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If your website were a house: To repaint, rehab or rebuild

What answer would you give if someone asked you, “How much does a house cost?”

Kind of a silly question, right?

Houses come in all shapes and sizes, in different markets and neighborhoods, made of different materials and with a wide range of finishes.

The same rings true for a website.

A 50-page site is very different from a 5,000-page site, which is very different from a 50,000-page site. You can pay for premium design or you can use a template. You can hire professional copywriters or pen it yourself. And you can deploy thousands of customizations depending on what you need your site to do for you.

There’s no canned answer here.

So now that we’ve established our house-website analogy, let’s think about the process of renovating a house.

There are options here too.

To drive some impact in the fastest, least-painful and least-expensive way, you could slap on a fresh coat of paint. The house will shine from the curb. But at least for now, you’ll have to be at peace with the home’s original plumbing and that 20-year-old HVAC system.

The next upgrade is a rehab – which could mean reconfiguring a room or two, putting on an addition or taking it down to the studs.

And the extreme option of course, is to roll in the bulldozer and rebuild from the ground up.

So which route applies to your website?

The most common thing I hear on new business calls is, “we need a new website.”

But that statement makes a lot of assumptions, including the following:

You have a significant budget in hand to do it right
You don’t need results too quickly (because like with a house, a website doesn’t get built overnight)
The website is the thing preventing your success in the first place

So before you conclude that it’s time to bring in the wrecking crew, here are a few scenarios where each route makes sense.

When to put on a fresh coat

If lead generation is low priority. Maybe your total addressable market is small and you know who all of your 20 potential customers are. You just need to look sharp in front of them.
If your company is looking to be acquired. Perhaps you’re in year four of a five-year cycle with a private equity firm who’s preparing to exit. Or your board of advisors is breathing down your neck to modernize the brand in front of suiters.
If you suspect you’re missing opportunities left and right because your website looks like it was built by your neighbor’s nephew in 1998 (which may be the case!). NOTE: In this scenario, a quick visual facelift is more of a phase-one bandaid than a long-term solve.

When to rehab

If the information on your site is up-to-date and well written, but it’s all about you (rather than your customers and their problems). In this case, you’d build an addition in the form of a blog or Learning Center and produce a base of resourceful content to address the problems and common questions of those most-important buyers.
If your website traffic is significant (2000-3000+ monthly visits), but you’re not generating more than a handful of leads each month. Here you’d retrofit your site with a lead-generation infrastructure (calls-to-action, premium content gated behind forms, Live Chat or a Chatbot) to convert more visitors who are sales-qualified (but not sales-ready) into leads.
If you really do need a full rebuild, but you’re constrained by budget. Frankly, I wish more companies in this situation would go the renovation route and focus on the 20% of changes that can produce 80% of the results they’re seeking. You’re much better off with a website that attracts, engages and generates some qualified leads than one that looks pretty but has no impact on your sales pipeline. Think continuous improvement here.

When to tear it down and rebuild

If you have both the luxuries of time and money at your disposal. A full website build is an intensive project involving research, strategy, site mapping, wire framing, design, development, writing and testing. This process is expensive. And even if rolled out in phases, it’ll take months – not weeks.
If you’re looking to take your company to the next level. When you build your own house, you get to make all the big decisions. Though the journey may be painful, the end product is exactly what you want it to be.

So which route to take?

That’s for you to decide. The right or wrong answer will be different for each company.

What kind of shape is your website in right now? Is it preventing you from achieving your business growth objectives? What results do you need to achieve? How fast? And what kind of budget are you working with?

If you need helping answering those questions, consider requesting a consultation.

Who’s ready to fire some customers?

A few weeks ago, my business partner Jon and I met with an impressive crew at an industrial distribution company. This group – a combination of C-Level, Sales and Marketing folks – had a really strong pulse on where to focus their business-growth efforts in the foreseeable future.

To brief us on their customer segments, they pulled up an ultra simple, yet very powerful four-quadrant graph that provided the inspiration for this article. Here’s what it looked like:

(NOTE: I later learned this model was based on the “Customer Stratification” concept developed by Dr. Barry Lawrence at Texas A&M. And although it was designed for industrial distribution, I firmly believe its applications extend into other industrial sector business models as well).

As their team began describing the characteristics of their customers in each of the four quadrants, I started thinking about the marketing implications for each.

Here’s where my marketer brain led me.

The top right

In the top right are your ideal customers. These are the ones who not only buy in high volume, but also buy the right (most profitable) products and/or services. From an operational standpoint, you’ll protect these customers. You’ll work hard to delight them and assure they’re taken care of – because replacing them is both difficult and costly.

From a marketing standpoint, two key implications stem from the top right.

The first relates to Positioning.

Simply stated, you want to construct your company’s Positioning around the characteristics of these top-right accounts so you’ll attract more that look like them.

When your Sales team describes who your company serves, they should paint a picture of businesses like these. When you document case studies, tell the success stories of these companies. And when you publish problem-solving, question-answering content in your company’s blog or Learning Center, focus on the problems and questions that you see at these types of accounts.

Here’s what our top right quadrant looks like at Gorilla. And here’s how we articulate our own Positioning so we speak to that audience.

The second marketing implication stemming from the top right relates to Lead Generation.

Any time you can clearly articulate who your ideal customer is down to the finest details (and you also know there’s market share to be won in that segment), it screams account-based marketing to me.

So build a physical list of target accounts (and the buying process influencers at those businesses) that resemble your customers in the top right. Construct a joint campaign between your Sales and Marketing teams to reach them through multiple channels (email, direct mail, hyper-targeted digital advertising, etc) and multiple touch points. Then go get ‘em.

The top left

Here’s where you’ll find your biggest growth opportunities.

They’re already customers, so they already know you. And if they already like and trust you too, then they’re poised for growth. Regardless, these customers are buying the right stuff – just not enough of it. (Or at least not yet!)

Is your team committing sufficient time to the top left – focusing first on retention and then growth of these accounts? If if not, why?

In his recent book Never Lose a Customer Again, author Joey Coleman references a key finding from the 2017 edition of the annual CMO Survey (conducted by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Deloitte LLP, and the American Marketing Association):

The average business spends 6.9 percent of total company revenue on marketing—and yet less than one fifth of that total spending is dedicated to customer retention activities.

So operationally, invest your time and energy into learning the ins and outs of your customers in the top left. Develop a deep understanding of their organizational challenges and goals. Build strong relationships inside of these companies with a variety of individuals. Expand your reach to different departments. Find ways to make yourself an indispensable partner that creates significant value in these customer relationships.

Marketing’s contribution to all of this should be Lead Nurturing. And my favorite recipe is exceptional content + email. Though neither is a replacement for a great product and exceptional service, they’re the perfect complements.

A customer-centric newsletter filled with legitimately-helpful resources (rather than promotional messaging about you) is a great place to start. Just as you’d expose prospects and leads to resourceful content that answers their questions and helps address their biggest problems, do the same for your existing customers in the top left.

Sometimes these customers see you as nothing more than the preferred vendor of what you currently sell them. So earn their full attention and strengthen their trust by demonstrating your expertise. Before you know it, those in the top left will have migrated into the top right.

The bottom right

In the bottom right are your wild cards.

When your margins are super thin, high volume can be a bad thing. These customers will quickly drain your resources as your Account Managers and Sales professionals burn through valuable time just to keep them on the roster. If this is your reality, you’ll need to decide quickly whether it’s feasible to migrate them North into the top right quadrant. If not, it may be best to cut them loose.

Now, I said these companies are wild cards because it’s also possible that the bottom right is feeding you while you sleep – via an e-commerce site or a customer portal where they can serve themselves. In these cases, thin margins at high volume may actually make the bottom right a growth area.

Regardless, if you’re committing significant resources to the top of the graph, it’ll be tough to give enough to the bottom right.

So if there is a marketing implication here, it’s Lead Nurturing.

What can you do through marketing automation – via email and content to develop these customers in the background, while your Sales Professionals and Account Managers commit their time and energy to the bigger opportunities up top?

The bottom left

Finally, in the bottom left, we can pay off this article’s title. When customers are low margin and low volume, they simple may need to go.

Operationally, this could mean making a courageous decision and proactively breaking up. Or it could translate to letting them walk away on their own as you evolve your offering and pricing.

The Marketing implication here is about Positioning.

Just as your Positioning needs to help you attract more customers like those in the top right, it should also detract those who’d fall into the bottom left.

When you eliminate low volume, low margin customers, you open up resources to focus on the top two quadrants. And that’s where growth happens.

So here’s your simplified marketing plan

There you have it. Now it’s your turn.

Sometimes it takes an exercise like this before the lightbulb goes on. So I encourage you and your team to give it a go.

And when you’re done, go fire a customer or two. I dare you.

Rest in peace, my dear “Contact Us” button

Unless you’re among the minority in the manufacturing sector, up in the top right-hand corner of your website sits one of the most misused pieces of communication in Marketing and Sales:

Yep, the “Contact Us” button.

On the surface, this button makes sense. You want to make it easy for a prospect to get in touch with you — and for you, in turn, to generate a lead.

But here’s the problem. More often than not, your website visitors aren’t interested in a sales conversation. At least not yet.

In fact, only 4% of all people who visit your site are sales-ready. And yet, there it is. A big, ugly button that might as well read like this:

Let’s put this into context

Imagine you’ve set up shop at a big industry trade show. You’ve invested in a fancy booth and staffed it with a team of experts. But every time someone approaches your table without a purchase order in hand, you greet him by asking, “Are you prepared to spend a boatload of money today? If not, here’s a business card. Call me when that changes!”.

Now back to reality. How would that scenario actually play out?

You would probably introduce yourself, shake his hand and engage in conversation. You’d ask smart questions, trying to uncover his key issues and learn what’s most important to him. Once you’d unearthed those issues, you might reference a success story from a past customer where you tackled a similar challenge.

All the while, you’re demonstrating your expertise and problem-solving chops. And he’s thinking to himself “These guys have seen my problem before and they’ve solved it for companies that look like mine”.

Before he leaves, you’d hand him a piece of literature most relevant his situation. And if you sense a potential fit, you’d offer a consultation to help him take the next step in his buying process.

But unless he was truly sales-ready at that moment in time, the one thing you wouldn’t do that day is swipe his credit card.

Yet, there it is…

So can’t your website behave more like a real person?

After all, your visitors are real people, right?

They’re the same people who show up at your trade show booths. They’re trying to solve the same problems and gather the same bits of information they’d gather if they were standing in front of you at that table. Just because they’re not sales-ready doesn’t mean that they’re not sales-qualified.

So let’s start thinking a little bit differently about how your website interacts with those individuals. Here are some examples:

How about using your site as a platform for objectively answering the 5 or 10 or 100 most commonly-asked questions in the form of insightful blog posts?
And on those pages, instead of passively asking your visitors to “Contact Us”, you ask them to subscribe to your newsletter to get insights like those in their inboxes twice per month?
What if you prompt those website visitors to download PDF white papers that cover those topics in more depth in exchange for their names and email addresses?
Or you offer a buyers guide that objectively compares solutions, weighing the trade-offs between fast, inexpensive solves and more-costly, but longer-term, sustainable options?
Maybe you even deploy a live chat or chatbot software that actively engages your visitors in conversation right there on key pages.

All of a sudden you’re generating leads that almost certainly would have left as anonymous visitors before their eyes even moved toward the top right corner of your website.

You’re building a list of engaged contacts that are primed for nurturing.

And because you’ve already captured their attention and started earning their trust, chances are you’ll be the first one they call when they are sales ready.

Fast results vs. sustainable success: take your pick

Are you playing the short game or the long game? In other words, what’s more important to you – fast results or sustainable success from your marketing program?

It’s not a trick question and there’s not a wrong answer either. But unless you’re prepared to make a significant investment in marketing, you’ll probably have to make a choice (and of course, most choices come with tradeoffs).

This graph is what we call The Marketing Results Curve. On the X axis, you have time. On the Y-axis, you have ROI.

As time passes (and we move from left to right on this graph), we also want to move North toward results as quickly as possible. But for your organization, how quickly is quickly enough?

Three paths to results:

From my viewpoint, there are three ways to get to marketing results:

Inbound
Outbound
Paid Media

Each path warrants a look in your marketing mix. But each should also come with different expectations for results – both in terms of velocity and ceiling. Let’s take a closer look and use some visuals to illustrate.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound focuses on building an authoritative presence online. Ideally, here’s how it works:

You develop thought-leadership content that establishes credibility for your website with the search engines.
That credibility drives up your search rankings, which leads to better visibility in Google searches.
Increased visibility drives more website traffic from individuals who are looking for answers to questions you can address and solutions to problems you can solve.
More (and better) website traffic thickens your sales pipeline with qualified leads.

When done well, inbound is the long game – the sustainable solution. The downside is that in most scenarios, a significant investment of time, money or both is required to establish that necessary authority online. (Note that real-world authority doesn’t automatically translate into online authority). So unless you’re cheating – which Google doesn’t like – results can take months or more to materialize. And even then, it can be a slow climb. Here’s what the inbound results curve usually looks like if you’re starting from scratch:

The payoff with inbound comes once you’ve established an authoritative position with Google, Bing, etc, and results begin to snowball. When that curve starts turning upward, you can often dial back your investment and keep seeing results pour in. But you have to earn that authority by solidifying your role online as a top-tier resource in your space. We’ve seen it happen for many of our clients who have committed to the long game. But not for those who call it quits after six or twelve months.

Outbound Marketing

With outbound marketing, on the other hand, you focus on an ideal customer profile (both the type of company and types of people at those companies whose attention and trust you need to earn), build a list of targets and go after each directly. We often refer to this approach as account-based marketing.

The benefit of outbound is that results can materialize very quickly, assuming there’s market share to be won. Unlike inbound, where you’re slowly building a sustainable lead-generation machine, with outbound, you’re either buying or quickly building a list of target prospects. In theory, you could be booking phone calls with future customers tomorrow.

But once you’ve burned through your list, you’re back to square one, spending more time or money to build and pursue a fresh list of targets.

When done effectively, outbound is a great way to get wins quickly. But it’s not a self-sustaining machine. Instead, you’ll always be feeding the beast with your time and money.

Paid Media

Paid media (which I want to discuss as its own entity here, even though you could technically stick it under the umbrella of outbound marketing) is about buying visibility in front of a defined audience. As Joe Pulizzi describes in his exceptional book Killing Marketing, paying for advertising is like renting access to your audience for a limited period of time, from a big media company.

Think of online paid media for B2B companies as the equivalent of a consumer brand buying ad space on a billboard or running a tv spot. You rent a slot in exchange for a fee. And when your time or budget expires, so goes your visibility. Similar to outbound methodology (like with account-based marketing), paid media can drive a short-term spike. But long-term viability requires plugging the machine with more coins when your media buy ends or your balance has gone to zero.

So which will it be?

There’s no canned answer to whether you choose fast results or sustainable success. Marketing is complex and a number of factors can (and should) influence your decision:

Here are some external factors to consider:

Are you in a competitive, crowded marketplace?
Are you a giant or a less-known player there?
Does Google respect you yet?
Or are you nowhere to be found for relevant searches?

And then there are the internal factors:

Is your sales cycle short or long? (Will a new lead take months or longer to turn into revenue?)
Do you have a board of advisors or panel of investors breathing down your neck about getting results yesterday?
Do you have internal personnel (with both capacity to fill and the right skill sets) to strategize and implement an effective marketing plan? Or will you have to hire outside consultants or an agency?
Oh, and what’s your budget?

If you have the luxury of time at your disposal and are willing to be patient, inbound (done well) is likely to be your answer. But if you need results to materialize quickly, then you’re best off turning to outbound and paid media.

Does it have to be one or the other?

Not necessarily.

If your budget allows for a sufficient investment in both the long game and the short game, I recommend creating a balance. Now you open up the possibility of your results curve looking more like this:

The beauty here, though it comes with a higher price tag, is that you play the long game, building that sustainable lead-generation machine. But you also fill the short-term void in that results curve with strategies and tactics that generate quick wins. The risk here is that you spread your budget too thin and accomplish nothing. So if you go this route, be prepared to invest sufficiently in both categories.

Whichever path you choose, be clear with yourself and team about expectations, and understand where the tradeoffs lie.

If you’re interested in talking about which approach to take for your business, please consider requesting a consultation.

How to create an inbound lead qualification process

When you’re new to online lead generation, “lead management” is usually the least of your concerns. Instead, your early challenges revolve around how to get in front of the right people, bring them to your website and convert them into leads in the first place.

But if you’re working from a smart strategy, some time passes and before you know it, things start working. Website traffic begins growing. RFQ submissions and consultation requests tick upward. White paper and case study downloads spike. Newsletter subscriptions increase.

That’s when a brand new problem emerges:

You don’t have an efficient way of managing your new and suddenly robust inbound lead pipeline.

First of all, if that’s where you’ve landed, let’s go grab a beer and celebrate. You’ve achieved what most companies like yours have yet to figure out!

But we should probably just stick to one beer and get back to the office pretty quickly because we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to build and implement a lead qualification process before you start drowning in form submissions and —even worse— missing sales opportunities.

What exactly do we mean by inbound lead qualification?

Inbound lead qualification is the process of figuring out whether a lead generated through your website is a good fit for your company so you can optimize your business development team’s time.

An inbound lead qualification process should include the following steps:

Define what characteristics make a lead a good fit or a bad fit.
Use marketing automation to screen leads based on those criteria.
Manually (but quickly) confirm the quality of the “good” leads.
Implement a process for further qualifying these leads without wasting your time.

When done right, inbound lead qualification can impact your business development process by:

Moving unqualified leads to the back of your sales radar (if not removed entirely) through automation.
Making sure leads that clearly exhibit sales-qualified and/or sales-ready characteristics show up in front of you with flashing red lights and a siren so you can’t overlook them.
Automatically sorting and organizing the rest of your leads in a way that lets your sales and marketing teams easily determine how to prioritize them.
Allowing your sales team to optimize its time by engaging and developing leads that are both sales-qualified and sales-ready.
Allowing your marketing team to optimize its time by engaging and developing leads that are sales-qualified but not sales-ready.

All sound good? If you’re with me, let’s take a deep dive into this process.

A sample lead qualification process

Inbound lead qualification involves both art and science. And frankly, it looks different from company to company. But here’s an outline that will put the process in context for you, based loosely on how we do it at Gorilla 76.

Step 1: Define what characteristics make a lead a good fit or a bad fit

The necessary precursor to effectively qualifying leads is a solid understanding of who your ideal customers are – both at a company and individual level. This first step in lead qualification is the most strategic. If you can nail it, the rest will fall into place with a little bit of work and the right tools. We cover this topic in depth in our article – Ideal Customer and Buyer Persona Profiles for Manufacturers – but here’s what we’re talking about.

Our best-fit customers at Gorilla are manufacturing or industrial sector companies that do between $10M and $200M in business annually. They possess deep expertise in their disciplines and sell customized, often-complex products or solutions that require a consultative sale. These companies are looking to align their business development strategies with an industrial buying process that’s moving online. And because they’re actively pursuing growth, they’re prepared to invest $6-12K/month into marketing.

At an individual level, we typically need to earn the attention and trust of the Marketing Director, the VP of Sales and the President/CEO. We understand their pain points and the challenges they often face. They often include:

Lack of awareness among the right people at the right companies.
A thin or nonexistent pipeline of inbound, sales-qualified leads.
Too busy serving customers to sufficiently pursue new business.
Not confident their marketing spends are producing new business.

And because we’ve taken the time to identify and document all of this, the implementation of our own lead qualification system was actually pretty darn easy. In other words, we know our buyer well. So as long as we put the right processes and tools in place, we can very easily determine who’s qualified and who’s not.

Step 2: Use marketing automation to screen leads based on those criteria

At this point, the most strategic part of the job is already behind you. You’ve identified the characteristics of a good lead. Now you need to teach your website how to screen inbound leads based on those same criteria.

For this step, I’m operating under the assumption that you’re using a marketing automation software. If you’re not, don’t worry. Read on anyway. You should at least be aware of what’s possible because automation can save you a ton of time. At Gorilla, we use HubSpot. All of our website forms are built there. And we’ve designed the questions in those forms to help us identify “good” and “bad” leads.

For example, because the size of our ideal customer usually falls into the $10M to $200M range, we ask a corresponding question in our forms:

And although we welcome anyone to our website, we serve industrial companies. We don’t need to clog our sales radar with lawyers, students, other marketing firms, etc. That’s why we ask visitors to identify with an industry:

Depending on who your ideal customer is, other information you can collect to qualify visitors includes the following:

Job title
Budget
Whether they’re currently working on a project
Geography
Number of employees

When your website is linked to an effective marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can take the automated side of lead qualification a few steps further as well.

Lead intelligence collection

After a form has been submitted by a website visitor, HubSpot tracks all of his/her activity on our site going forward. Most notably, all page views are logged. Think about that for a second. When a visitor lands on your site, reads a blog article and then leaves a minute later, how engaged do you think that person really is? Probably not so much. And it’s helpful to know that before picking up the phone to call him/her.

But how about someone who reads a blog article and then three of your product or service pages before leaving, spending five minutes on each page? Maybe a bit more engaged, right?

And finally, how about a visitor who reads a blog article, visits a few of your product or services pages, views your pricing page, visits your RFQ page three times and then looks at three case studies? There’s a lead who’s showing some buying intent. And if the form data indicates “sales qualified” as well, you better be on the phone with that individual in the next five minutes!

Here’s an example screenshot from our own site that shows me “sales readiness.” Look at the names of the pages this individual viewed:

Lead scoring

At Gorilla, we’ve built a lead scoring system to segment our leads based on qualification. We learn through form submission data and their behavior on the website (which pages were viewed, how much time was spent viewing them, etc.) how qualified a given visitor may be. So we then use automation to assign points to that individual’s contact record in HubSpot.

We assign positive points for visits to the following pages: Case studies, Pricing, Working with Gorilla, How Our Proposal Process Works. On the flip side, we assign negative points if the visitor is from another marketing agency, is a student or if the company does less than $5M in business.

On the bonus page for this article, we included a screenshot directly from HubSpot that shows how our lead scoring system is set up.

Lead segmentation and automated email alerts

We’re not done automating yet! Once an individual’s lead score breaks 30, we consider that person to be “Marketing Qualified”. He/she is automatically dumped into a list that’s named accordingly, and HubSpot sends me the following email:

Pretty cool, huh?

Step 3: Manually (but quickly) confirm the quality of the “good” leads

This step gets manual. But it should be quick and painless as long as you have a good process in place.

Once you’ve programmed your website to bring seemingly good leads to the surface and weed out the rest through automation, you’ll want to manually look at these “Marketing Qualified Leads” (MQLs) and determine for yourself if they’re actually good ones. With your blessing, they should be reclassified as “Sales Qualified Leads” (SQLs) and be passed through to your sales team to pursue.

But you’ll need a repeatable process to make this efficient. Here’s an example:

You receive an email alert from HubSpot that you have a new Marketing Qualified Lead.
You click the link in the email and visit that individual’s contact record in HubSpot and look at the pages that person viewed.
You spend 30 seconds looking at his/her company’s website to see if they look like the right type of company to do business with.
You jump over to LinkedIn and learn what you can about the company there—number of employees, what role the individual plays at the company, etc.

This process should take you less than five minutes. After the manual screen, you either mark the contact as Sales Qualified or you move on. If it’s the former, the lead should be automatically moved into the “Sales Qualified Leads” list in HubSpot and your sales team should be automatically alerted.

Visit our bonus page to see the exact checklist we use for this process at Gorilla. It will help you formulate your equivalent version.

Step 4: Implement a process for further qualifying these leads without wasting your time

At this point, you’ve successfully separated good leads from bad and passed the good ones to your sales team. If they’re not thanking you for the time you’ve saved them yet, you can still win them over by helping them implement some of the following!

Send a qualifying email before you set up a call

In the case where a lead has asked you for a consultation or sales call, you want to avoid getting sucked into a black hole with someone who’s unlikely to be a real buyer. We’ve all been there before, and it’s an ugly place. Despite the lead qualification you’ve already done, a straggler or two will still manage to slip through the cracks from time to time.

So you might send a qualifying email to probe a little deeper. Have a few templated questions ready to copy and paste into an email related to budget, the timing of the project, who should be involved in the conversation, etc. You probably already know which questions to ask. You just need a quick and repeatable process for doing so.

Many times, I’ve received responses to my qualifying emails that looked something like this:

“Hey, Joe. Thanks for sending this along. That all makes sense and we’re probably not the best fit given your focus. I appreciate you saving me the time!”

Just as your time is valuable, so is theirs. Do everyone a favor by further qualifying before chatting.

Assign some homework before the call

Pass along articles and resources to a lead, and don’t get on a call until they’ve read them.

Not only can you set up better sales calls by helping educate your lead a little bit before you talk, you can learn which leads are truly engaged. What existing website content could you send ahead of time to help answer your lead’s common questions while simultaneously helping you gauge how engaged he or she is? Find it and send it. HubSpot’s email tracking feature will show you which links were clicked.

How to get started

That was a lot to digest, so thanks for bearing with me! Here’s how I recommend you proceed.

First, if you haven’t yet, visit the bonus page to get a condensed checklist that outlines Gorilla’s full lead qualification process. That will give you a tangible model to start with. Your business is your own and your version of this process will almost certainly be different. But our example should help you get started in designing yours.

Next, as you’ve seen here, effective lead qualification has both manual and automated components. While you don’t absolutely need a marketing automation software to do it, it makes things a lot easier and saves your team a lot of time in the end. I recommend a live demo with HubSpot if you haven’t done that yet.

And finally, since the first step I outlined in this article is about identifying and documenting your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas profiles, I encourage you to read our article on the topic and download this template to get that process in motion. Like I said earlier, that’s the most strategic step. The rest is about implementing some tools and showing them what to do.

If you have any tips based on your own successes or stumbles with lead qualification, I’d love for you to share them in the comments below. And if you want to talk lead qualification strategy, I encourage you to Request a Consultation.

Thanks for reading!

How manufacturers can generate content marketing ideas

One of the toughest steps for a manufacturing organization, as they get started with content marketing, is simply figuring out what to write about. You’re not alone there. But my advice is actually quite simple. And ten minutes from now after you’ve worked your way through this article and downloaded our Content Planner Worksheet , I’m confident you’ll feel much less intimidated.

So – are you ready for the big reveal?

OK. Here it is…

Answer the common questions you get from customers every day.

Yep. That’s it.

I realize that might sound like a cop-out. But keep reading and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

As a true marketing geek, one of my personal heroes is Marcus Sheridan, one of the most respected leaders in the marketing industry today and author of a book you absolutely MUST read if you haven’t yet – They Ask You Answer. In his book, Marcus couldn’t say it any better:

“If I was on a sales appointment, as soon as the prospect would ask me a question my immediate thought was, have I answered that on our website yet? And remember, I’m not talking here about one -or two- sentence answers to questions. I’m talking about really answering the question, including deep explanations while approaching each with a “teacher’s” mentality—without bias and trying only to educate the reader.”

Think about the questions you (or your company’s sales professionals) get every day on sales calls. What are the common problems they’re trying to solve that you hear about all the time? You know – those ones that are so familiar that you know exactly what they’re about to describe before they even finish the first sentence.

These are what we call “content triggers”.

Here’s how John Hall, the author of another great marketing book – Top of Mind – describes content triggers in an Inc. Magazine article:

“That moment when you see something really valuable or innovative but realize it’s not well understood is what I call a content trigger. A trigger is something you identify as an idea or topic that you can develop content around to communicate a message to an audience. The better you become at identifying, documenting, and acting on these triggers, the better you become at communicating your brand’s innovation.”

When you make a habit of proactively looking for content triggers, you’ll begin to notice them everywhere in your communications with prospects and customers.

What are the long answers to questions that you rewrite in emails all the time that make you think, “I just typed up a really similar response to that same question the other day”? If you’re at all like me, there are plenty of occasions where I find myself digging through my sent emails to copy and paste a few paragraphs into a new one.

These are content triggers.

What are the comments, issues or requirements you see time and again in RFQ submissions that warrant a thorough response?

These are content triggers.

What types of content to create from your triggers

In They Ask You Answer, Marcus Sheridan devotes a series of chapters to “The Big 5” types of content – a concept he’s preached about for years. They are:

Cost/price articles
Problems articles
Vs./Comparison-based articles
Review-based articles
“Best of” articles

For our B2B industrial sector clients, we often lean on the first three in this list to generate content ideas.

Cost/price articles

Cost/price articles address the common questions you get about the cost of one service vs another, one product vs another, long-term cost of ownership, expected ROI, etc. For whatever reason, conversations about money tend to be avoided early in sales conversations – as if they’re taboo. But you know your prospects are thinking about money, so go and write about it. At the very least, you’ll earn their respect for being transparent.

Problem articles

Problem articles address those common problems your customers come to you to solve on a regular basis. Write about those problems and corresponding solutions in depth. We always say that it’s the job of our journalists at Gorilla to extract the expertise from the brains of the engineers and technical professionals at our clients’ companies and translate that into educational content for their audiences. If your company is filled with true subject matter experts, there’s no reason you can’t do the same.

Vs./Comparison-based articles

Vs./Comparison-based articles are exactly what they sound like. What products or services are your customer and prospects trying to compare during the buying process? What are they trying to understand about each? Just as you’d compare and contrast them in conversation, do it in writing or through a video and give it life on your website.

Content for different buyer personas and different stages of the buying process

Many of our manufacturing clients don’t sell widgets, but instead, complex and often highly-customized products or services. The more this rings true, the more valuable their in-depth, educational content becomes. Think about buying a car vs. a pair of socks. One can be highly customized, with much more at stake if buyer’s remorse follows the purchase. The same can’t be said for the other. So as a result, you naturally have more questions to get answered when you’re buying a car. The same applies throughout that long and complex industrial buying process.

And “buyer” often doesn’t refer to a single person either. Instead, you’re facing a buying committee made up of a Design Engineer, a Plant Manager, a Procurement Manager, a CFO, a CEO and who knows who else. Each has different priorities and needs. And each might be involved at different stages of that buying process.

So plan your content accordingly. What content triggers exist earlier on in the Research stage? How about the Evaluation Stage? And as you move closer to making the sale? What content should be created for each stage to address those triggers? And which of those members of the “buying committee” – or your buyer personas – should they be written for?

So here’s how to get started

Start by downloading our Content Planner Worksheet and use it as your guide. Here’s what it looks like:

Then call a brainstorm with your Sales team. Heck – take them all out to lunch. Start your brainstorm by filling in your content triggers in column A. Note which buyer persona you’re dealing with for that trigger in column B. And then write in the potential titles of articles that could address those triggers in column C. Repeat this process for each stage (Research, Evaluation and Purchase) of the buying process.

By the end of a 60-minute lunchtime brainstorm, I would bet you’ll have anywhere from 20 to 50 great content ideas. And just as importantly, you’ll feel confident about your direction as you kick off a fresh content marketing campaign.

Good luck getting started and let us know if we can help!

Why cost per lead is a deceiving marketing success metric

This previously-published article was updated on March 13, 2018.

Just as it sounds, “cost per lead” refers to the price you pay to generate a new business lead. On the surface, measuring cost per lead is quite simple: Add everything you spent on a marketing initiative and divide it by the number of leads generated.

You want to keep that cost figure low, right?

In theory, yes. However, those numbers can be deceiving, and I’ll give you two reasons why. Let’s start by comparing cost per lead across three different marketing channels: Trade shows, print advertisements and inbound marketing.

Trade show cost per lead

Say your company attends one trade show per quarter. Let’s start by adding up all the associated costs, including:

Airfare
Hotel rooms
Meals and other travel costs
Floor space
Booth design
Designed and printed materials
Shipping costs
Labor costs of employees

Let’s estimate that the total cost equals $20,000. We’ll also say you walked away with 50 new contacts from business cards you collected. So, your cost per lead was $20,000 / 50 leads, which equals $400 / lead.

Print advertising cost per lead

Say your company also runs print ads in the same three trade journals every month. Costs for this totals $4,000 / month ($12,000 total for the quarter). Because you’re smart, you put unique URLs at the bottom of each ad so you can attempt to track how many people saw that ad and proceeded to visit your website. Maybe you traced six leads during Q1 directly to those ads. Hence, your cost per lead (for the entire quarter) was ($4,000 / month x 3 months) / 6 leads = $2,000 / lead.

Inbound marketing cost per lead

Finally, you’ve started learning about inbound marketing and decide to invest in content creation, search engine optimization (SEO) and online lead generation this year by hiring an outside agency.

The agency fee is $5,000 / month ($15,000 for the quarter). During those first three months working together, let’s say you generated 21 leads. So, your cost per lead for the quarter was ($5,000 / month for 3 months) / 21 leads = $714 / lead.

The table below illustrates the visual summary. Note that all the numbers I’ll be presenting, although hypothetical, represent actual patterns we see for inbound marketing with our actual industrial clients.

Glancing quickly through these numbers, you can see that inbound marketing ($714 / lead) was almost twice as expensive as trade shows ($400 / lead) for generating new leads. Print ads ($2,000 / lead) look like they were a waste of money.

Well, it’s not that simple. Let’s take a closer look.

Why cost per lead is deceiving

There are two fundamental problems with using cost per lead as a marketing success metric:

Cost per lead doesn’t account for lead quality.
Cost per lead encourages quick wins over sustainable lead generation results.

For the remainder of this article, we’ll examine these two points in depth. I’ll also present a solution for measuring results in a more meaningful way.

Problem #1: Cost per lead doesn’t account for lead quality

All leads aren’t created equal. In our previous example, you may have collected 50 business cards at your trade show booth. Nice. That’s 50 new leads, right?

But how qualified are those leads? Isn’t it possible that 20 of those individuals were just vendors trying to sell you something? Isn’t it also possible that a business card exchange is no more than an act of courtesy — an exchange those individuals will have with the next 10 or 100 people they meet? Sure, you might have come home with 50 “leads” but how many are truly sales-qualified leads?

Alternatively, let’s consider your inbound marketing campaign and the quality of the leads it generated. You began your inbound marketing campaign by identifying the problems your ideal customers face as well as the common questions and concerns you’re consistently addressing during sales calls. You fed those insights to your marketing agency and they helped you produce targeted content addressing those issues. They also helped you carefully choose and incorporate strategic keywords into your content so search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo recognized it.

Before long, targeted visitors started discovering that content in their related Google searches and new website traffic trickled in. Because that content addressed issues your customers cared about, they were immediately engaged. You earned a little trust and, depending on where they were in their respective buying processes, they either downloaded a white paper that dove deeper into the topic or (even better) were ready for a sales conversation and filled out your Request for Quote form. In short, they provided their names, email addresses and phone numbers in exchange for your expertise, thus becoming tangible leads.

Which of these channels just produced a more qualified set of leads? While my objective here isn’t to discount the value of attending a great trade show (or to say that inbound marketing is the only solution for everyone), my point is that not all leads are created equal. Because of this, we can’t discount lead quality at the expense of volume. We have to dig deeper.

Let’s go back to the table we examined earlier and add two extra rows: “Sales-qualified leads” and “Cost per sales-qualified lead.” These are the leads you can look at and say, “Yep, we want to attract that type of company. And yes, that’s exactly the person from the company whose attention and trust we need to earn.”

You’ve probably noticed that the print ad spend isn’t getting the job done. Compared side by side, trade shows are still more effective than inbound marketing, just not as much as we originally thought. Considering who is actually a sales-qualified lead can give you a more accurate picture of the success of your marketing initiatives.

Regardless, all of these marketing investments are really expensive when we consider their outputs of leads that are actually sales-qualified. Maybe we shouldn’t be marketing at all and should just get back to boots on the ground, knocking on doors and cold calling!

