Marketing Blog

I think reviews are helpful for a few different niches that we serve. They are great for generating leads for construction marketing, general contractors, and financial services. But honestly, everyone should take the time to try to garner good reviews.

People with problems love to know how others with a similar problem were able to solve it. The internet has made it a lot easier to find the solution to your problems.

Recommendations have power “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” but most of us aren’t IBM. You are offering “social proof” that you have a good solution for your subset of customers. Social proof is a person or company volunteering that they have done something and giving reasons why you should do it too. That is why testimonials are so powerful.
But sometimes it is uncomfortable to ask for testimonials. I understand, it sounds a bit full of yourself to say, “So tell me how awesome my company is and how much you love it.”

And isn’t that what we think we sound like when we ask for a testimonial or review?

Make the Ask Smaller

But in reality, all you are asking is, “We believe that we helped you solve a problem. Would you mind writing (or telling us) a sentence a two about it?”

Now it seems like a much smaller ask right?

What should the testimonial say?

I would make it as easy on the person you are asking as possible. Leading with the “just a sentence or two about how we helped” has been a great format for us.

Ideally, at some point, you will have collected a lot of testimonials and can pick and choose the most compelling testimonials.

What makes an Effective Testimonial? 

A good testimonial is clear and to the point. It describes a problem, the solution and why someone should work with your company.

Also to add even more “social proof” you should have the name of the person, and a picture seals the deal.

Who to Ask for Testimonials?

Ask friends and family first. We have done a lot of work for friends and family members; you might of as well. These are often the easiest to approach about a testimonial.

Next, ask clients that you have worked with more than once with whom you have a relationship. Try to bring it up organically in the course of a conversation in person. If you don’t anticipate seeing them in person, then follow the steps below.

How to Ask

I think the easiest way to request by email detailing exactly what you are asking for and where. Make it as easy as possible for your network to review you.

If you don’t get a response, I think a follow-up phone call is a very good idea.

While you should personalize each request as much as possible, you can use a general e-mail template to make “your ask” as easy to fulfill as possible. Have a model for each platform on which you are looking to get reviews. If you are trying to get reviews via social, request the review through social. Makes sense, right?

You can ask for reviews on a variety of platforms. Always try to make it as easy as possible for people to review you.

• Social (Facebook)
• Search engines (Google, Bing)
• Niche directories (Thumbtack)
• Review sites (Yelp)

For instance, if you want a review on Google send your prospective reviewers a link to that page so they can review you with the least effort.

Want additional information on marketing strategies for Construction Marketing or General Contractors?Download our guide.

Ah, trade shows. I have a love-hate relationship with trade shows. I know that’s odd considering we do marketing and trade show training, but hear me out.

I love them when there is a good trade show marketing strategy in place. Good times. You can get a ton of leads, opportunities and move people down the sales funnel. You get to work with a team, and everyone pulls together.

However, when there is no strategy, and the plan is “go to the show” then there are problems.

While there are a lot of things to consider for the marketing side of a trade show, one of your primary goals is to generate leads. Hopefully, you get a lot of potential leads from the show floor. Now we raise the question; How do you handle the leads on the trade show floor?

At a former company, at the end of the show, we sat in a room after the show and distributed leads. And by the end of the show, I mean days later after everyone was back in the office.

“Triage your leads at the end of each day, every day”

If you are doing this, I am metaphorically hitting your nose with a newspaper. This is a bad, bad approach!

Mainly because of the time lag. There is no possible way that you remember the nuance of your 3-minute conversation from Monday on Friday. Especially since you had 50 similar conversations.

That is the reason you need to triage your leads at the end of each day. Get them in and get them distributed.

You might feel weird doing this on the show floor, but I have done it many times with no ill effects. Some people are worried that their competitors are going to overhear. If you are concerned about that, have a room rented off the show floor where you can distribute the leads.

But most of the time that is overkill. Frankly, most people are exhausted after working the show and just want to go. Their tiredness affords you some semi-privacy to distribute the leads.

Now you have the leads, and you can get them into the hands of people who can help. But some of those leads are not going to be that great, right?

For that reason, we fall back on B.A.N.T., which you probably know stands for:

• Budget: Do they have the budget for your solution?
• Authority: Are they the decision maker? Or at least an influencer?
• Need: Do they have a need for your solution?
• Time Line: Are they interested in making a change in a reasonable timeline?

