get the sale, to see if they’ve been taken care of? Does your company push automated, broad messaging designed to attract targets to an audience that actually has very specific, real needs? Does your company treat a new addition to a database as a success? Does your company look to generate a contact, rather than one that shows the potential the customer can realize by partnering with you?

Is the cycle of lead generation a seemingly unbreakable machine that can’t even be discussed, deviated from or challenged?

I’m not suggesting that sound lead acquisition and management systems aren’t critical to any successful manufacturing enterprise. What I am asking, though, is to think if the system to manage leads in your company has become the tail wagging the dog and may be unintentionally harming sales.

Some customer relationships just don’t work out. That’s a fact of business life. But many end too soon because they begin on a foundation that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of disappointment. These systems are often built on measuring a lead reaching a specific point in the chain through the seller’s organization and less about the progress the customer is making at each stage.

Consider our own frustrations as we deal personally with lead generators and bureaucrats. And then ask yourself, “Are we generating something valuable or just an invoice?” 

 

Ad Clickers - Less Likely Prospects

 Using a search engine or industry web site to find information, answer a question or reach a web site to buy something has become as second nature for most of us as using the remote control to surf TV channels.  Search advertising borrows from the inherent utility of the search engine and industry site - buyers are presented with links that match their query and are designed to quickly direct them to specific products and services.

 

Online display advertising, however, is a different story. Prospects go to web sites for information and engagment not to click on ads that send them elsewhere.  Recent research has only 16 percent of prospects clicking on display ads in a given month indicating that most visitors to a typical advertiser's site get there some way other than clicking an display ads.

 

So how valuable is click measurement as a means of assessing online display ad effectiveness?

 

Not very.  In fact, click-based display campaigns can run completely counter to your interests as an advertiser. Optimizing your campaign for click, instead of optimizing for conversions, is pursuing the wrong objective. For display advertising, clicks aren't just suboptimal, they're anti-optimal. And they're likely to produce significantly poorer results.

 

Search behavior is linked to an explicit and often an immediate need. There is a clear reason for searching, with a clear result in mind. When prospects consume most types of online content, they have arrived at their destination. There's typically no intent to leave at the earlies opportunity.

 

Prospects don't expect to click on an ad. Relying on display clicks to drive conversions is often a dead end.  Visitors most likely to click on display ads are often vastly different from your best prospects. If you're optimizing your campaign for clicks, there's a good chance you're actually anti-optimizing for sales. Instead, optimize toward your ultimate objective: the campaign conversion rate rather than toward the click-through rate.  Focus on developing the ncecssary systems and skills to understand the true impact of your ad investments throughout your prospects' path to purchase.

 

Connect with people who really are your prospects. The low click-to-conversion correlation doesn't mean display ads are ineffective. 

 

Next time: How to optimize for conversions.

 

Source: Konrad Felman, Quantcast