But before we jump to that conclusion, let’s look at the second reason cost per lead can be deceiving.

Problem #2: Cost per lead encourages quick wins over sustainable lead generation results

As an owner of a business that has been incrementally growing for over 11 years, I understand there’s little room for waste. When something isn’t working, you have to consider going in another direction.

But as a marketer, I know that some marketing initiatives are designed from day one to achieve quick results at the expense of a sustainable infrastructure. If you gauge success based on the results produced over a short period (like three or even six months), you’ll never get an apples-to-apples comparison of each marketing channel’s true impact on your business growth.

Let’s illustrate this point by extrapolating the three-month cost per lead comparison tables we’ve been using over 12 months.

When you glance at the bottom right corner of these three updated tables, notice what has happened. The cost per lead and cost per sales-qualified lead numbers for print ads have remained cringe-worthy. And the trade show figures have stayed pretty high too. But look at inbound marketing.

Let your eyes run from left to right across the cost per lead row and the cost per sales-qualified lead row under Inbound marketing. Notice how these costs have dropped every single month. In January, the cost per lead from inbound marketing was $1,000. And the cost per sales-qualified lead was a whopping $5,000. Travel though time all the way to December and those figures have been reduced to $56 / lead and $278 / sales-qualified lead, respectively. The same cannot be said comparing the first few months of trade shows and print advertising to their respective last few months.

So, what the heck’s going on here?

What you’re seeing is the snowball effect of inbound marketing. When you run print ads or attend trade shows, you learn how to improve for the next one. You make those adjustments and experience some improvements. However, each trade show is a one-and-done marketing initiative. You spend $20,000 and experience a temporary spike in leads around that time, but then all of that activity dies off until you spend $20,000 on the next trade show.

Similarly, you might spend a few thousand dollars to run print ads in January; the publications circulate, visibility for your ads spike accordingly, and hopefully the phones ring a bit more for a few weeks. But unless you spend $4,000 again next month, the incremental return on that month’s investment goes to zero as soon as the next issue is published.

Now, here’s where inbound marketing is different. When you invest in inbound, you’re building a sustainable inbound lead generation infrastructure that gains momentum as it builds.

Let’s illustrate this with an example.

One of our clients — Green Dot Bioplastics — is an incredibly innovative manufacturer of sustainable plastic materials. Green Dot helps customers and prospects solve challenging, real-life business problems through helpful content. Over the past three years, our team has helped Green Dot harness their knowledge of sustainable plastics and translate it into helpful, user-centered content.

This particular piece — Why sustainable plastics? — was designed to help their ideal customers take the next step in their product development process. For that same page, we created “content upgrades” or “lead magnets” on topics that compelled readers to trade contact information for expertise on bioplastics, which helped them become sales-qualified leads.

Over the first few months, this page generated no results. It didn’t rank well for Google searches related to “sustainable plastics” and as a result, didn’t drive much new traffic at all. But both us and our client weren’t surprised. In fact, we knew this would happen.

However, as we helped Green Dot publish increasingly helpful, customer-centric and problem-solving content on a consistent and ongoing basis, their site began to gain viewership and credibility in the sustainable plastics community. In particular, this Why sustainable plastics page caught the attention of top industry journals like Eco-Business, Waste Advantage Magazine and Bio-Based WorldNews, who all began linking to it from their sites.

As of this month (March 2018), this page has been ranking first for almost a year in Google searches for “sustainable plastics,” even ahead of content by plastics industry giants like DOW Chemical. And it continues to drive tangible new leads with names, phone numbers and email addresses for Green Dot every month.

This page about wood-plastic composites has had a similar effect. Over the last couple of years since the page was created, it has fluctuated between the second and fourth spot in search results related to “wood plastic composites” and has continued to produce qualified leads.

Although Green Dot may never spend another dime on the two pages we mentioned, those pages will continue generating leads well into the future. Talk about sustainable, right? Imagine three years from now when they have ten pages performing as well as those two.

The point is this: Not all marketing and advertising initiatives are designed to produce results immediately. Some channels require a heavy upfront work to lay a foundation for success.

In the case of inbound marketing, you need an infrastructure on your website to facilitate ongoing lead generation. That means optimizing your existing content for search engines. It means building a Learning Center to house your educational content. It means actually creating useful content month after month. It means fostering credibility for that content by building references to it (inbound links) from industry-leading sources that tell Google, “Hey, this content must be good. You should bump it up in your search rankings.”

And sometimes it means being patient, even with the pressure to produce immediate results.

So how SHOULD you measure marketing results?

My answer is simple: Measure the revenue generated by each marketing initiative.

Consider which leads were produced by your marketing investments in print ads, trade shows, inbound marketing or other channels. Did they become paying customers? If so, how much did they spend? And what is the expected lifetime value of these new customers?

With the right tracking mechanisms and a two-way data-sharing process between your Sales and Marketing teams, this kind of reporting and measurement is no longer out of reach.

If cost per lead remains an important metric for your organization, consider both the quality of those leads and the length of your data evaluation period. Shift your focus to cost per sales-qualified leads rather than the cost per (any) lead. Measure that figure over the course of a year before drawing conclusions about the success or failure of your campaigns.

Some useful resources

If you’d like to learn more about implementing success metrics and benchmarks before designing your marketing initiative, watch our video What marketing results manufacturers should be measuring. Although we recorded this video for manufacturing organizations (which is the audience we serve at Gorilla 76), it’s relevant to any business to business company.

We’ve also created a simple downloadable spreadsheet that lets you enter your revenue growth target, average customer value and close rate. It will then show you how many sales-qualified leads and how much website traffic you’ll need to hit your revenue goal through inbound marketing. Feel free to download our marketing performance targets worksheet.

Consider subscribing to our Industrial Marketing Newsletter for useful resources on inbound marketing. We’ll send content your way once or twice a month, depending on your preference.

Thanks for reading!

Manufacturers, here’s how to use account-based marketing (ABM) to land high-value clients

Done right, inbound marketing nets a lot of traffic and converts a good number into leads — some qualified, some not.

To indulge in a metaphor, inbound marketing is fishing with a net. Not every fish (lead) you catch will be a keeper (qualified). Your marketing team parses through the catch, passes the qualified ones onto sales to close and throws the rest out to sea.

This is at the core of what we do here at Gorilla. We help manufacturers build a consistent pipeline of online revenue by attracting the right web traffic, converting them into leads and nurturing them until they’re ready to buy. We use a net to catch the right type of fish, and enable their sales team with the tools they need to close the deal.

And we’ve seen a lot of success with this approach for manufacturers. In fact, this bioplastic material science startup generated 92 highly qualified leads in just 10 months with an inbound approach. Inbound —casting a net— is a great way to reliably catch, convert and close the right leads on an ongoing basis.

But if you’re already catching a continual stream of leads with inbound, it might be good to supplement your catch by spearfishing. Or, to reel the fish metaphor in, try account-based marketing (ABM) on for size.

ABM is like fishing with a spear. It’s a laser-focused marketing strategy that concentrates on identifying, engaging, nurturing and closing a list of hand-selected accounts that perfectly align with your company’s needs. Inbound is about building the framework to attract qualified leads to you — ABM is about actively tracking them down.

You first work with your sales team to develop a list of companies that exactly match your ideal customer profile (ICP). Next, you gather contact information for the key stakeholders within each company you’re targeting. Think of everyone who might be involved in the purchase decision: Design engineer, plant manager, procurement manager, C-Suite executives, etc.

Then you run a hyper-targeted campaign to turn each stakeholder into an advocate for your company. The ultimate goal of ABM is to land these target accounts and expand them into profitable and long-lasting customers.

What we’re talking about here isn’t cold calling prospect after prospect, praying one bites. ABM is a highly targeted outbound approach that relies heavily on your knowledge of your target audience’s pain points and ability to produce high-quality educational content.

In this post, we’re going to cover:

The reason ABM is making a comeback for B2B companies.
Why ABM is a good strategy for manufacturers.
Ideas for implementing ABM for your company.

Why now? The reason ABM is making a comeback for B2B companies

Account-based marketing (ABM) is not a new idea. In fact, it’s been around about as long as people have been selling things to other companies.

So why is ABM —an old-school sales tactic— making a comeback today?

Well, because now there’s technology that allows us to target specific people with personalized ads and nurturing email campaigns.

AdRoll. Terminus. LinkedIn Ad Targeting. There are plenty of new platforms you can use to serve up hyper-targeted ad campaigns to grow awareness of your company among your target audience. There are even tools like Prospect.io that will help you find the contact information for stakeholders at each of your target companies, allowing you to send more personal messages — like sending educational content tailored to their pain points or, eventually, a request for a meeting.

In the old days, salesmen used to make a list of target companies, drive around town and give their pitch. Now we can hop online, identify companies that fit our ICP to a ‘T’ and reach key stakeholders without ever leaving our computers.

Using a mix of new technology (i.e., automated email campaigns, targeted ads) and old-school tactics (i.e., mailers, handwritten notes), you can gain awareness among stakeholders and start a conversation about how your services alleviate their specific pain points. As you build relationships with each stakeholder through empathetic and educational content, you’ll grow from being a solution to being the solution.

At this point, it’s important to make something clear: Even with new technology, the relationships you aim to build with ABM will still be hard-earned. These new tools don’t do the marketing for you — they just make it easier to automate, measure and scale your ABM efforts.

But these platforms have opened up opportunities for B2B companies to generate highly qualified leads and cultivate profitable relationships with the companies they’d most like as clients.

Why ABM is a good strategy for manufacturers

ABM is more than a buzzword or a trend — it’s a strategy that real companies have seen real success with. 96% of B2B companies say employing ABM has contributed to their marketing success, according to an ABM adoption benchmark report. And 60% attribute a revenue increase to ABM.

For manufacturers in particular —with their long sales cycles and high-value products and services— ABM poses a unique opportunity to speed up pipeline velocity and generate high-quality, high-profit leads.

Greater pipeline velocity so you can close deals faster

You’re not selling $5 bracelets at a mall kiosk. Manufacturers sell highly complex solutions — and the buying decision for your services or products is not taken lightly. There are likely at least six or seven stakeholders with varying levels of involvement in the buying decision. Each stakeholder has their own priorities and pain points, which can cause the buying cycle to drag on for months.

ABM can help speed up this process. More than half of B2B companies report greater pipeline velocity due to ABM, according to a study by SiriusDecisions.

By earning each of these stakeholders’ trust early on with targeted awareness campaigns and helpful content geared toward their unique pain points at every stage of the industrial buying process, you have a greater chance of winning their vote during the purchase decision. And, as a result, you can close the deal faster.
You hand-select each company on your list — so you know each lead will be highly qualified

The companies that make the cut for ABM exactly match your ideal customer profile (ICP), meaning they meet your criteria based on their budget, location and the accessibility of their decision makers.

These companies have been hand-selected for their potential to blossom into long-term, profitable relationships. And they do. 60% of B2B companies who implemented ABM campaigns stated that their revenue was higher due to the strategy, according to a study.

This can be attributed to two factors:

The quality of the companies you choose

Because your marketing and sales team work together to pre-qualify each company on your list, you can be confident that acquiring them as customers will be worth it. If you close the deal, you know they’ll be a good fit relationship- and budget-wise.
The trust you build throughout the campaign

In an ABM campaign, you personally address each stakeholders’ pain points head on, earning attention and trust for your company. When the purchase decision comes around, they’ll be more comfortable choosing you.

Although ABM is a labor-intensive strategy, it can have a great impact on your bottom line in terms of revenue increases from influenced accounts. And because you are targeting a finite number of companies with ABM, you can easily and accurately measure the revenue it’s generating.

While not a plug-and-chug solution, ABM is a great way for manufacturers to target, land and retain high-value accounts. By winning over each decision maker at each company, you not only have the opportunity to speed up the buying cycle, but also build more profitable client relationships.

Account-based marketing ideas for manufacturers

Before we give you a couple ideas for starting an ABM campaign of your own, there’s something we need to stress:

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy, not a string of tactics.

Anyone can blindly cold call a 100 target companies with a sales pitch — that’s not ABM. ABM isn’t just advertising. It isn’t just sending out hand-written notes.

ABM is much more holistic and deliberate than that. It’s the strategic process of identifying accounts you’d like to work with, engaging them with helpful content and building long-lasting, profitable relationships with them.

Your marketing and sales team work closely to identify a selective list of companies you’d like to work with. Use your ideal customer profile (ICP) as your guide during this process.

If you’re a metal building manufacturer, your ideal customer might be a small to medium general contractor who will bring a lot of repeat business. You’d identify a list of companies who fit this profile and gather contact information for the key stakeholders at each company.

Once you’ve identified the companies you’re targeting, you’ll need to engage them with content meant to increase awareness and address stakeholder pain points. Who your audience is and what they care about will guide your decisions about how to communicate with them. Targeted advertising campaigns, email campaigns and customized how-to videos are all good options.

The purpose of ABM is to land and expand high-value clients. To this end, your job is not done when the ink is dry on a contract. ABM is about building relationships with stakeholders before, during and after the sale.

Now onto ideas for starting an ABM campaign of your own. Here are three.

Run a hyper-targeted paid media campaign

AdRoll and LinkedIn allow you to zero ad targeting in on the specific people you need to reach. While display ads aren’t the most personal method of communication, they are a great way to get your company’s name in front of decision makers.

Offer something helpful. We run ads to our Industrial Marketing Guide — a guide for B2B manufacturers on how to grow business online. The key here is to offer something helpful that relates to the audience you’re targeting.
Set up automated email nurturing

If you identify 50 companies that would be a good fit, and you have the contact information for the decision makers you need to reach, you can generate a series of automated emails.

While these emails are automated, they shouldn’t be impersonal. A canned email will get a canned response — or no response at all.

Try to be as specific, helpful and educational as possible. Offer something of value, like a case study, guide or even a blog post written specifically for their company and their pain points. Once, we recorded an eight-minute long video geared toward only the CFO. It took time, but it got us in the door for a meeting.

Three or so should suffice — you don’t want to overwhelm someone who isn’t interested.
Add a personal touch with mailers and hand-written notes

Emails are easy to automate, but nothing stands out like a handwritten note. It shows you put thought into the communication and that goes a long way when you’re trying to cut through the clutter.

If you write letters to more than one person in a company —the plant manager, lead engineer, VP of sales, etc.— assume they’re going to compare your message. Tailor your letter to their specific pain points. The engineer cares about the technical aspects of how your solution works. The CFO cares about the bottom line. The CEO cares about efficiencies, growth and public image. The VP of sales cares about, well, sales.

Sure, custom direct mailers and letters take a little more time, but the impact they will have is well worth it.

As part of a comprehensive marketing plan, ABM can help manufacturers capture and retain high-value clients. If you’re ready to have a conversation about how ABM fits into your lead generation strategy, we can help.

At any scale, budget and timeline, ABM empowers industrial companies with the framework they need to seek, engage and close long-term, profitable accounts. Let’s start with a three-month trial. We’ll evaluate your industry and develop a plan to spearfish your ideal clients right out of the water. Request a consultation to get started.

Case study: Inbound marketing generates $800,000 in Q2 revenue for generator distributor

CK Power is a Midwest-based engine and generator manufacturer and distributor specializing in custom solutions for its customers.

The problem: an outdated site lacking the content and conversion paths needed to attract search traffic and generate leads.

The solution: a strategic inbound marketing plan focused on building a pipeline of qualified leads with keyword-targeted content and conversion opportunities.

The results: $800,000 revenue in Q2 of 2017 alone.

“We’ve seen a measurable increase in revenue since working with Gorilla 76. In Q2 of 2017, we were able to attribute $800,000 in revenue to leads that Gorilla helped drum up through our combined marketing efforts. I highly recommend them to any company looking to grow in the industrial sector.”

-Clayton Costello, Operations Manager, CK Power

The problem

Clayton Costello, operations manager at CK Power, realized in mid-2015 that inbound marketing would become a core part of CK Power’s overarching marketing plan. Print ads and event sponsorships weren’t showing clear ROI, so Clayton decided to invest a portion of the CK Power marketing budget toward digital strategy: website infrastructure, content marketing, SEO, PPC and more.

We’ve worked closely with Clayton to grow CK Power’s traffic and leads and even proven a measurable return on investment through closed-loop reporting.

The first solution: building a solid foundation for growth

Building a successful inbound marketing program starts with solid brand positioning and a website that’s built to scale content marketing efforts and convert leads.

Digging into the data, we determined that the website needed a technical and conversion rework to improve user experience and drive visitors toward our conversion opportunities (educational guides, product catalogs, consultations, etc.). Clayton handed us the keys to the website, and we began site mapping and wireframing the site.

The EPA’s Tier 4 deadlines were fast approaching, so we decided to highlight CK Power’s understanding of Tier 4 regulations by featuring a detailed guide on the home page. We also helped visitors segment themselves easily by choosing between specific types of generators and engines they were interested in.

Once the visitor found the specific power equipment they needed, we made it easy for them to download an industry- or product-specific brochure that could be printed out or shared digitally in exchange for their contact information.

We also installed LiveChat, a messaging software for websites that allow businesses to answer visitors’ questions on the fly. We wrote custom messages for CK Power’s high traffic pages that invited conversations between Clayton and potential customers.

From a technical perspective, forms weren’t always loading correctly, and sometimes data wasn’t being collected due to a DNS issue. From an SEO perspective, there were duplicate pages and important pages buried within multiple folders, making it hard for Google to prioritize our keyword-targeted pages. Cleaning up these technical issues improved both our rankings in search engines and the amount of contacts generated.

Ongoing solutions: content marketing, SEO and CRO

While the new website certainly helped results (as you’ll see in the section below), a good digital marketer’s job is never done. There are endless opportunities to grow traffic, leads and sales through continued inbound and paid media efforts.

Let’s start with where we’ve seen a ton of success: Search engine optimization by building educational and informative content.

Google’s secret sauce boils down to two key ingredients: (1) credible, relevant links pointing to your website that effectively “validate” your website and (2) informative, keyword-targeted content that helps answer a searcher’s queries. When these two factors mix together, rankings happen.

Let’s get into a specific example.

As we mentioned above, Tier 4 is a big deal in the power generation industry. Any company that manufactures or uses off-road diesel equipment needed to be Tier 4 compliant in 2017. Back in 2015, CK Power saw these regulations as an opportunity to educate their audience and become a true thought leader in their industry before regulations went into effect. After consulting with CK Power and performing keyword research we identified keywords and topics their target audience was searching for as Tier 4 deadlines neared. Topics ranged from Tier 4 FAQs, common Tier 4 transition problems, OEM purchasing considerations and general regulation information.

First, we built up a strong content base that could live on CK Power’s site. This is important because you want to manage the platform where traffic will eventually stream into in order to turn that traffic into leads via guides, product catalogs and consultations. The content was keyword optimized to eventually rank in search engines.

Second, we help the CK Power team write for online industry publications to build credible backlinks to their site and further boost authority. There are hundreds of niche publications that CK Power could write for, publications in manufacturing, construction, facility management, data center management, etc. Since CK Power had built up a resource center full of Tier 4 content, it was natural and easy to link back to the valuable content they’d created, effectively building credibility (and rankings) in Google. We also created an infographic on Tier 4 regulations that we shared with these publications to build links at scale to help our keyword-targeted content rank.

Writing keyword-targeted content and guest writing for industry publications are tried-and-true strategies that should be part of every ongoing inbound marketing plan.

The results

More than a facelift to an outdated site, the website rebuild was focused on turning the site into a true business development tool. After a slow month in December 2016, the site launched in January 2017, resulting in a 150 percent increase in leads from the previous month.

Not only did we see a significant bump in leads, we also saw traffic increase by 45 percent from December. Cleaning up the site’s architecture to improve the flow of PageRank and improving the site’s URL structure resulted in higher rankings in Google that translated to more organic visitors.

In the end, the visitor-to-conversion rate went from less than 1 percent to 1.87 percent after site launch. There’s still work to be done to hit our goal of 2-3 percent, but we’re confident that we’re moving in the right direction with CK Power. And they are as well.

The ongoing inbound marketing efforts have also played a pivotal role in CK Power’s success. Average monthly organic traffic generation has grown 193% since October 2015, and average monthly lead generation has grown 336%. Even after the website was completed in January 2017, leads have continued to grow over time. You’ll also notice that organic search (denoted by green) has become a dominant channel for CK Power’s lead generation because of the ongoing SEO work. After consulting with his internal sales team, Clayton attributed $800,000 in Q2 2017 revenue to leads generated from inbound marketing.

If this case study has interested you in the potential impact of a long-term inbound marketing strategy, you can sign up for a consultation today to talk with our co-founder Joe Sullivan. He’ll guide you through what working with Gorilla entails and work with you to determine if we’re a good fit.

Six building blocks for a lead-generating manufacturer website

In this white board video, we’ll look at the six things a manufacturer website needs in place to serve as business-generating tool and resource for potential buyers – rather than simply a digital capabilities brochure. After introducing those six building blocks, we’ll look at examples within the context of a real website.

The B2B Website Planning Handbook

This guide gives you as a manufacturing organization a structure for auditing your marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving your program’s ROI.

View guide

Related resources

Designing industrial websites to convert: User flow maps explained

We’ll show you how to plan intentional paths for prospects to take on your website – from the point at which they arrive to the point at which they convert into real leads. Read the article.

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

In this article (and it’s video counterpart), we’ll look at where the infrastructure of your website sits among the seven core elements we believe must be present, optimized and working in sync to achieve significant and sustainable revenue growth through marketing and sales. Read article or watch video.

How industrial SEO works and how manufacturers can rank first in Google

This article will help you design an industrial SEO strategy by explaining what Google cares about, how marketers have failed to beat them and where to focus. Read article.

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

We created our original video library – The Foundry – to teach manufacturing companies how to grow their businesses online. Subscribe to our newsletter to get these videos and other industrial marketing content in your inbox monthly.

Video transcript:

Hey, everybody. I’m Joe Sullivan, a co-founder of industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76. And today, we’re gonna be talking about the six building blocks manufacturing organizations really need to have in place for their websites to serve as business-generating tools instead of just digital brochures that kind of talk about what they do and how great they are.

So, I’m gonna start by introducing these six building blocks and then we’re going to jump over to my screen and we’ll take a quick look at what each of them kind of looks like within the context of a real website.

So let’s start with this first building block, a Flexible Content Management system. In short, a content management system – or a CMS – is exactly what it sounds like, really. It’s a software platform used for managing all the information on your website. The reason your CMS is so important is that the process of building a website can’t be looked at anymore as a project where you have a start date over here and an end date over here. Instead, your site needs to go through a continuous improvement process as you learn how visitors use it, what content they’re consuming and why they are or aren’t converting into real leads.

So, for continuous improvement to happen, you need to have the ability to quickly make edits on the fly without having to go through your IT guy or your web design company every time you need to change something. Our CMS or content management system of choice for growing our manufacturing clients is WordPress, hands down. It’s estimated at this point that WordPress powers something like 25% to 30% of the internet – and for good reason. The platform is “open source”, meaning that code is freely available to developers who can modify it, edit it, make it better or customize it to their needs. And that means thousands of developers are out there constantly making WordPress better. LightCMS and Joomla are a couple alternatives that you could use as well.

The second building block is Thought Leadership Content. I can’t emphasize enough how important content is going to be in your online marketing and lead generation strategy as a manufacturer. So just about every manufacturer’s website at this point is filled with service and product pages, maybe some case studies – ultimately, things that are kind of all about them, right? How great they are, why you should be their customers. And I don’t disagree that this content needs to be there. After all, you need to state your value proposition, you need to make it clear to your potential buyer that you may have what they’re looking for. But during that industrial buying process, the reality is this: Your customers and your website visitors don’t care about you. They care about themselves, right? And at least until they’re confident that you understand the problems that they have, the challenges they’re trying to solve, and the goals they’re trying to accomplish, they’re thinking about themselves.

So, if you think about the best sales professionals out there, they’re problem solvers, right? They’re able to demonstrate that they can understand the pains of their buyers, and your website kind of needs to act the same way. Only once that happens do the ears of those potential buyers start to open up. So, what am I talking about when I say that thought leadership is building block number two? Really, I’m talking about content that helps answer common questions, solve common problems, and in the process of doing so, earns the trust and attention of your website visitors. Only then does it prompt real sales conversations to happen.

It’s estimated that over 50% of the business-to-business buying process happens before the buyer even makes contact with sales. And so, you really need your content to deliver during the first half of that buying process. Thought leadership content can come in a variety of forms from educational articles, to white papers, downloadable guides, ROI calculators and videos like this. The key is that your thought leadership content is there to be helpful and not to talk about you, but to help your buyer solve problems.

Okay, the third building block is on-page SEO or Search Engine Optimization. This is all about ensuring that your website is optimized to show up in Google searches related to your offerings in your areas of expertise. There’s still a lot of old-school thinking and really terrible advice out there from SEO professionals – things like stuff your site with keywords, write a bunch of mediocre content with those keywords incorporated into it, build as many links as possible from anywhere on the internet back to your site. We’ve covered the complexities of SEO in much more depth elsewhere and we’ll link to some of that content in the page notes here, but because right now, we’re talking about on-page SEO or, sort of, what you can control from within the walls of your own website, we’ll keep it short here.

So, the first thing you need to know is that exceptional, resourceful, audience-centric content is key. And we’ve kind of covered that already in the last section here. Another thing you need to know is that from an on-page SEO standpoint, there are some best practices that you’re gonna want to follow to tell the search engines like Google what your page and your site as a whole is about. So, you need to think of each page on your website as an opportunity to attract ideal customers who are looking for content related to topics on that particular page. So, if your page is about metal stamping for the aerospace industry, you probably want a keyword like “aerospace metal stamping” in the page title of the URL, the headline, and maybe a couple more times on the page. SEO is a lot more complicated than what we’re covering here, but when you’re talking about what you can control from within the walls of your own website, these SEO best practices are a good place to start.

Okay, the fourth building block is User Flows. Sometimes, we call these “visitors-to-lead conversion paths”. And what we’re talking about here are the routes along which you want to direct your website visitors from the point at which they arrive on your site to the point at which they take a lead-generating action like filling out a form. Planning user flows is a really strategic part of the website planning process, and it’s an ongoing thing you need to be doing after your site launches, too. So here’s kind of how you want to think about it.

Each buyer persona that you’re targeting – whether that person is an Engineer, or a Procurement Manager, or a CEO – each person has a different need when he or she lands on your site, and your job is to get those individuals to what they’re looking for before they leave and don’t come back. Because a vast majority of B2B website visitors are researching and evaluating and not yet ready to buy something, you need to equip your website with opportunities to convert those anonymous visitors into leads once they arrive at their destinations on your site as well. So just because your qualified visitor might not be ready yet to pick up the phone or to fill out a “request a quote” form doesn’t mean they won’t trade their names, email addresses, and phone numbers for helpful white papers, guides, case studies, tools related or whatever information they’re trying to gather. So when that happens, it allows for your team to step in and take control of the sales conversation. So, this process really isn’t optional anymore if you’re serious about generating leads on your site. It works really well for 100% of our manufacturing clients and it’s pretty central to their business development strategies at this point.

The fifth building block is Mobile-friendly Design. In the 2017 study about digital media use in the industrial sector, a company called GlobalSpec reports that engineers spend 21% of their online time on smartphones and tablets, and that percentage is growing, not shrinking. So what kind of user experience do you think your visitors are getting if they’re constantly pinching and scrolling as they try to navigate your site on their phone? Here’s a hint, it’s not good. So, mobile friendliness is also on the rise as a factor that affects search engine optimization and it needs to be a consideration on your website, for sure.

The sixth and final building block is CRM and marketing database integration. In case you’re unfamiliar, CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”. Some of the most popular CRM software platforms out there include Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot. And when we refer to marketing database, we’re really talking about a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Pardot, or Act-On. Without going into too much detail here, these databases are where you manage your leads and sales opportunities. And it’s critical that your website is properly synced to whichever CRM and marketing automation tools you’re using. So that means tracking code is going to be installed on your website, your website forms are configured to funnel new contacts directly into the software, etc. The best automation tools do a whole lot more as well, and we won’t go into that here, but we’ll link to an article in the page notes so you can learn more. So, in short, your CRM and your marketing automation software tools are, kind of, your bridge between your website and ongoing marketing and sales processes.

Okay, so now that I’ve explained what each of these building blocks are, I want to put each of them in context for you. So, let’s jump over to my screen and very quickly look at examples of each within the context of a real website. Because I want to protect the privacy of our clients, I’m gonna use our own Gorilla 76 website for these examples. I realize we’re a marketing agency and not a manufacturing organization, of course, but these six building blocks that we’ve been talking about are present and equally important for us as a business-to-business company. So, we’ll go ahead and open the back door to our site and let you inside for a few minutes.

Okay, so let’s use this page on the Gorilla site for our example. This is an article we recently wrote titled “Manufacturing marketing: Four questions to guide your strategy.” Building block number one, as we’ve talked about, is the Content Management System, which, for us, is WordPress. And because I’m already logged into WordPress, I get this little navigation across the top that lets us access the CMS or Content Management System. If I click on “edit post”, it will take me right into the back end of this article where I can make updates on the fly, edit content as I see fit. And I just click this blue “update” button over here and all the changes I made will go live immediately. I can also add new articles over here on the left with the click of a button, and I can access other pages on this site, make edits to those as well, over here in the left navigation. Because our developer has done a lot of customization of our site over the years, we can add call-to-action buttons, resources, videos, forms, things like this very easily as well. So, let’s put it this way, if you’re capable of using Facebook, you’re capable of using WordPress. It’s really easy.

Okay, so the second building block is Thought Leadership Content, and this article that we were just looking at is a good example. We’re speaking to our core audience here which is midsize manufacturing organizations, and teaching them about our expertise which is industrial marketing strategy. This is really just one article inside an extensive industrial marketing learning center that we’ve created. We’ve been publishing a wealth of content here for years from articles to white papers to videos and other guides. And all that stuff is written for that exact manufacturing audience that we target as an organization.

The third building block is On-page Search Engine Optimization. So, as you can see, we’ve targeted this keyword “manufacturer marketing” here. It’s up here in the page title. It’s here in the title of the article or main headline on the page. We’ve used it in other places on the page – not keyword-stuffed it – but we’ve used it. And we’ve used related phrases in some places as well, like “marketing for manufacturers” here in the URL, used “marketing for manufacturers” down here in one of the sub-headlines on the page. And sort of, you know, the combination of this content being thorough and targeted and making use of on-page SEO best practices and also the credible links that we’ve built to that page from other sources on the internet as well has helped us to rank first organically for “manufacturer marketing” as you can see here. And we’re also ranking first for “marketing for manufacturers” in the same way. And it’s worth noting that we get a lot of our best leads through this page directly out of related Google searches.

Okay, the fourth building block is User Flows or “visitor-to-lead conversion” paths as we sometimes call them. While we make it easy for visitors to request a consultation up here in the top navigation when they’re ready to do so, we also, you know, understand that most visitors aren’t ready to buy right away, as we’ve talked about earlier, so we make sure we equip our pages with other calls to action. In this case, we’re thinking about, you know, what this person might care about, what else they might maybe download, or how we could get them to fill out a form. And so here, we’re, you know, saying, “Prioritize your marketing spend and maximize ROI,” and encouraging them to download our “How to Audit Your Industrial Marketing Strategy” guide. So, we’re driving them to this piece here where we, kind of, tease them of, you know, what they’ll get if they’ll download the guide and ask for some contact information in exchange for it. And, you know, it’s really through these conversion focused pages that we generate a majority of our leads at Gorilla, and the same goes for almost all of our manufacturing clients.

The fifth building block is Mobile-friendliness. So, let me exit full screen here, and we’ll show you what I’m talking about. As the size of your browser window shrinks, you can see how the content on your website, adjusts to fit that size. So this is about the width that you’d find of the content on a mobile phone and maybe this is what a tablet looks like or an iPad versus a desktop computer that small or big. And so, the content adjusts based on what device you’re on, which is referred to often as “responsive website design”.

Then finally, we have the sixth building block which is CRM and Marketing Database Integration. So, when somebody fills out a form like this on our website, this form is actually hosted through our CRM and marketing automation software, HubSpot. And inside the software, a contact record for anybody who fills out these forms is automatically created for us. And then, inside of these contact records, I can add notes to their profile, see what pages they viewed on the site and send alerts to tell me when they revisit our site. I can also track open deals that are going on on the sales side of the software.

Let’s pop over there real quick. Deals can be tracked here. I can set tasks for myself, forecast what the pipeline looks like at any given point in time, build reports, send email campaigns. There is just a ton you can do between the marketing automation and sales sides of the software. So, for Gorilla, HubSpot is a really important tool in both our marketing and sales processes. And over half of our clients use it as well.

Okay, that wraps it up for today. So, thanks for bearing with me. I know that has a lot to cover. As I mentioned, I’ll post some of the related resources in the page notes on our site. I also encourage you to subscribe to our industrial marketing newsletter to get more content like this in your inbox once or twice a month. Just visit gorilla76.com/newsletter to subscribe. And then finally, if you’d like to set up a free consultation to talk about your website and how it fits into the bigger business development picture for your organization, please fill out the request for consultation form on gorilla76.com. So, thanks for watching.

Ideal customer and buyer persona profiles for manufacturers

In this screencast video, we’ll explore how to define your audience in two ways: 1) the companies you want to attract and 2) the individuals within those companies whose attention and trust you need to earn. And then we’ll show you how to document profiles of each so your Marketing team, your Sales team and the rest of your company will all be rowing in the same direction when it comes to developing new business. We recommend downloading these free worksheets if you’d like to fill in your own profiles as (or after) you watch.

Related resources

Ideal Customer and Buyer Persona Worksheets

Download these free worksheets to help you flesh out your own Ideal Customer and Buyer Profiles.

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

This guide gives you as a manufacturing organization a structure for auditing your marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving your program’s ROI. View guide

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

Creating your ideal customer and buyer persona profiles are critical precursors to developing an effective Brand Positioning. In this article (and it’s video counterpart), we’ll look at where Brand Positioning sits among the seven core elements we believe must be present, optimized and working in sync to achieve significant and sustainable revenue growth through marketing and sales. Read article or watch video.

Ideal customer and buyer persona profiles for manufacturers

This article is the written equivalent of this video on this page, in case you prefer reading to watching. Read article.

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript:

Hey, everybody, I’m Joe Sullivan, a co-founder of industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76. And today, I’m gonna be talking about a critical first step in building a sustainable ROI-driven business development system. And that’s clearly defining and documenting your target audience.

So it can be really tempting to jump straight into a new marketing campaign. But that, of course, is gonna take resources, it’s gonna take time, manpower and capital. And if you stop to think about it for a second, doesn’t it only make sense that you take the time to truly identify who exactly it is you’re targeting and what they care about? As marketing and sales professionals, it’s in our best interest to optimize our resources, not to create waste.

In this video about ideal customer and buyer persona profiles, we’re gonna take a look at how to define your audience in a couple of different ways. First, the types of companies that you’re selling to – or your ideal customer profile. And then second, the types of people at these companies that you need to reach – who would be your buyer persona profiles. And then, after we take a look at each of these, I’m gonna show you how to go about documenting each with your marketing and sales team. So let’s jump over to my screen.

Okay, so let’s start by defining your ideal customer at a company level. So think about your customer base for a second. Which ones are the most profitable? Which ones allow your company to do your best work – the work that you’re truly experts in? Which ones do you and your team actually enjoy working with? Think about the ones that maybe don’t cause you anxiety in the middle of the night.

So these ones are your ideal fit customers.

Now, imagine yourself waking up a few years down the road, and seeing a portfolio of clients that look just like this. This is exactly why we want to define our ideal customer profile, so we can seek out and win businesses that we actually want rather than just what falls onto our lap.

