Marketing Blog

Repeat after me. Your Company is not Your Product. Again, Your Company is not Your Product

I think that a lot of enterprises have a problem when making a corporate video. They want to talk about their products (and did I mentions that your company is not your product).

Your company is your brand. And your brand is everything about your business. How you answer the phone, your font, your invoices.

Everything. So why not make your corporate videos about your brand?

That is why I am so confused when people want to make a corporate video that is….well just about a product. Not to say that a video shouldn’t be about your product.

But not your first video. And maybe not your second or third video either.
Now the question, “Why should I not make a video about my product? I have a great product, ” and I am sure you do.

I have a great product as well, but…

First people don’t care about your product. That is a hard pill to swallow, I know.

Take 366 for example. We provide marketing for our clients.

Unfortunately, no one wants to buy “marketing.” Marketing is only a means to an end.

What our customers want are:

Leads or
Sales or
Visitors or
Branding or
Something, but never

“Marketing.”

That’s why we made a video about us. Yes, it mentions what we do, but the overall feel is an introduction to 366 and our brand.

Instead of a product video, I think a better corporate video is more about YOU.

Your company, your branding, who you are. You want to help your customer, reveal more about your business or show that you are a person.

That is what video excels at doing. I think one of the problems with an industrial video is that we use it as a fancy brochure. It is so much more than that. Or it can be if we do it right.

For instance, take this video we did recently for a client. This video was for the North American arm of a large international industrial company.

The product they make is not relevant to this video at all.

In fact the entire video is about recent events in the company.

While this is not the complete video, this is a trailer to get people interested enough watch the full-length video.

What we wanted to demonstrate from the “trailer” is the personality of the company and the CEO. People rarely see top management of a company as being people, too. They are usually a headshot on the website or in a corporate bio, but not living, breathing people like you and me.

So how do you keep your corporate video from becoming like everyone else’s? And by everyone else, I mean a bit boring and not full of value for your customers.

Have a plan: The first objective for any tactic is to have a plan. What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? What are your goals for this video project? And are your goals S.M.A.R.T.?

Show your Personality: Be a human. Act like you are not just a corporate cog. And above all, have fun.

B2B is a misnomer. People buy from people. Be a person that people want to buy from and partner with.

Add Value: Give your audience something they want. Based on your goals and your buyer persona figure out what they want and give it to them.

Nobody needs a commercial on your product. Give your prospects something they value. Tell them how you solve their problems.

Or at least give them a reason to buy from you, instead of your competitors.

Measure: How can you measure the success of your video production? That can be complicated depending on your goals. I suggest hosting your video on Wistia or a similar platform that gives you feedback and insights into your video performance while improving your SEO.

Want to make a more compelling video for your business? Download our guide to video marketing here.

As marketers, we spend a lot of time and money making sure that we get more leads. Leads are the lifeblood of sales. While you should measure marketing ROI with more than lead generation, many of things that we try to do in marketing are to drive more leads.

There is a world of tactics that you could spend your marketing dollars on to harvest more leads. However, how do you know where you should spend them? Well, I would look at your most recent expenditures. Check your CRM and see where you have spent money in the past. (don’t have a CRM? Let me suggest one for free here).

Let’s say you recently attended a trade show. You spent $50,000. Be sure you include everything. Travel, meals, booth space, entertainment, giveaways. Everything. (and yes I know that there are more benefits to trade shows then raw leads, but we are going to simplify for the sake of illustration.)

You generated 50 leads and 25 qualified leads (want to know the difference between qualified leads and regular leads? Check out our video).

Now we need to make assumptions so feel free to put in your numbers. Download the Lead Calculator here.

Let’s say for instance that you can usually get five opportunities out of 25 qualified leads, and out of the opportunities, close one sale.

If your sale generates 50k + you are good. If not let’s say it only causes 20k…well…then you might want to look at what other returns you are getting on that trade show.

But before you cut the show entirely ask yourself, how many times does that customer you generated buy again? If they are going to buy only one more time, that puts you at a 50K investment with a 40K return. Not great, but a lot better.

But if your customers tend to repeat buy over a number of years the scenario becomes more attractive. Let’s say if they buy every two years for ten years then absolutely keep going to the show if you can get that return.