For different circumstances, we might use a different qualifier, but seat of your pants on a trade show floor the quicker you can qualify the better. Remember for a trade show we want to qualify and move on.

So how do we triage the different leads that we get? Typically we divide them into an alphabetic order. 

A: A leads, oh those sweet A leads. That is why we come to the show. These are our targets. They meet every one of the BANT qualifiers there maybe a little wiggle room if we haven’t gotten all of our questions answered, but they are it. Depending on the size of your show and how alignment in the industry, this is probably about 10-15% of your leads. These are sales ready. Get them into a nurturing program, but sales must contact them within 12-16 hours at the latest.

B: These leads are giving the A’s a run for their money. They meet at least three of the qualifications, but there are a few more questions. They are ready to turn over to sales but might need some massaging. Give them to sales but remember they need to go into a nurturing program as well.

Depending on your lead volume you might contact them within 12-24 hours, but they need to be in sales hands.

C: C’s are tricky. C leads may meet part of our BANT. They may be a company that we target that we can help, but they may not be ready, AND this person doesn’t have the authority.

However, these are people that we want in our ecosystems. We want them to get our information; we want them to get our newsletter or connect on social.

The best idea for these companies is to nurture them and keep your company front of mind. While they may not be great leads now, they have potential.

D: OK maybe they have potential. Not a lot. They meet maybe one of our BANT qualifications. Probably “Need”. But they don’t have the others. They could use our solution maybe at some point in 18-24 months. Don’t disregard them, put them in your nurture stream.

And hey maybe they will remember you when they are at their next company. They may also be a possible supplier, or even excited college student looking to break into the industry.

Which brings us to F: This is pretty much competitors. Ditch them; they will follow you anyway on social if you are doing a great job.

We hope this helps you get a better ROI from your trade show marketing. Want to learn more about trade show marketing strategy, get our guide.

Often content marketing and inbound marketing get tangled in people’s minds. It is much the same way that SEO and inbound marketing get confused.

However the key to remember is that inbound marketing is an overall marketing strategy. Whereas content marketing and SEO are tactics.
What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and production of various items that are hosted online. The content can be e-books, white papers, videos, infographics. Pretty much any content that you can create and publish online.

Benefits: So what are some of the benefits of content marketing?  As people and companies build more and more walls around getting to decision makers, you need a way to engage those people from an inbound (new marketing) way vs outbound (traditional sales and business development) . That is the key behind content marketing. You offer something of value that your prospects want and need. That brings them into your website.

Objective of Content Marketing

This content functions in a couple of different ways.

Nectar: Bees don’t visit flowers because they like the smell, it is because they want to get something of value. Bees go to flowers to collect the nectar.

Content is the same way, it is the nectar of your website. This is value that you are giving to your customers (usually for free) that will help them in their jobs or lives. Let’s say you are an industrial company. In this scenario you sell industrial tubing. You could create an ebook on how to find the best sort of industrial tubing for different applications.

Contact: The goal for the content marketing is to get downloads. In order to get your valuable content, visitors have to provide an email address and name. What you do with that information varies depending on your goals.

Informational: The best content is always informational. It should not be sales-y. You are offering this to help your audience. Yes the long term goal is to acquire customers, but it is also to build a reputation. A reputation as knowledgeable and helpful!

Useful: Creating content that gets downloaded is only part of the task of content marketing. In addition you need to create content that not only appears to be useful for your clients on your offer or landing page, but actually useful.

Imagine the feeling of submitting your information to get a piece of content that you think will be great, only to find out it is cobbled together and basically worthless. What is the chance you interact with the company that produced that sub-par content?

Goals: Creating content without specific goals is not going to do a lot. Trust me, I tried to do it that way for years. Content by itself is ok, content with a plan is great! You need to go in with goals of what you want to accomplish from your content.

Ideally your goals should be S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific
• Measuable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

Content Marketing vs Inbound Marketing

So now that we know what content marketing is, how does it work in inbound marketing? As we discussed content marketing is a tactic of inbound marketing.

With inbound marketing you are going to use software automation, and other smart elements on your website in order to maximize your content. Content marketing is only a piece of your inbound marketing strategy. However it is a very important part.