So now, think about what are the shared characteristics of these ideal customers? What are the common threads when you look at things like the following?

Their industry
The size of the company in terms of revenue and number of employees
Maybe how much they spend with you
Their geography
Who they sell to
Technology they use
Your access to their decision makers
Maybe company values

Write all the stuff down, this is what’s really gonna start to form your ideal customer profile.

Now, I need to point something out. So when you start to create an ideal customer profile, and really start laser focusing on that exact type of business, if this curve represents your current volume of leads being generated, then in the short term, it might start to look more like this, which may not be that exciting to see. But as you start to look more closely, the curve of truly sales-qualified leads is likely to go from something like this to something more like this.

And here’s what else is really great about this. So the companies that are out there who are really ideal fits for you – they start to perceive you as an expert in their space rather than just a generalist. And now all of a sudden, you’ve kind of differentiated yourself from the competition. You become the solution, rather than just a solution.

So here’s a quick example. At Gorilla 76, we don’t call ourselves a full-service marketing agency with a wide array of services for a wide variety of business, but instead we call ourselves the industrial marketing agency. And we help manufacturers, and industrial service providers build online marketing and sales programs that attract the right leads and drive more sales.

And time and time again, our specialization really helps us attract and win business with the right types of customers that we’re truly best at serving, and by doing what we’re best at doing.

So now that we know what the type of company looks like that we’re targeting, we need to dial in on the individual human beings at those companies who play a role in the buying process. This is were we get into buyer persona profiles.

So a majority of the manufacturing organizations that we work with at Gorilla don’t sell commodity products. Instead their buyers are looking for more customized, solution-oriented products or services. And this results in a highly consultative and often long sales and buying process for them.

So the buyers in these situations are rarely just one person, but instead a committee of individuals with different roles within the company and requirements for what’s being purchased.

Inside these companies that fit your ideal customer profile, you’ve got a wide variety of individuals with different jobs, and often a handful or more of them are gonna be looped into the buying process in some capacity. These people might include Design Engineers, Plant Managers, Procurement folks, Presidents, CFOs, and others. And these people –whoever they are at your ideal customer – this is who your buying committee is, because each of these individuals has a different pain they’re trying to solve.

Your sales team already knows you can’t just talk to them all the same way, but marketing has got to follow suit. That’s why we create these persona profiles. So let’s take a look at a few example buyer personas that may or may not make sense for you to classify within your own business.

One that we see often within the target audiences of our manufacturing clients is who we’re calling here The Information Gatherer. This is the person who is tasked by a decision maker to go find a solution to whatever it is. And because the majority of information gathering in the B2B industrial space is now happening online, this person is often going to Google to look for products, services, answers to questions and solutions to problems. So if you want to be in front of this person, and on the list that this person puts on the desk of his or her boss, you need to have their attention and online visibility in front of them.

A second example persona is the person we call The Spec Seeker. This person is often an Engineer, a Plant Manager, or some technically-minded individual. The Spec Seeker often has the technical expertise to understand how a solution will work within the company’s facilities and operations. He or she is certainly going to be involved in terms of evaluating the options brought to the table by that previous persona, The Information Gatherer.

And then a third example persona could be The Decision Maker, often a President or CEO, maybe a CFO. This person is gonna make the final decision, and ultimately write the check. So decision makers are trusting their team to thoroughly vet options and this person ultimately cares more about things like ROI, long term cost of ownership for a solution, building sustainable relationships with smart, experienced partners and sort of high level things along those lines.

So some of these personas may or may not resonate with you. Maybe there are others that make more sense for your business. Regardless, here’s what you want do to document each persona.

For each one, you want to write down:

Common job titles that this person has
The role they play in the buying process
Their level of authority at the company
Common pain points that this person has. We bold this one because the pain points of this individuals is often what’s gonna form the foundation of your marketing strategy.
What he or she values about you
The level of education needed by this person about what to buy
Where he or she seeks information, whether online or offline
How he or she usually discovers you in the first place
Potential objections this person has to hiring you
Keywords he/she might search for on Google, especially with that Solution Seeker persona
And then we usually like to throw in a real life example or two from some of your existing customers that sort of fit this persona. That helps you kind of keep it in perspective and tie it back to your real world, and your real business development situation.

So now that you know what needs to happen in terms of documenting these buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, let’s briefly touch on what this documentation process should actually look like.

So the first step is to get your team together, and this is really critical because you need everybody who plays an important role in your business development process to be on the same page. You want upper management, the head of your sales and marketing staff and any key marketing or sales consultants, or agency partners to be present.

The next step is to define your ideal customer and buyer personas. This should be a collaborative discussion between the group in the room. Sometimes it can be a pretty lengthy one too, as everybody is gonna have their own opinions.

The third step is to put it all in writing

And then finally, you absolutely wanna share this throughout your organization. From management to operations to customer service, to sales and marketing, you want everybody rowing in the same direction.

Okay, that’s it for today. So I’m gonna post some of the previously mentioned resources in the page notes. I encourage you to subscribe to our industrial marketing newsletter, and visit our Learning Center to find more content like this one. And if you’d like to set up a free consultation to talk about defining and documenting your company’s ideal customer and buyer persona profiles, please fill out the consultation request on gorilla76.com. So thanks for watching.

Why you shouldn’t write a website design RFP

This previously-published article was updated on October 30, 2017.

I remember writing the original version of this article with a chip on my shoulder while waiting for my oil change in a Firestone lobby. I wasn’t angry at the Firestone crew (great job as always, guys!). Instead, I was angry about the website design RFP our agency had junk sunk a whole bunch of time into, just to receive a canned response informing us they’d “gone in another direction.”

Well, it’s four and a half years later, and it’s been four and a half years since we last decided to answer a website design RFP.

And in the meantime, we’ve learned a lot about how a B2B company should be evaluating agencies for that big, overwhelming website build on the horizon. So we thought now would be a good time for a refresh of this article.

The first time around, I gave our readers more of a rant than an actionable guide. Yeah, sorry about that. This time though, I set out to give you the latter. So below we’ll start by looking at three reasons why we believe website RFPs aren’t the right way to evaluate agencies. And then we’ll share our recommended alternative and a tool to help.

Why the website design RFP is a bad idea

I could probably give you ten or twenty good reasons. But here are the three I believe are most important.

1. Website RFPs suppress the exact expertise you’re seeking

When you’re sick, you go to the doctor. You describe your symptoms, let Doc perform the check up and rely on his/her expertise for both a diagnosis and remedy. Similarly, when you’ve got a leak under the sink that you can’t seem to fix, you call a plumber. The plumber checks out the problem, identifies the solution and chooses the right tools and materials to fix it.

If you’re anything like me, your doctor and your plumber have knowledge, experience and skills that you don’t. And that’s exactly why you’re willing to pay for their help.

Marketing agencies and web design firms are no different. When you hand an agency a list of requirements (in the form of an RFP) instead of explaining the challenges at hand (and your target outcomes), you’re writing off their knowledge, experience and problem-solving abilities as unimportant.

2. Website design RFPs emphasize tactics over goals

Here are the types of things you’ll find listed on website RFPs:

Social media interactivity and social sharing icons
Joomla content management system
Newsfeed on homepage
Biographies of all key team members. And definitely links to their social media profiles. Including MySpace
Mobile-friendliness across ALL mobile devices ever made in the history of humanity. Ever.
Humongous, MASSIVE, COLOSSAL company logo on ~~homepage~~ every page

But here’s what’s backward. When you start by focusing on the tools and tactics, you take all the emphasis off the problems you need to solve in the first place, and more importantly, the outcomes you expect to see when those problems are solved.

Earlier, we talked about how you rely on the expertise of your doctor or your plumber. I don’t tell Doc what medicine to prescribe. I might suggest one that I read about on WebMD (which I’m sure the doctor just loves). But ultimately, that’s his or her job, right? And your plumber has that big white Ford van for a reason. There are all kinds of tools for the job in there. No need to haul your toolbox up from the basement to assist.

So what does it mean to focus on the problems and expected outcomes for your website build instead of the tools and tactics that you suspect will get you there? Well, start with the reasons you’re rebuilding your site in the first place. Ultimately, you’re trying to solve some kind of problem or produce some target outcome, right? Here are some examples that might sound familiar:

Problems you might need to solve:

We’re not generating enough qualified leads through our website
We’re not ranking in search engines for important keywords and phrases
Our website makes us look unprofessional

Ok, now we’re making some progress. So what would success look like? Maybe something like this?:

Goals / outcomes you might want to achieve

Attribute $3M in revenue growth over the next 12 months to our marketing investment
Generate an average of 10 quotes per month through the website, averaging $100K/each
Generate 25 sales-qualified leads per month

Now we’re really getting somewhere.

And here’s what else can be interesting. When you start by focusing on outcomes instead of tactics, your agency might even help you discover that a complete website rebuild isn’t what you need to meet your goals in the first place.

WHAT?! BLASPHEMY!

Here’s an example. When we started working with our client CK Power a few years ago, we learned that they were seeing 2000 – 3000 website visits/month, but getting very few leads. Well, we knew that feeding their sales pipeline with a consistent stream of qualified inbound leads was their priority. So rather than spending months and thousands of dollars rebuilding their less-than-perfect website right away, we focused year one of our engagement on converting more of that existing traffic (on that old, semi-clunky website) into leads. Here’s what happened:

The success that came with going from 0 to 50 leads/month in year one created both the confidence and budget to invest in a full website overhaul during year two. And as you can see in the graph above, results were just further amplified.

When you paint a picture of your target outcomes for the agencies you’re considering hiring, you give them the chance to design a highly-customized and goal-focused plan (rather than focusing their energy on making sure your Twitter icon is on every page).

3. Website RFPs substitute relationships with lists of requirements

It may or may not surprise you to hear that before I started dating my wife Julie back in 2005, I did not put out an RFP with the following requirements before making a decision about whether to marry her or someone else:

Brown hair
Hazel eyes
Can consistently cook a perfect steak
Hardcore Green Bay Packers fan (or at least expresses strong dislike of Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings)

Instead, we did that whole thing where you date for a few years, get to know each other, realize you’re ultra compatible, fall in love, get engaged and then eventually get married. I know. It’s crazy, right?

Well, you might not be exactly marrying your marketing or web design agency. But this isn’t like buying a new pair of socks at Target, either. You’ll be spending a lot of time with this group of individuals and putting a lot of trust in them as well. Do you really want to kick off that relationship with an impersonal 15-page document that looks like something out of a law school textbook?

If you find the right-fit agency, they’ll become a partner to you for years to come, helping you finesse your new website and watch your tangible results grow year after year.

So what’s the alternative to issuing a website design RFP?

We wrote our B2B Website Planning Handbook to provide guidance in the process of selecting an agency and planning for a sustainable and results-oriented website build. It’s free and you can get it here. Included in the handbook are the following:

Five things a B2B website is not
The critical components of a B2B website
Six things to do before you start building
How to choose a web-design agency
Strategic planning worksheet

But before you dive into the handbook, let me leave you with a few parting recommendations:

Have a REAL, human conversation with your potential agency partners. Don’t put yourself through the long tedious process of writing an RFP (and then having to evaluate those firms) before you’ve even met them.
Educate them on the problems you’re trying to solve.
Help them understand what success would look like in the year after your new site goes live. What kind of revenue growth would your company see? What would your inbound lead pipeline look like? What promotion would you be given by your boss as a result of your brilliance?!

At Gorilla 76, our expertise lies in helping manufacturers and industrial sector B2B companies create online marketing and sales programs that attract the right leads and drive more sales. If that sounds like you, and you’d like to try out one of those real-life human conversations I mentioned earlier, click here to Request a Consultation.

Thanks for reading!

Designing industrial websites to convert: User flow maps explained

What makes a good industrial website? What does “good” even mean? Are good websites informative? Are they easy to use? Are they clean and visually appealing? Do visitors find what they’re looking for?

Those are all necessary elements for good B2B websites—the flesh that hangs on the bones of your business’s most important asset.

But those elements alone aren’t enough when the goal behind your site is to generate contacts and leads. To do that, you need to take an important step that drives the design, construction and maintenance of your site going forward.

User flow maps

They are what they sound like: routes showing how visitors ideally travel through a website from an initial starting point —usually a piece of content you’ve created that the visitor found in a search engine— to a terminus where a conversion (hopefully) takes place.

There can be hundreds of these on a given site, but they basically break down into segments based on a site visitor’s stage in the buying process.

Remain vigilant and harbor the user flow map mentality at all times. The opportunities to turn your industrial website into a conversion machine are endless.

Top-of-funnel buyers are in the initial research phase of their journey. User flow maps for these visitors are the simplest: They land on a blog post and like it enough to click the “subscribe” button to join your newsletter.

Middle-of-funnel buyers are still researching, but they want more detailed information. Good user flow allows the visitor the opportunity to learn more on the subject they read about in a blog post. It usually comes in the form of a call-to-action to download a white paper, a guide or other premium content.

Buyers deeper in their journey have narrowed their searches and may want to learn more about your company. From their initial landing page, they may be directed to your “About” or “Home” pages. Those pages may feature case studies or testimonials showing your product or service at work in the field.

Note that the above routes are far from fixed. You can make more complex and varied user flow maps, but the point is that an industrial website designed to convert must have these ideal paths of travel ingrained in its DNA.

How user flow maps help

Maybe the best way to illustrate how user flow maps enhance websites is to talk through the questions you won’t be able to answer if you don’t use them.

What discovery-stage content will you create to attract the audience you’re trying to reach? What action do you want someone to take at the end of their visit? Is your site linear and progressive or a journey without a destination?

The lack of a detailed plan for how visitors travel through your site is likely to spawn the “What now?” questions that often render websites digital dead weight instead of integral business generation tools. You can learn more about other critical components of website pre-construction here.

Think in retrospect, too

User flow maps are critical to the beginning stages of any new website build or the overhaul of an existing site. But established sites can still benefit from real-time user flow tinkering to take advantage of trends.

For example, say you wrote a blog post that explains there’s more to widget design than meets the eye. The post is two years old, but it’s optimized for search and it’s earning big time traffic.

Is there a call-to-action on the page? Is there someplace else further down the funnel you can direct this volume of visitors? Can you write a new case study showing how your business enhanced widget design with stellar results for a client? Can you tinker with the closing paragraph of the post to invite visitors to request a quote or consultation?

Remain vigilant and harbor the user flow map mentality at all times. The opportunities to turn your industrial website into a conversion machine are endless.

Other considerations

Effective user flow mapping is all well and good, but it’s only one of the many things you need to do right for you industrial website to convert. Here are some other ideas you need to consider:

Your content has to be good. The most intelligent user flow maps are useless if the content you build around them isn’t optimized for search and doesn’t provide the information your site’s visitors are seeking. You must make a good first impression, and research shows you only have a few seconds to do that before someone checks out.
Production value has to be high. Web users can detect BS a mile away, and relying on cheap templates and stock photography will earn you nothing but scoffs from users. Take the time to invest in professional photography and experienced web design and development so that the digital space you create is worthy of your visitors’ time.
You do need user flow maps, but you might not need a from-scratch site rebuild. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if it’s only a little broke, it’s cheaper and easier to fix it instead of just junking the whole thing. We love building websites, but we won’t recommend you go down that road unless we believe you really need it.

It’s a team sport

Creating user flow maps and using them to inform what your industrial website contains can work wonders, but it’s far from the only thing you should be doing. It’s just one part of a larger website planning process—something you can learn more about by reading our B2B website planning handbook.

Marketing-Sales Alignment for Manufacturers

In this screencast video, we’ll look at why Marketing and Sales departments at manufacturing companies tend to operate in silos. More importantly, we’ll show you how to get them working in sync so you can drive better-qualified leads and more resulting revenue for your organization.

Related resources

How to Audit Your Industrial Marketing Strategy

This guide gives manufacturers a structure for auditing their marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving that program's ROI.

View guide

Aligning marketing and sales

This chapter from our Industrial Marketing: The Definitive Guide details some of the content covered in this video. It will also help you put marketing-sales alignment in context within a more comprehensive industrial marketing strategy. Read chapter from guide.

VIDEO: What marketing results manufacturers should be measuring

In this white board video, we explore five key metrics you need be tracking to understand the ROI of your industrial marketing initiatives. From new customers to sales-qualified leads, total new contacts and website traffic, we’ll show you how to set targets that will help you reach the one marketing metric that really matters – revenue generated. Watch video.

Ideal customer and buyer persona profiles for manufacturers

At the heart of marketing-sales alignment is the mutual understanding between the two departments about who your ideal customer profile looks like at a company level, and who the individual human beings are that you need to be speaking to within those companies. This article will help you set the stage for marketing-sales alignment success by showing you how to document each. Read article.

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript:

Hey, everybody. I’m Joe Sullivan, a co-founder of industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76. And today’s topic is one that’s really been my personal mission with our clients for the last year. That’s aligning the marketing and sales departments within their manufacturing organizations.

So the reason this has become such an area of passion for me is that we see this great divide between marketing and sales departments almost 100% of the time when we’re talking to industrial sector companies for the first time.

We’ve also seen firsthand sort of what happens when that gap starts to be closed. Changes just happen all across the board on the business development front. All of the sudden, marketing and sales are working toward the same goals, more qualified leads are being generated, the volume of those qualified leads starts growing, and ultimately, revenue growth follows suit.

So in this video, we’ve broken it down into three sections here. First, we’re gonna talk about why that great marketing sales divide exists in the first place. Then we’re gonna take a look at why closing that divide matters. And then finally, we’ll get into some tangible stuff and take a look at how to actually go about doing it. So let’s jump over to my screen.

Let’s begin by talking about why this great divide so often exists between marketing and sales teams within B2B manufacturing organizations. Think about this question for a second. Why do marketing and sales departments exist in the first place? Why would a manufacturing organization staff or even outsource marketing and sales personnel? The answer is pretty simple. Ultimately, these departments exist to help grow the business. The job of marketing is to create business opportunities, and the job of sales is to close them. Yet, so often, this great big wall exists between the two departments. But why is that?

So we’ve identified four reasons we think this divide exists. The first reason is that, in many cases, neither department really knows much about what the other one does. Marketing kind of does their thing and sales does theirs. And each department has a stereotypical impression of what goes on across the hall. As far as the marketing department is concerned, sales is on the phone all day cold calling, entertaining prospects on the golf course, knocking on doors, walking the halls of trade shows. And as far as sales is concerned, marketing is doing arts and crafts, and having brainstorms in coffee shops, playing around on social media, and doing, who knows what on the company website. But the point is that each department often exists in its own silo.

The second reason we believe this divide exists between marketing and sales is that sales is as much of an art as it is a science. No B2B salesperson works exactly the same way, and once they kind of figure out what works, they’re less receptive to change a lot of the time. So what’s the motivation for a salesperson to listen to what marketing has to say? Why fix what’s not broken, right?

The third reason for the divide is that, until the last five or 10 years, marketing success was often measured by vanity metrics, and that’s if it was even being measured at all. So by vanity metrics, I mean things like, how many people we’re reaching, how many marketing activities we’re executing, are the phones ringing more? Today, however, we have this wealth of information available to us online that lets us measure things that actually impact business growth, like website traffic, contacts generated from that traffic, sales qualified leads that were a part of those contacts, opportunities created from those sales qualified leads, and then revenue generated from those opportunities. And along with these measurement capabilities comes a whole lot of lead intelligence that sales departments don’t even know exists to them in a lot of cases. So sales can’t harness this data if they’re not aware of what’s available in the first place.

Finally, the fourth reason this divide exists is that, despite the good intentions of many manufacturing Presidents or CEOs, they often lack the knowledge around what’s even possible from a marketing-sales alignment perspective. And as a result, there’s no mandate coming from above to get these two departments in sync. So that’s a perfect lead in to the next part of this video, where I’m going to talk about why closing this gap is so important.

So I want to start here by sharing a few stats with you. First, 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer talks to sales. Second, 50% of leads are qualified, but not yet ready to buy. And then third, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies become 67% better at closing deals. So together, these three stats really tell the story of why marketing and sales teams should be collaborating. The fact is this, the B2B buying process starts well before the first sales call, and so marketing needs to be hard at work for your organization before that touch point happens. Let’s look in more detail.

So here’s what marketing needs to do. First, they need to learn from the sales team who the ideal customer is. What are the characteristics of the companies who are the most ideal fits? Next, marketing needs to understand who at those companies, whether they be design engineers, plant managers, presidents, procurement folks, whoever they may be, play a role in the buying process. After that, they need to identify what all the challenges and pain points of those people are. What do each of these buyer personas care about in the first place? Next, marketing needs to learn where these individuals go to seek information, whether online or offline. And only then can marketing start to execute. So whether through content marketing, SEO, paid media, or other channels, marketing’s ultimate jobs are to generate website traffic among companies that fit the ideal customer profile, then convert that traffic into tangible leads, and enable the sales team to effectively pursue them. The job of sales, on the other hand, is to qualify and convert those leads into opportunities and then move them through the buying process to revenue.

So I always like to end with some tangible steps that you can take to put what you’ve learned into practice. So let’s look at how to tear down that wall between your marketing and sales departments. Here are four things you want to do. The first step is critical. You need to reach a mutual understanding that the authority figures within the marketing and sales departments, for example, the VP of Sales and the CMO, will meet quarterly, minimum, to share insights, data, and feedback. And you have to think of this meeting as being mandatory, not optional. The second step is to create together those ideal customer and buyer persona profiles. The third step is to set shared targets for revenue and sales qualified leads. And the fourth is to create a written process for sharing on open and closed leads and sales between the two departments.

Let’s take a little bit of a closer look at the last three on this list. So in regard to creating those ideal customer and buyer persona profiles, the idea is to develop a mutual understanding between marketing and sales for what types of new business opportunities you’re pursuing as an organization. I recently wrote an in-depth article on this topic and I’ll link to it in the page notes. We’re also working on a video on this topic as well, similar to this one, but zeroed in on ideal customer profiles and buyer persona profiles. But in short, here’s what you want to come to an agreement upon.

In terms of the ideal customer profile, you want to agree on industries that you’re targeting, the size of the companies within those industries in terms of revenue and number of employees, how much they spend with you, where they’re located, who they sell to, the technology they use, your access to their decision makers, company values, things like this. Get this all in writing.

And then in terms of your buyer persona profiles, for each of your different buyer personas that you’re targeting – the people who play a role in the buying process of those ideal customers – you want to be able to document their job titles, the role they play in the buying process, their level of authority at the company, their pain points, what that person values about you, the level of education needed by that person about what to buy, where he or she seeks information, how he or she usually discovers you, potential objections to hiring you, keywords he or she might search for in Google, and then real-life examples of that client within your existing customer base.

So back on this action step slide, let’s talk about the third bullet for a moment, setting sales and SQL targets together. So in short, here’s what you want to do. Start by agreeing upon a revenue target. Let’s say your company wants to grow by 10 million in the next year, and you want 50% of that growth to come from new sales as opposed to growth of existing accounts. So that means marketing is gonna have to generate leads that result in $5 million in new sales. Pretty simple math there. If your average customer is worth $500,000 to you, then you’re gonna, of course, need 10 new accounts to reach that $5 million target. And if your sales team can effectively close one in three of the sales qualified leads put on the table, then you’ll need to generate 30 truly sales qualified leads. Once you have these targets in place, now you can work together to build a plan to reach each of those key metrics along the way to revenue target.

Finally, back on this action step slide, let’s address the fourth bullet point, creating a written data sharing process. So with your quarterly marketing-sales alignment meetings that we’ve been talking about, here’s what you need each department to bring to the table. Marketing should be a bring a list of all leads generated over the past quarter since you last met. And then sales needs to bring a list of deals closed over the past quarter, value of those deals, opportunities that were lost over the last quarter, and reasons for losing them. And then together, you want to talk about all this stuff.

Marketing can solicit feedback from sales about which leads were ideal and which are either unqualified or maybe even a waste of the sales team’s time. Sales can, on the other hand, communicate which deals that were closed, that they want to replicate. And if you’re using a smart marketing software – something like HubSpot – you can learn which marketing activities generated the leads that actually closed as customers. Then together, you can make strategy adjustments to do more of what’s generating revenue and less of what’s not.

Okay, that’s it for today. So I’m gonna post some of the previously mentioned resources in the page notes. I encourage you to subscribe to our industrial marketing newsletter and also visit our learning center on a regular basis for more content like this. And if you would be interested in setting up a free consultation at some point to talk about how to get marketing and sales aligned at your organization, please don’t hesitate to fill out the request for consultation form at gorilla76.com. So thanks for watching.

Using guest authorship to educate your audience and become a thought leader

Do you ever read an article or post relevant to your business and wonder who the author is? Are they talking about something you know? Do you know more than they do?

Lots of the articles you read in trade publications or industry blogs come from guest authors with expertise in a particular space. So who are these guest authors?

Turns out, it could (and should) be you, because it’s a valuable piece of any traffic generation strategy.

Guest authorship as an amplifier

At its most basic level, guest authorship is an amplifier that puts messages you’ve created in front of a powerful audience. That power comes in a few different forms that depend on the audience you target:

Width – If you want to get the biggest possible audience for something you wrote, you’re best off targeting a bigger publication that boasts a large, diverse audience—think Industry Today, for example. But for that to be successful, you need to speak in general terms about broad topics. This isn’t the place for nitty gritty details. It’s about sheer numbers, and if you do get something published, there’s the potential for a serious number of eyeballs pointed at your content.
Depth – More specific or technically difficult content is best targeted in industry- or process-specific settings. You’re not trying to go viral here. Rather, you’re targeting a considerably smaller but more knowledgeable and invested audience. For example, Industrial Heating doesn’t earn near the traffic that Industry Today does. But if you’re an industrial heating professional, the leads you get thanks to guest authorship in the former are far better than the ones you’ll get from the latter.

Guest authorship is a critical component of the industrial marketing programs we build with our clients. See an example in action here. We also do it for ourselves, as this example illustrates.

Generate referral traffic

Guest authorship is also an opportunity to direct the audience you’ve reached to your website. If something you’ve written is chosen for publication, a link to your site is almost always included. That puts your URL in the eyesight of an important audience, and if someone in that audience clicks that link, Google takes note.

That’s why it’s important to think beyond the guest article. Guest authorship led someone to your site—good for you. Now what? To make the most of the exposure you’ve earned, you’ll need to make sure your site includes abundant additional resources that are informative and accessible. Don’t overlook this: It’s a serious turnoff to follow a link and then find there’s nothing there to see.

We help our clients produce websites that maximize this opportunity every day.

Build backlinks

Being chosen to contribute as a guest author means someone with authority in your space thinks you have some authority, too. Congratulations—it may earn you some additional traffic. But what if you convinced the algorithmic brains of the internet of the same thing?

Include a link or two to pages or posts on your site in a guest article you hope to publish. Search engines know that trade publications are trusted sources of information. When that trusted source of information links to something on your site, it’s like a digital reference letter telling the search engine that your site also has authority. And because search engines want to provide relevant information to searchers, they make your backlinked content easier to find in search results.

Learn more about backlinks here.

Get maximum return by building backlinks on .gov, .org or .edu sites. Search engines give a lot of credence to government, educational and non-profit institutions.

What good guest articles look like

You can’t just bang out 500 words about something you know and expect acceptance to every publication you pitch to. Even the best articles have acceptance rates that more closely resemble mediocre batting averages than stellar test scores.

Your content needs to rock because it’s competing with hundreds —even thousands— of other submissions from authors who want the same thing you do: Exposure. Audience. Referrals. Backlinks.

Prove to the editor that your content is worth the space. Answer questions you know people in your space are asking. Provide insights or information no one else has. Solve problems no one else is solving.

And for the love of Mike, don’t write a sales pitch. That never flies, and editors have good memories. Just as they’re more receptive to pitches from folks they’ve published before, they’re lightning fast on the delete button if you make a habit of pitching content that’s never any good.

Guest authorship with Gorilla 76

This is all easier said than done. That’s why we make guest authorship an integral part of our Industrial Growth Solution. Over a decade of experience in the inbound marketing world has helped us establish relationships with dozens of publications and editors across the industrial spectrum.

Simply put, we know how to target who you need to reach. We make it work for our clients every day because it’s critical to industrial lead generation as a whole. Download the guide below to learn more.

The quick 1-2 punch to upgrading your email marketing

From where I’m standing, it seems as though email marketing has been the industrial sector’s unicorn—the strategy that’s proven effective time and again but evasive for many manufacturers or suppliers to get right. When digital marketers in our space see the success of our B2C counterparts, it seems obvious to jump into this channel and grab for that low-hanging fruit. While yes, that monthly newsletter checks the box of email marketing, how well does it aid the sales team by developing and delivering more qualified leads?

Generalized communication is difficult to motivate prospects with, as not everyone in your sales funnel has the same pain points. The good ole one-two of smarter email is to segment your list and utilize triggered emails when possible. Here’s the quick and dirty how-to for accomplishing it.

Give ‘em the hook: segmentation

Segmentation is the first step to upgrading regular email communication. It approaches messaging from the question of “who is this being sent to?” The greater the precision that you can answer that question, the better of an email you’ll be able to develop. Segmenting can be accomplished a number of ways but common approaches for the technical buyers in the industrial sector include:

By industry: If you’re supplying to multiple supply chains, there’s a strong chance each has specific considerations for the buying process of your product. Common topics here are regulation and organizational standards. While news of your latest certification may matter in the food processing industry, your automotive prospects may not be concerned.

By common problems your product solves: This topic may align with some industry-specific solutions, but may take that specificity a step further. If you’re adding new products to your inventory, specifying by applications can be more meaningful to individual leads than a wide-sweeping announcement.

By purchase cycle: Leads for contract manufacturers that are at the design phase have starkly different needs than leads at the vendor selection stage. Knowing where yours are at can define the resources you recommend to them.

Just before you go for the knockout and create 10 new segments, ensure you’ve considered feasibility of the segmentation plan. Gauge this based on your marketing team’s capacity and your CRM’s robustness. If the CRM hasn’t previously been updated with the data you want to segment by, check if there’s a relatively easy method for acquiring that information. Potential data sources include LinkedIn, internal data sources like an ERP or data warehouse, added fields on lead generation forms, or site behaviors in an analytics tool. The other consideration—the marketing team’s capacity—is based on existing marketing strategies and projects. Segmentation requires ongoing commitment to developing more than one newsletter email per month and will demand time to deploy successfully.

If there’s doubt, get your feet wet with a couple segmented emails according to characteristics like job title. There’s often overlap between job title and common problems or position in the buying cycle and job title can prove to be an efficient segmentation strategy.

Follow with the uppercut: triggered emails

Triggered emails are marketing automation at its finest. They create a segment of their own because they’re based on a small percentage of your email database that have engaged with your company in a specific way. Because of this, triggered email success stories are scattered across the internet, driving clicks, sales and great ROI.

Getting started is based on identifying what events trigger these emails. List all potential options—from a newsletter subscription or other form completion, to a disengaged prospect or a lead that gave you a business card at a trade show. While not all of these need to trigger emails, understanding the scope of opportunities can spur some ideas for individual emails or email series.

With each event in mind, the next step is to consider the goal of the email that follows that event. If you consider your most recent Amazon purchase, the follow up email provided confirmation that the purchase was made successfully and a link to the order page. The goal was to assure you that the order was received and in-progress. A similar mindset works for B2B ‘transactions’ as well. If a lead downloads a guide, thanking them for their interest and inquiring about additional questions may suffice.

Finally, consider the number of touchpoints that makes sense for an event or transaction. These triggered emails may best be served with a triggered workflow of a series of emails.

Taking the belt

Ultimately marketing aims to serve the sales funnel and the nature of email is nurturing leads from mildly aware to requesting a quote. Segmentation and triggered emails are smarter, more catered approaches to handling the touch points in between. If trying them out makes sense for your strategy but not your capacity, let’s chat. Consultations are always free.

We don’t template our marketing plans. Here’s why.

Put simply, no one company has the same needs as another company. We’re an industrial marketing agency, meaning we work exclusively with B2B industrial companies. Around 85% of our active clients describe themselves as manufacturers, distributors, industrial service providers or contractors. They’re all hardworking B2B companies in the industrial space. And yet, despite being in the same niche, their businesses are incredibly different from an operational perspective, business development perspective, market share perspective and just about every other perspective you could have.

These are unique businesses, and their marketing plans need to stem from specific business goals.

Addressing business needs by asking questions

We don’t sell one-off projects. Instead, we maintain clients on a retainer basis, meaning our work is ongoing and evolving. Each quarter we meet with clients to discuss their specific business needs. We ask clients to think about the following questions before each meeting to generate fruitful discussion:

What are your business goals for the next quarter? What about the next six months?
What educational information is your audience going to be searching for online?
What markets do you want to pursue?
Are there capabilities or products you want to market aggressively?
Are there pressing website updates you need done in the next three months?
Are you attending trade shows or conferences that could be supported by inbound or digital marketing assets?
What’s going on at your company that’s newsworthy?

Of course, we don’t come to these meetings empty-handed. Based on the marketing data we collect we have suggestions on how to push results further. Looking through client web analytics, we ask ourselves some of the following questions:

What marketing channels are driving the most leads?
What keywords are we currently ranking for in Google?
What keywords can we realistically start to rank for over time?
What pages drive the most traffic, and how can we modify those pages to convert more leads?
Why are visitors leaving the site, and how can we compel them to stay?
What conversion opportunities (white papers, comparison guides, brochures, etc.) can we create to generate more leads from our existing traffic?
How can we replicate success competitors are having online?
What marketing channels haven’t we explored that could drive results?
How can we improve user experience (UX) to increase website engagement?
What types of conversion opportunities are missing from the site?
What content could we create that would go viral on industry trade journals?

The exact questions we choose vary, but our goal remains the same: How can we generate more qualified leads for the client through our online marketing efforts? We’ve found that focusing on results, rather than the quantity of agency deliverables, leads to more qualified prospects for our clients.

A tale of two marketing plans

Let’s look at two common online marketing problems industrial companies face: low traffic and low traffic-to-conversion rates. In other words, not a lot of people are visiting your site, and not a lot of website visitors are turning into leads. These are two unique problems that require very different solutions.

We’ve documented a traffic generation case study for a coatings manufacturer here, and a lead generation case study for a construction company here. I’ll paraphrase the case studies below:

In the case of US Coatings, there wasn’t enough existing traffic to generate a large quantity of qualified leads each month. US Coatings is a small company, and a lot of the big players weren’t paying attention to niche keywords online. We created a stockpile of educational, keyword-targeted content with the intent of ranking in Google for various terms. By creating content around niche topics, we were able to rank for a ton of valuable keywords that drive consistent traffic each month. As of writing this piece, US Coatings gets around 100 leads a month from their website. When we started with them, the website drove around 15 leads a month.

In the case of The Korte Company, traffic was strong already. We’d already built up a stockpile of educational content, but visitors weren’t converting into contacts at our target rate. To remedy this problem, we created a ton of white papers and guides for visitors to download in exchange for contact info. We focused on creating downloadable guides specifically for their most popular pages. Then we improved the user experience on those pages and updated the navigation to funnel visitors towards our conversion opportunities.

The results? A 600% increase in monthly contacts generated from the website after two years.

The consequences of templating marketing plans

New clients typically have some reservations about not buying tangible deliverables.

“Another agency is offering 48 blog posts over a year at the same price point, but you’re not planning out specific deliverables past Q2. What gives?”

The problem with promising 48 blog posts a year is your marketing agency isn’t using data in real time to make decisions. When the right systems are in place, traffic, lead and sales data are readily available, and the best marketers use that data to guide marketing plans. Conversely, we’ve seen that inflexible contracts hurt overall results. When the focus of your marketing is churning out blog posts, white papers or guest blogs, results suffer.