How Much is a Lead Worth?
How often will a customer buy?	5 times
Average Sale Price	$20,000
Opportunities to Sales	20.00%
Average Opportunities from Q.L.	20.00%
Qualified Leads (Q.L.) from Leads	50.00%
Leads	50
Each lead is worth	$2,000
You have Generated	$100,000

 

This chart demonstrates you can spend $100,000 for your trade show and still break even.

Remember generating leads is not the only goal for marketing, but if you want to tie a quantitative value to a specific marketing spend it works fairly well.

Want your own lead calculator? Download it here.

About ten years ago I started out with inbound marketing. However, I would get this complaint from management about blogging and content creation.

“If we do this we are giving away all of our secrets! Our competitors will steal all our ideas!”

Oddly enough I still encounter this objection on occasion.

So let’s do our best to put a final nail in the coffin of this objection.

• You don’t give away everything
• Your competitors (if they are smart) are pursuing content creation already
• Sales has changed
• Give value before the sale

1. You don’t give away everything. For instance, I am not suggesting that if you are an industrial company that you use the blueprint of one of your widgets as a piece of collateral.

First of all, none of your prospects are going to see any value in a blueprint. People don’t care about the technology; they care about how the technology helps them.

So your collateral and blogging are based around helping them solve their problem. And is giving people information on how to address a problem online really any different from what you do on the tradeshow floor or magazine article interview?

2. Your competitors are already pursuing content marketing to some extent. In fact, if they are smart they are looking at inbound marketing (think content marketing combined with automated marketing).

That means that the perception in the market is that your competitors are thought leaders in the industry and you….well… maybe you aren’t. Your competitors are probably also generating leads and opportunities through their content marketing strategy of which you never hear.

3. Sales has changed: In the pre-internet days, actually maybe even a decade ago, to get information about a solution you had to talk to a company. That usually meant hearing a sales pitch or going to a tradeshow.

Now in a matter of minutes, you can log on and learn most of what a company has to offer and how their solution might work for you.

Today customers go 60% of the way down the sales funnel, on average, before they pick up the phone to talk to a company. They progress that first 60% with information that they find online.

What happens if a prospect comes to your website and they can’t learn about the information that they want? That’s right they move on to the next site.

4. Value before the sale: If you can help a customer with their problem before they even talk to you, don’t you think you change their perception of your company?

I would say heck yeah!

If you are offering value on both sides of the sale, then you become a resource, not a vendor. Who do you think people want to work with resources or vendors? And who do you think they feel is more expendable, a resource or a vendor?

Want to learn more about content marketing or inbound? Get our guide to starting an inbound campaign.

 

Many of the clients that we work with have a small marketing budget and a smaller staff. However, they can still make a big impact if done right. Let’s talk about a few ways to more effectively market your industrial company.

Outsource: Many of the clients that we work with have a tiny or non-existent marketing department. If this is the case for you, utilizing a firm to outsource particular strategies or tactics that you want to pursue may be a good fit for your business.
For instance, you don’t need to have a videographer on staff 24/7 for the few video project you might do a year. The same for photography. The same for social media. However, you can also outsource most if not all of your marketing functions.

We’re talking to a few of clients now about utilizing 366 consulting to create the overall marketing strategy. The in-house junior marketing associates actually execute the plan. We help train the junior staff to make them even more effective and check in every month to make tweaks to the strategy.

Stay on focus: Instead of trying to do everything, pursue every social media platform and every new tactic, it’s best to narrow your focus.

What we have found useful is to look at the types of customers that make the biggest impact on our business and focus on them.

That’s why we tend to concentrate on industrial, material handling, construction, and professional services. These are the clients that we feel we can do the best job for and have the best return on our time.

So a good exercise is to look at what niche or service you provide that gets you the best bang for the buck and spend your marketing dollars there. I know that’s scary because you might lose out on another opportunity. However, focusing on a niche makes you much more powerful in the long run.

Message: In addition to staying focused you need to stick to your message. Make sure that your messages are strong and that your USP makes you stand out from the pack.

Be sure that you focus on strengths that make you more valuable to your customers.

Key in on your most valuable message and making sure that it resonates with your customers.

Technology: Marketing technology gets better every year. You can use marketing automation and other tools to multiply your bandwidth.

Using technology, you don’t necessarily need more people grinding out more marketing; you just need a relatively inexpensive piece of technology.

