Marketing Blog

The majority of marketers worldwide think that video marketing is the content creation that creates the highest ROI? Pretty cool right?

However, if you have ever gone to Youtube, you can tell that while there are a ton of videos the quality is….let’s say hit or miss.

This is especially true when you look at industrial video marketing. If I have to hear one more CEO droning on about his company, I will claw my eyes out.

Well probably not, that does seem a bit dramatic. Ok, I will be bummed out and forced to eat a sundae to recover. I dislike poorly done videos.
One of the reasons I got into marketing was local car commercials. They were so bad… and most continue to be bad. I wanted to go into marketing to make sure they were better, but while my career took a different turn, I still think if you are going to create a video you should at least make it watchable.

So how do you have an industrial video that does not encourage people to push the back button?

Keep it fun: One of the things we continually preach is that you need to display your personality in your marketing. The phrase B2B is misleading. You are not marketing towards a large faceless entity you are marketing to a group of people. So don’t market like a big faceless entity.

Your industrial video marketing is a great way to display your personality. Use people from the office or the plant and show a bit of why you like working there. Fun is contagious.

Keep it short: The length of your video does a lot to influence both how many people watch and how engaged they stay with your video.

You want to keep your video in the area of 1-3 minutes. I think the sweet spot for an industrial video is right below two minutes. Psychologically a 1.47 long video seems vastly shorter than a 2.07 long video.

Keep it creative: Find a way to keep your video innovative and entertaining. While entertainment is not the end goal for your video if you have an original or fresh take people are more engaged.

Keep it focused: In football, they say that if you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterbacks. It is similar to marketing videos if you have two messages you have no messages. Remember to stick to your one overriding message and have everything else support that message.

Want more ideas on video marketing? Download our Complete Guide to Video Marketing here.

In a lot of manufacturing and industrial marketing, in fact, in any technical field, you need to write about some very complicated issues. Many times the person who is writing about them doesn’t have a background in the subject.

I have been there. A lot.

I am not an engineer, or in the construction industry, I don’t have a CPA, and I do not know the ins and outs of automated material handling. At least not as well as the engineers, CPA’s and designers who know their stuff.

However, I can and have written about the above for a few reasons. Not because I am super intelligent, but because I initially started as a journalism major. Journalism taught me to I listen and learn and maybe more importantly to translate. Translation is essential because as well as the technical people know their stuff, they can’t always write about it, at least from a marketing or sales perspective.

It is vastly different to write about specs and features than to translate those features into benefits and USP’s to successfully perform marketing for industrial companies.

So here is my guide to writing intelligently about subjects where you are not an expert.

Step 1 Read: Take the time and research your subject. You need to find out as much as you can about your topic. Look at your competitor’s websites and their collateral. Also don’t forget to read your own collateral and website.

If you have any groups that are focused on your industry, visit them and read as much as you can about the subject.

Lastly perform searches online and see if you can come up with angles that you may have missed.

Do the initial research to a have a baseline on your writing and to know what questions to ask for the next part.

Step 2 Outline: From your initial research you should be able to write a short synopsis of your angle for your piece. Also, you should write a framework to keep everything organized. Now you will find that despite your research you will still have a lot of questions.

That’s great. Write down your questions and move on to step 3.

Step 3 Interview: While many of the technical people at your company may not be able to write about their expertise they know how to talk about it.

And they are likely to be passionate about their field and want to talk about it. The problem is that a lot of people may not want to hear about it because frankly a lot of technical information may come off as dull.

So as an interviewer, you have a perfect scenario.

• Someone who is a technical expert
• Who is engaged in their topic
• In a field that many find not that interesting

In short, someone who wants to talk, but there are not a lot of listeners. You will fill that gap.

And you come in as an informed listener because of your earlier research.