Say you have $5000/month to spend on a marketing agency. The agency writes up a contract for 48 blog posts for the year, because you’ve collectively decided heavy blogging will increase your chances of ranking in Google and drive more traffic. Fast-forward eight months, and you haven’t seen any substantial increase in traffic or leads. Now would be a good time to shift gears, but the contract isn’t flexible, and your budget is tapped. Both parties end the agreement frustrated.

We avoid this problem by not templating our marketing plans. Instead, we put together customized solutions each quarter based on your business goals and the marketing opportunities we’ve found. Holding your agency accountable to specific results helps your business stay focused on what matters: drumming up new business opportunities for your sales team.

We stand by this approach, because at the end of the contract, what do you want? 48 blog posts collecting virtual dust or 48 paying customers?

If you’re interested in the latter, download our tactical guide to industrial marketing or reach out for a consultation with Gorilla co-founder, Joe Sullivan. Both can steer you in the right direction and help set you up for inbound marketing success.

How does content get us leads?

The point of marketing is to find, attain and keep customers for the sake of growing your business. Easy enough, right?

Marketing shows up in many forms, with many names and styles that can begin looking like a word cloud – sure, the words are familiar, but what does it all mean? We specialize in implementing an inbound marketing strategy and an essential element to this strategy is great content.

While it’s not the end all be all, content probably has the most profound effect on your overall marketing efforts. Where companies fail and others succeed often has to do with the effectiveness of the content being produced.

But how does it work?

Content makes you visible during the search phase of the industrial buying process

The easy place to start is by producing content with search engine optimization (SEO) practices. This strategy of creating informative content geared around what people are searching for is done with the purpose of appealing to Google and other search engines.

The more appealing our content is, the higher our content can appear in search results and the better the likelihood people will visit. In our world of instant gratification, people want excellent information and they want it available immediately, which is why those first few spots on a search engine results page is key.

The purpose of SEO driven content is to build awareness and bring people to our site. Google’s algorithm is complex and knows the difference between well-crafted content and bad content that doesn’t provide anything of value other than the keyword being repeated a few times. Producing compelling content helps Google understand your business as a strong source of information related to the keywords being targeted.

Exceptional content attracts links and is a part of our link building efforts, an important factor in legitimizing your website in a search engine’s eyes. Write great content and people will seek it out.

Content qualifies your business during the evaluation phase of the industrial buying process

The next objective of the content is to provide educational information essential to potential clientele. By preemptively answering their questions and addressing their pain points, you immediately begin to establish trust and position yourself as an expert in the industry.

Engineers are often buyers in the industrial market. They tend to get most of their information prior to making a purchase through search engines and peer recommendations. It’s important for the content to be framed to appeal to the decision makers and buyers. By feeding them problem-solving content, you’re nurturing visitors and driving them to become sales-qualified leads.

Content helps you convert visitors into leads

Ultimately, the goal of content is to drive visitors to convert into leads. The content that lives on your site works to bring potential clients and educate them. The next step is to entice them to trade contact information for gated resources, typically in depth content that provides a deep understanding of a niche aspect of the services you provide.

This action of trading contact information for resources generates the lead for your sales team to follow up with. Additionally, the sales team will find the content beneficial for increasing their efficiency and making their interactions with prospects more meaningful.

Does it all really work?

Let’s keep it simple. You’re here, on this page, reading this article. How did you get here? Was it through a Google search? Did you end up here through exploration of our website’s Learning Center? Maybe someone referred you. The point is, you’re here reading this article because we created the content along with many other pieces of content aimed to draw visitors to our site and educate them. It’s simply a piece of the puzzle.

We have the tools, knowledge and ability to transform your website into a forge for compelling and effective content. Additionally, we can track, monitor and report on the content efforts and their effectiveness.

Ready to learn more? Start by downloading our guide to lead generation.

Why you need to stop spending $5000 a month on industrial journal print ads

We’re an industrial marketing agency who does 90 percent of our work online, and over the years, we’ve observed some marketing trends from industrial companies. Traditional marketing efforts often involve journal print ads. This may have been an effective marketing strategy at one point, but now it’s outdated.

What are the problems with journal print ads?

One of the biggest issues with relying on journal print ads is the inability to measure return. It’s difficult to know how effective the ads are without measuring tools, and the medium is one that can’t be measured in detail. Unless the information is provided by an individual, it’s impossible to know if the ad drove the individual to become a lead. That’s the problem! And guess what – digital marketing provides the solution.

Print ads are relatively expensive for what you get, and much like all forms of paid media, it only lives for a period of time. By the time the next issue comes out, the advertisement is old. This payment for disappearing content ends up becoming an expense instead of an investment. And your ad, well, it lives on a magazine that acts as a placemat in the breakroom.

Depending on your target, print ads are becoming less relevant. The industrial market has shifted to see engineers becoming buyers of products and resources, which is great! Those with the knowledge of what they need are now buying goods and services instead of less knowledgeable intermediaries.

The IEEE Engineering360 just released their 2017 survey of engineers, engineering management, project managers, research and development technical support and quality control professionals. The survey analyzes the industrial buying process and highlights where buyers are getting information. While some may be surprised by the results, we expected them.

When asked which information services do you typically use in the course of your work, 83 percent of those surveyed said general search engines. The other two categories to score more than 50 percent of those surveyed were supplier websites and online catalogs. Of all the listed options, the only two that relied on printed mediums were printed trade publications and printed directories and buyer’s guides which scored 19 percent and 14 percent, respectively. If the goal is to sell more, doesn’t it make sense to reach the buyers in their preferred medium?

Why is web marketing a better alternative?

Have you thought about what you’re getting out of print ads? If you run a print ad for 12 months spending five grand a month, at the end of a year, what did you receive in return? We ask many businesses that question and have yet to get a good answer. This is because print ads don’t offer measurable returns. They are merely branding options that don’t build trust or credibility. It’s like throwing darts into a vast abyss and hoping the phone starts to ring. On the flip side, what we do, you can measure.

Any inbound marketer worth their salt can take that five grand a month budget and use it to grow the company through tools and tangible goals. The tools enable us to track how many clients we need to close, how they close and what avenue they came from. The ability to build a plan around how to get specific traffic can’t be done through a print ad.

So, what does web marketing look like?

Much of web marketing involves building a multifaceted infrastructure. That means there isn’t a single answer. Pouring all resources into pay-per-click ads, SEO efforts or content will not generate the results that casting a wider net will. Think of it as fishing. The more lines in the water, the more fish you can conceivably catch.

The most prominent effort should be to build a plan using multiple tools to get to a target number of qualified leads. Start out with the number, figure out the submetrics needed and then determine the tools to meet those goals. We created this video to fully explain what marketing results you should be measuring.

For these efforts, we created the seven core elements of an industrial marketing strategy.

Brand Positioning
Website Infrastructure
Website Traffic Strategy
Lead Generation Strategy
Sales Enablement Strategy
Lead Nurturing Strategy
ROI Reporting Process

These seven elements, optimized and working in sync, will produce tangible, measurable results from highly-targeted individuals.

From the start of implementing a new industrial marketing plan, we tend to focus on awareness generating elements such as SEO, pay-per-click, retargeting media, educational content and outreach email. These efforts are all about reeling in potential customers.

Once we’ve reeled them in, we shift the focus to conversion rate optimization. How do we convert these visitor into leads? Tools such as gated resources, white papers, buyer’s guides and ROI calculators are valuable pieces. Suddenly, those visitors we just attracted to our site are willing to trade contact information for the valuable resources, thus giving your sales team the contact information for a new lead.

Our last focus is to deploy strategies and tactics to make sure the sales team has processes in place to handle the inbound leads. Ensuring a CRM system is in place along with building an email marketing strategy to nurture leads enables the sales team to focus on highly-qualified leads. It boils down to automating elements of the marketing plan to free up your team to focus on other areas.

By taking a look at your own web marketing efforts, you can start to highlight areas that need improvement. We wrote this blog post to assist industrial companies in auditing their own industrial marketing strategy. You’ll work through each of the seven core elements of an industrial marketing strategy one by one. Doing so will bring into light whether your company is in a problematic state, just meeting the status quo or fully optimized.

If this article describes your marketing efforts, you should check out our guide for auditing your internal marketing strategy.

How your sales team should be using content in their sales process

Sales people have all been there.

You’re on a call with a prospect. In the industrial and manufacturing spheres, the buying process tends to be longer. Lots of people are involved. Lots of money is at stake. These buyers want to buy, but they’ll do their due diligence first.

If only you could get off the phone and send them information that relates directly to the questions they’re asking.

Content marketing spawns industrial growth by understanding clients’ industries and creating the content that targets their buyers. But we also think sales teams can level up by using that content to increase their efficiency and make their interactions with prospects more meaningful.

Why do we believe this?

Adoption of content marketing programs in the industrial and manufacturing sector has lagged behind other B2B arenas, but it’s gaining ground—fast.

According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 survey of manufacturers, almost two-thirds of manufacturers always or frequently consider how content marketing impacts someone’s experience with their organization.

The study also showed that 65 percent of manufacturers have content marketing programs in “young” or “adolescent” stages, and that 82 percent of manufacturers felt that creating quality content factored into their success.

Read more key findings from the CMI study here.

The point? More industrial firms are adopting these programs because they’re realizing they work. The next step is to empower sales teams to use the fruits of successful content marketing programs to help close more sales.

The digital marketers’ role

Marketers make messages. In the information age, messages matter—a lot. That’s because more buyers compile their shortlists of good candidates before they ever speak with any of them.

The marketer’s role is to craft clear, compelling messages that cut through the noise to provide information buyers will use during the buying process.

Marketers do a lot of studying to pull this off, including:

Thorough research of the industries they’re trying to reach.
Identification and analysis of buyer personas in those industries.
Learning the language those personas use when they’re on the hunt for information.

With the groundwork laid, it’s a matter of strategic multimedia storytelling. Writers, artists and editors take what marketing strategists learn and turn it into messages that speak meaningfully to the people you want to reach.

Then, that content is passed along to the sales team for them to add to their toolbox. This is what sales enablement is all about.

The two-way street

But sales team members are far from just passengers here. The integrated sales/marketing apparatus works best when the sales team is as active in content ideation as the marketing gang is.

That means informing the marketing team of current trends, pain points or new questions emerging among prospects. It means generating content ideas based on what they hear in their day-to-day contacts. It means assisting marketing in “speaking the language” of these prospects to ensure messages hit their marks.

And if you think you’re stepping on marketing’s toes by shuttling content ideas their way, think again. Sales teams have their ears closest to the ground. They hear how buyers’ thinking evolves over time. Sales teams’ insight —and active participation— is priceless for the marketers who generate this rolling stock of information.

What you get in return

In time, you’ll become armed with a trove of content you can use to help answer any question a prospect might have in any stage of the buying process.

It might be a blog post that directly addresses a question your prospects are asking. It might be a video that explains an industrial process. Maybe it’s a white paper that digs deep to explain why a product or service your company offers makes sense to buyers. It could be a case study illustrating how a customer did better business because of something your firm offers.

The more content you have up your sleeve, the better positioned you are to be a credible, trustworthy source of the information buyers crave.

Efficiency and quality

When sales and marketing teams merge, they become a double-barreled unit that ultimately makes sales teams more efficient. You could give an hour-long lecture during a call with a prospect to address their questions and concerns. Or, you could take five minutes to compile content that meets their needs.

It’s what we do at Gorilla 76. After nearly every sales call we’re on, we follow up with an email loaded with related content that reinforces what we talked about and strengthens prospects’ understanding of what we offer.

This does two things for you. First, it quickly supplies prospects with the information they’ll use during their decision-making process. Second, it frees you up to get to that next call faster. These combine to potentially increase the touchpoints you make with prospects while also boosting the quality of those interactions.

We know the industrial and manufacturing buying process can take months. While this strategy might not speed that up, it keeps you top-of-mind as a trusted, credible source of information and puts you in better position to close the sale.

The bottom line

More and more, buyers do huge amounts of research on their own before they ever request a consultation or quote. That underscores the importance of content as a traffic-generation machine.

But salespeople can optimize the buyer’s journey by keeping the content pipeline full from start to finish, and become trusted sources of information along the way.

Your customers’ business —and your own— will improve as a result.

Our in-depth guide on B2B website planning is a great resource you can use to build the groundwork for an all-star sales-marketing one-two punch. Get the handbook below.

Analyze, report, repeat: Here’s what you should be tracking

When your boss asks you how the online marketing efforts are doing, what do you say? “We’ve increased impressions by 30% and traffic is up 15%.” Do you know what that means for business growth? Does your boss?

Digital marketing is great for equipping businesses and marketers with the data to define their success and find unending opportunities for growth. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly difficult for marketing leaders to determine what truly matters to grow their company.

And yes, I say grow the company, because marketing is more than buying ads in trade journals or getting tchotchkes for a trade show. Marketing isn’t an expense; it’s an investment in growing revenue, and we need to know if it’s pulling its weight.

Get started with defining metrics

So where does one start on the quest for finding the holy grail of marketing success? At the end. Success is based on the bottom line—driving new revenue—and for industrial B2B marketers, that also means filling the sales team’s pipeline of leads with top notch opportunities. Therefore, when we report on marketing efforts, it should all relate back to these KPIs: sales qualified leads (SQLs), customers, and revenue generated.

From there, we can work our way backwards. If you consider the marketing and sales funnel as your path to marketing data nirvana, the steps backward include total leads generated, total website traffic visits, and even total impressions of the website. Each of these represent the KPIs of the buyer’s journey, and because they’re all relational, they can be calculated into rates that provide a standardized metric to compare with industry standards.

What do each of these KPIs actually look like in analytics softwares?

Leads generated: In terms of leads generated, this KPI can be defined by metrics like Form Completions or New Contacts in HubSpot or Goal Completions in Google Analytics. The main difference here is that while New Contacts is a straightforward representation of new leads, Form Completions includes repeat engagements from prospects and Goal Completions is useful for companies who don’t invest in a marketing automation tool.

Website traffic visits: Traffic can be described by Users, Sessions, or Visits, depending on the tool and are typically differentiated by softwares’ backend tracking. The one delineation worth mentioning is that users is representative of individuals while sessions separates individuals’ return visits.

Website impressions: Impressions are typically differentiated by source. They may originate from organic or paid search or even social. Getting a summarized metric of all of these is ideal but typically more labor intensive.

Before getting weighed down with the overwhelming thought of tracking all of these metrics, understand that they are all representative of the same thing. Whether users, sessions, or visits is your KPI for measuring site traffic, the goal is to understand how it changes over time and how that change impacts the ultimate KPIs mentioned before—SQLs, customers and revenue.

Digging deeper into the reports

KPIs may be the bulk of the marketing report or summary passed up the chain of command, but if you’re running marketing operations on the day-to-day, you likely have more pressing questions to address with data analytics. Exploring data past KPIs can quickly put a seasoned marketer in the weeds, so it’s key to have specific questions for the data at the outset.

Some of those questions might be:

What marketing channel is contributing the most to new leads?
What blog post is earning the most impressions and traffic to the site?
Is the traffic to specific product or service pages different from what I expected?
How engaged are site visitors with the website in general and on specific pages?

Once the key questions are listed, note what metrics might provide the answers. For the first question above, tools like HubSpot’s Sources report or Google Analytics’ Attribution report will break down total leads by each channel.

Top: Screenshot of HubSpot Sources report. Bottom: Screenshot of Google Analytics Attribution report.

This quick preemptive mental check will help you get in and out of reporting softwares more quickly and get back to the bigger priorities of marketing operations. And if you’re not sure where to start with questions, check the marketing report you just created. Answering which KPIs changed and why will not only grow your understanding of the data and get some question-brainstorming started, but it’ll help you answer those very same questions when the higher-ups ask.

Check website performance with regularity

Understanding what data to look at is all well and good, but a standard frequency is necessary to identify trends as they arise. The bare minimum for checking website analytics and evaluating performance should be quarterly, but a smaller interval is important for any active digital marketing efforts.

For campaigns or event-based marketing efforts, check on the performance of those efforts within 30 days of its start. Ongoing efforts should be re-evaluated approximately every month as well. The basis for this time frame is to establish a baseline and identify opportunities for improvements. However, if paid traffic is included in your marketing strategy, it’s best to review your AdWords, Facebook Ads, or other paid channels weekly. With more direct budgetary influence, these campaigns are vital to keep on track.

Digital marketing is a great opportunity for industrial companies because there’s a variety of insights to be unearthed from website data analytics. Not only can you get full transparency to the success of marketing efforts, you can identify trends among prospects to improve marketing efforts moving forward. And the next time a boss asks you how the online marketing efforts are going, you can respond, “Great, our increase in impressions and traffic resulted in 5 more SQLs, a new customer and $100,000 in added revenue.”

Hey marketing manager, here’s how to get a raise by using an agency

When a company revisits its marketing apparatus and finds it to be lacking, it faces a simple but important choice: Can we do what we need to do on our own, or should we seek an agency partnership?

Meaningful marketing drives revenue. Many skillsets come together to achieve this—skillsets that no one person has. Meanwhile, marketing managers are stuck between understanding the advantages of an outside partnership and wanting to prove their worth to their organization.

The truth is, both can exist at once. Convincing the bosses to buy in to an outsourced inbound marketing program —and then seeing success because of it— could even earn you a fat pay raise and the steadfast trust of your superiors.

Strength in numbers (of skillsets)

As stated above, various skillsets converge to create effective marketing programs. Here are a few:

Market research and knowing the niche.
Understanding buyer personas and their behavior.
Creative, engaging copywriting.
Clean web development and design.
Lead generation and nurturing.
Web analytics and ROI measurement.

Marketing managers are talented folks, but rarely do they possess all the skills listed above. And when they work for a small- or medium-sized business, a couple road blocks stand in the way of building the perfectly well-rounded marketing team.

For one thing, there may not be enough salary room to afford to hire everyone needed to make a program work. For another, even if a company did invest in building a marketing team, it’s unlikely there would be enough work for team members to justify the cost of employing them.

Strong agency partnerships provide balance when a business’s marketing needs require a roster of rock stars—just not all day, every day.

Complementary relationship

Partnering with a well-rounded agency also ensures you, the marketing manager, are putting your time and skills to the best use.

Say you’re stellar at SEO. An agency’s writers and designers can take your keyword know-how and build compelling content that resonates with prospects.

Maybe your bread and butter is on the creative side. That same agency can turn its strategists loose on your ideas, ensuring your creativity is built, placed and seen in ways that drive conversions.

Perhaps you’re a Jack or Jill of all trades, working closely with an agency on every facet of a marketing program. The agency’s expertise is going to rub off on you. Your expanding knowledge base will ensure you’re irreplaceable.

Look good in front of your boss

Maybe you’re sold on the efficacy of an agency partnership but aren’t sure how to convince the folks in the C-suites.

Tell it like it is. Talk about what you know, concede the things you don’t and explain how an agency partnership can fill in the gaps. Put the conversation in terms of “now” and “later.” What can you, the marketing manager, achieve on your own now? What can be expected in terms of return on that effort? What could we accomplish with the added skills of an outside agency? Will that return be exponentially greater? What more can we accomplish in-house with marketing duties off our plate?

Having command over your marketing situation as it stands —and knowing what it’ll take to improve it— looks good to superiors.

Showing that the return is well worth the investment looks even better.

It might be time for a change. Know for sure by conducting a thorough audit of your company’s industrial marketing strategy. Get the guide below to learn how to do it.

How many blog posts do we need to rank first in Google?

If you consult with a digital marketing agency or invest in SEO, this type of question is going to come up.

Over the years the essential question has taken a lot of different forms:

How many blog posts do we need to rank first?
How many backlinks do we need to rank first?
How many social shares do we need to rank first?
How much “engagement” do we need to rank first?
How many Google +1s??

But ultimately you want to know how do we rank first for this keyword in Google?

I’m here to give you an unsatisfactory answer: it’s complicated.

Reframing the question

SEO is not a zero sum game; it’s not about ranking first, second or even third. It’s undeniable that higher rankings lead to higher traffic, and it’s understandable that someone investing in SEO wants to rank first for specific keywords.

But there are better metrics to look at to evaluate whether or not your SEO efforts are proving fruitful. Fixating on particular keyword rankings actually distracts from the primary objective of B2B marketing: getting new business.

Instead of asking how do I rank first in Google, ask how do I generate qualified leads through search engines? The quantity of qualified leads coming through your website is the best measure of your online marketing success.

Obsessing over rankings isn’t productive to search engine marketing, but a smart keyword strategy is still the backbone of any successful inbound marketing campaign.

What keywords should we target?

Now that we’ve framed the question properly, let’s talk about the difference between fat-head and long-tail keywords. Fat-head keywords are short, broad, high-volume phrases searched by your customers.

Examples of fat-head keywords in the B2B industrial space include:

Construction company
Sustainable plastics
Diesel generator
Flooring contractor
Industrial coating
Quality control software

These are keywords you’ll want to track over time, but you can’t expect to write a few blog posts and instantly rank first. A combination of keyword-targeted on-site content and off-site links pointing to your content is the best way to eventually rank for these keywords.

Ranking for these types of keywords is a long-term goal that you achieve by consistently earning backlinks and writing educational content. But to know how long that commitment takes, you’ll need to assess the competition. You can do this by performing a SERP (search engine result page) analysis.

First, download the MozBar plugin.

Next, gather a list of 10-20 fat-head keywords that would drive the most qualified traffic using the Google Keyword Planner. Don’t just look at search volume! Figure out the keywords that your best customers are searching for and target those.

Once you have a list of fat-head keywords, search for each phrase and activate your MozBar. Take note of the DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) rankings for each URL on the first page. DA represents the number of backlinks pointing to that competitor’s domain, and PA represents the number of backlinks pointing to that exact page.

In order to compete, you’ll need to have a similar DA and PA. Try to find the fat-head keywords with pages ranking that have low PA and DA; these are the best opportunity keywords to rank for over time. You don’t need to have the same level of authority right away, but you’ll have a good idea of what you need to compete.

Note: Moz has a keyword research tool that does a lot of the heavily lifting for you.

Fat-head keywords are something you aspire to rank for over time, while long-tail keywords are opportunities you jump on right away.

Long-tail keywords are longer, specific phrases searched in search engines. They are typically questions, comparison searches and other types of long queries.

Here are some examples of B2B industrial long-tail searches:

Diesel v. gas generator sets
Construction management benefits
How to make products more sustainable?
What is a low VOC level in paint?
Office flooring plans
Stainless steel pipe specifications

Long-tail keywords are perfect for shorter blog content that will supplement your site, attracting backlinks and showing Google you’re an expert in your industry.

You can easily find long-tail keywords by searching for your fat-head keywords in Google and looking at the related results at the bottom of the result page.

Another great way to get long-tail content ideas is by interviewing your sales team. What are the most common questions prospective customers ask? It’s very likely qualified leads are searching these same questions in Google first, looking for answers and ultimately a solution provider.

Long-tail keywords are typically much less competitive than fat-head keywords. Google is looking for a very specific answer, and by creating content that provides that answer, you’re much more likely to show up in the corresponding search result.

Putting it all together

On a week-to-week basis, you need to be focusing on the questions your customers are asking, building up a content base that targets long-tail keywords. You’ll see a steady increase of traffic as you start to rank for low volume, but highly targeted keywords.

On a quarterly to biannual basis, you need to be tracking your fat-head keywords. Build pages around fat-head keywords that will help your prospective clients find what they’re looking for, whether that’s an online purchase or information that qualifies you as an elite problem solver.

Fat-head keywords can take months or even years to rank for, but steadily producing long-tail content that supports your fat-head keywords will help you meet those long term goals.

By honing in on long-tail keywords, you can start to see results from your inbound marketing efforts a few months into your campaign. Focusing on only fat-head keywords can become discouraging, and often distracts from the results you’re really trying to get out of marketing; more business opportunities that turn into happy customers.

To learn more about how you can reframe your mindset from, “we need to rank first in Google!” to “we need to generate online business opportunities!” check out our Hardworking Inbound Marketing Guide for B2B Industrial Companies.

You can also learn about how long-tail keyword research led to a 200% increase in traffic and leads over two years for an industrial coating manufacturer.

Ideal customer and buyer persona profiles for manufacturers

We all want to attract, engage and win business with the right people from the right companies in the right industries. But we don’t always lay the foundation for those kinds of opportunities to materialize.

As a marketing agency that’s been working with industrial sector companies for over ten years, we’ve seen time and again that a laser focus on your target audience is the often-overlooked first step in building a sustainable, ROI-driven business development system. Think about it for a second. Before you commit valuable resources to business development –from time to manpower to capital– don’t you want to feel certain that you’ve clearly identified exactly who you’re targeting and what they care about?

If we skip this step, we’re setting ourselves up to throw darts. We’re thinning out our efforts across a wide variety of sales and marketing channels, trying to speak to anyone and everyone that might buy from us and hoping something we do produces the results needed to meet our business growth goals.

I think it’s fair to say that we all want (and need) to optimize our most important resources, not create waste. So in this article, we’ll look at how you as a B2B manufacturing organization can clearly identify and concisely document:

The types of companies you’re selling to (your ideal customer profile).
The types of people at those companies you need to reach (your buyer persona profiles).

We recommend downloading these free worksheets if you’d like to fill in your own profiles as you read. And if you’d rather watch than read, the video we recorded below covers the same topic:

Defining your ideal customer at a company level

Think about your customer base. Who are your most profitable customers – those who spend considerably, but at the same time aren’t draining all your resources? Who are the customers you look forward to visiting? Those who don’t cause you to wake up with cold sweats in the middle of the night? Who are the ones that aren’t making your team hate their jobs? These are your ideal-fit customers. Now imagine waking up three years from now and only having to do business with companies like this.

What are the shared characteristics of those organizations? Where do common threads lie when you think about the following?

Industry.
Annual revenue.
Number of employees.
How much they spend with you.
Their location.
Location of their customer base.
Size of their customer base.
Technology they use.
Level of access you have to their decision makers.
Intangibles like their company values and how you feel when you’re working with them.
Real life examples of companies that fit this profile.

Now write these things down. Flesh them out and refine them. This is your ideal customer profile.

When you focus your business development efforts on these types of companies, a few things will start happening:

Your volume of inbound leads will go down. Yep, you read that correctly. But here’s why that’s ok…
The leads you start attracting become much better fits. That means your sales team is spending their time pursuing business that’s more likely to close, while simultaneously not settling for customers who you probably shouldn’t be working with in the first place.
The leads who are ideal fits begin perceiving you as an expert in their space rather than a generalist. Now you’re differentiated from competitors who used to be comparable alternatives to you.

Case in point: We’re a marketing agency. But we’re not a full-service marketing agency with a wide array of services for a wide variety of businesses. We’re an industrial marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow their businesses online. And we’re constantly told by clients and prospects that this specialization and the resulting experience matters to them.

Defining your ideal customer at a human level

Very few of our clients at Gorilla sell widgets that are perceived as commodities in their respective marketplaces. Instead, most sell highly-customized, often-complex products or services with big price tags, targeting very specific audiences.

As a result, the following three points usually ring true:

Their customers’ buying processes are long (weeks, months or even years rather than minutes, hours or days).
Their sales processes are very consultative.
The buyer on the customer’s end is not one person, but a committee.

And that third point is key to this “ideal customer” conversation. Yes, eventually someone on the customer’s end will make the decision and write the check. But well before that happens, someone else at that company is out there looking for solutions that include a handful or more of your competitors (and hopefully you!). And still others from that company are evaluating their options from a variety of perspectives – cost, technology-fit, ease of use or implementation, and so on.

So it only makes sense that both your marketing and sales efforts address the different stages of the industrial buying process, as well as the individual human beings who will inevitably influence it. We call these your buyer personas. For many of our clients, those buyer personas look something like this:

The Information Gatherer

This person is tasked by his or her boss (or some decision marker) to find a solution to a problem. The Information Gatherer doesn’t know exactly what he or she needs, which leads to a thorough search (more often than not online) that involves heavy self-education and an exploration of potential solutions. Even though the Information Gatherer is rarely a decision maker, he or she is very influential in the decision-making process. And because you want your name on the short list of potential partners that he or she delivers to the boss, you need to assure the Information Gatherer finds you.

The Spec Seeker

This person is often an Engineer, Plant Manager or technically-minded individual. The Spec Seeker usually has a better idea of what he or she needs and how that solution will work within the company’s facilities and operations. This person tends to be the evaluator and qualifier of options that the Information Gatherer brings to the table.

The Decision Maker

This President, CEO or C-Suite Executive is rarely the person out in the digital wilderness trying to directly solve the problem at hand. Instead, he or she oversees that process and makes the final buying decision. The Decision Maker usually cares most about ROI, long-term cost of ownership and building sustainable relationships with knowledgeable, efficient partners.

At least one or two of these buyer types might sound familiar to you. Maybe there are others for your company. Regardless, once you define who those key buyer personas are, here are the points you’ll want to document for each:

Common job titles.
Role played in the buying process.
Level of authority and decision making power in the buying process.
Common pain points / problems / challenges he/she needs to address.
Type of buying experience he/she seeks.
What he/she values about you.
Level of education needed about what to buy and/or how to make that buying decision.
Where he/she typically seeks information during the buying process (Google, peers, industry resources, etc.).
How he/she usually discovers you in the first place.
Potential objections to hiring you.
Keywords he/she might search for in Google (problem he/she needs solve, product or service he/she needs to find, provider he/she needs to discover).
Real life examples from your customer base (individual people) who fit this persona type.

Documenting your ideal customer profile and buyer persona profiles

Now you’re ready to create those two core documents that will steer your marketing and sales efforts: Your Ideal Customer Profile and your Buyer Persona Profiles. Under perfect conditions, below is how you do it. But first, if you haven’t yet, download these free worksheets for each to help you organize everything.

Step 1: Gather your team

From upper management to internal (and external) marketing and sales staff, this process should be collaborative. You’ll want these key stakeholders in your business development process to be in agreement about who your ideal customer and buyer personas are.

Step 2: Define your ideal customer and buyer personas

This is the most difficult step – deciding who that ideal customer is and who those individual influencers in the buyer process are. You might butt heads here, but you’ll need to reach common ground before you move to step three. Use the guidelines earlier in this article to stimulate your brainstorming process.

Step 3: Draft your profiles

Put it all in writing.

Step 4: Share with your company

Once your business development team is on board with your ideal customer and buyer persona profiles, it’s time to get everyone else at your company on the bus. So share throughout your organization.

The last step is to go get started! This process will take brainpower and some patience. But you just can’t skip over it or you’ll be backtracking somewhere down the road, and you’ll have thrown away a lot of time and money in the process.

Need a hand working through this process?

If you want to enlist the help of a consultant who’s been through this process with many industrial sector companies, consider requesting a consultation to get that conversation started.

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

In this white board video, we explore the seven core elements we believe must be present, optimized and working in sync for an industrial sector B2B company to achieve significant and sustainable revenue growth through marketing and sales.

Related resources

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

Following the seven core elements structure from the video above, this guide gives you as a manufacturing organization a structure for auditing your marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving your program's ROI. View guide

View guide

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

Here’s the article version of the video above – about the seven things we believe must be present, optimized and working in sync to achieve significant and sustainable revenue growth through marketing and sales. Read article

Industrial Marketing: The Definitive Guide

This is our most comprehensive piece of content about online marketing for manufacturers and industrial service providers. You’ll learn how to construct a marketing strategy that will generate highly-targeted website traffic, convert website visitors into real sales leads with names and phone numbers and converge your sales and marketing efforts into a streamlined business development machine. View guide

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript

Hey, everybody. I’m Joe Sullivan, a Co-Founder of industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76. And today we’re gonna be talking about what we believe are the seven core elements of an industrial marketing strategy. So these are the things we think need to be present, optimized, and working in sync, if you’re really gonna see a return on your marketing investment.

So let’s start right in the middle with Brand Positioning. I don’t think I’m gonna get an argument from many people when I say that, with marketing or sales, your customer really has to be at the center of everything you do. So when we talk about your customer, we’re talking about the type of company, first of all, the industries that, you know, those companies are in, the size of the companies, what they buy from you. Who is that ideal buyer? And then who are the individual human beings at those companies that you deal with in the buying process? So, it’s probably some combination of design engineers, plant managers, procurement folks, CEOs and presidents. Whoever that might be for you, let’s identify those people. And then, what message are you gonna deliver to those people? So the message really needs to be, you know, for the customer, it needs to be customer-centric. What problems do you solve for them? What challenges do you address? What value do you deliver to them? Let’s not focus the message on you, but the customer.

Okay, so once you’ve got your positioning in place, the next thing we’re going to deal with is, your Website Infrastructure. So today, for a manufacturer or industrial service provider, your website needs to be a lot more than just a brochure. It’s the online face of your company. It needs to be a business development machine for you. So some of the things that we’ve gotta have present are a flexible CMS, or Content Management System, so your site can grow and evolve as your company does. You site’s gotta be mobile-friendly, so it’s easy to view on mobile phones, on tablets, on desktop computers. You’ve got to follow best on page search engine optimization practices. Your website’s got to be CRO ready, or Conversion Rate Optimization ready, meaning we’ve gotta have the infrastructure in place, so we can easily add call-to-action systems, and lead-capture pages, as the site grows and expands. You’ve gotta have a learning center in place, a knowledge-base, a place to publish blog articles, publish white papers, publish case studies – the things that are gonna help your buyers in their buying process. And then we’ve gotta be linked to a CRM and a marketing automation software, so that, as leads are generated through the site, profiles of those individuals are created in the backend, and that whole process is tied to what your sales team is doing.

Okay, so that’s Website Infrastructure. Once we’ve got that in place, we need to shift the focus to driving qualified traffic – to your Website Traffic Strategy. Traditionally, awareness in marketing has meant doing things like attending trade shows, sending direct mail pieces, running print ads in trade journals, probably lots of cold calling. And, you know, all these things probably still have a place in some capacity for you. We’re not saying throw them all away, but it’s worth noting that these are all push tactics. It’s throwing a message out there to the masses, whereas with online marketing, your website traffic strategy is about generating awareness and attracting people to you who already have a need and who are already in some capacity sales-qualified, right?

Okay, so things that should be part of your website traffic strategy… The first one’s content, marketing, which is really core to all of this stuff. It’s all about attracting the right people to you by publishing content that’s designed just for them to help them solve their problems. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a big piece of that. In addition to the on-page search engine optimization that we mentioned already, is building inbound links from other credible sites to your site, to show Google and the search engines that your site is credible. Guest authorship can be a great way to do this. This is really its own topic, so we’ll stop there on that one. Social media… in some capacity, social media may play a role for you. For some of our clients it does, for some it doesn’t. LinkedIn is often a good venue for manufactures for lead generation, but it takes work and energy. Pay-Per-Click, retargeting other paid forms of online advertising, probably somewhere along the way may play a role for you, as well. Okay, so that’s number three, Website Traffic Strategy.

Number four: Lead Generation Strategy. It’s worth noting that a lot of manufacturing organizations, we realize, are not e-commerce stores. They’re not selling widgets. They’re selling complex, customized solutions, and their customers go through long buying processes. And so, that’s why lead generation is so important in the business-to-business space, and especially for manufacturers. The other thing worth noting is that, because most of your website visitors are not ready to buy something right now (they’re doing their research, they’re doing their homework, you know), a Contact-Us button, or a Request-For-Bid button, really isn’t enough to generate a lead. Those are for the people who are ready to have that conversation. So we need to think about people who are earlier in the buying process and, you know, may be inclined to download a white paper or a buyer’s guide, a case study, maybe register for a webinar or subscribe to your newsletter. These are what we call “gated resources.” They hide behind a form. You ask for some contact information in exchange for that thing that is a helpful resource to them in the buying process. It’s a fair trade, and this sort of thing works really well for manufacturers.