For instance, for marketing automation, we use HubSpot which is an all-in-one platform, using Hubspot we have more than doubled our efficiency. And a marketing automation plan is much cheaper than hiring a full-time employee.

Not ready for a full-scale solution? In the past, we have used HootSuite, Google Alerts and various other tools for social media to make us more productive without having to add more permanent staff.

Want to learn more about how you can make your marketing more effective? Contact 366 for an assessment.

How do you get people to read your blog articles or other content? Business blogs by their very nature are not as interesting as other content on the internet.

Which is a nice way to say most of them are downright boring.

How do you make your blog more interesting? Well, you write information that your readers want to read.

It seems easy enough, doesn’t it? Problem solved!Ahh, but how do you know what they want to read? The simplest way to make sure that you are creating content that your customers and prospects want is to develop buyer personas. This means that you know who you are writing to and so you craft the information for them.

A Q&D guide to develop buyer personas

Problem and Solution: What problem does your prospect have that you can solve? For instance, we help people with website design and marketing.

However, usually our clients real issue is that they want more customers. So remember to focus on your buyer’s real problem and how you can help them solve it.

Create: Make sure that you have a narrow view of your target. For instance, selling a solution to a CEO is different than selling to the director of supply chain. They have different goals and different problems. A CEO is more likely to look at things globally than a more local position.

Target: For a persona to be extra useful you need to create a “real” person that fits your criteria of your buyer.

For instance, let’s say that your targets are COO’s of Fortune 500 companies. That is pretty vague.

Now compare that to: Douglas a COO of a Fortune 500 who lives in Charlotte, NC. His company wants to improve efficiency through material handling automation. He has been married for 33 years, has three children, is 55 years old and his hobbies include golf and fly fishing.

Who seems more real? Who is it easier to craft a piece of content for? Douglas, of course. You kind of know Douglas. He has weight, and we know what moves the needle for him.

Give Value: We always preach that to be successful in marketing and business you need to emphasize giving value on both sides of the sale. You need to give value to your prospects by giving them information that has value. Not sales information, but genuinely helpful information.

We already know what their problem is, now give them some ideas on how to solve it.

Segment: Now you need to segment your marketing. It is much more efficient to create content that will appeal to each of your buyer personas. That’s right, you are probably going to have a few. There may even be different personas that you create content for at each company.

For instance, you might have an engineer who is doing the research on how to solve a particular problem. Then you have the CEO who is making the final decision.

However, you might have an influencer at the CFO or a director level. Knowing all of those buyers and having content built for each of them is very powerful.

Interested in building a complete buyer personas? Get our guide on how to Develop Buyer Personas for Your Business.

The Curse of Knowledge is an odd phrase. Since when is knowledge a curse? When you want to communicate the benefits of your products or services to your customers, it can be a curse. You tend to talk and write at the level you understand, but perhaps it is not as clear to your customers.

This is especially true in a lot of the industries that we help. There is so much to learn in engineering, construction and financial services that you tend to overwrite, under explain and get in the weeds quickly.

So how can you avoid this?

Write to your audience. Who are they? Have you completed a customer personae? (If not download our Guide to Buyer Persona’s here) Write to their familiarity with your industry and their need in mind.

Start with topics that they care about. Most likely it will be a benefit that your product or service provides. Find the solution that you want to highlight and share with your customers.

How sophisticated are your audiences? Don’t make assumptions. Talk to your actual customers. Make it part of sales and customer service to help with your buyer personas

Silo: Don’t just run your ideas of a message past 5 people who have all been in the industry for 10+ years. Find someone who is new to the industry in your company. Then run your message by them.

You aren’t trying to sell to the converts, you are trying to sell to people who don’t know as much about your solution as you do.

Remember, possible buyers will have different levels of knowledge related to your solutions. Some may be very well versed in your industry, while others may be new needing smaller and more broken down information.

Education: Create content and information that educates your prospect. That means that you will need various different pieces of collateral dependant on your prospect’s level of understanding in the solution. 

For instance, you could have an introductory e-book to help them move down the path. Then a comparison guide for finding the right solution to their problem.

The guide is to lead your prospect further down the funnel by educating them.

The key to good business writing is to know who you are writing to and what they want. They want to solve a problem. Help them and you help yourself.

Want more information about how to build success buyer personas? Download our Guide to Building better Buyer Personas.