You are going to nurture your contacts so that the leads you send over to sales are “sales ready”. The time of marketing throwing every random lead over to sales and saying “Figure it out” is over.

With inbound marketing you are developing legitimate qualified marketing leads.

If you are interested in learning more about inbound marketing you can download our guide to inbound marketing here.

Your content marketing efforts may be the most important part of your inbound marketing strategy. You need to have a compelling piece of inbound marketing content that resonates with your audience. You also need to have a great landing page that highlights the benefits of downloading your content.

If you have read and followed the first blogs about inbound you have already completed steps that will make this easier for you when creating the content.

You already have your buyer personae from the first step. You know who our audience is and to whom we are talking.
In the first post, we used “Whole Life Wally” for our financial services example. However for this one, just for fun, let’s say we are a construction company that wants to market to an audience interested in playgrounds for towns.

So our target is probably the head of the recreation department, Recreation Ron. 

The first question is, what type of content to build? There is a huge variety of content that might be useful to your audience.

Our most downloaded types of content are e-books. We condense a lot of valuable marketing information for our visitors. The key is that they get the value before they become customers. In fact out of 100 people that download our information, only a few become customers.

For the purpose of this example let’s say we will build an e-book for Ron. However, you can also create video, checklist, infographics, pretty much anything. Don’t forget about recycling printed information if it has value and would speak to your audience.

But back to Ron.

What would Ron be searching for when finding a construction company to install his playground?

Perhaps cost-efficiency? He works for a city, so he will probably be budget conscious. How about a “Guide to Budget Playground Equipment.”

Or maybe the real question is child safety? So that would be a different e-book. I would suggest you make your e-book at least eight pages long with a lot of images or illustrations that make it an easy read.

Ok done with the content?

Now you need to create your landing page. I would suggest taking all of the usual steps that you do before creating a page. Do some keyword research around your content marketing. You can use Google Keyword tool to find keywords with good traffic.

Then make sure you describe your offer well. Having an image of what your visitors will receive can help. But it all comes back to the question; Will your audience perceive this as valuable?

Make sure that you talk about the benefits of downloading your content. What will your visitors gain? Why should they take the final step and “pay” with their contact information?

As far as your form for contact information ask for the bare minimum that you can is one technique. The value and scarcity of your content will dictate what information you can get from your prospects.

Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Download our Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Manufacturing and industrial marketing strategy don’t always easily translate to a personal relationship between prospects and your brand. Sometimes there is a problem getting an emotional connection to people.

Industrial air filtration? Construction? Material handling? Is there a less personable sounding business than material handling?

I think industrial and manufacturing companies need to take a page from CPA’s, accounting and insurance companies. In these financial services companies, you have to develop a personal rapport with customers.

Why? Most of these financial services company’s marketing is in a very well-defined location. They have a limited target area and a limited audience, and if they don’t build a rapport with their market, they fail.

In financial services, business owners know that people work with people they like. And if brands can show a more personal connection it is more likely that people will like you.

So how can industrial marketing build a personal relationship?

Social: Social media is a great way to display your personality. You can show potential customers, suppliers, etc. real insight into your company. When you do fun events, sponsor charities or celebrate birthdays, this is not just a chance to build morale; it also lets your company’s personality shine through.

Images: If you are thinking about having pictures of your employees on your website do it. Not just the executives, but people that your customers interact with on a daily basis. If people are going to talk to Sue in accounts receivable, have a picture of Sue on your website.

Some executives say that you shouldn’t have pictures of people who work at your company. After all, they might leave.

My pushback is, so you want to have stock pictures of people who will never work for your business? That doesn’t make sense to me.

The key is to build your website on a CMS (content management systems). That way if Sue in accounting leaves you can replace her picture with Janet.

Video: Video is a great way to illustrate your humanity to the world. However, there are caveats. Be sure that you are giving your staff a way to be real in the video. Also, know how to get the most our of your video production.(Need help with that? We have a Guide to Video)

For instance, we used a bit of our personality in our video about how 366 competes with larger marketing agencies. There is an underlying theme that we tie back to again and again that is within our strategy.

The key is not to let “professional” get confused with uptight. There is no business to business sales. It is people buying from people.

Let your company’s personality shine through, and you can develop a personable brand.

Interested in more Industrial and Manufacturing Strategy? Get your guide here.