Once you start putting those gated resources in place, then we shift the focus to CRO, Conversion Rate Optimization, which is about maximizing the volume of website visitors that are actually converting into a real lead, by taking one of those lead-generation or form-submitting actions, right? Okay, so that’s Lead Generation Strategy.

I’m gonna jump over here. Number five is Sales Enablement. This is really about what happens after the lead is generated. One of the biggest challenges we’ve found, as a marketing partner for manufacturing organizations, is that, you know, the Sales teams kind of struggle with what to do after that lead is generated. And we think there are a couple reasons why that happens. One, there’s a lack of communication between Marketing and Sales very often. We need to kind of bring that together. And then, two, not all leads are sales ready, and a lot of Sales teams push back on getting leads on their plate that, you know, aren’t ready to buy something right now. But that’s kind of what you’re dealing with, with inbound leads, and there are ways to, you know, help you optimize the time of your Sales team, so that their time isn’t wasted on leads who are, maybe qualified but not yet sales ready.

So things we need to put in place are the processes, first of all. Who on your team is responsible for dealing with the inbound leads? What is that person gonna do? Follow up calls, emails. On what schedule, or when are those things gonna happen? So getting those processes in place and following them to a tee. And then the next step is really putting the tools in place that are gonna help optimize your Sales team’s time, give them lead intelligence, help them understand what these inbound leads are actually doing on their site, what they’re interested in doing. And so CRM tools and marketing automation software are a couple of tools you’re gonna wanna have in place for your Sales team, and to really bring your Marketing and Sales organizations within your company together. Okay, so that’s number five, Sales Enablement.

Number six is your Lead Nurturing Strategy. This is kind of the marketing side of what happens after a lead is generated. So your Sales team’s dealing with the hot and more sales-ready leads. Your Marketing side can deal with the leads who need to be developed a bit still. And a lot of this is gonna happen in the form of e-mail. So monthly newsletters can be a great way to continue to educate your contacts to keep them coming back to your site, to stay engaged with them, so that, when they are ready to buy – whether that’s a year from now, or a month from now, or five years down the road – you’ve been in front of them on a regular basis. You’ve been adding some value over the course of time, and they’re gonna think of you first, right? And, then automated e-mail campaigns can be triggered, based on all kinds of things that your visitors are doing on your site, or when their lead score reaches a certain threshold. We won’t get into that now, but there are a lot of ways to use marketing automation in the lead nurturing process.

Okay, so then number seven. Wrapped around all of this is your ROI Reporting Process. So we can measure website traffic all day. We can measure leads all day. But what really matters to you? Revenue, right? So, luckily today, we have the ability to attribute revenue back to your marketing activities, and dial in even as closely as a specific email campaign, or a search engine optimization campaign, or even an individual article that you wrote to a very specific buyer type. What we need in place, though, are the right analytics tools to be able to do that. So things like Google Analytics, maybe a marketing automation software, like Hubspot, and then we’ve gotta have a written data-sharing process in place. We’re big fans of documenting that process. How are Marketing and Sales going to communicate with each other? What reports are sales gonna provide to Marketing, so that Marketing can go match closed sales with individual contacts, and figure out what was the source of those contacts? What activities did they take that play a role in them actually buying from you?

And then, in order to facilitate that kind of communication and dialogue, we’ve gotta have recurring Marketing/Sales meetings. We recommend at least monthly, to get in the same room with the Marketing team and Sales team. Make sure that communication’s happening and that both parties are getting feedback from each other and understand what the other’s doing etc.

Okay, so that’s it. These are the seven core elements of an industrial marketing strategy. We have written an article that goes into depth on all of these seven components. We’ve also written another article that helps you figure out how to audit your own industrial marketing strategy, following that structure. And we’d encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter to get stuff like this in your inbox on a regular basis. So that’s it. Thanks for watching.

What marketing results manufacturers should be measuring

Related resources

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

This guide gives manufacturers a structure for auditing their marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving that program's ROI.

View guide

Planning for results before choosing tactics

Like in the video on this page, this chapter from our Industrial Marketing: The Definitive Guide outlines an approach to planning a strategy around the results you want to achieve – from revenue to new customers to leads to traffic. View chapter of guide

Industrial marketing case studies

From engine manufacturing to sustainable plastics to industrial coatings to design-build construction, see our collection of marketing success stories with other industrial sector companies. View case studies

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript

Hey, everybody. I’m Joe Sullivan with industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76, and today we’re talking about what marketing results manufacturers really need to be measuring.

So, we’re in kind of an interesting place in the B2B marketing world today. Ten or 15 years ago, it was all about print ads, direct mail, trade shows, cold prospecting. And probably some of these things still play a role at your company today in terms of your marketing strategy. The problem is, these traditional tactics can be really hard to measure in terms of their impact on your business. And it’s kind of a different story today as industrial buyers move online starting to look for solution providers, products, services, answers to questions they have, solutions to problems they have. Everything, all of a sudden, becomes measurable, and so you start to know what’s working and what’s not in terms of your marketing strategy. So we’re going to take a look at how you measure all that today.

The first thing you need to measure is really all that matters in the end, and that’s revenue generated by your marketing activities, right? That’s kind of why we’re doing marketing in the first place – to grow the business. So let’s just say that you’re a $20 million company and you’re targeting 20% growth this year. That means you’ve got a $4 million growth target for the year. And let’s say you want to be able to attribute 50% of that growth to your marketing investment. So, if that’s the case, it means we need $2 million to be generated directly from your marketing activities. Okay? Good starting point.

So, the next one is new customers. How many new customers is it going to take to get to that $2 million goal from your marketing activities? So the thing we’ve got to look at is, what’s a customer worth to you? You can think about this in terms of lifetime value or the customer’s spend over the first year – however you want to do it. We kind of prefer looking at it as lifetime value, but however you want to do it, let’s just say that a customer is worth $100,000 to you. So if we need to meet that $2 million goal, we’re going to need 20 new customers to be generated from our marketing activities. Okay, so that’s the first two.

Sales-qualified leads is the next one. And when I’m talking about sales-qualified leads, I’m talking about leads that are put on the table in front of the people on your team who are actually selling, that can be validated or verified by them as being the right type of company and the right type of person at that company. Like, “Yes, this is somebody that I would actually engage with. They fit our ideal client profile, and I’m going to pursue them.” So that’s a sales-qualified lead. So, how many sales-qualified leads do you need to get to 20 customers? Of course, a lot of this is going to depend on the effectiveness of your sales team. How good are they at actually closing a good lead when it’s put in front of them? Let’s just say that number is 50%. They can handle, you know, closing 50% of the leads put in front of them, so we’re going to need 40 sales-qualified leads to get to those 20 new customers. Okay, so the first three are covered.

The next thing we need to look at is, how many total new leads or contacts do we need to generate in order to get 40 sales-qualified leads? So, of course it would be wonderful if all of the leads generated through your online marketing activities and your website were sales-qualified. The reality is, you’re going to have students doing research projects, you’re going to have competitors spying on you, you’re going to have leads that just aren’t good. So let’s just say that 1 in 10 leads generated through your website is truly sales-qualified. So that means we’re going to need 400 total new contacts or leads over the next year to get to those 40 sales-qualified ones. It probably looks like an intimidating number, but you know, it’s actually achievable, depending on what energy you can pour into your marketing and how smart you are with it.

Okay, and so then the last thing we need to look at, kind of stepping back even further, is how much website traffic do we need to generate in order to convert, you know, 400 visitors into actual contacts on your site. So, if you’ve done any of your online marketing homework or you’ve learned a little bit about lead generation in the online world, you’re going to know that a good percentage of your website visitors are not going to be ready to talk to you. They’re researching, they’re learning, they’re trying to get questions answered. And so, if we know that only a small percentage are going to convert, or fill out a contact form, or request a bid form, then we need to think about, how are we going to get all the other visitors on your site that are actually qualified but not sales-ready to convert into an actual lead?

So, you think about who the different buyer types are that you’re targeting. Maybe engineers would download a technical whitepaper on a topic that, you know, is related to what they’re looking for, and they trade you some contact information for it. A procurement manager might download a buyer’s guide or a pricing guide, trade you some contact information for that. A CEO might use an ROI calculator, or a long-term cost of ownership guide, or something along those lines. So, however you do it, the key is to trade something of value to your website visitor in exchange for a name, a phone number, an email address, so that they actually become a physical lead for you.

So, if you’re doing this right and you’re doing a good job targeting the right types of buyers and putting offers in front of them that are going to appeal to them and help them in their buying process, you should be seeing about 2% to 3% of your visitors converting into real leads. So if that’s the case, if we need 400 new contacts and we know we can convert 2% to 3% of our visitors into leads because we’re doing such an awesome job with our online marketing, it means we’re going to need 13,000 to 20,000 visitors over the next year at a 2% to 3% conversion rate. That translates to about 1,100 to 1,700 visits a month.

So, this is the stuff you really need to be measuring. It all starts with revenue and it trickles all the way down to how much website traffic you’re going to need to generate the leads that it’ll take to get to that revenue.

So, the next thing I want to look at real quickly is measurement tools. How are we going to actually go about measuring this? What tools can you put in your hands to help you do that effectively?

The first one is Google Analytics. It’s kind of the obvious thing you need to install if you’re not using it yet. It’s a free tool, it’s going to provide you with a wealth of data, and it takes about five minutes to install. So Google Analytics is going to help you look at website traffic, to set some benchmarks, and look at your traffic growth over time. It’s going to help you figure out how visitors are finding you in the first place, their geography, what content they’re looking at that’s actually helping them convert into leads. So that’s Google Analytics.

The next one is HubSpot, or at least some kind of inbound marketing software. HubSpot’s our favorite, personally. HubSpot will help you look at comprehensive marketing performance online, and in particular, on your website. It’s also going to give you intelligence on individual leads in your sales funnel, what they’re looking at on your site, how they’re behaving, what they’re doing. It can be really great for framing sales calls and for segmenting your visitors based on all sorts of different criteria.

Moz is the next one. Moz is a search engine optimization tool that’s going to help you identify SEO opportunities, as well as track your SEO performance over time.

And then, Hotjar is a conversion optimization tool. It’s used for heat mapping and looking at how visitors are actually interacting with content on your site, how they’re moving through your site, what they’re looking at. Ultimately, the goal with using a tool like Hotjar is to help you improve your visitor-to-lead conversion rates so you can get to that 2% to 3% that you’re going to need to really start generating the leads you want.

So that’s all we’ve got for today. I’m going to post some links to related resources in the page notes on this page, and I would also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter. So, thanks for watching.

SEO (search engine optimization) for manufacturers

In this white board video, we introduce a handful of the most important Google ranking factors as of 2017. Then, we explore the two we believe are most important in depth: 1) Content relevance, quality and comprehensiveness and 2) Backlinks from credible websites.

Related resources

How industrial SEO works and how manufacturers can rank first in Google

This article will help you design an industrial SEO strategy by explaining what Google cares about, how marketers have failed to beat them and where to focus. Read article

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Moz is one among the most respected authorities on SEO and their content reflects it. If you’re looking for a 101 intro to the topic that’s pretty comprehensive, this guide is highly recommended. View guide

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

This guide gives manufacturers a structure for auditing their marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving that program's ROI.

View guide

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript

Hey, everybody. I’m Joe Sullivan, a Co-founder of industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76, and today we’re talking about SEO, or search engine optimization, for manufacturers. So there are all kinds of things that Google is gonna take into account when deciding which pages to show you for any given search query. As of 2017, some of the top ranking factors include: content relevance, quality and comprehensiveness, links from other authoritative websites into your site, mobile device friendliness, page load speeds, site security and social media signals. But we really want you to focus on these first two because they’re probably where you’re gonna get the most bang for your buck, especially if you’re just getting started with SEO.

So, let’s talk about this first one. You kind of have to think of Google as a business. The way that your business or my business competes with other businesses, Google competes with Yahoo and Bing and the other search engines. And in order to kind of remain the best search engine and to keep you coming back, Google’s gotta satisfy your search results on a regular basis. So let’s just say you are a manufacturer of industrial ovens. That means your site is gonna have to have some of the best, highest quality content out there about things like custom curing ovens and manufacturing furnaces or whatever topics are relevant to your business, if you want Google to be consistently showing your pages to searchers who could be relevant customers for you. But what does the best content really mean? We really point to these three things: relevance, quality, and comprehensiveness.

So, is the content on your website relevant to the search queries that are probably being executed in Google searches by your audience? Is the content on your site of high quality? And we’re gonna talk later about sort of what signals to Google, whether something is high quality or not. But in short, you really need to be just producing really good, educational, helpful, problem-solving content. And then, the comprehensiveness of your content. Is it sort of shallow, surface level stuff on your site about your products and services? Or are you really going into depth and answering questions and solving problems for your customers? And that’s kind of the stuff Google is looking for these days.

You’ve gotta consider also that you’re not the only one out there producing content. If you were to do a Google search right now for “industrial oven manufacturer,” at least, as of yesterday when I did the search, it turned up over 12 million page results. Of course that doesn’t mean that there are 12 million industrial oven manufacturers out there, but it does mean that there are 12 million-some pages that Google has deemed relevant in some way, shape or form to that particular search query. So, regardless of who your real life competition is, that’s kind of what you’re dealing with as far as competition goes online. So, for your stuff to rise to the surface above all the garbage, you really need to focus on relevance, quality, and comprehensiveness for your content.

Okay. So now that we’ve sort of talked about this idea of creating great content and getting all that stuff out there to represent you in the online space and hopefully attract the right people to you, we need to teach Google what that content’s about. We need to help Google understand what all those pages on your site are about, if Google is gonna be able to show those to people in the first place. So, there are some best practices here that you’re gonna want to focus on on individual pages of your website. And you need to think of every individual page on your website as a different keyword ranking opportunity. On every page on your site, you want to choose a keyword that makes sense and sort of describes what this page is about. And you want to be able to use that in the page title, you want to use the same keyword in your URL or website address, in the main headline on your page, and maybe one of the sub-headlines, and maybe a few times in the body copy.

All that stuff sort of tells Google what this page is about and helps Google index it properly. What you don’t want to do is over-stuff this page with that keyword. That’s kind of an antiquated practice that marketers used years ago to try to outsmart Google and game the system. Not only is Google not gonna look at that as a beneficial thing for you. Now, you’re probably gonna get penalized for it. So, keyword stuffing is a bad thing. You just want to be smart about using it in these proper places on the page so Google kind of understands what your page is about.

Okay. So let’s jump over to the second big SEO factor here – back-links from authoritative websites to your website. Let’s say this is your website right here, and then here’s your sister’s blog. Your sister writes a blog about your family, and because she’s proud of you, she decides, “Oh, I’m gonna mention my brother or my sister and I’m gonna link to your company website right here.” Well, the first thing to note is that Google sees this link right here and it’s gonna sort of recognize that this is a vote of confidence, in a way, for your site. But because your sister’s blog probably isn’t the most authoritative website out there, and because it’s about your family and not about what your company does, this link’s probably not gonna help you a whole lot with SEO related to the things that are on your website.

Now, on the other hand, let’s say that you’ve been smart about getting your business listed in industry directories and maybe you even wrote a guest article on a small industry journal site. Okay, Google sees this link and says, “Industry relevant website, fairly credible website. This link’s gonna have some value in terms of SEO for your company.”

And then let’s say you’ve really taken to heart this idea of writing this relevant, high quality content and you’ve even gone as far as to get it out there and pitch it and promote it and try to get it picked up by industry journals, and all of a sudden Engineering.com picks up your content, publishes one of your articles, links back to your site. This is all of a sudden a huge vote of confidence for your site. It tells Google that, “Hmm, this website must have some credibility because we’ve got these sort of industry relevant, credible sources linking back to it.”

Okay. So that’s kind of the concept here, and not only are you getting exposure in front of the right audience and hopefully getting some click-throughs from these sites to yours, but those inbound links are really what gives you the SEO juice.

So, we’ve talked about creating the relevant content, we’ve talked about building back-links from authoritative sites to your site. “How do we go about actually making this happen?” is really the big question. And as far as the first point here goes – creating that relevant, really exceptional, high quality, comprehensive content – you gotta start with the problems your customers are having and the questions they’re asking on a regular basis or conversations that these prospects are having with your sales team. If you can start answering some of those questions, solving some of those problems with written content or video content like this, that’s the type of stuff you want to really focus on. Write educational articles, publish videos, publish case studies and white papers and things that are gonna be helpful to your buyer, your potential customer during their buying processes. And if you can start doing that stuff on a regular basis, maybe publishing 500 or 1,000 words of content a month and then you start working towards 2,000, 3,000 words a month, it’ll kind of start to snowball for you.

But on the other side of things, building those back-links and really telling Google that, “Yeah, this is a credible source of information and these are good pieces of content.” How do we sort of get that credibility in place? And that’s about building those back-links. And so, you want to be able to promote all that content relentlessly. Reach out to editors of trade journals. If you work in the automotive space – are a manufacturer of automotive parts, reach out to automotive news. Or if you’re in the food space, reach out to food manufacturing magazines. Try to pitch your content. Get that stuff picked up and they’ll build those links back to your site. That’s what’s gonna kind of move the needle from an SEO standpoint.

So, that’s really it. In the page notes. I’m gonna list some resources related to SEO, and I would also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter to get content like this in your inbox a couple times a month. Thanks for watching.

How content marketing helps manufacturers sell complex solutions

In this white board video, we explore why content marketing makes so much sense for manufacturers who sell complex, customized products or solutions. We’ll take a look at the industrial buyer’s journey and what types of content will appeal to the engineers, plant managers, procurement folks and CEOs along that path to making a purchasing decision.

Related resources

How to influence the industrial buying process with smart content marketing

This article will help you tackle a complex industrial buying process that requires the cultivation of buyer trust with the help of content marketing. Read article

2017 Manufacturing Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends

This joint study by Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and IEEE Engineering360 explores the state of content marketing companies like yours, right now. View study

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

This guide gives manufacturers a structure for auditing their marketing and lead generation strategy, as well as next steps for improving that program's ROI.

View guide

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript

Hey everybody, I’m Joe Sullivan, a co-founder of industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76. And today, we’re gonna be talking about a topic that really needs to be core to any online industrial marketing strategy.

That’s content marketing. So we found in the industrial sector that content marketing works best not for companies that sell widgets, but companies that sell highly customized, and often fairly complex solutions, and often their people’s expertise and experience really are just as valuable to the buyer as the product or service itself. A lot of times these types of companies also deal with long sales processes that may play out over months or even longer, and on the buyer’s end there are quite a few people involved in a lot of situations including design engineers, plant managers, procurement managers, CEOs and presidents. So you might ask why these companies? Why does content marketing make sense for these companies versus others?

And really the answer is kind of simple. It’s that these industrial companies are making complex buying decisions. They need to make the right choice because they don’t want to have to backtrack, they don’t want to lose money by having to backtrack. And if you think about, you know, in your personal life, you wouldn’t walk into a car dealership, ask to talk to a car salesman for five minutes, and walk out 20 minutes later with a new car. There’s a process to this, right? That involves researching, evaluating, comparing your options.

So let’s say you’re a contract manufacturer that specializes in the aerospace industry, and a prospect finds you through a Google search for something like “aerospace injection molding.” It would probably be unrealistic to think that this prospect is going to find you in the Google search, navigate to your website, look for the contact us button immediately, pick up the phone and ask to be sold to, right?

Just not realistic. So, you know, you kind of need to put yourself in that buyer’s shoes, and think about how you’d behave when you’re looking for a solution. So, you know, whether you discover a solution provider through a Google search, or looking through an industry directory, or even through a referral from somebody that you know and trust, you’re still gonna vet that solution provider.

This is really where content marketing comes into play. Right here is a simplification of the industrial buyer’s journey, and over on the right is the buying stage of that journey, which really only represents a very small portion of this entire process. According to Google, 96% of your website visitors are not ready to buy anything, yet a majority of manufacturers’ websites use this tiny little contact us button as the only opportunity to generate a real lead. And this is designed for people who are ready for a conversation.

We know that most people are not ready for a conversation. 96% of your visitors are not ready to buy. So doesn’t it make more sense that we focus here, and here, and here, and here, when we’re trying to generate leads online?

And the big question really is how do we go about making this happen? So if you’re that aerospace contract manufacturer, how do you compel that prospect who Google searched you and landed on your website, but isn’t ready to buy anything to actually become a real lead? And so let’s illustrate that. Let’s use that exact example of a Google search for “aerospace injection molding.”

Let’s say that you had written a piece of content titled “Injection molding versus thermoforming for aerospace component manufacturing”, and this is the page that came up in that Google search. So absolutely somewhere on this page, we wanna have a place to compel this visitor, in case they are ready for that conversation, to request a bid, request a consultation, whatever that might be. But knowing that this is a small percentage of people who are gonna do that right now, we need to give them another opportunity to become a real lead. And this is where offering something like a buyer’s guide, a white paper, something that they can download, and in exchange for that download, because you’re offering them some value in their buying process, you’re gonna ask for their name and their email address, and their phone number. And now you can proactively step in and take control of that buying process.

So there are so many ways that you can do this. There are so many types of content that you can use. Going back to the buyer’s journey for a second, prospects who are in this research stage of the buying process, types of content that tend to work really well for them are things like educational articles, white papers, e-books, tutorial videos like what you’re watching right now. For prospects who are in more of the evaluation stage of their buying process, you’re gonna want to publish things like case studies, or maybe design an ROI calculator, or write cost comparison articles, or product comparison articles, things that are gonna help them make their decision.

The most important thing is that you take into consideration your buyers, what they care about, the problems they’re trying to solve, the questions that they’re trying to answer. Write great content. Create good resources for them that help them in that buying process. And by doing this you’re giving a taste of your solution. You’re not giving away your secret sauce. Just a taste of it. Enough to earn their attention and trust, help them take the next step forward in the buying process, and prompt them to take some kind of lead generating action.

So that’s really it, in the page notes I’m gonna put some resources – links for some resources around content marketing, I will also put an article that specifically addresses the industrial buyers journey and the role of content there that we recently published, and I would encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter because once or twice a month you’ll get content like this in your inbox.

So thanks for watching.

Construction marketing for contractors and subcontractors

This previously-published article was updated on July 1, 2017

Construction marketing is complex

Whether you’re a general contractor or subcontractor, you’re probably not selling a commodity product, but high-value, highly-customized services where differentiators include things like experience, capacity to meet a project’s deadline, safety history and of course price.

That complexity doesn’t go away on the buying side either, where your “buyer” is rarely an individual person, but instead a buying committee. Each member of this committee of decision makers comes to the table with his or her own needs and priorities.

What results is a highly-consultative sale where it’s your job to establish trust and build relationships throughout a process that can take months or even years. Sound familiar (and maybe a bit painful too)? If so, read on.

Marketing for contractors isn’t just about awareness

SEO alone is not the answer. Pay-per-click alone is not the answer. Print advertising alone is not the answer. If these awareness-generating, discovery-oriented marketing activities were enough, then your ideal customer would simply discover you through an ad, a Google search or an industry directory, and then proceed to enlist you for their big job that day.

But we all know it doesn’t work like that. Not even close. Instead, the long road to a closed deal is just beginning.

It’s for that reason your marketing strategy has to extend beyond pure promotion and actually start to provide value and utility to your prospects all throughout that long buyer’s journey. And that value should be derived from your company’s wealth of knowledge and expertise.

How to deliver value to your prospects from day one

During the earliest stages of your prospect’s buying process, you do of course need to assure he or she discovers you. After all, if you’re not on the bid list in the first place, you can’t play the rest of the game. But the key is to attract and provide utility to the right people from the right companies who are already out there trying to fulfill a need, rather than soliciting the masses with generic promotional advertising.

Content marketing (paired with smart SEO) is one of your strongest weapons for discovery. You can then supplement content with highly-targeted paid media like pay-per-click and retargeting ads.

Once you’ve successfully attracted your prospective customers to your website, you have a short window of time to assure them they’re in the right place. Before they click the “back” button and return to their Google search, you need your website content to confirm quickly that yes, you can indeed help solve their problems. And you’ll need to back up the “brochure” content on your site by demonstrating your company’s expertise through helpful content that answers their questions and assists their buying process, as well as case studies that prove you’ve walked the walk.

After you’ve started earning trust, you’ll need your website to generate physical leads out of these anonymous website visitors. And because most of them aren’t yet ready to put you on the bid list, you’ll have to create other opportunities for lead generation to happen.

Let’s illustrate this content-backed, utility-driven discovery and lead generation process with an example from one of our clients – The Korte Company.

An example of smart construction marketing in action

The Korte Company is a design-build contractor that serves a variety of industry verticals very well. But in recent years, they’ve focused on establishing and growing their business in the healthcare industry – building hospitals, outpatient clinics and other medical facilities. A key facet of their growth strategy has involved translating their expertise and experience into marketing content that provides utility to the buying committees of their prospective healthcare industry customers.

If you Google search “healthcare construction” or “medical facility construction” you’ll consistently find Korte at the top (or near the top) of the organic (unpaid) search results. And a high volume of highly-qualified traffic to their website results from that.

But this isn’t by chance. Korte has committed to being educators of their healthcare industry audience – not just promoters of themselves. They’ve earned their Google real estate.

Korte has written articles like the following about a variety of healthcare construction topics:

They’ve also written a wealth of in-depth content like the case studies and white papers below that prompt their visitors to trade contact information for a helpful resource:

The role of construction marketing after lead generation

Marketing doesn’t stop once the lead has been generated. Content can and should be used to continuously educate different members of the buying committee all throughout that long buying process. It serves as a complement to the personal interaction of your sales staff – not a replacement for it.

Using the previous Korte Company example once again, not only does their content serve to attract, build trust and generate leads on their website, it forms the core of their email marketing strategy – to nurture and stay top of mind every month with their audience. And it also translates well into a print format, to be used by their sales team as direct mailers and leave behinds after key in-person meetings.

In conclusion

The smartest GCs and subcontractors out there have built business development teams made up of marketing and sales professionals that work as one cohesive unit. They share the same goals, the same vision for success and the same message.

If you’d like to have a conversation about how build this kind of team within your organization, we encourage you to request a consultation. We’ve been immerse in construction marketing for over 10 years – and we’ve even won a few awards (2013 CMA awards / 2012 CMA awards).

We’d love to talk!

Construction marketing resources

We’ve written a wealth of content over the years about marketing and lead generation for industrial sector companies in our Learning Center. A selection of related articles and case studies follow.

Advanced industrial marketing strategies to test in your arsenal

If you’ve read other articles on industrial strategy on this blog before or you’re the marketing pro in your organization, you’re likely familiar with the basics of SEO, content strategy and digital marketing tactics as a whole. When you reach this point, you’ve likely been tinkering with your company’s online strategy, learning how engineers engage with your content and even driving some year-over-year growth for traffic or leads that’s caught your President’s attention.

Now you have something to prove and are looking for some homerun strategies to implement and keep the marketing pipeline growing for your sales team. Look no further, here are some of my favorite strategies to employ in a rounded-out industrial marketing plan.

#1: Keyword research with related searches for smart SEO and lean content

We’ve spoken often about the complexities of SEO, but what makes it such an intricate challenge? Since Google has held their poker hand close — namely, their search results algorithm — marketers speculate and test a variety of methods for boosting rankings of their content in search results. One such method, based on the goals of Google to mirror search results with natural language and ideas, is the use of the related searches section of most search results.

In the keyword research phase, where a marketer is initially identifying topics for opportunity, this part of a search engine is pure gold. Not only does it provide new ideas and additional rabbit holes to explore for topics, it displays what Google deems related to the keyword already being researched.

Here’s an example rabbit hole for an idea. Perhaps an industrial coatings contractor is seeking to educate some GCs’ junior engineers on fireproofing — specifically, the types of fireproof coatings. A few keywords off the bat might include cementitious fireproofing, fire retardant coatings or industrial fireproofing paint. If we search for cementitious fireproofing and scroll to the bottom of the results we see this:

Screenshot via Google.com: Related searches.

Related topics include cementitious fireproofing thickness, materials and application. From here, the coatings contractor could explore each of those keywords in turn for additional topics to expand on. Then, once a healthy list of keywords is collected, one can follow through on their keyword evaluation process.

Why is this meaningful? Google is providing a highly transparent view of what their algorithm considers related topics. Further, it enables a lean approach to SEO by addressing multiple subtopics in one well-rounded content piece. It increases probability of SEO success through content diversification; this method is to an SEO what six sigma is for your manufacturing facility.

#2: Heat mapping your website for visibility to prospects’ needs and behaviors

While heat mapping isn’t reserved for digital marketing, it has made recent headway in the industry as conversion optimization grows in popularity. In this scenario, heat mapping visualizes the clicks, mouse movements, or scrolling patterns of site visitors in an effort to identify frustrations and ease the journey to becoming a lead.

The end result of heat mapping and conversion optimization in general, is focused on the user — the prospect — but it doesn’t only value their experience with the site. A heat map of clicks or mouse movements identifies what users are looking at, what they care about and what might be difficult for them to navigate on the site. This can arm internal teams with a better understanding of who their users are, whether the team is learning more about prospects’ behaviors or determining that the visitors on your site are not prospects at all, but engineering students completing a research project.

A good first step for setting up heat maps is to identify the most highly trafficked pages of your website. These pages should be seamless in getting your prospects the resources they want and need. In the case of one steel pipe distributor, their pipe specifications pages were known to be great entry points for valuable leads and rich resources on their product offerings. However, in the heat maps of these pages, a trend emerged:

Screenshot via HotJar.com: Heat map of click behavior.

Site visitors were particularly interested in the chemical requirements specifications for their pipes and appeared to highlight the chart to presumably copy and paste it elsewhere for later reference. To test the theory and supply a more easily transferable resource, the chart was translated into a PDF and offered just above the chart. The result was exciting:

Screenshot via HotJar.com: Heat map of click behavior.

Not only did the PDF receive clicks and downloads, but the previously existing hot spots at the corners of the chart disappeared. A point of frustration — at the very least, added work — was minimized by a relatively quick solution.

The value of heat mapping lies in its simplicity. Focusing on the user — the potential customer — and understanding what they expect from a website creates opportunities to improve the experience and reduce steps to becoming a lead. Heat maps supply the data to bridge the gap between online leads and you, the marketer.

#3: Attribution modeling to understand marketing contributions

Possibly one of the most meaningful bits of marketing data available, an attribution model is intended to give transparency to what marketing efforts are impacting sales growth. There’s multiple perspectives to attributing marketing with closed deals. Our B2C counterparts with shorter sales cycles may use a single-touch model in which a sale is 100% attributed to an individual marketing channel or content piece.

However, in B2B — and industrial specifically — where sales cycles last weeks, months and years, attribution must be smarter than that. More so, attribution must consider the impact both marketing and sales teams have on the end deal. This is just another reason for the marketing and sales teams to act as a partnership. A full scope of the sales funnel from awareness to deal closing is key to defining which steps along the way were most impactful.

The first step in getting this full scope of the sales funnel is to identify marketing-sourced leads that are sales qualified and that have closed as customers. This will be an ongoing process, but at the outset, reviewing the last 90 or 180 days’ worth of leads can provide a good sample of leads to evaluate. Defining touch points with these high-value leads and aligning them with key steps in the sales process can define the weight and value assigned to each channel.

The end goal with attribution reporting is defining where marketing and sales are making the difference and focusing your marketing and sales budgets in those places. Starting out with a simple single-touch model is a good first step to introducing yourself to the methods, data and decisions that can be made with these insights.

Wrap it up

Each of these advanced tactics aim to drive at a better understanding of your site visitors, prospects and customers to deliver better what they seek in the buying process. While no single strategy or tactic will earn you and your company the full pipeline on leads you seek, identifying new opportunities to strengthen your current industrial marketing strategy is always a useful practice. If you find yourself with lingering questions, our Industrial Marketing Guide is a comprehensive resource for filling in the holes of a marketing strategy.

Industrial web design inspiration: three sites for success

For many businesses, the website is often the first introduction for customers and clients. Across all markets, a company’s website is where people end up through search results in their quest to research and learn more about services and products.

The same holds true for the industrial industry. Building a website for businesses in the industrial industry is a different challenge compared to more customer facing websites. From dense information and business goals to creative graphics, typography and color schemes, there are many design elements to consider.

A greater importance is being put on readability and usability over aesthetics. Not long ago, agencies were designing and developing websites with wild navigation systems. These hi-tech appearances have started to fall away for more minimal, cleaner layouts. Companies and website visitors alike are more concerned with every page working properly and ensuring it’s easy to use.

Our designers are regularly looking for industrial web design inspiration. We’ve put together a combination of important design factors we consider for Gorilla-built websites along with inspirational sites from companies doing design right. These websites have been inspirational for our own designs.

Dense information

What makes industrial website design a different challenge than more customer facing websites is the technical aspect. There is usually a lot of dense information that we have to figure out a way to make more easily digestible. Even within the industrial sector, design is a challenge from business to business. We design sites for businesses specializing in construction, bioplastic manufacturing, dairy production and commercial flooring installation among many others. Each one is completely different, loaded with extensive amounts of information that needs to be conveyed to potential customers.

The challenge is becoming an expert, having a sound understanding of what they do and conveying that through the websites design and content.

One of the sites we use for industrial web design inspiration is Webscope. We’ve been impressed with the information Webscope conveys through its design. The company created a communication platform for web developers and clients. Webscope’s message may be simple, but conveying a clear understanding of what the app is, its abilities and why it’s beneficial could easily be muddled and bogged down with expansive content. Their site takes an efficient and effective route to clearly and concisely communicate with visitors.

We took a similar approach when designing for CK Power. We created a graphic to help explain complex Tier 4 engine regulations. This flow chart has been very popular with their audience. It’s been a helpful way to lead potential customers through complex information. The EPA’s Tier 4 information is complicated and dense, consisting of thousands of words. The flow chart our designers created condenses it down and gives credence to CK Power as a thought leader.

Business goals

All design decisions are based off business goals set up prior to designing the website. Every element of the website has a business goal tied to it. Some websites look cool just to look cool, but for our clients, everything serves purpose. To help with the determination of the business goals and how they fit into the design, our designers wireframe the websites we create.

When wireframing, we’re thinking about the buyer personas. How is this buyer persona going to navigate the website? How can we make it easiest to find things? One of the main goals is to drive conversions.

Timepot, an employee hours tracking site, is a great example of a website with clean, efficient design with the clear goal of driving visitors into conversions. The option to start a free trial is heavily featured without being negatively aggressive. Eyes aren’t bogged down by hard-to-understand visuals, the navigation is simple and every element has the clear goal of encouraging visitors to convert. A few minutes on the Timepot website will show why it has provided us with plenty of industrial web design inspiration.

When we designed the site for Spectra Contract Flooring, leading visitors to the case studies pages was a prominent business goal. With the case studies page being a major priority, we gave it a featured spot on the main navigation in addition to visual call outs on the homepage.

Visuals: graphics, color theory, typography

One of the overall business goals to keep in mind is to make a website visually compelling to keep visitors on the site and engaged with its content. Often, the first impression is the lasting impression. Potential clients will come across your homepage and within 10 seconds, make a decision whether to stay or leave. Visuals that reflect the values of the company, the services performed and the products produced can affect people on a subconscious level. From treatment of visuals and color theory to typography, these elements make up the aesthetics of the site, affecting visitors’ actions.

Designers can learn how to use color appropriately in school, but sometimes you have to take the creative freedom and use what you’ve learned through experience. The rules aren’t hard and fast. That applies to typography as well, you can learn the basics such as line length and font, what to use for headlines and body copy, but experience and creative freedom comes into making design decisions.