Interview tips:

• Schedule your interview in advance.
• E-mail the questions to your technical expert, so they have a framework for the discussion.
• Have a defined time limit for the interviews (say 25 minutes). The more specific, the more you sound like it will be concise.
• Schedule a follow-up for any additional questions Ask your technical expert if they would mind reading your writing before you publish

When you are creating a new or updated industrial website, you need a lot of content either pages, case studies, blog posts, whitepapers, etc.  Need some ideas on strategy get our Industrial and Manufacturing Guide.

We tailor most marketing videos towards potential clients and leads. While we all know it is important to spend resources attracting more customers sometimes it is just as critical to market to different stakeholders like current and future employees.

Recently we had a conversation with a person in human resources at an industrial company. She was interested in our thoughts on how to convey their culture to prospective employees. Immediately I thought of video. I firmly believe that video allows you to put your best foot forward and gives potential employees a real insight into your company.If you are thinking about a human resources video of your own, whether for recruitment or internal employees, here is some advice on the keys for your human resource videos.

Goal: Know what you want to accomplish ahead of time. Remember to focus on the most important results you want to see. Are you trying to build a recruitment base or illustrate your company culture to new employees?

One of the most critical parts of goal setting is to ensure that your goals are SMART. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. Making your goals, SMART is the only way to know if you have met your objective.

If you want more information about building SMART goals, you can download our template here. 

All and Nothing: Remember what your objective is and stick to it. Don’t try to make a video that appeals to everyone and does everything. That is a great way to make a bad video.

A video for recruiting is not going to be the same as a video for a shareholders meeting.

Chose Your Cast Based on Your Audience: Depending on the video it might help to have people that are at different levels of the organization. If you are recruiting for a large financial services company, not many of your future employees are going to be in the C-suite so be sure to feature employees that they can relate to easier.

Be Genuine: There is a difference between being prepared to speak on film and sounding like a corporate robot. Newsflash: Nobody believes the corporate robot. So make sure that the people that appear in your video are genuine and real.

A way to do this is to get everyone who will be on film comfortable. You might want to practice a few takes and be prepared to run through the video a few time until everyone gets used to the camera and nerves settle.

“Being unique and being respectful of your audience’s time goes a long way to a successful video.”

Length: Make sure there is no fluff in your video. Be stern with the editing knife. This all starts when you build your script and continues to the final edit.

If possible, have an outside objective partner do the video editing. Choose someone that is not beholden to anyone in the company and removed from company politics.

Most videos should be under three minutes long but a two-minute video is better and a minute and a half is probably the ideal. Get in, tell your story and get out.

Originality: There are a lot of bad corporate videos out there that have the same feel. If I had a dollar for every executive explaining their company with a potted plant in the background I would be writing this blog on my yacht.

Don’t make a boring video! If you can’t think of an exciting or entertaining premise contact a professional video marketer who can help you. Your human resources video’s originality works hand in hand with length. Being unique and being respectful of your audience’s time goes a long way to a successful video.

It’s all about showmanship, right?

Now the question is what videos to create? Here are some examples that might work for you.

Introduction Video: This is a very general way to introduce your company. It is probably the most used and, in my opinion, the least effective when it comes to new employees.

The problem is that many companies tend to focus on hard facts like the number of employees, locations, and sales amounts. These are not very relevant to new or prospective employees. If you want to do a general introduction, try to focus on the human aspect of your company for the video.

You need to find something that a new employee would relate to, perhaps a benefit of working for the company outside of the usual medical, dental and 401-k

Interview Video: This type of marketing video is more geared towards a deep dive with one key individual. It could be a CEO or CFO or a more junior employee.

Once again I think interview videos are more effective if they are relatable to individual employees. For instance, if you want to illustrate growth potential at your company focus on someone who has worked their way up the ladder of the company.

Culture Video: One of the central questions that I ask companies is, “What is your culture like?” I imagine that a lot of future employees ask that question as well.

Video is a great way to illustrate your culture with the bonus that you can approach a “company culture video” in a lot of different ways. You can focus on the work environment, company mission, values, expectations goals, etc.

However, the key is to hone in one aspect that is the most engaging to potential employees and zero in on that.

For that reason, I broke out the Values below. Feel free to substitute “values” for any of the above subsets.

Values Video: the values of your company can be an exciting way to introduce your business to prospective new employees. An example of this video might be a talk with one of your senior members of management. Or possibly use snippets of different employees talking about what they think the values of the company are.

Interested in creating a recruiting video that speaks to your potential recruiting base? Sign up to talk about an introductory video with no obligation and qualify for a 25% discount if you proceed with a video project.

We meet with a fair number of companies about their industrial marketing. Many of these companies want a new website. Their current sites are dated, not functional or just look well…bad.

We help companies with marketing and website design. However, often the underlying problem is not their website, it is that they don’t have a real message. Their message is flawed, dated or they try to cram a bunch of different messages together.

AND they have a bad website…

That’s why we want to talk about how to find your industrial marketing message. (Even if you don’t have an industrial or manufacturing company this process will work for nearly any B2B company.)

Let’s get started.
First Step: The easiest way to find a great message is to ask a question to your customers. What do you do that makes them choose your company over everyone else? 
Don’t worry if you have more than one answer. Most companies probably will have a variety of responses. Although, you might have different versions of the same idea.

For instance, if you get “quick delivery” and “easy ordering” that might all lead you to the fact that your ordering process beats your competitors.

Second Step: OK, you have your input from your external sources. Now put all of the answers up on a board and try to group them. In our above example “quick delivery” and “ease of ordering” could be grouped. 

How you ask? Those are totally different, right? Because the real thing we are trying to tease out of our questions is not the features that our customers like, but the benefits that we offer them.

For instance “delivery time” could in the customer’s mind, in fact, be “shorter downtime” or “increased production.” People and companies don’t buy features; they buy benefits.

So we want to focus on the benefits that our company provides
.
And let’s all hope that why your customers choose you is not cost. Cost ‘s hard to compete on and not a great long-term solution. If it is cost, maybe look for your second reason.

Third Step: Now you know why customers choose you. Let’s say that it is delivery speed and ease of ordering. We might know the benefit that we are trying to find.

Great. Talk to your marketing and salespeople. How do they speak of these factors in their presentations? How do they have that message formulated? What really resonates when they talk about “quick delivery”?

Fourth Step: OK we can take our benefit that we found in step three and build our message around that.

Let’s say that our benefit that everything coalesced around the most was “shorter downtime.” That’s a really marketable benefit that has a financial gain for our customers.

We want to build all of our messages on our website, print collateral around the fact that we offer a short downtime.

It would be best if we could say that we have the shortest downtime in the industry, the southeast or something along those lines. But unless you actually have stats to back it up, I would be reluctant to print that.

Note: Be wary of combining too many features into a very broad benefit. Yes, it will appeal to more people, but broader message is often a weaker message.

We hope this helps.

Speaking of help

Hey good news guys!

In October we are going to launch a self-paced, class web design class. Not only will it teach you how to build a self-hosted modern website like this, it will also teach you the marketing you need to do first to make a website that your customers and prospects love and generates leads.

100% from scratch! 

And the best part is it requires 0% technical knowledge. If you can set up an account on Facebook, you can create a great website with no ongoing monthly cost from a website builder, program or developer, because you are the developer.

Sign up for an alert and qualify for early bird pricing that is over 67% off of the regular price.

In our first SEO on-page article we talked about how to take advantage of long-tail keywords. Now we want to dig down into what we need to optimize a website page.

The first part is to make sure you write around the long-tail key phrase you researched. Make sure that it is a unique keyword for your site (you haven’t used before).

Page title: Add your keyword to your page title. Remember you have 72 characters that can appear in your page title so use them. Also, bear in mind that search engines weight the words at the front of your title more heavily than the ones towards the end.

Your key phrase should also be included in your page slug and URL as well.

Content: Makes sure that your key phrase is in the first part of the page. Placement of the keyword near the top is different from traditional writing where you lead up more to your topic. Writing SEO optimized copy is more similar to scientific writing vs. prose.