Additional visuals include graphics and photos. Sometimes, a company selling a product or selling a service will include photography or visual aids. Having high quality photos is important. Images, illustrations and visuals often capture someone’s attention quicker than text.

One of our favorite websites for visuals is from Decta, a provider of online payment services and e-commerce solutions. Decta provided industrial web design inspiration through their site’s use of typography, color theory and visual elements. These elements play an important role conveying comfort and expertise as a thought leader in e-commerce. The color scheme is filled with soft, blended tones while the font is to the point, using simple lines without flair.

Returning to CK Power, we chose the site’s font for the sharp angles, along with a thick and tough appearance similar to an engine. The color scheme is bold, emphasizing the fonts and matching the qualities of their engines. CK Power’s website commands the screen with assertiveness, but never crosses the threshold to aggressive.

Before jumping into a costly website build, make sure you are asking the right questions, placing an importance on effective design and looking to other successful sites for plenty of inspiration.

Want to learn more about our B2B website design? Read about how we develop and design websites as an integral role in your businesses toolbox.

How industrial SEO works and how manufacturers can rank first in Google

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a pretty complex topic. A Google search for “SEO strategies” alone turns up over two million page results as of May 2017. According to Search Engine Land, the SEO market was worth over $65 Billon dollars in 2016, and I can’t even venture a guess at how many hundreds of thousands of SEO consults are out there looking to steal a piece of that pie.

If SEO were simple, we wouldn’t need all this content on the topic and professionals trying to sell you their (often self-proclaimed) expertise. You’d simply follow all the steps in a neat little “do this and rank first” checklist and hit the publish button. Then you’d book a luxurious, all-inclusive Caribbean island vacation and sit on the beach drinking piña coladas while your website climbed to the top of Google, generating thousands of qualified leads every day.

But instead, what we have are hundreds, if not thousands, of other manufacturers like yours competing for those top few positions in Google for all the keywords related to your product or service offerings. So in this overcrowded, cutthroat, clutter-infested mess of an online marketplace, how can you possibly win at the industrial SEO game?

Well, although that handy “do this and rank first” checklist may not exist, we’re not completely in the dark either. In this article, I’ll focus specifically on Google and how to make industrial SEO a true business driver for your manufacturing organization.

In order to realize success, there are four things I believe you first need to understand:

Google’s mission
How Google makes money
How marketers have tried (and failed) to outsmart Google over the years
How Google chooses where to rank YOUR website

I’ve structured this article around those four points.

If you’d rather watch than read, here’s a seven-minute video we recorded that covers a good portion of the below.

Otherwise, let’s dive in.

Google’s mission

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
– Google

Pretty simple in theory, huh? Think of Google as a library – the biggest library ever conceived. Having grown up in the 80s before we even had the option to jump on AOL via dial-up connection (remember this accompanying soundtrack?), I can remember venturing into the Wauwatosa, Wisconsin Public Library with my Mom and rifling through library card catalogs to figure out where I could find The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. (Millennials, check your local antique store if “card catalogs” made you scratch your head).

In retrospect, these catalogs were a bit tedious to use, but at the same time, pretty effective. Every book you might need to find was represented by a card. And every card helped you sift through the jungle of information around you to find exactly what you were looking for.

Google’s search bar is kind of like a big, ever-growing library card catalog on steroids for all the information that exists online. And when I say steroids, I’m talking about the kind from the late 90s and early 2000s that had Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds blasting 60-70+ homers a year. According to this article by Statistic Brain, as of 2014, there were an estimated thirty trillion pages indexed by Google.

Whoa. That’s a lot of library cards.

But with Google, of course – unlike with its ancient library card catalog counterpart – I don’t have to know my exact destination. In fact, maybe I’ve never heard of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. But I do know that today I feel like reading something like…. oh, I don’t know, a…

And then voila!

664,000 options for me to choose from, with the ones that Google thinks are most relevant to me right there at the top.

Dang, Ma! How cool would that have been back at the Tosa Library in 1989?

OK – so let’s head back into our modern manufacturing world and business environment – where Design Engineers seek information to help them write specs, Procurement Managers seek vendors to put on bid lists and CEOs seek partnerships with strategic growth partners.

Here’s the thing. It’s not really any different than the Chronicles of Narnia example I just used. Your buyers turn to Google when they need to collect information, get questions answered, find solutions and so on.

So if Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, we need to assure the information published online about your company is both accessible to Google and useful to your audience.

This is really what’s at the heart of industrial SEO.

How Google makes money

So as it turns out, Google didn’t set out to become the most comprehensive index of information in the history of the world out of the pure goodness of its heart.

Just as your company competes with other manufacturing organizations for the attention of prospective customers, Google competes with other search engines like Bing and Yahoo for your attention.

And if Google expects to maintain its household name in the world of online information searching – the Kleenex or Xerox of their space – they need to maintain their reputation as the absolute best tool for helping you find exactly what you’re looking for, fast and on a consistent basis. (Don’t forget – there was once a day when you “Yahoo searched” something. Yep, that’s right. Yahoo.).

Just as the reach and viewership of the big TV networks command higher prices for advertisers than those of smaller networks, Google’s overwhelming market share of online searches justifies the spends of their advertisers. In fact, advertising revenue alone earned them $79 Billion (!) in 2016.

My friends, Google is highly motivated to continue building and refining the world’s best library card catalog on Sammy Sosa-style steroids.

How marketers have tried (and failed) to outsmart Google over the years

For almost 20 years now, marketers have tried to beat Google. They’ve dug deep to learn how Google indexes content and ranks pages. And they’ve played every card to make their content more visible in search results. To their credit, the persistence demonstrated by many of these marketers has led to their share of wins over the years, even if through “black hat” practices. But most of those wins were short lived, and have eventually come back to nip them in the butts through Google-imposed penalties.

In the mid to late 2000s, marketers overstuffed their websites with keywords. The more you used your target keyword on a given page, the higher that page would rank. But keyword stuffing was just a manipulative tactic – not a signal of quality or credibility for the content on that page. So Google fixed that problem by discrediting keyword-loaded pages and penalizing the rankings of websites that continued deploying these practices.

But marketing people are resilient.

So in the late 2000s, these marketers got back on their feet, did their homework and discovered that inbound links from other websites back to their own sites were being considered by Google as votes of confidence. Naturally, “link building” was born. Marketers gamed the system by doing whatever it took to build hundreds or thousands of links from other websites to theirs. It didn’t matter if those other sites were credible sources. All that mattered was the volume of inbound links. As a result, low-quality content had the ability to rank really well with a little bit of sneaky marketing assistance.

Well, as you might guess, Google didn’t like that too much either. So the empire struck back. In February of 2011, Google rolled out it’s historic “Panda” algorithm update – designed to combat low-quality inbound links as ranking manipulators.

And so here we are in 2017 with more information online than ever before, challenging Google to weed through exorbitant amounts of garbage to give its searchers exactly what they’re looking for.

And as we know (because you and I are both Google searchers too), what we seek is high-quality, informative, helpful content that answers our questions, helps solve our problems and in the case of your industrial buyers – helps them take a step forward during the research, evaluation and purchase stages of their buying processes.

When you boil search down to its essence, what really matters is great content. And five years from now when there are 300 trillion pages on the internet instead of 30 trillion, great content will be ten times as important.

How Google chooses where to rank YOUR website

Google keeps its algorithm under tight wraps, and understandably so. If they gave away their magic ranking formula, the marketers would win – not the credible, authoritative creators of exceptional, informative content for targeted audiences. And as a result, the searchers would lose. That said, the greatest authorities on SEO (companies like Moz and Search Engine Land) have built their own businesses around understanding what makes a web page surface among all the others in the universe that may resemble it.

A recent article by Search Engine Journal examines 2017’s Four Most Important Ranking Factors, based on a study by SearchMetrics, Backlinko and SEO PowerSuite. Those four factors follow:

Content (high quality, comprehensive and audience-relevant)
Backlinks (a diverse and significant volume of inbound links from other authoritative websites to yours)
Mobile-First User Experience (fast page load speed and readability of your site’s content across mobile devices)
Other Technical Factors (see the full article if you’d like to explore further)

Under the assumption that you’re not yet an industrial SEO guru, these are four great starting places. Begin by getting inside the heads of your ideal customers. Understand the pain points and challenges of their buying committees – from their Design Engineers, Plant Managers and Procurement folks, all the way up the chain to their Presidents and CEOs.

Then build your content strategy to serve them accordingly. Write informative, comprehensive content (like this article, but for your audience) and choose smart keywords to target on those pages (but remember – don’t keyword stuff them!).

Then design a content promotion and link building strategy to get those articles published on trade journal websites in your industry, and more importantly, in the industries of your own customers. Just make sure those inbound links are coming from credible sources. Enlist a smart developer or industrial marketing agency to assure your site is mobile device-friendly and technically-sound.

Ultimately, your industrial SEO success will result from your commitment to being an exceptional resource for your audience and proactively working to expose your content to them.

And, finally, after lots of hard work, loads of patience and a bunch of mini successes and failures along the way, you’ll earn yourself the right to Google “All-inclusive Caribbean island vacations” (which, by the way, should give you about 12.7 million page results to choose from).

Using content and email to stay in front of leads

When businesses decide to enter the online marketing sphere, one of the first things they’re bound to notice is how crowded with content the web is. And while the bulk of that content is garbage, garbage is loud. Online content marketing programs help firms avoid becoming a part of the mindless static of the internet. It’s hard work.

When you’re developing a program that rises above the noise of competitors clamoring for buyers’ attention, it boils down to this: If you want to get and hold customers’ attention, you need compelling, purposeful content and effective, scaled distribution. And you must have both. One without the other won’t work.

Creating the right content

It’s not enough to start a company blog and shovel anything that comes to mind up on the site. For content to do what it’s designed to do —generate better leads and ultimately spur more business— it needs to speak to a target audience in meaningful ways. Know your customer. Know what motivates them. Know the questions they ask and supply the answers. Know their pain points and illustrate how you can alleviate them. Also understand that leads come from different niches or disciplines. If you develop content that covers all buyers’ bases, you cast the widest net possible and increase the chance to drive more business.

Tailor content to the sales cycle

The best way to hold buyers’ attention against competitors is to become more guide than salesperson. That’s where developing content to target different stages of the buyer’s journey comes in. It might look like this:

A possible lead researches a topic and comes across an informative article on your blog.
The lead is intrigued and wants to know more, so she downloads a white paper with more in-depth information.
Now she wants to see real-world examples so she can apply your product or service to her specific needs, so she reads real-world case studies.
Maybe she’s not ready to pull the trigger, but she can stay up to date with news and trends by subscribing to your newsletter.
If she’s ready to talk numbers, she requests a quote.

Not all buyers’ journeys are identical, so you’ll need to adjust what you offer to make it as useful for the folks you’re targeting as possible. But the point is to have information available for leads at all stages of the sales cycle. For example, if a potential lead comes across useful information about your product or process but can’t fully understand how she can apply it to her business, she may abandon you for someone else who can clearly illustrate what’s next.

Using email effectively

A smorgasbord of useful content that targets leads at different stages of the sales cycle is only as useful as its delivery. Data keeps showing that the return on investment for email lead nurturing is astronomical in relation to the cost to maintain it. Even the bare minimum —a monthly newsletter and nothing more— keeps the line of communication open between you and your leads as they make their way through the sales funnel.

But you can drive serious business when you drill down deeper, applying email marketing strategy to your content marketing program. For example, when a lead fills out a form and downloads a white paper from your site, you can set up a trigger to send an email to the lead with additional information about your related products or services.

Similar triggers can be applied to RFQs, supplying leads with additional educational content they can consume while they wait for a contact from your sales team. Simply put, for just about every stage in the sales cycle where there is targeted content and a call to action, there is an opportunity to send a targeted email. Setting up these programs requires some time and resources, but the opportunities that come along with them are too good to ignore.

Analysis: Is it working?

All this may sound logical in theory, but theories don’t keep businesses afloat. Results do. Web metrics provide critical information about the traffic on your site while email engagement metrics can determine whether your emails and content are effective. For example, open rate and click rate tell you whether your contacts find value in the content you send them. Armed with this information, you can then tweak your program to better serve the leads you’re trying to guide through to sale.

Stick to the program

The hardest part of having content and email marketing programs is keeping them going. The intended results won’t be instantaneous. But a cardinal rule in content marketing is that if you want it to work, you have to give it enough thought and enough time. It’s far more than just saying “Hey, we’re here!” over and over.

Outsourcing to a marketing agency may be the answer, and its benefits are clear:

Full-time marketing agency staffs aren’t juggling between marketing duties and other tasks the way in-house employees might be.
Agencies have experience with many different clients, bringing experience and insight into what works to each new customer.
These teams are well-versed in analyzing data and using it to continually improve clients’ content marketing programs.

There’s no learning curve—the expertise, experience and measurement capabilities are all built in.

Looking to learn more about content and email marketing strategies? Check out our Hardworking Inbound Marketing Guide for a comprehensive outline on driving qualified website traffic, turning that traffic into real leads and nurturing those leads into customers.

Gorilla-built websites: A guide for tech geeks

Websites are now what store showrooms were decades ago: A company’s introduction to customers, the all-important first impression that makes or breaks the rest of the relationship.

Just as cruddy showrooms lacking inventory or knowledgeable staff were bad for business, websites that are hard to navigate and don’t answer customers’ questions are a sure ticket to seeing nothing but goose eggs on the bottom line.

Web developers at Gorilla 76 understand that the pressure’s on for ITs to keep sites working cleanly with user experience in mind. When we build new sites for clients, our team combines a focus on functionality with a commitment to ease of use and security to craft digital showrooms that turn browsers into buyers.

Here’s what that process looks like:

Initial site survey

Gorilla web developers’ first step is to survey a client’s existing site to assess its preexisting functionality. We work closely with clients to identify which elements should migrate to the new site, which to eliminate and which can be improved.

Then, we discuss ideas for new apps or portals. It’s a two-way conversation where we listen to what’s worked and what hasn’t for our customer and suggest ideas we’ve seen work for other clients.

Finally, we map out elements of the new site and outline what we need to begin building.

Selecting a CMS

We always prefer WordPress. It’s perhaps the most popular open source CMS available, and it’s easy to see why:

It’s clean, easy to use, well-kept and updated often.
Its security team is among the best on the web.
It offers the flexibility to build anything we want into clients’ sites.
It’s not restricted by proprietary software.

This isn’t to say we won’t work in any other CMS. If it’s in the LAMP environment, we’ve done it before and are glad to do it again.

In addition, our developers are experienced in working with APIs for all kinds of applications, including marketing platforms and CRMs. Ultimately, the goal is streamlined lead generation. When it’s done effectively, it works in clients’ favor in two key ways: First, efficient lead generation allows salespeople to remain focused on their core role instead of worrying about busywork. Second, it drives down the cost of customer acquisition, making marketing programs even more valuable to clients.

Support tickets suck

Which is why we don’t believe in them.

We pride ourselves on being exceedingly available and responsive. If something goes wrong, let us know. We’ll handle it right away. No cues, no hoops, no red tape.

After all, if it was our own site, we’d do what needed to be done right then and there. There’s no reason to treat clients’ sites any differently.

Well-rounded development

At Gorilla 76, we think websites are too important to our clients’ businesses not to have a team of skilled web developers on-call and at the ready for any project. We think that because, as a marketing agency, we know how critical it is to create meaningful messages that help turn leads into sales.

The messages are crucial, but they’re useless without an effective messenger.

Understanding your industrial buyer’s behavior using your marketing CRM

As more industrial companies understand the opportunities of partnering marketing and sales teams together, manufacturers and subcontractors alike are becoming more sophisticated in how they communicate with prospects in the buying process. At the core of the marketing and sales partnership success is the customer relationship management (CRM) software that provides visibility on prospects, from discovering suppliers to closing deals.

A CRM can frame a lead’s needs and pain points through on-site behaviors. This enables the marketing team to understand where to focus future strategy and the sales team to cater conversations to those pain points and ultimately win more business.

Basics of Industrial Buying Behavior

To understand the behaviors of industrial buyers and how those translate into the lead data in a CRM, we should recap the key steps of the buyer’s process. The industrial buying process—while considerably longer than our consumer marketing counterparts—contains important steps that you can pinpoint to your prospect’s problems and address through content marketing solutions, e.g., educational articles or downloadable resources.

At the initial awareness step, leads are acknowledging a potential problem and researching the industry to understand their needs. In the simplest form, this may look like a “Know your Coatings: Alkyds vs Epoxies” article or a “Trends in Manufacturing Automation” blog post. When a prospect recognizes their problem and begins to identify their needs or potential solutions, they transition to the consideration or evaluation stage. These types of leads begin looking at your website for what you offer, focusing on capabilities pages, related certifications and product specifications. Both of these stages often go unnoticed by unsuspecting and ill-equipped competitors.

However, at each stage touch points can be initiated that aid in transitioning leads to the final decision stage. Most commonly seen by sales teams, this step in the buying process focuses on the quoting, negotiation and decision-making process. Often, the specifications are already defined by their internal team, limiting the sales team’s ability to consult and provide the optimal solution for a prospect. Starting a conversation with a lead earlier in the buying process can help the sales team better understand needs and develop those ideal solutions that win more deals.

Buying Behaviors in a CRM

With the buying process steps in mind, we can distinguish leads’ behaviors on your website according to the articles and resources that prospects view. When you offer resources at different stages of the buying process, gated by forms to identify these leads, a CRM can collect exact page visits in addition to what specific resource was downloaded. These provide invaluable insights into what needs that individual prospect has.

At Gorilla 76, we’re supporters of HubSpot’s CRM and sales tools for their granular view of individual contact’s engagement with our site. However, various CRM or marketing automation tools can offer similar amounts of transparency about your website and its visitors.

In the screenshot below, you can see a summary of one user’s page views available in HubSpot’s CRM. This summary thoroughly outlines the course of defining their need—in this case, for a new website—and evaluating us as a solution provider. At the initial research stage, this lead is understanding their need by visiting a page about website planning. Later page views for case studies and pricing indicate a transition to evaluating us as a solution provider for that need. This level of transparency enables us to cater sales outreach to the individual’s paint point—her website—and the level of sales readiness indicated by the pricing page visit.

Screenshot via HubSpot.com: Contact page-visit summary.

For a manufacturer, this behavior may resemble page views for that “Trends in Manufacturing Automation” article we mentioned earlier or a conversion calculator initially. Then, evaluation stage behavior may transition to ISO certifications, a product catalog, or even the Request for Quote page. The trends article and calculator serve to grow awareness for prospects of their problem, potential solutions, and solution providers. In contrast, certifications and product catalogs serve to address the prospect’s consideration stage where they are evaluating those potential solutions and suppliers.

Strategy Aimed at the Buying Process

For a marketer, if these types of content do not currently exist on your site, the three stages of buying behavior provide a great backbone for developing a content marketing strategy. Outlining common pain points at each stage in the buying process and writing content to address them is an optimal starting point. In conjunction with blogs or freely available resources on your site, you’ll want to include lead generating resources as well. Product guides or thorough educational white papers are great opportunities to trade contact information for your expert knowledge.

Once this lead generating infrastructure is in place on your site, you’ve earned some new leads and you’ve reviewed their behaviors on your site, you’ll want to establish ongoing touch points with them to further educate and nurture them until they’re sales-ready. While this can be accomplished with a monthly newsletter to everyone, your newfound insight about leads and their pain points warrants some personalized attention. Email personalization is reported to increase click through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%, so using the lead data readily available to you is simply monetizing what you already have.

To get started, the marketing and sales teams should identify which leads are qualified enough for one-on-one sales conversations and which leads would benefit from segmented emails. The segmented emails enable the marketing team to speak more specifically to different audiences and provide relevant information, but on a more sizable scale. One-on-one conversations are intended for the sales-qualified leads that the marketing team identifies for their sales team. These recommendations are based on site conversions that suggest sales readiness or qualifying factors that demonstrate a high-value lead.

Screenshot via HubSpot.com sales tool: Automated email series configuration page.

In either case, CRM tools often include email templates and email automation features to organize these conversations more efficiently. Templates can be customized for one-off emails from sales team members or can be bundled into a series of ongoing resources from the marketing team. With this flexibility and the support of an existing marketing strategy, both internal teams can glean understanding about site visitors, sales qualified leads and ultimately customers.

Often, the customer’s journey from awareness to evaluation to closing as a customer is jumbled across disjointed teams and disjointed software tools. With the amount of data available to industrial organizations today, this confusion can be cleaned up with an organized process and structure supported by a universal contact management tool. Taking the 10,000-foot view of the customer’s journey allows marketing and sales professionals alike to identify where disconnects exist and develop a streamlined partnership for earning more and better leads.

Looking for the next step to developing your marketing strategy? Check out our Industrial Marketing Guide for a comprehensive outline of marketing strategy for companies in the industrial sector.

10 tips on how to write for the industrial sector

Writing for the industrial sector is unique given the technical features of the content. Add in the B2B aspect and suddenly you’ve got detailed, complicated material for a very specific audience. Anyone can put together words on a page, but it actually takes a lot of skill to effectively write for industrial clients. Here are some of the best writing tips we’ve learned over the past few years.

Ask questions and then ask more

When talking with subject matter experts at your company or your client’s company in order to gain valuable information, it’s important to have a list of questions going into the interview – that’s journalism 101 – but there should always be more questions that arise during the interview. The more information you can glean from the expert, the more your fact-based writing will be understandable to the reader.

Become an expert

Your writing is better when you know the subject material. Clearly articulate the nuances of the subject matter by collecting an abundance of information. Study the information until you have a thorough knowledge of the subject.

Know your audience

Every piece you write should have target personas identified. Work with your client to develop a list of personas and before you start writing copy, identify which persona(s) to aim for. Targeting specific personas will enable you to craft the message for best results.

Find a balance

Keeping the target personas in mind, the audience you’re writing for will vary widely in terms of pre-existing knowledge of the subject material. Find a balance in your writing between technical and educational. If your target audience is engineers, a more technical driven piece is appropriate, but if you’re writing for a purchasing manager, a focus on the benefits instead of the technical specifications may be the right approach. Depending on your target persona, you don’t want the information to be too rudimentary, but you also don’t want it to require a doctorate to read.

Don’t use jargon for jargon sake

Building off the last tip, jargon is a fine line to walk. Jargon should be used in places in which it will enhance the writing, and when it’s essential to the information. Too much jargon will alienate the reader and make them feel like an outsider in a room of experts talking amongst themselves.

Be curious

So much of the subject matter you come across will be foreign. Be curious. It’s much easier to write about a topic of interest. Curiosity will help increase your own interest in the topic and more often than not, the writer’s interest – no matter what level it may be. And your genuine enthusiasm will be apparent in the writing.

Research, research, research

This is two-fold – research the subject material to become the expert, and research the competition to see what has already been written on the subject. Knowing what others have written will give you a sense of what you could do differently to rank better for search.

Keep your goals front and center

Before you start writing, know the purpose of the content. Is it to target specific keywords? How about drive conversions? Know the specific content marketing goals beforehand and keep them front and center throughout the writing process. It’s easier to write with goals in mind rather than backtrack to attempt to fit already written copy into the goals.

Have an SME (subject matter expert) approve what you write

While you have done the research, asked many questions and become an expert on the material, using an extra set of eyes from an expert in the field will catch any factual errors that may be present.

Have fun

Often B2B writing can be viewed as boring and uncreative. That doesn’t have to be the case though. As long as you are true to the material and the project’s goals, have fun with it. Be the creative writer you were hired to be, because if you’re not – the material will be just like many of the examples you read in your research: flat, uncreative and boring.

A great example showing these tips being utilized is the content marketing strategy behind The Korte Company. Over time, The Korte Company’s online presence has grown into the company’s “voice.” Their unique voice conveys a sense of confidence and relatability in the construction world thanks to each of these tips being implemented to their fullest in the writing.

While many of these tips will improve your writing overall, they’re particularly helpful in B2B industrial marketing. From expertise and curiosity to balance and fun, make your writing stand the test of time in a field that is constantly changing.

Ready to learn more? Download our lead generation guide.

Case study: generating 92 qualified leads in 10 months for a material science start-up

Green Dot Bioplastics is a bioplastic material science company committed to improving our environment through material advances. They’re a full-service bioplastic company and are dedicated to delivering the best sustainable materials for their customers.

The problem: Despite seeing a significant increase in leads generated from the website, Green Dot didn’t have a system for verifying lead quality.

The solution: We created a monthly ROI reporting system that set up a feedback loop among Green Dot’s sales team, the marketing team and Gorilla 76.

The results: We verified that 92 qualified leads in the past 10 months have come through the website as a result of continued inbound marketing efforts.

“As a startup company, tracing ROI back to our marketing spend is incredibly important. Gorilla 76 has helped us measure the success of our marketing efforts over years of working with them. Their team cares about showing real ROI, and we’ve worked with them to create an effective closed-loop system between our marketing and sales teams.”

– Kevin Ireland, Communications Manager, Green Dot Bioplastics

The problem

After a year of continued content marketing, website improvements, link building and conversion optimization, we managed to double the total amount of contacts coming into Green Dot’s website.

While quantity of online contacts is a useful metric for assessing inbound marketing efforts, we didn’t have a pulse on how qualified these contacts actually were. Over the course of a few months, we dedicated our time toward setting up an effective reporting system to find out.

The solution

Developing an ROI reporting system (sometimes referred to as “closing the loop”) involves creating a feedback loop between sales and marketing teams. In this case, that meant working with Green Dot’s teams to devise our system.

We started by asking the following questions:

What makes a lead qualified?
How do we define different levels of lead quality?
What disqualifies a lead?
What information do we need to gather about our leads to qualify them?

We realized our online forms needed to be reworked to ask more specific questions. We also realized we needed to eliminate unnecessary information fields that might deter contacts from filling out forms. Asking for key bits of information like “size of company” and “job title” helped us qualify leads, as well as eliminate bad leads from our database. By revising forms to ask more questions, we temporarily took a slight hit in overall quantity of leads but gained valuable information about incoming leads that helped the sales team close.

We also set up a system where Green Dot’s sales and marketing teams meet every month to go through the leads generated online and rate them. The marketing team then sends us each month’s leads to be marked accordingly in HubSpot, our lead database. Using HubSpot, we were able to track which online marketing channels brought in the best leads. This two-way system ensures Green Dot puts its marketing budget toward channels that actually drive qualified leads.

The results

By prioritizing lead quality over lead quantity, we were able to drive 92 qualified leads in just 10 months through the website. The sales team now gets valuable data about contacts being generated, and they can quickly determine whether or not it’s worth spending their time pursuing each lead. We can now figure out what marketing channels and content are driving leads, allowing us to develop more effective marketing plans.

If you work for a B2B industrial company, and you’re not sure where to allocate your marketing budget, we can help. Request a consultation today to receive a free assessment of your current marketing efforts.

Will content marketing really speak to technical buyers?

A persistent claim in the B2B universe is that content marketing programs are not effective for manufacturers. The old wisdom says highly technical buyers are immune to content marketing messages.

But data from Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 Manufacturing Content Marketing survey show that the benefits of content marketing are becoming clearer to manufacturers, and that must mean that these technical buyers are buying in.

Gaining ground

A big reason why the myth that content marketing doesn’t work for manufacturers has persisted is because fewer manufacturers have these programs compared to other B2B firms.

That’s still true, but this year’s survey showed manufacturers are gaining ground: 31 percent of manufacturers reported having documented content marketing strategies compared to just 18 percent a year ago.

What’s more, the data point to manufacturers beginning to understand content marketing in much the same way as other B2B firms have:

64 percent of manufacturers always or frequently consider how content marketing impacts someone’s overall experience with their organization compared to 71 percent of other B2B firms.
64 percent of manufacturers always or frequently prioritize quality of content over quantity compared to 76 percent of other B2B firms.
49 percent of manufacturers stated their marketing leadership team gives marketers enough time to produce content marketing results compared to 52 percent of other B2B firms.

Key takeaway: Recognizing how content marketing plays in to overall brand experience, focusing on quality over quantity and understanding that results take time are critical pieces of good content marketing programs. These data show manufacturers understand that.

Content marketing maturity

It’s fair to say manufacturers are comparatively new to content marketing compared to other firms—only 19 percent of surveyed firms claimed to have mature or sophisticated content marketing programs.

But consider where the rest of the surveyed firms fall:

37 percent say their content marketing programs are in “adolescent” stages, having developed a business case, seen some success and gotten better at measuring and scaling their programs.
28 percent claimed to be in “young” stages where growing pains are evident as they try to develop cohesive strategies and measurement plans.

Plus, the commitment among manufacturers to develop and/or maintain their content marketing programs is strong:

49 percent claimed to be extremely or very committed to content marketing.
59 percent said their organizations have been much more or somewhat more successful thanks to their content marketing programs.

Consider this other important point: 19 percent of manufacturers reported their overall content marketing approach has been very successful while 49 percent considered their approach moderately so.

Key takeaways: Knowing that content marketing takes time to produce results, and knowing that manufacturers are committed to these programs, expect to see many of the firms in “adolescent” and “young” stages move up into “sophisticated” and “mature” territory soon. By that same logic, the 49 percent of surveyed firms who reported moderate success with content marketing need only stay focused on developing their programs. Persistence pays off.

What drives success?

Many factors combine to make a successful content marketing program, but some appear to be more important than others:

82 percent of manufacturers surveyed said that creating quality content factored into their success.
69 percent reported a clear content marketing strategy drove success.
62 percent claimed an increased priority on content marketing was critical.
57 percent said spending more time on content marketing was key to their success.

Notice that the bottom three points in the above list are important steps en route to the top point, creating quality content. Keep that in mind when you consider this:

67 percent of manufacturers claimed not spending enough time on content marketing factored into the stagnancy of their programs.
62 percent reported content creation challenges drove stagnancy.
51 percent reported that shortfalls in their content marketing strategies caused stagnancy.
42 percent said that stagnancy occurred when content marketing was not prioritized highly enough.

Key takeaway: The relationship between what drives successful content marketing programs and what causes them to stagnate is real and compelling.

Uncertain but optimistic

While the survey says more manufacturers believe in content marketing enough to try it, this measure of uncertainty stood out:

A third of surveyed firms said their organizations are clear about what a good content marketing program looks like.
A third said their organizations weren’t clear on this point.
A third weren’t sure either way.

That means there’s still work to do, but it looks like manufacturers are up to the challenge: 97 percent of them said they planned to create at least the same amount of content this year as last year; 68 percent said they’d develop more.

Key takeaway: Manufacturers may remain somewhat uncertain about content marketing, but the survey indicates many of them see value in it. Will these programs speak to their buyers?

The data show they probably already do.

If you’re thinking about starting or overhauling your online marketing program, we’re ready to help you get started. Take the first step by reading our handbook on B2B website planning.

B2B industrial marketing – the past, the present and the future

As inbound marketers, our day-to-day decisions are often influenced by what has happened in the past. What blog post performed best last quarter? What call-to-action drove the most conversions? What nurturing email had the highest open and click-through rates? It’s in our nature to study the past in order to adjust and improve for the future.

In this in-depth Q&A, we’re going to sit down with long-time client of Gorilla 76 – Todd Imming, CMO of The Korte Company – to talk the past, present and future of industrial marketing.

Can you give us some backstory? How’d you get where you are today?

Well, it’s certainly not a traditional route. Originally, I wanted to be an oceanographer. So when college rolled around, I headed south and earned a degree in Oceanographic Technology. However, the job market for ocean studies looked bleak, and I was looking at working either at a dive shop or on an oil rig. Neither appealed to me at the time, so went on to study finance and business in the Midwest. Two years later, I received an MBA at Washington University in St. Louis.

During my second year in the MBA program, I took an internship in Hartlepool, England where I worked for a construction supplies company. It was here where I experienced my first photo shoot. I was hooked. When I got back to the states, I knocked on the door at the Puckett Group, a St. Louis advertising agency, where I got another internship. Eventually, that internship turned into a job and I was officially named an “account guy.”

After my time with the Puckett Group, I came back home to Highland and worked on the client side for Artex International as the Marketing Director. I was there for several years and that’s where I started to first see the early signs of modern marketing. Web was really starting to gain the attention of marketers and it was exciting. Everything we were doing was being done for the first time. We learned everything on the fly.

I started here at The Korte Company in 2003. There was something about construction that really excited me. Our company has a remarkable heritage, something we’re very proud of, and I saw an opportunity to be part of something great.

Describe your day-to-day role at The Korte Company…

I know everyone says it, but really – it changes every day. Right now, I’m working on some revisions for a new collateral piece. Earlier, I was working on figuring out the best way to get a few folks up and running on InDesign. I can’t forget the big picture stuff, as I have to give that attention as well. There’s a new job that I need to update on our website, a press release that needs to be written and emailed out, meeting notes that need to be reviewed, an email campaign that needs to be approved – honestly, the list is long. My job ranges from the big conceptual stuff to the minutiae.

How big is your marketing department?

We’re a marketing department of two. We choose to work with specialists on an as-needed basis, as opposed to trying to continuously adjust full-time staff.

For me, recent marketing efforts require trust. Period. There’s no way a marketing group of two can handle day-to-day and big-picture stuff and keep up with digital evolution. It’s simply not possible. That’s why I’ve chosen to work closely with an industrial marketing agency.

Will you continue to invest money in digital?

Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt, we’ll continue to invest in the digital arena, as that’s where people are. That’s where people are going to be reached. I’m not sure where the future of TV is with regard to the B2B space. When I see the spots, I have to wonder who are they trying to reach. Traditional marketing just doesn’t seem to be nearly as relevant as it once was.

What percentage of your budget do you spend in digital versus traditional?

We’re 80% digital, 20% traditional. Ten years ago, it was just the opposite. And the print work we’re doing now, really, there should be an asterisk by it. Typically it’s being done to support an organization or publication that we care about. Our digital work is where we truly fish for new business.

How does inbound marketing play into your strategy?

It’s my belief that inbound marketing is the first step to everything. It’s the first step to engagement which is the first step to landing new work. It’s the initial step that we take and the most important step in engaging potential clients.

Do you find inbound methods to be more useful than traditional methods?

Yes. Absolutely. Traditional marketing is dead for us. Direct mail and trade publications are irrelevant for businesses like ours. Inbound marketing is the only thing that keeps us ahead of the curve from a marketing perspective. It’s the only way a mid-sized company has the ability to reach a national audience efficiently.

Have you seen good results from your online efforts?

Yes. Incredible results. Since we’ve started tracking results more carefully (July 2013), everything has been trending up. We’ve seen organic search traffic grow from around 3,000 visits per month to closer to 8,000. Conversions (contacts) from that traffic have gone from around 20 per month to roughly 150 per month. Last month (February 2017), we saw 173 site conversions. And we’ve closed the loop and landed work thanks to nurturing efforts. Gorilla actually wrote about one example in a case study.

The growth of our brand has been exponential. Our sales cycle is long, so it’s always tough to drive it directly back to sales, but nurturing is extremely strong. We have a mechanism in the works that is doing what it was designed to do – attract visitors, convert visitors into leads, nurture leads until they become customers. It’s a machine.

How do you sell new-school technology in an old-school industry?

With any new technology, there’s going to be a learning curve and an acceptance curve. It’s a process that takes time and patience. Those that buy in, that innovate, that believe – those are the ones that will have success. Those that don’t are going to be relying on old-school methods that aren’t as effective as they once were. As a marketing guy, it’s my job to take the company to new places.

Should industrial companies place their bets on the web? Do you see traditional methods coming back?

Take a look at the demographics. The people who grew up on the internet, are now making construction decisions and running businesses. I think it’s safe to say that betting on the web isn’t much of a bet at all. It’s a guarantee.

What methodologies have you shelved for now? Do you see them coming out of the toolbox anytime soon?

We’ve significantly dialed back our print spend. We’re not doing much direct mail. We are becoming more active in industry tradeshows, but there’s always a digital component.

How can we engage the attendees of a trade show before the event even starts with email? Are there social media opportunities? Can we follow up post show? Can we drive new contacts to our blog so that they can see we’re thought leaders and are working hard to educate?

Is there anything you see on the frontier that could be a smart play for Korte?

Better use of video as a communication tool. That’s something that really interests me. It’s getting easier and easier to generate video content. Don’t get me wrong – you still have to be able to tell a compelling story. But the mechanics of it all are more accessible.

Other than that, the only prediction I have is that things are going to continue to be unpredictable. We must stay ahead of the curve – and that curve lives on the web. We always are inspired by what the cool kids are doing. Not the B2B folks. We’ve already seen that. The cool kids are constantly evolving how they generate and receive information.

We must continue to evolve. Small steps make for big strides when added up. We need to keep an ear to the ground. What’s our target market doing? What cities are hot? Where is there opportunity for growth on a national level? What are our clients thinking? We want to be where they are.

Where do you find new ideas?

Truthfully, I watch what my kids are doing. One is a junior in college, one is a senior in high school and I have a 7th grader. They’re connected constantly – and that’s an understatement. They live and breathe the Internet. I watch what they’re doing. What inspires them inspires me.

Learn more about The Korte Company

To learn more about The Korte Company and to watch as Todd brings his ideas to life, visit korteco.com.

Case study: quintupling web traffic in three years for a coatings manufacturer

US Coatings is a leading provider of high-performance industrial coatings and linings. They tailor their products and services to fit the needs of their clients.

The problem: a small industrial coatings manufacturer competing against huge companies in a saturated market.

The solution: writing high-quality content that addresses target audience pain points in order to drive organic traffic in Google and gain awareness.

The result: US Coatings’ monthly traffic grew by 450%, organic traffic by 780% and website contacts by 550% in three years of working with Gorilla 76.

“Gorilla has helped us build a comprehensive online marketing strategy that’s putting real leads on the table for us every month. Their work has become an important piece of our business development strategy.”

– Mike Reed, President, US Coatings

The problem

Competing in a saturated market against big names, US Coatings President Mike Reed knew he needed to outmaneuver the competition. For a smaller company, brand awareness was a big issue. Larger companies like Sherwin-Williams and Carboline maintain a high share of the coatings market, staying top-of-mind for many of US Coatings’ target audience. Mike identified online marketing as an opportunity to develop the business.

The solution

After consulting with US Coatings, we realized creating content that addresses specific customer pain points could drive traffic from organic search. We decided to dig deeper by performing thorough keyword research into what keywords could potentially drive traffic for US Coatings via organic search. Rather than paying for Google AdWords, we wanted US Coatings to own real estate in search engines that would continue to drive compounding traffic.

We identified keyword opportunities that we could write about in order to rank over time. Rather than go after high-difficulty, high-volume keywords, we realized the big opportunity for US Coatings was identifying keywords with low-difficulty and low-medium search volume. These “low-hanging fruit” keywords were topics that were ignored by the bigger brands but happened to be extremely profitable for US Coatings. The keywords were targeted toward US Coatings’ specific buyers, rather than broad terms that anyone might search.

As an industrial coating manufacturer, US Coatings isn’t interested in a homeowner looking to paint his or her garage. Google can bring in a wide variety of traffic, so the trick was to identify opportunity keywords that addressed a specific pain point US Coatings’ customers were having. For example, the EPA released new restrictions for industrial paints and US Coatings was able to create content about different types of products that met them. This drove highly relevant traffic that converted into real leads for US Coatings to pursue.

The results

US Coatings’ monthly traffic grew more than 450% from July 2014 to July 2017. As denoted by the green bar, organic search increased by more than 780%. By consistently producing high-quality content that answered specific pain points, Google started ranking our content higher in search results for various terms.

Of course, website visitors that don’t turn into contacts won’t grow your business. Here’s how traffic impacted US Coatings’ online lead generation:

As traffic grew, online contacts generated grew 550% from July 2014 to July 2017.

Identifying your buyers’ pain points, as well as the opportunity keywords those buyers are searching for, can result in strong online lead generation. In the right niche — and industrial markets tend to be great niches for this strategy — writing great content in tandem with smart keyword research is a strategy designed for online marketing success. If you’re a B2B industrial company, you can learn if this strategy will work for your business (and if it’s the right strategy for your business) by requesting a consultation today.

Why a private equity firm – marketing agency partnership makes sense for everyone

A few months ago, a light bulb went on in my head when my business partner and I sat down over lunch with a Managing Partner of a St. Louis private equity firm.

He had discovered our industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76, in a local business publication and recognized right away that the clientele of our two companies (middle market, high-growth-potential manufacturing businesses) were in near-perfect alignment.

And just as well aligned was the value our respective firms work hard deliver to our clients – sustainable business growth. We just happen to deliver that value from different places.

The value a smart private equity firm brings to the table

Generally speaking, private equity firms help the companies in which they invest with some combination of the following:

Big picture strategic planning
Identification and pursuit of new markets
Capital access in the form of equity and/or debt
Development of the management team
Recruitment of key employees
Provision of leadership through a seat on the Board
Operational support
Identification of M&A opportunities

But one glaring hole that tends to exist within the walls of these firms – a modernized marketing and lead generation strategy that will organically create business development opportunities for their investments. And this is exactly where a marketing agency partnership begins to make sense.

The value a smart marketing agency brings to the table

Marketing for business-to-business companies today is drastically different than it was ten years ago. Whereas B2B marketing was once an unmeasurable jungle of expensive print ads and fancy direct mailers, today we operate in a world of tight budgets that require data-driven, smart marketing decisions to be made with every step.

Simultaneously, buying power has begun shifting to younger demographics who are gathering more and more of their information online during the buying process. And more and more of that information is becoming readily available to those buyers every day.

In recent years, these trends have resulted in a major shift among B2B marketers away from traditional marketing tactics and toward the likes of:

SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing
Online lead generation
Email marketing, marketing automation and lead nurturing

Here are a few supporting data points:

71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search (Google)
66% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority (Hubspot)
53% of marketers say half or more of their budget is allocated to lead generation (BrightTALK)
39% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2017 (Content Marketing Institute)

How to get started with a marketing agency partnership

If you believe some synergies might indeed exist between your private equity firm and a results-driven marketing agency, here’s how you can put that kind of partnership in motion:

1. Identify a marketing agency whose audience aligns with yours

Just as the previously-mentioned private equity firm’s mid-sized manufacturer client base directly aligned with that of our marketing agency, you need to find your equivalent. Not every agency will be the right fit for you and your investments.

If your firm specializes in growing healthcare companies, Google search “healthcare marketing agencies.” If you specialize in growing OEMs and industrial service providers, Google search “industrial marking agencies.” You get the idea.

2. Make the agency prove why they’re the right fit

Confirm that your goals align. Confirm that the agency’s approach is focused on bottom-line growth for their clients, just as yours is. Ask them to walk you through their pricing structure, as well as their processes for generating website traffic, leads and sales for their clients. Ask them to share case studies with tangible results as proof of sales-qualified lead generation and resulting revenue growth for their clients. Make sure their personalities mesh with yours and most importantly, those of your clients.

3. Give the agency a trial run, but hold them accountable

Once you feel confident, make the introduction to one client who you believe will benefit most from their services. Hold your agency accountable for results, just as your client holds you accountable. Everything is measurable today, so assure they’ve clearly stated what key performance indicators (KPIs) they’ll use to measure success. Ask for monthly reports accompanied by brief analyses of the results. And meet quarterly with your agency to work through more detailed reports and to assure they’re tracking toward those KPIs.

If the results are there, you may have identified a partner who brings a brand new value proposition to your current and future investments.

Need a hand finding the right marketing agency?

Our industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76, serves a very specific audience – mid-sized manufacturing and industrial sector companies. So we may or may not be the right fit for your client base. If not, we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction so you can find the right agency partner. If you’d like schedule a short consultation, click here or fire me an email at joe@gorilla76.com. And in the meantime, consider taking a look at a few case studies that demonstrate how we’ve driven tangible lead generation results for our manufacturing and industrial sector clients.

Why journalists make terrific content marketers

When firms want to enhance their business and take advantage of prospective clients’ hunger for information, they often turn to content marketers to create engaging content that develops leads and advances them through the all-important funnel.

But they rarely look beyond the content. After all, it’s the content that develops leads, not the creator. Anyone can write, right?

Sure. But there’s a difference between copy and copy with depth, clarity and context. And odds are, you want the latter over the former.

Better find a journalist.

We’re curious

We always want to know how something works. We always ask why. We always question our world. We feel naked when we’re not chasing down the scoop.

That obviously bodes well for citizens who depend on curious reporters, but it’s also effective for businesses who want an edge in educating customers about why what they offer makes sense. You’re telling me this product, process or brand addresses customers’ needs? Prove it. Tell me more.

We know a lot…

Whether via formal education, life experience, years on the job or a combination of the three, journalists know a little bit about a lot of things.

You could argue that reporters earn paychecks by learning. “You learn something new every day” is inaccurate because it’s never just one thing.

…but we don’t know it all

Good reporters find out quickly that the more they know, the more they don’t know.

We freely and constantly admit it. But far from turning us off, admitting what we don’t know is like pouring gas on a fire. If we don’t know, odds are good the public doesn’t, either. It’s on us to tell them.

Good research drives good marketing content. Reporters are right for the job because our success depends locating the information we need to tell well-rounded stories.

There will always be a learning curve, especially with complex topics in niche industries. But that curve will always be shorter when a reporter is on the job.

We’re good translators

Reporters are experts at translating niche jargon into layman’s terms. That’s partly an innate skill and partly because our duty to the public demands it. Asking sources to put on the brakes and explain something like we were born yesterday is second nature.

Experts wary of getting too deep in the weeds of their brands or products can take comfort in working with journalists to develop content. Tell us what you know. Tell us why it matters. We’ll work through the weedy parts together. Complexity doesn’t alarm us.

We’re obsessed with facts

Gumshoe reporters take facts seriously. You don’t know real despair until you’ve put your name on something that turns out to be wrong. That’s why we work so hard to get the story right.

For example, journalists and metallurgical engineers likely don’t have much in common, but they share a devotion to precision. A few degrees Fahrenheit separates metallurgy from playing with fire; an exact dollar amount on a city budget line item separates public interest reporting from town gossip.

Did you get the dog’s name? Was the corpse wearing shoes? If your mother says she loves you, get a second source. Trust us. We’ll get it right.

We’re skeptical

We don’t believe you. It’s nothing personal. In fact, it’s a good thing. Journalists are trained not to take anyone at their word. If there’s a way to independently verify information, we do it.

This skepticism in the service of the public can be channeled into serving businesses and brands in a number of ways. For one thing, skepticism ensures that the information we relay comes from reputable sources. For another, skeptical reporters are well-versed in playing devil’s advocate, trying to poke holes in sources’ statements to see what holds up to scrutiny.

Reporters-turned-marketers aren’t out to trash your brand or business, but you’d be surprised at the depth that can emerge when a reporter starts pushing. There’s always more to the story.

It’s not about us

No one showers reporters in praise or riches. We get as many angry phone calls from sourpusses and know-it-alls as we get bylines. We don’t do it for fame and very few of us make any real money.

Someone would have to be either insane or insanely dedicated to keep reporting, dim prospects of living the good life be damned. That dedication never leaves us even if we leave the newsroom.

Whether we’re reporting the news, creating marketing content or sending a text to Mom, you can bet it will be well-written, well-researched, clear, concise and truthful. That’s just how we are. There’s a code we learned that we’ll never forget no matter what we write, or for whom.

Case study: increasing monthly contact generation 650% in two years for a national construction company

The Korte Company is one of the largest design-builders in the U.S. In fact, they helped invent the design-build methodology. The Korte Company is well versed in a variety of markets — ranging from Department of Defense work to healthcare and education.

The problem: Despite strong monthly traffic numbers, The Korte Company’s site wasn’t optimized to convert visitors into leads.

The solution: analyze existing traffic and optimize high-traffic pages by changing layout and creating relevant downloadable content to convert more visitors into leads.

The result: a 650% increase in monthly website contact generation over two years.

“We’ve seen steady growth in traffic and leads since launching the new site back in 2015. By refining our digital marketing strategy to focus on the biggest conversion opportunities, we’ve seen more engaged visitors that convert into tangible leads for the business development team to pursue. Obviously, Gorilla has played a key role in that process.”

-Todd Imming, CMO, The Korte Company

The problem

As a well-established company in the construction industry with a reputation for phenomenal work, The Korte Company never had a problem generating traffic to their website. The combination of a strong brand and a CMO who understood the value of content marketing resulted in a steady flow of traffic coming into the company site back in early 2015.

Despite having a large amount of consistent traffic coming into the site each month, visitors weren’t converting into leads. While the website was performing well from a branding perspective, it functioned more as a digital sales brochure than a lead generation tool.

It featured imagery of their best projects, a blog with educational content, company news, market pages and even had a few downloadable white papers to convert top-of-funnel traffic into leads. The Korte Company website had all the bases covered regarding the critical components of a B2B website as a sales tool. However, just as important as it is to have educational content and top-of-funnel downloadable guides to convert visitors, those guides need to be strategically placed in meaningful ways that prompt a download.

The solution

The Korte Company’s site needed to use the content they produced more effectively. Gorilla 76 was tasked with restructuring the site in a way that would result in more visitors converting into leads. The need to rework conversion paths resulted in a full-blown site redesign over the course of several months, as well as continued development of premium content pieces to fill the site’s highest-traffic pages.

For instance, the homepage is almost always the highest traffic page on a site, making it the online storefront of your business. We cleaned up the navigation, laying out The Korte Company’s services and the markets they serve to help the right visitors at the right stage of their buying process find valuable lead generating content more easily. We added relevant markets and services that helped visitors find exactly what they were looking for.

Once we determined the key paths a visitor could take on the website, we identified high traffic pages that deserved unique, premium content in the form of white papers, case studies and guides.

These service- and industry-specific downloadables serve a specific purpose: Get educational and qualifying content in front of visitors that prompt an exchange of contact information for useful resources. The Korte Company’s marketing team can then pass that information on to the business development team to help start sales conversations and close deals.

After the initial website rebuild was complete, we continued the strategy of identifying high-traffic pages and augmenting those pages with high-quality content focused on educating visitors, qualifying The Korte Company as an industry expert and converting visitors into leads.

For example, we identified “warehouse construction” and “distribution center construction” as search terms that were driving traffic to a few specific pages on The Korte Company’s site. These are highly profitable keywords, and the associated pages that rank drive around 1,100 visitors a month through organic search. Once we realized qualified visitors were finding our site for these types of terms, we created The Complete Guide to Warehouse Construction, a premium guide that teaches facility managers and owners the ins and outs of warehouse construction. The guide has generated 189 new leads to date by asking visitors for their contact information in exchange for the downloadable PDF. These are leads earlier on in their buying process, giving The Korte Company’s business development team the opportunity to nurture them into paying customers.

Content development for opportunity markets is also a staple of The Korte Company’s marketing strategy. For example, “hangar construction” was identified as a growth opportunity by the sales team, so we developed blog content that addressed common design and cost challenges associated with building hangars. The end result? Ranking for hangar construction terms and generating a customer who has signed off on a pre-construction deal that could lead to an $8 million job.

The results

By focusing on high-traffic pages that could be turned into lead generating machines, improving the overall user experience and expanding search market presence, we were able to increase monthly contact generation on the website by 650% in two years, going from an average of 27 contacts a month to 202 contacts a month.

Each quarter we assessed the biggest opportunities to pursue based on The Korte Company’s existing website data, making adjustments to key pages and creating new content to generate more qualified leads.

All successful online marketing campaigns start with an audit of your existing online presence to determine where the opportunity lies. If you’re ready for an assessment of where the online opportunity is for your industrial business, request a consultation today to get the conversation started.

Big takeaways from the 2016 IEEE industrial buy cycle study

In 2016, IEEE Engineering360 conducted a survey of engineers, engineering management, project managers, research and development technical support and quality control professionals. The survey analyzed the industrial buying process, from the buying cycle and the engineers’ increasing role to meeting supplier expectations and reaching potential customers.

With hundreds of responses from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, the survey shows how dispersed the purchasing responsibilities have become over the last few years in organizations of varying size from around the world. Here are the five big takeaways from the 2016 IEEE industrial buy cycle study.

Big takeaway #1: Engineers are also buyers

As the development cycle shortens, the engineer continues to take on more responsibility. Engineers are now part of the buying process – researching, analyzing and determining what components are needed during the development process.

The buying process is a team effort. It is highly collaborative amongst a group of colleagues who share responsibility during research and evaluation of brands and suppliers. The traditional buying process has changed and the engineers are involved from beginning to end, often making the actual purchase.

In North America, engineers are spending an average of $121,200. Additionally, the average purchase requiring a sign-off from a higher authority doesn’t kick in until $4,700.

This means engineers have more authority in the buying cycle, creating new, streamlined marketing avenues. Creating content aimed at engineers is more important now since engineers are gaining more and more influence in the buying process.

Big takeaway #2: There is a definitive buying cycle

Engineers typically go through a buying cycle consisting of three major steps.

Research and needs analysis – Identification of specific needs, investigation of possible solutions, scanning for new developments and canvassing peer networks to discover what’s available
Comparison and evaluation – Determination of the most suitable options through side-by-side comparisons, review of educational materials, hands on testing and collaborating with a supplier’s technical representation
Actual purchase of the component, software or service – Obtaining the appropriate signatures, negotiate supplier terms and conditions, establish distribution channels

This buying cycle commonly lasts 12 weeks from beginning to end and is on a never-ending cycle, renewing itself on average 4 times per year.

Big takeaway #3: The rule of three

Engineering teams are remarkably consistent in evaluating, reviewing and requesting quotes from three suppliers. This practice is known as the “rule of three.” Gathering, evaluating and reviewing information from three competing solutions is the norm, with 50 percent of the engineering teams surveyed following the rule of three. One, two, four and more than five suppliers evaluated make up portions of the other 50 percent.

The “rule of three” is consistent across product categories, regardless of the company size.

Big takeaway #4: Supplier expectations

The majority of engineering teams stated they want to work with suppliers that prominently follow through on certain characteristics and traits. The top five characteristics were:

Technical support
Delivery
Availability/turnaround time
Compatibility with existing products or systems
After sale customer service

While there are many more characteristics that are important to engineering teams from around the world, these were the top five commonly expressed. What do you notice that’s missing from the list? How about lowest price? Or previously purchased from company? While those two characteristics are important and they show up further down the expansive list of characteristics, they aren’t in the top five. A supplier can’t rest on their laurels – low price and loyalty are not enough to keep business. While both are still important factors and are closely evaluated, the engineering teams’ focus appears to be fixated on the product meeting its requisite functionality and ease of obtainment.

Big Takeaway #5: Best practices to reach the buying engineer

Engineers study troves of information from proven sources in order to find solutions. When evaluating information, engineers stick with bread-and-butter sources. The top five sources engineers tend to use are:

Supplier Websites
General search engines
Online catalogs
Colleagues
Industry or standard organizations

There is no single go-to resource preferred. Instead, it is a wide range, emphasizing the importance of having a multi-channel marketing strategy to connect with potential customers.

While this survey isn’t the end-all-be-all for industrial marketing, it does highlight some important aspects. The buying personas are trending to a more technically proficient realm, so while a multi-channeled approach is ideal and important, providing an easily obtainable product with great service and technical support is critical.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

How to influence the industrial buying process with smart content marketing

Unless you’re selling a commodity product, you’re probably no stranger to a complex industrial buying process. And of course, that’s because what you sell is complex too.

In fact, if you’re anything like most of our industrial sector clients, you’re just as much a consultant and educator of your customers and leads as you are a president, marketing director or salesperson. Your job involves listening, learning and understanding the problems your buyer needs to solve before the conversation about buying even begins.

You don’t sell widgets, but smart solutions to tough problems that require building relationships and cultivating trust. And the process of buying that kind of thing is nothing short of complex.

In this article, we’ll first look at three characteristics of the industrial buying process that foster complexity:

Your customers aren’t companies, but real people
Your customer isn’t one person, but many
Big purchases don’t happen overnight, but over time

Next, I’ll introduce a powerful solution that will help you face the complex industrial buying process head on – content marketing. We’ll look both at the role content marketing plays in the industrial buying process and how content should align with the different stages of your buyer’s journey.

Finally, I’ll send you on your way with two assignments to help you kickstart a content marketing strategy for your business, and I’ll point you toward a few great resources to help you along the way.

Let’s get started!

Three important characteristics of the industrial buying process

1. Your customers aren’t companies, but real people

Sometimes it’s easy to forget who’s on the other end of your trade journal ads, mailers, website content and company newsletters. Your buyers are people – real, live, human people with their own jobs to do and their own problems to solve. These real people must be the focus of your industrial marketing strategy.

2. Your customer isn’t one person, but many

Step outside your business environment for a minute and picture yourself answering a call from one of your good buddies. How did you say hello? What’s the topic of the conversation? What’s your tone? What kind of words are you using?

Mid conversation you glance down and see another incoming call. It’s your five-year old niece Suzie and she wants to video chat. You can’t bear to wind up in her dog house, so you tell your buddy you have to run and immediately shift dialogue from this weekend’s fantasy football matchup to princesses and fairies. How does your tone change this time? And your choice of words?

After a few minutes, Suzie hears the ice cream truck and you’re suddenly an afterthought. That’s probably a good thing since you’ve got a handful of important emails from your boss to answer. Medium, tone, content and selection of words all change again, right?

Now let’s travel back to your world of industrial marketing and sales.

Just as Best Buddy, Little Suzie and Bossman are all very different real live people who require very different styles of communication, your customers, leads and prospects do as well. On a regular basis, you and your company are pitted against an army of questioners defending themselves against your sales pitch. That army is comprised of design engineers, procurement folks, plant managers, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs and maybe a few other C-something-Os that haven’t even surfaced yet.

Each cares about the different things, consumes information in different ways, speaks in his/her own voice, faces his/her own unique challenges and strives to achieve his/her own individual goals. Each requires your attention, but each is different. That means one-size-fits-all marketing won’t cut it.

3. Big purchases don’t happen overnight, but over time

If you’re nodding your head so far, then I imagine you’re also used to a buying process measured not in minutes, hours or days, but instead, in weeks, months or years.

The best salespeople understand how that long buying process works. And if you have a few of those salespeople working with you (or if you happen to be one yourself), I’m sure they’ve catered their selling process accordingly. But for some mysterious reason, this long-buying-process mindset rarely carries over to the marketing strategies these same companies deploy.

In fact, I’m willing to bet that more than 90% of the company websites of manufacturing professionals who read this article have one single call-to-action on their website. And it either looks like this:

Or like this:

Stop to think about that for a second. The sales cycle takes weeks or months or years. But the only call-to-action on the website asks a visitor to buy something right now.

Seems a little bit backwards, doesn’t it?

At the time I’m writing this article, it’s 2017, but I drive a 2003 Camry. Yes, it’s true.

There she is in my driveway. A beaut, wouldn’t you say?

I know that one of these mornings, I’ll rush out the door for an important meeting and Ol’ Reliable won’t start. And because I’m a fairly rational guy, I’ve been in the car-buying mindset for a few years. So, do you think my first move after I first started contemplating my trusty Camry’s mortality was to walk into a car dealership and say, “I’m here! Start selling to me!”?

No sir.

But here’s what I have been doing for quite a while:

Observing every mid-sized SUV equipped to comfortably carry two car seats and all the other stuff that comes with a couple little kiddos
Reading Car and Driver comparisons online to self-educate
Talking to friends about their car-buying experiences
Google searching things like “Ford Explorer vs. Toyota Highlander”, “best midsize SUVs” and “how to outsmart a sleazy car salesman who thinks he’s gonna get the best of me but doesn’t know what’s he’s got coming”

If I do the car thing the same way this next time around, I’ll be driving that SUV until at least 2031. So I’m damn well not reading the CliffsNotes before I make this purchase! Instead, I’m putting in the time to educate myself and learn. Then, I’ll go talk to the car salesman, informed and ready to tell him what I want and how much I know it’s worth. Watch out, car salesman.

Here’s the thing. Your buyers are no different. I don’t care if they’re Engineers or Procurement Managers or CEOs. Like we discussed earlier, they’re all humans. And because they’re probably smart humans, they’re doing their homework too.

IEEE Engineering 360’s 2016 Industrial Buy Cycle Study found that the length of the typical industrial buying cycle stages are as follows:

Research and Needs Analysis: 4.5 weeks
Comparison and Evaluation: 3.9 weeks
Purchase: 4.0 weeks

The reality is that your prospective customers don’t want get on the phone and listen to your sales pitch until they’re ready to get on the phone and listen to your sales pitch. Until that time comes, they’re steering clear of your website’s Request a Quote button. And they’re glancing right over your $5000 “Hey we’re amazing and you should definitely hire us” trade journal ad you’ve been running every month for the last ten years.

The bottom line is that decisions involving real people, multiple people and long timelines are usually associated with significant financial investments and important consequences that naturally require extensive research, comparison and evaluation.

Manufacturers need to embrace this reality and think about their marketing communications differently, or any kind of marketing investment they make will amount to nothing short of a waste of their time and money.

Enter content marketing.

Content marketing and its role in the industrial buying process

This long, complex, consultative industrial sales process you know so well happens to have a marketing counterpart. It’s called content marketing. And the rest of this article serves as an introduction, paired with action steps for you to put this practice in motion for your organization.

As defined by marketing thought leader Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute,

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content marketing is about teaching your prospective customers and helping them take a step forward in their buying processes. It’s about answering their common questions, helping them solve problems and illustrating potential solutions. Content marketing exists not to replace the consultative sales process, but to support it. Great content will attract more-qualified prospects in greater volumes, begin to earn their attention and trust and prompt real sales conversations that you would not have otherwise been afforded.

No marketing approach makes more sense for an industrial company selling complex solutions to multiple people over an extended period of time.

How content aligns with the industrial buyer’s journey

Here’s a simplified representation of the complex industrial buyer’s journey:

And here’s how (and where) most manufacturers deploy marketing communications to their prospective customers along that journey:

But here’s how (and where) manufacturers should be deploying those marketing communications:

And really, a separate timeline like this should exist for each of your buyer personas, to match the differing needs of each along their respective buying journeys.

As you see above, content can exist in many forms. A few examples include the following:

Educational articles

Educational articles or blog posts (like the one you’re reading right now) help your prospective customers discover you in search engines, trade journals, social media networks or other online publishing platforms. These articles help educate your visitors, familiarize them with your organization and prompt them to say, “Huh – these guys are pretty smart. And they really seem to understand my challenges.” Here are a few examples of educational articles by industrial companies:

Gated white papers, E-Books and downloadable guides

More comprehensive, premium white papers and guides that require the submission of contact information in exchange for the content allow you to generate real leads from your website visitors. These premium types of content offer enough value to your prospective customers that they’re willing to trade you their names, email addresses and phone numbers. This exchange forms the foundation of an inbound lead pipeline for your sales team. Here are few examples of downloadable, form-gated content by industrial companies:

Tutorial videos

Putting a real face on camera adds a human element to your content. Remember – your buyers are real people. They want to know that you’re one too.

Case studies

Case studies demonstrate that you walk the walk. They serve to qualify your business as a potential solution for your prospective customers once they’ve done the preliminary research in their respective buying processes.

Beginning your organization’s content marketing journey

If you’ve made it this far, hopefully some of what you’ve read has resonated and that you’re beginning to formulate a vision for how content marketing could work for your business. Here’s are the first two steps I recommend to get started.

1. Identify and document your buyer personas

Everything begins with your buyer. So start by picturing your perfect customer. Who is that company? And who are those individuals who play a role in the buying process? Design Engineers? Procurement Managers? CEOs?

Just knowing who they are is not enough. You’ll want flesh out buyer persona profiles for each in writing, share them with everyone at your organization who plays a role in attracting and acquiring new business and reach an agreement as a team that these are indeed accurate descriptions of your ideal buyers.

For more guidance on how to write your targeted manufacturing buyer persona profiles, read this article.

2. Create that first piece of content

Beginning the work is always easier said than done. But you need to start somewhere. You’ve identified your buyer personas, you’ve identified what they need to learn and understand before they buy from you. Now it’s time to teach them.

So choose one buyer persona, one common question that buyer tends to ask during his buying process, and write a comprehensive answer. Remember that you’re teaching – not selling. You should of course conclude your article with a call-to-action, like asking the reader to request a free consultation with one of your company’s experts. But aside from that, your job is to teach.

Once you’ve published your first piece of content on your website, I’m confident you’ll feel both a sense of accomplishment and relief. Your next piece will come much more easily, as will each that follows. Simply getting started is the biggest hurdle you’ll face.

Some content marketing resources to help you keep learning

Thankfully, so much great free content can be found online about about, well, creating content. This guide by Moz is a good place to start: The Beginners Guide to Content Marketing.

I also strongly recommend the following three books, and in this order.

Start with They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan because you won’t be able to put it down. Marcus demonstrates the power of content marketing through real-life case studies that have transformed businesses and the lives of the people who run them. If this one doesn’t inspire you, I formally give you permission to keep running those $5000/month print ads!
Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi will teach you how to build a targeted, engaged and qualified audience of prospective customers by becoming the greatest teacher in your space.
Everybody Writes by Anne Handley will coach you on how to be a writer when you’re not a writer so you’ll be less intimidated about getting started.

On that note, it’s time to go get started! Don’t wait until next week or next month. The sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll begin attracting the right buyers and booking more calls with sales-qualified leads.

If you want investigate how buyer personas and content marketing fit specifically into the bigger industrial marketing picture, read our Industrial Marketing: The Definitive Guide. Or if you’d like to chat about how to bring all of this to life for your B2B industrial company, consider requesting a consultation with one our Industrial Marketing Strategists.

Thanks for reading and good luck getting up and running!

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

Select marketing channels with business growth in mind

Whether you’re a senior executive or a business development manager, managing the marketing budget is an inescapable challenge. Understanding how to use that budget most effectively will help you make the right decisions that bring new business to the company. Often one of the most effective opportunities to evaluate and improve return on how that marketing budget is spent is in choosing the right marketing channels for your industrial company.

Traditional marketing brings personal interaction at premium prices

One common delineation in marketing channels is between traditional, off-line marketing and digital, online marketing. With traditional marketing, there’s a familiarity and comfort tied to the usual trade show and print publications. Backing these channels is the understanding that your business’ prospects are reading these topical publications and attending your industry’s trade shows for the latest news and industry developments. With trade shows specifically, you’re getting that face-to-face interaction that can be tough to beat with online marketing channels.

However, off-line marketing brings with it some limitations that the digital solutions can quickly overcome. Trade shows and print publications bring along a hefty cost that can be difficult to track returns on. Between a trade show’s print materials, signage, and the time your team sinks into attending them, one event can run your team $12,000 (In another cost breakdown, totals were ranging up to $40-60k). Print publications can bring similar costs for a single full page ad. In either case, these one-off marketing buys can add up quickly—consider three trade shows a year or bi-monthly ad buys—with little to show.

With some technical expertise, marketing dollars work harder online

With online marketing channels, there’s a transparency to how marketing dollars work toward company growth. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) are two popular approaches to attracting prospective customers to your website via their keywords in search engines. In the case of either digital channel, today’s technology can connect website visitors to ERP tools to identify how customers find your website and what pages they looked at before becoming a customer.

If you’re skeptical whether engineers or operations managers are seeking solutions online, consider this: 70% of that technical audience uses general search engines as information sources for products or services. That’s only surpassed by the websites of suppliers themselves.

Source: IEEE Engineering360’s 2016 Industrial Buy Cycle Study

When the prospect has found you but are not yet ready to buy, other online channels like email marketing and social media can serve as avenues for ongoing touch points with prospects until they are prepared to buy. While social media has the limitation of a less industrial audience, email is a strong opportunity to communicate with leads at any scale. In either case, social media and email are easier to get started due to their lower costs, and they bring with them additional insights on how your prospects respond to your marketing efforts.

No matter the channel, online brings with it a barrier of technical knowledge to excel. While consulting or partnering with a specialized marketing agency are always options, there’s a variety of online resources to begin learning about each channel. Check out these 101 resources to get you started: SEO, PPC, Email, and Social Media.

Bring digital to your traditional marketing efforts

If trade shows and print publications is where your company thrives, there’s great value in maintaining the brand you’ve established there. Moving full force into the digital realm can get overwhelming. However, digital media can support those traditional channels and help reveal some ROI for your effort and budgetary investments. Creating a unique page on your website that is dedicated to your print ads or trade show can reveal how many prospects are interested in your company. Once they’re on-site, continue to educate them on your products or services until they are ready to request a quote.

As with recommending solutions in manufacturing, there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all solution to marketing channels. Each can offer benefits to a business development strategy, just as each has its challenges. With today’s engineers looking more frequently online for vendors and answers for their projects, online marketing channels should make up at least part of your marketing plan. The cost efficiencies and added insights about your prospects only support that idea. However, the decision should factor in your business’ needs and be based on where new leads are. After all, if marketing isn’t serving the bottom line, why have it?

Looking for the next step to developing your marketing strategy? Check out our Industrial Marketing Guide for a comprehensive outline of marketing strategy for companies in the industrial sector.

Using the buyer’s journey to evaluate content marketing success

With today’s online world, a strong website can lead the way for a B2B company to find new business opportunity and build a brand. Often a content strategy is a large contributor to accomplishing this but we as marketers might not fully understand how these efforts contribute to the business’ bottom line. With the abundance of analytics tools available, we have many different ways to track behaviors and develop attribution models. However, lacking a data analyst or a personal desire to dive into the numbers can leave us scratching our heads on where to start.

Understanding the buyer’s journey

To identify important data worth evaluating, and in turn, what KPIs to focus on, we need to dig into the goals of our content marketing strategy. One widely-accepted strategy is to follow the traditional inbound marketing methodology originated by HubSpot. Aimed at attracting new site visitors and converting them into leads, content pieces can guide individuals through the buyer’s journey to become qualified leads for the sales team. From there, the actions these pieces encourage become the KPIs in the buyer’s journey that we can focus on to determine ROI.

Establishing KPIs at each stage of the buyer’s journey

The structure of this model can be simplified according to those primary goals for the content strategy: attracting new visitors and converting them into leads. The KPIs for attracting new visitors is logically the number of new visitors a page attracts, or the number of new sessions initiated. Likewise, the key metric for conversions is the number of forms completed for the respective content piece.

The key part of this model is the final step of calculating new customers from these content efforts—or, the number of buyers who completed the journey. Since this data often lives with the sales team, creating a cross-team partnership is important to gaining the full perspective. Access to this data allows your marketing team to gain a stronger understanding of what a valuable lead looks like.

Evaluating your efforts

Once you have these metrics, you can understand how content strategy is performing as a whole and identify where its driving value. Are your site visitors and new leads becoming profit-driving customers for your sales team? If not, is the current site traffic the right audience to convert into leads? Are the leads that are converting becoming customers?

When you start answering these questions, you can begin to identify specific pieces that are superstar content or dropping the ball to attract potential customers. Do any blog posts have above average conversion metrics? Does a specific downloadable guide lead to more customers than others?

Get started measuring ROI with our Online Marketing ROI Manual for B2B companies.