You should also mention your key phrase through the copy as appropriate we must caution against “keyword stuffing” or using the key phrase unnaturally.
Remember you are not just writing for SEO but for a real human audience you want to persuade to act. This can be easy to forget when you try to create “perfect SEO” but getting your audience to the page is only part of the battle. Getting them to act is winning the war.

Note: If it comes down to ticking a box for SEO or writing better always lean towards better writing.

Another component of your content is to make sure that you have over 300 words on your page. More is better to a certain extent as long as it is all engaging content.

Headings: You should use your key phrase in your headings. Not necessarily all your headings, (remember you have two audiences). A good place to add your key word is in an H2 heading.

Links: The internet is a connected ecosystem so remember to add internal links as appropriate. For instance to a related blog article or a call to action to the next step you want your visitor to make.

Image: You should chose an image or images that help engage your readers. However, you should also use an alt description that includes your keyword.

Meta description: The meta description is a synopsis of your page. In search engine results it is below the page title.

In WordPress, you can edit your meta description beneath the page copy. However, different themes and plugins can affect the location. Depending on what program you use to build your website it lives in different places.

You should keep your meta description below 160 characters and remember to build the synopsis around your chosen key phrase.

SEO is an important part of inbound marketing. If you need help with your SEO in Charlotte or anywhere in the Carolinas reach out to us. Want to learn more about SEO and inbound marketing download our Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Not every visitor to your website is at the same stage in their journey. In fact, given the variety of keywords, you might appear for it’s impossible to know all of the different paths a potential buyer is using to get to you.

When you add-in social media or direct search, you have even more variants to your possible visitor’s stages.

The problem is that if you have a newer website or don’t have a variety of content, you might not be able to tell your visitor’s stage. This includes premium website content, which is a downloadable piece of content for your visitors.

However, if you have pages that detail how you can help your prospect’s journey, it will be more beneficial to you and your sales team in the long run because you will not only be garnering leads but you will know where they are in their journey.
If you know where a lead is in their path, then you know what the next step should be. If a buyer is early in their process, you can send them supporting literature. If they are in the decision phase, you might want to reach out directly.

A central part of inbound marketing is offering premium content to your potential buyer to generate better leads for you.

Awareness:

This is the first step of their journey. They have a problem and are casting about for a way to fix it. For instance, let’s say that you are an insurance company. Your salespeople say that they need better leads for your new “Plan A Product.”

What is the solution? I would suggest adding content creation as a part of your inbound marketing process.

You need potential buyers who are looking for the solution that “Plan A Product” solves.

Content Creation: For the awareness stage, you want to start with creating educational blog articles that fulfill that part to your buyer’s stage. At the awareness stage, you are not going to sell anyone so why try? All you want is to help your potential customers and show that you are a thought leader.

Also, you might want to incorporate premium content. Perhaps eBooks and whitepapers.

Our primary goal for this part of the journey is to make it less sales-y and more educational. People want your help, so help them.

Consideration:

At this stage, your potential buyer has committed to finding a solution to their problem. They know that they have a problem and that there may be a few ways of solving said problem.

Let’s say you offer automated material handling. While there are a variety of means to address the puzzle of distribution, your challenge is to present the benefits of your solution.

Content Creation: For this stage of the buyer’s journey, you might consider premium content that provides a comparison between a few different solutions.

One of our clients who offers an automated material handling solution has a video that directly compares the difference between automated picking and manual picking.

It directly shows the difference and how automated saves you money in the long run with space, accuracy, and labor.

Decision:

You have a prospect that knows they have a problem and knows in a general way what solution they need. At this point, while you still need educational content you also need content that is edging more towards a sales feel as opposed to purely educational.

Content Creation: In this decision stage you might want to look at more content that directly supports your production color solutions. In this phase, you are likely to use case studies, or product services literature.

If you can offer a product demo that might also be helpful for your prospects.

As we know, buyers go through a lot of the buyer’s journey before they even contact any partners or vendors. To be part of the decision you need to have good, engaging premium content for potential buyers.

Want to get templates to produce your e-books? Download 5 Free Ebook Templates