Using these three KPIs to outline the buyers journey can provide great foundational insights to identifying success in your content marketing strategy. ROI can be broken down by the goals of each step in the buyer’s journey, identifying where the right traffic and leads are coming from to become new customers.

Jon Franko provides inbound marketing insights

Jon Franko, one of our founding partners here at Gorilla 76, was recently interviewed by Hatchbuck,which produces sales and marketing software for small businesses. Both Gorilla 76 and Hatchbuck got their start in St. Louis, so it was exciting to chat with a fellow successful local business. Jon was asked about topics like inbound marketing, Gorilla 76’s strategies, and the methods we use to drive traffic for our clients.

Check out the interview to read Jon’s insights, and find out how marketing has changed throughout his career and where he thinks it is heading in the future.

Before you rebuild your B2B website, read this

So you “need” a new website. Your current site is ugly, lacks professionalism, doesn’t get much traffic, underperforms on the lead-generation front, and it doesn’t resonate with your audience. In other words, things are broken and you think the fix is a shiny, brand new website.

And you know what – you might be right. But don’t jump into a costly rebuild just yet. Consider the following options. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of that $40K+ that you’d be spending on a new website. And most importantly, you should see more leads and sales.

“Traffic is down! We need a new website!”

A website rebuild MIGHT be what you need, but there’s a really good chance it isn’t. If traffic volume is your issue, unless you just have a major website construction flaw, a site rebuild probably isn’t going to attract visitors in throngs. Instead, you’d be smarter to consider the following.

SEO audit

The first thing I’d do is probably run my site through an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit. Now, I could learn how to do this myself, or I could reach out to an agency (cough, cough) to do it for me. Or I could even do something REALLY basic like use Hubspot’s website grader. The diagnostics I gather will greatly inform me on why traffic isn’t at the level I’d like it to be. I might have a URL structure problem, I might not be using keywords that are effective, I might have forgotten to think about page titles and page headers on the individual pages of my site.

A simple SEO audit can uncover lots of SEO mishaps at the fraction of the cost of a website build. Get these fixed and you should start to see a climb in traffic.

Content strategy and implementation

You don’t blog? You don’t add content to your site regularly? You don’t think about a keyword strategy that will attract new users via the search engines? Those are all problems and they need to be fixed.

I can say with confidence that 95% of the time an investment in content strategy and implementation will drive significantly more traffic than a new website build ever will. The more good content you have on your site, the more traffic you’ll capture in search engines. Think of it like fishing. The more lines you have, the better your chance of catching a fish. I’ve actually written a post comparing content marketing to duck hunting and the use of duck decoys. It’s a similar analogy.

Link building

If you’re not familiar with link building and the reasons for doing it, start here. If you ARE familiar with link building, but you’re not doing it, get your act together! Link building has been one of the single best tactics to date for Gorilla in terms of driving traffic to the sites we manage, as well as helping said sites climb in the search engines.

This is a practice that must be done right and must be done with the right intentions, otherwise, Google will penalize you and once that happens, well, you’ve got an entirely new set of problems on your hands. Before dumping $40K+ into a new website, take a small chunk of that budget and explore an in-depth link-building initiative. Agencies that do this have processes in place that have proven to be effective and efficient.

“Leads? Through my website?! I must need a new website.”

Maybe. But doubtful. Before assuming that the reason you’re not getting leads through your website is that you need a new website, first, think about what might be broken.

Do you have conversion opportunities? Do you have a form that users can fill out to ask questions or to request a bid? What about downloadable educational content that you give in exchange for an email address? Are your forms too complex or not asking the right questions? Are your landing pages in disarray?

There could be a wide variety of factors at play, all of which could be determining the lead volume you’re getting. All are drastically cheaper than a website rebuild.

“Got the traffic and conversions. But no buyers. My site lacks professionalism. I need a rebuild!”

You guessed it – you probably DON’T need a new website. Yeah, professionalism is nice, and shouldn’t be undervalued, but as my business partner Joe wrote in a blog post, “The JOB of a B2B website isn’t to look professional, just as your job isn’t to wear professional-looking clothes. Nope. Professionalism is a characteristic of how you present yourself. It’s not a job description. Whether you’re a marketer, salesman or B2B company executive, your JOB is to grow your business. Likewise, your website’s JOB, first and foremost, is to grow your business.”

So, “That’s all good and great,” you’re thinking, “but I need sales.” Okay. What are you doing on the nurturing front? Do you have an email strategy in place? What about a true sales process that goes far beyond the single phone call or email? Are you aggressive enough?

“I hear your points. But I still think I need a website.”

Let’s say you own a coffee shop on a side street somewhere a few blocks off the main drag, and you decide you want to grow business. Would your first priority be a costly redesign of your store? Or would you build a plan to generate foot traffic off that nearby busy road. We’re guessing you’d promote your business to get in front of the right audience. And when those patrons started filing through your front doors for their morning jolt, you’d do whatever you could to engage them and get them to come back again and again.

So before you settle on an expensive website rebuild, talk to a professional and get an opinion. There’s a good chance that you can start getting results for less money than you originally planned.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

Industrial search engine marketing: SEO vs PPC

Companies outside of the industrial sector have been using online marketing to drive brand awareness—and more importantly, sales—for quite some time. These opportunities are, as some of you may know, just as beneficial to industrial companies for finding new leads and growing sales.

Not managing an online presence for your company is neglecting the primary resource potential buyers are using to research product specs, services, standards, and suppliers. According to IHS Engineering360’s Report on Digital Media use in the Industrial Sector, 89% of technical professionals use generic search engines (think Google or Yahoo) as a source of information for work.

If you’re an industrial marketer and you haven’t transitioned your focus to online efforts, now is your time. Getting started with marketing on search engines (ie. search marketing) will help with finding those leads and customers, via SEO and PPC.

Defining the acronyms

The end goal of search marketing is getting your company and your brand on the search engine results pages (SERPs) so that potential customers already seeking your product or service can find you. The two ways to achieve that are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC).

SEO, also called ‘Organic Search,’ is focused on improving your website’s content so that search engines deem your site relevant and valuable to those potential customers. Each search engine has its own ‘spiders’ that crawl websites and their code to identify if the site’s contents are relevant to the keywords a user searches with. The other option, PPC, also referred to as ‘Paid Search,’ is a pay-to-play option that gets your company right in front of that product engineer or operations manager via word-based ads.

In each case, it’s about knowing what keywords or phrases that audience is using to search for your product. To the left is an example of a Google SERP, with the paid search and organic search both present.

How do they differ

Choosing where to focus your efforts between SEO and PPC depends on you and your company’s marketing goals. Both will help build your brand awareness on search engines and drive leads, but each in different ways.

SEO is about building long term value as a thought leader and providing guidance to potential customers before they’re even ready to request a quote. It is about optimizing one’s website so that both search engine’s crawlers and site visitors find content relevant to their question. It is not an easy process, nor guaranteed, but yields greater brand equity and enables you to begin a conversation with your customers before they know they’re ready to buy.

In contrast, PPC is quick and versatile to enable you to hit the ground running with custom ads, test different ads to find the best options, or change things up to stay aligned with your changing business. PPC is exactly how it sounds; spending is directly connected to the number of clicks your ads receive. This double-edged sword means that you get what you pay for, and you also lose that site traffic as soon as the spending stops.

Which is for my business

If your company seeks a long term, equity-driven strategy to grow business online, SEO is the clear solution to provide content that answers your audience’s questions. Getting the most out of this strategy involves writing to appeal to site visitors and optimizing technical aspects of your site to appeal to search engines. The result is a larger, more relevant audience to educate about your product or services that lasts long after the content is published.

On the other hand, where SEO takes time to see ROI, PPC can attract new leads the day it starts. If you’re looking to understand your leads better, testing with PPC is also the better option for its versatility. In the end, PPC will offer results that more closely tie spending and performance.

While organic and paid search have very opposing values, they are not mutually exclusive. PPC and SEO also complement each other. While growing the long term investment of SEO, PPC drives the immediate attention to your site. Additionally, while PPC tests what new concepts drive traffic to your site, SEO focuses on what already works.

Conclusion

Search engines are the primary resource for professionals across manufacturing, construction, distribution, and industrial services to seek solutions to their businesses’ problems. Industrial marketers are at a point where online marketing is status quo for the industry. Whether the focus is on SEO, PPC, or both, there is valuable real estate that competitors already vie for. The newbies must now adapt to earn their share of it.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

How a CRM will help industrial sales professionals sell more

On the topic of lead pipeline management, one consistent thread runs through our consultations with industrial sales professionals: There is no consistency.

“Systems” for managing the new business pipeline, even within one given company, range from actual CRM (customer relationship management) software platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot or Pipedrive to Excel spreadsheets to lists on white boards to (gulp) “I won’t forget to follow up with anyone”.

So why is it that lead pipeline management can vary so dramatically from one industrial company to the next? Well, to start, every sales professional is different. Each has methods that have led that person to where he or she is today. More often than not, we hear, “This is how I’ve always done things. It works just fine.” And I suppose it’s human nature to leave things alone when they’re working “just fine”. But in this particular case, I’d like to argue otherwise.

When something isn’t broken… fix it anyway

Over the past few years, emerging CRM tools have created efficiencies that would be foolish to ignore, even by the best of sales professionals and business development teams. I’ll walk you through some of the most effective features below.

But before going any further, I want to stop for a second and defend the honor of sales professionals across the world. I’d like to clarify that these sorts of tools, as powerful and they may be, will never turn someone who can’t sell into a sales all star. And by no means are they a replacement for the power of personal interaction or tried and true methods of pursuing, nurturing and closing new business opportunities.

But when used to their full potential by smart sales professionals who understand how to use them, the best CRM tools do have the power to help a mediocre salesman rise to respectability and a good salesman flirt with greatness.

First, the baseline tools in a CRM

Because I want to focus on a few unique, more advanced CRM features in this article, I’m going to make the assumption that you have at least some familiarity with the basic functions you’ll find in most CRM software platforms. Those include the following:

Individual lead and prospect profiles where contact information can be stored
A function for logging notes within those profiles
The ability to BCC the CRM software on emails you send your prospects so all written points of contact are automatically logged within their profiles
A task list function that allows you to construct a time-stamped agenda of business development todos and tie them to individual prospects, leads, companies or deals
A deal pipeline that lets you track the lifecycle stage of all potential business opportunities, move them from one stage to the next as the deal progresses and assign weighted projected revenue to each

The advanced CRM tools that really get us excited

The basic features I listed above are great. And you’ll find them in any legitimate CRM platform. But a few CRM software developers have raised the bar in recent years by introducing suites of tools that let you automate repetitive tasks, gather intelligence on the activity of prospects and leads, and in the end, get a lot more done with your time. Those are the kinds of things that get us excited. Speaking from personal experience, below I’ll share a few of examples of the tools we love from our CRM of choice – Hubspot Sales Professional.

Prospecting tool

The Prospecting tool identifies the IP addresses of your website visitors to pinpoint companies that are visiting your website right now. You can also set up daily email digests of those visiting companies for you or someone on your team so you don’t miss opportunities in the moment.

Cold calling is often like taking a shot in the dark. But when you suspect a need exists at a given company, you can feel more confident about the time you invest pursuing them.

Email templates and reporting

Sales professionals tend to waste a lot of time recreating first touch points, follow up touch points, reengagement touch points, etc. across their prospects and leads. Hubspot Sales Pro lets you create and save common email starter templates that you can pull and customize as needed for a new or existing contact.

Once you’ve sent an email that was based on a template, the CRM software tracks its performance and automatically generates reports on that template’s effectiveness in comparison to others.

The accompanying email tracking function will show you a real-time log of those activities as well, so you know when in time a prospect is engaged.

Sequences tool

The Sequences tool puts templated emails on steroids. Sequences are email progressions that are triggered by actions taken (or not taken) by a recipient of one of your emails. For example, let’s say your personal sales process includes five initial attempts to connect with a prospect before you call it quits. This software lets you manually write (or template out) those email touch points ahead of time and send them on a schedule you’ve determined for yourself.

That might mean email #2 in your sequence goes out three days after email #1, but only if your prospects fails to respond to email #1. If and when your prospect replies to a given email in your sequence, the remaining steps will be paused. But until then, the sequence runs in the background while you’re hard at work elsewhere.

Documents tool

At Gorilla, we’re huge advocates of content marketing. Content makes up the core of almost all lead generation work we do for our industrial sector clients. Content draws their niche buyers out of search engines, converts them into leads, helps establish trust in their expertise and parallels their sales initiatives. Hubspot Sales Pro integrates content marketing into the sales process by allowing you to store a bank of documents such as product catalogs, white papers and buyers guides right there in the CRM and quickly attach them to emails.

How to get started

If you feel energized by anything you’ve seen here, I recommend one of the following two steps, if not both.

Go watch the five minute video about Hubspot Sales Pro on their website. See if it makes sense for you. Their basic CRM is free. Start there if you’re not ready to invest in the full version of the software.
Consider talking to us, or at least someone, who can help you implement a plan to roll out a CRM platform within your organization. It doesn’t hurt to at least have that conversation. Click here to request a consultation.

10 lessons from 10 influencers in our first 10 years

Our industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76, turns ten this July. That’s right — the big 1-0. Surprised? So are we. But then again, we’ve worked hard, caught some well-timed breaks, and most importantly, have been fortunate to be surrounded by an incredible cast of influencers — so maybe it’s not THAT surprising.

In the past ten years, we’ve had to make a lot of decisions. Some have been good. Lots have been bad. Regardless, we’ve done our best to listen and learn from those influencers we’ve been fortunate to know, those folks who are quite a bit smarter than we are and more experienced in this whole “business” thing.

Here are ten of the most important lessons we’ve learned in our first ten years of business and the people behind them.

Know what sets you apart

Influencer: Virginia McDowell, retired President & CEO of Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc.

As told by Jon

We were young. We had a business plan born out of a “Business Plan Kits for Dummies” book. And we had a meeting scheduled with one of the smartest business minds in St. Louis. What could possibly go wrong? The short of it: lots.

As we mentioned in our opening, we’ve been blessed with access to the minds of some really smart folks. Virginia (VA) McDowell, most recently President & CEO of Isle of Capri Casinos, Inc., just happened to be one of those people.

Joe and I met VA via a board on which we were both involved (bonus lesson for the youngsters: get involved!!), and VA agreed to meet with us so that we could “pick her brain.” We met. Things went well. She requested we send her our business plan … the one that was created from the yellow “Dummies” book. We did such. And with A LOT of confidence.

VA reached out a week or two later — she wanted to meet.

We were all about it. Happy hour at T.G.I. Friday’s was our recommendation. And you thought the “Dummies” part was going to be the only misstep. Anyway, VA showed up with our business plan in hand and it looked like one of my high school math assignments. It was covered in red ink.

From sentence structure to big ideas, she offered opinions and feedback. It was amazing, especially considering she had been traveling nonstop since we met last. We went through all of her suggestions and changes, picked up the tab (actually, I think VA might have picked up the tab — we were that unpolished) and we thought we were good to head home for the evening.

Wrong.

“So this is all great — but what makes you different?”

“Well, um, we’re, we’re a, well, we’re like a big agency with really cool copywriting and cool design capabilities but at a lower cost and less hassle and we’re super nimble because we’re small and the big agencies are evil and no one wants to work with the big agencies because they’re not nimble and have stale copy and design.”

(ten-second pause)

“No. That won’t cut it. What makes you different?”

(ten-year pause)

“We’re an inbound marketing agency for the industrial sector. We help manufacturers, service providers, distributors, builders and their subcontractors grow their businesses online.”

Thank you VA. It took us awhile to finally figure out what you were talking about, but damn — I’m glad we finally did. Since narrowing our focus, our business has grown significantly. We owe much of that success to you.

Do it with passion

Influencer: Derek Mabie, President & Founder of Evolve Digital Labs

As told by Joe

I’ll never forget the afternoon we sat in a Clayton, Missouri conference room full of fiery investment bankers and Derek Mabie, President/Founder of Evolve Digital Labs.

We were pitching business together, but Derek’s approach was quite a bit different from mine. To make a long story short, by the end of a heated two-hour new business meeting, Derek was literally on his feet yelling at our potential clients, telling them why they were wrong about their marketing approach and why they couldn’t afford NOT to hire him (and I suppose us) to be their partners.

I was ready to sneak out the back door. But instead, we all walked out the front door with a big contract and a relationship with a new client.

While Derek’s approach might not have worked with everyone, these guys wanted someone with passion. They wanted someone who was so confident in his ability to help them be successful, that they truly couldn’t afford to not hire him.

My point isn’t that you should always scream at your prospective clients; but success stems from true passion for what you do. If you can’t bring passion to the table, you can’t be great.

Every time I catch up with Derek over lunch or a beer, I leave energized. Ideas are spinning in my head. I feel like I can conquer the world. Meanwhile, Derek has actually started conquering the world, having grown his company from the one-man operation he was eight years ago when I met him into a business that’s made the Inc. 5000 two years running and is one of St. Louis’ fastest growing companies.

You’re the work that you do

Influencer: Mitch Meyers, retired Co-Founder/President & CEO of The Zipatoni Company

As told by Jon

I’d argue Mitch has had the biggest influence on our business. It’d also be poor etiquette not to do so as I eat Easter and Christmas dinner at her house every year.

“Aunt” Mitch Meyers, of Spuds McKenzie and Zipatoni fame, has introduced us to almost half of the people on this list, and has been within two degrees of separation on almost 25% of our current billings. She also was the one who told us to start charging for our work back when we were doing spec work for fun. Yes, I said for fun. It was actually on her porch in the seventh month of 2006 (see where the 76 comes from?) that we decided to start our business.

“You are the work that you do.”

Honestly, I could write a long list of lessons that Mitch has taught us through the years, but perhaps the biggest and most impactful was, “You are the work that you do.” If you do work for big, shiny, cool clients, but it’s crappy work — work that you don’t enjoy — you’ll be a crappy agency. But if you do work you love and work you believe in and work that actually “works,” even if for lesser-known companies, you can be a great agency.

We’ve chosen the latter path and it’s paying off. We love what we do and the companies we do it for. We believe in what we do. And what we do is working for our clients. Mitch — thanks for the impactful advice.

Learn from the people who are doing it right

Influencer: Bob Ruffolo, CEO of IMPACT Branding & Design

As told by Joe

For the past four years, we’ve closely followed what the guys at IMPACT Branding and Design have done as a marketing agency. In many ways, they’ve already become what we’re striving to become.

IMPACT has grown a significant client base from scratch, built an incredibly talented team and consistently delivered exceptional, results-driven work for their clients year over year. They’re viewed as thought leaders in the online marketing world and are the cream of the inbound marketing agency crop.

What I really respect is that more than once, Bob Ruffolo, the CEO at IMPACT, has willingly offered his time to us, answered questions about struggles we’ve had and shared stories of his successes and failures. We’ve eagerly listened and let the knowledge Bob has imparted on us translate into successes for ourselves.

We’re our own company with our own unique client base, niche audience and skill sets. There’s no formula for successfully running Gorilla. But many of the challenges we face have also been faced by others. Thanks to guys like Bob, the trail is becoming easier to hike.

Be a good person first

Influencer: Todd Imming, CMO at The Korte Company

As told by Jon

Through the years, we’ve been fortunate to work with a growing list of great clients. Clients that trust us to do our job, that look to us for advice and ideas, that respect us as business professionals. Joe and I consider ourselves very lucky in this regard, and really, it’s one of the best parts of being at Gorilla. All of our clients have influenced us through the years, but one client and one lesson really comes to mind.

It was three or four years back. I received some bad news from the vet about my yellow lab Deuce. He’d been given about three months to live with what was thought to be an aggressive form of cancer. The doc said even with surgery, odds weren’t good whatsoever.

Enter Todd Imming, CMO at The Korte Company – a long-time client of Gorilla. I talk with Todd several times a week. And while we talk about work, we often stray outside of the 9-5. In casual conversation, I told him about Deuce and his scare. Todd expressed concern.

In fact, he called daily to check on the pup. And that was it on many occasions. No “Hey, where are we on this?” Or “I have revisions for that.” Just “How’s Deuce today? Is he doing okay?”

Todd knew that this dog was a big part of my life, and he genuinely cared about how he was doing. This is the CMO of one of the biggest Design-Build construction companies in the United States and he was concerned about one of his vendor’s dogs. That was amazing to me and it had a big impact on me.

It’s something I try to keep in mind with employees, clients and vendors. Work is important, really important, but the human side of it all — that’s what matters the most. I fail at it often, but that idea of remembering we’re all people at the end of the day, and business really is only a small part of the equation — that really resonated with me.

As for Deuce, I opted for surgery. He made it. And since the scare, he’s come to work with me almost every day. In fact, he’s on our website. He’s actually at my feet right now as I type.

Hire people who are better and smarter than you

Influencer: Dan Rashid, our first employee

As told by Joe

The two of us flew solo for our first few years in business.

As a pair, we collectively served as Copywriter, Designer, Marketing Strategist, Developer (gulp), Account Coordinator, Project Manager, Bookkeeper, IT Guy, Trashman, Plant Waterer and Floor Swifferer. Put simply, when you’re a startup, you figure out how to get stuff done (even if some things aren’t done so well).

The difference ten years later is that now every one of the roles mentioned above is filled by someone who’s exceptional at that role (although Jon still takes out the trash — he’ll talk more about that later).

Our first hire was a guy named Dan Rashid. He was a really talented employee and he helped with a variety of things around the office. But his primary job was that of Web Developer. He was also the one who taught us how to let go.

Dan was a Developer and we weren’t. So for the first time, we had to learn how to delegate. And how to trust. By hiring an expert who was way better at what he did than we were at doing that particular thing, we got that much stronger as a company.

Letting go of responsibility and trusting others to do the job is one of the most difficult things we’ve had to do. But reflecting on ten years of business and the nine positions that have been created outside of the two of us, it’s laughable to think we could have survived without the expertise of our respective team members. So we’ve committed to recruiting, hiring and retaining great people who bring things to the table that we never could have. And we’re stronger now than ever because of our outstanding crew.

Encourage your employees to grow

Influencer: Jim Mayfield, former SVP Executive Creative Director at Schupp Company

As told by Joe

My first real job was at Schupp Company, a St. Louis marketing agency, where I was hired as a Junior Art Director. Jim Mayfield was my first boss and also my first professional role model. He was that boss whom you were a little bit scared of — not because you feared for your job if you messed up, but because you wanted his respect. He was the first to give me a chance, and was also a tremendous teacher to me as a young marketing professional.

What Jim didn’t know for the first year and a half of my employment, though, was that his 23-year-old Junior Art Director had started a side marketing business. So the day I got the “Please see me before you leave today” email, I figured I was toast.

Jim sat me down, asked some questions to figure out what this Gorilla thing was all about and made it clear that my “Gorilla work” needed to remain a nights-and-weekends initiative that absolutely couldn’t conflict with my agency work. Then he smiled and sent me back to my desk.

About six months later, shortly after I announced that I was making the leap and taking Gorilla full-time, he and the rest of the agency surprised me on my way out the door with a farewell party in the agency lobby, fully equipped with Gorilla decor. He showed that he supported me and that meant a lot.

Jim shook my hand, wished me luck and told me there would be a place for me here if it didn’t work out. I’ll never forget that.

When someone wants something as badly as I wanted to make a go of it on my own, you’re not going to stop them. Instead of firing me, Jim did his best to encourage me to stay in the months that followed. But he also let me do what I was going to do anyway — and still encouraged my development along the way. The lesson I took from this experience was not, “Oh well, I guess my employees will leave us eventually,” but instead, “What can we do to help our team achieve their full potential here, own their roles and find a place to grow?”

If we give 100 percent to creating that opportunity, then we’ve done our best. If they go, we’ll support them when they do.

Cash flow is crucial

Influencer: Norty Cohen, CEO/Founder of Moosylvania

As told by Jon

My first boss at my first real job was Norty Cohen of Moosylvania.

While at Moose, my interactions with Norty were relatively limited. “Good morning,” “Have a good night,” “Oh, sure, I’d love to present the copy lines you requested to you while you grill your lunch,” and, “So wait — you didn’t actually email me about the thing I just came in and apologized for and that was actually the guys in the other room who created a fake email address in your name and now I’ve thrown myself under the bus.” Stuff like that.

But when I left Moose, Norty offered interaction in a big way. He was one of the first people who reached out, offering to advise and mentor. That in itself is amazing as I had just quit the company he owned. But what was also amazing was one of the smartest marketers in town, who had grown one of the most well-known promotional agencies in the country, had offered to help me grow my business.

I remember one lunch we had in particular in which he talked a bit about cash flow. At the time, our business was much more project-based and we found ourselves constantly fighting the ebb and flow of the bank account. Feast. Then famine. Feast. Then famine. A big project comes in, money follows, but then money quickly goes out. And then it’s peanut butter and jelly for a month or two until that wave of business came back.

Norty shared the idea of approaching every job — small or large — like a retainer.

So it’s a project. Bill it over 6-12 months like you would a retainer. It’s easier for the client, guarantees money coming in for a set amount of time, and also gets a client in the habit of paying something every month — which often sets the stage for a true retainer of sorts.

Obviously, money in your pocket is always the best case scenario. But sometimes, when it’s in your pocket all at once, it doesn’t stay there long — especially when you’re a young business and you haven’t quite earned your stripes in money management.

Since that lunch with Norty, our business has shifted to almost 100% retainer billings. That means every month, we have money coming in — guaranteed. That means Joe and I and our entire team can sleep a little easier. That also means something other than peanut butter and jelly for lunch.

Genuinely help solve problems and be rewarded

Influencer: Brian Signorelli, Principal Sales Manager at Hubspot

As told by Joe

As of early 2013, we’d been doing some form of online marketing for our clients for close to seven years. But it wasn’t until then that we crossed paths with the now marketing-software giant Hubspot. We quickly became a Hubspot partner agency, using their software to amplify the marketing work we do for ourselves and for our clients — improving results and measurability of ROI for everyone involved.

And while we thought we were just signing up to make use of a software platform, what emerged was a strong partnership with a company that’s helped us grow as an agency in ways we wouldn’t have predicted.

Brian Signorelli, who’s since moved up the ladder at Hubspot, was our first point of contact, and we consider ourselves lucky that he was assigned to us. Brian’s job was to help little marketing agencies like Gorilla become experts in implementation of Hubspot’s software so we’d be compelled to sell and implement it for our clients as well.

And wow, did he teach us how to sell. In a period of two years, our approach to growing our own business was transformed entirely. Brian helped us learn that successful selling in the business-to-business world stemmed from genuinely helping solve business problems for our potential clients, well before a contract was ever on the table.

In the year or so that followed our series of consultations with Brian, we transformed our own business development infrastructure entirely. We knew how industrial sector companies could generate profit through online marketing. That’s what we did every day. So we committed ourselves to educating on exactly that — through our marketing content, through the preliminary sales conversations that resulted from that marketing content, through the intensive consultations that followed those preliminary consultations, and straight into the multi-year client relationships that have followed those consultations. The moment we figured out how to sell by helping, rather than selling by selling, everything changed.

In the past three years we’ve nearly tripled our revenue, and we’ll readily attribute much of that growth to the transformation of our sales philosophy that Brian helped us design.

Keep taking out the trash

Influencer: Mike McClorey, retired business owner; Rodney “Smith”, Operations manager

As told by Jon

Let’s get straight to the point on this last one: In the relatively recent past, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It’s something I question sharing, and while I’m not ashamed of it, I’m definitely still not to the point of being proud of it. In fact, other than this post, which is really important to me, I don’t see myself talking about my diagnosis in a professional setting again anytime in the near future.

Back to the illness. Long story short — there’s currently no cure, only ways to manage; it’s not fatal, just can make your life kind of crappy if it gets aggressive; it’s relatively manageable, with healthy living and adherence to meds; and it’s not the end of the world — the news from the doc could have been way worse. Obviously, it’s not exactly something you want, but whatever — I’ve learned you make the best of what you’re dealt, and until this slight bump, I’d been dealt pretty favorably. According to my MS specialist, I have a relatively minimal case, have probably had it for years, and the prognosis appears to be more good than bad, especially considering my mild symptoms to date.

That said, six months ago, when my doctor told me those four words I’ll never forget, I wasn’t quite so optimistic. In fact, I was easily at an all-time low. I was didn’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed low, never-been-so-scared-in-my-life low and this-is-the-end-for-me low. And in my defense, understandably so. I was young, healthy and always one (for the most part) to stay on the straight and narrow. As you can imagine, lots and lots and lots of “Why?”s. But, I soon saw that wasn’t going to accomplish much.

But what did accomplish something was talking to others who had been there before. And it impacted me more than just on a personal level. It very much impacted me from a Gorilla perspective as well — after all, Gorilla is a huge part of who I am.

Enter Mike McClorey (introduced to me by the previously mentioned Mitch Meyers) and Rodney “Smith” (introduced to me by a client who knew about my recent news). Both Mike and Rodney have MS. Both have had MS for a long time. And both are absolutely dominating MS, their personal lives and their business dealings.

I talked at length with both, and have continued to reach out for mentorship. Mike and I meet almost monthly for lunch. And Rodney is just a phone call away. But both, early on, told me two things that are very similar in nature. “Keep taking out the trash.” “Pedal a little bit harder.” I interpreted that as keep doing the dirty work and fight through the bad days. Illness or no illness, this was strong business advice. It just took the diagnosis to make it stick. I’ve read similar advice on a million motivational posters. But now, the advice really mattered. It actually made sense. It had context.

When I met with Mike, we talked about my business. He was a successful businessman himself (he CHOSE to retire — now he’s running a farm in Missouri). He asked about our growth and such. I told him that we’re still small enough where I have to take out the trash. We finished lunch, said goodbyes and agreed to meet again.

He texted me two hours later. “Keep taking out the trash. Even if it doesn’t help your MS, it’s a good trait in a boss.” I thought about that the next time I took out the trash. And then the time after that. And still today, every time I take out the trash, I think as crappy as a job as that might be, it’s something that many with my diagnosis would love to be able to do. As long as I continue to take the trash out, I’m winning. Both against the disease and as a leader.

“The doc says my one leg is 15% weaker than my other leg. So I just pedal 15% harder with the weaker leg.”

As for Rodney, he’s a crazy talented cyclist (read: basically professional even though he won’t admit it) with MS and I called him in despair to talk about my condition. He’s originally from the St. Louis area but now lives down the road a few hours — just one of his stops in a very successful business career. I called him to seek some sort of greater truth. Some sort of deeper understanding. What can I do to fight this? What is the secret elixir? Do the diets work? Is a cure really near? His response (while on his bike)…

“The doc says my one leg is 15% weaker than my other leg. So I just pedal 15% harder with the weaker leg. That’s how I deal with it.” He told me to not let the “What ifs” become a reality.

So from both of these guys, so many lessons. MS in general as taught me much. It’s reinforced things I’d taken as cliché. Appreciate what you have, when you have it. Work hard. Do the dirty work. Fight. And just live your life.

Onward!

If there’s anything that the past ten years has taught us, it’s that there are no guarantees. All we can do is continue to prep for the future, work hard and try to be good employers and partners. If we do that, and we continue to catch a few breaks, we’ll be telling you about the 20 lessons we learned in just 10 more years. Hell, maybe we’ll even have a party.

Thanks to all who have supported us. Family, friends, clients, vendors and fellow Gorillas. We’ve been very lucky to surround ourselves with people smarter than we are. And so far, it’s paying off.

Behold: The single finest piece of content marketing I’ve ever seen

Or: Why I’m not scared about the state of content marketing

Content is king, right? Actually, there’s a fair bit of discussion going on in marketing and business circles about how content marketing is actually ruining the Internet. Pieces like this one from the Harvard Business Review, for instance, paint a picture of the practice as, at best, ineffective, and at worst one that’s making the Internet a less effective medium for sharing ideas, conducting research and connecting with people. That’s a pretty scathing indictment. It sure sounds something I’d like to distance myself from.

Or take this diatribe against the supposed drink-the-Kool-Aid culture of inbound king Hubspot, written by journalist-turned-ordinary-citizen Dan Lyons, that appeared in Fortune Magazine. While it mainly focuses on an over-the-top startup culture seeking to fashion work as a never-ending flight from anything that looks, smells or even feels like real, actual work (Infinite Jest meets HBO’s Silicon Valley, in Lyon’s retelling), Lyons has a pretty bleak outlook on content marketing’s overall objectives as well. “Buy our software: Sell more stuff,” is how he describes HubSpot’s mission. Again, not exactly the impact a young(ish) media professional is trying to make on the world.

So am I up to my eyeballs in disillusionment with content marketing? Do I spend sleepless nights pondering the social utility, or lack thereof, of the industry that I’ve entered into? No, not really. And that’s for reasons beyond the obvious irony of Lyons entering the startup fray in order to create content (a book) that he presumably hopes people will buy.

No, in the industries in which I work, people are always looking to buy. Damn good thing, too. Otherwise, hospitals wouldn’t be built, factories wouldn’t be fireproofed, bridges wouldn’t be protected from corrosion and quality control wouldn’t be conducted as well as it could be. No, companies in my industry were always going to buy (and, contra-Dan Lyons, are usually only making a few large purchasing decisions per year, not gobbling up “stuff”). I just try to use content to influence who’s involved in those transactions. And HubSpot provides a platform for me to do that. In that regard, it reminds me a lot of the old saying that technologies are morally neutral until they are applied.

So the question remains: Do I believe that content marketing can be conducted in an honest, ethical way that actually contributes to the social utility of the Internet rather than detracting from it? Damn right I do. And that, without further ado, is what leads me to introduce the single greatest piece of content marketing ever created.

Utility is king

Here it is.

The Weber Grill Guide PDF in all its glory. Rarely do I fire up the (alas, gas) grill anymore without this big beautiful piece of branded content pulled up on my phone or tablet. Allow your eyes to adjust to its brilliance for as long as needed, but then let’s take a look at the details so I can attempt to justify such a lofty claim. *

It’s simple- a five-page PDF, each introduced by the same 147 words of content.
It’s succinct- There are books upon books on the subject of backyard grilling. I’m looking at one beautifully bounded example on my shelf right now. It runs to 432 pages, including the index. But our little PDF intro copy comes with two rules of thumb: grill these cuts on direct heat and those cuts off of it. That’s the sort of advice you can keep in your brain’s back pocket.
It’s authoritative- “Cooking times for beef and lamb use the USDA’s definition of medium doneness unless otherwise noted.” For me, I’d rather you just slowly walk the cow past the grill on its way to my plate, but at least I have a trustworthy baseline from which to start. The appeal to primary and authoritative sources always does wonders for branded content.
It’s useful- This is the big one. The be-all and end-all. The sine qua non. This is the feature that keeps me consulting it every time I fire up the grill. It’s a graphically intuitive way to ballpark times for all the meats and veggies I’m likely to be cooking up on a given day. And that’s usually far more interesting to me than some lengthy tome on the art and aesthetics of cooking with outdoor ovens.

Tools like this grill guide from Weber are the reason I don’t fear for the content marketing industry or my place in it. Because this is what I strive to create for my clients. Hell, it would be a dream to create something this useful. Because this is the kind of content that can actually fundamentally change a business by helping it to become associated with more than just a product. Even Apple, a company Lyons has written about a fair bit himself, didn’t become the cultural phenomenon it did just by selling stuff. It got to that point by convincing people that it produces the kind of useful tools that creative people need to become their best, most productive selves. So while it’s true that, in my line of work, it may look more like an album of spec sheets, a tank linings comparison guide or an infographic explainer for some new EPA rules, that’s not really the point. The point is that, whatever’s meant by “content,” it had damn well better be useful.

Rather than contributing to the Internet becoming a cacophonous and shady back-alley bazaar with a screaming salesman around every corner, we can all hope to cut through the clutter with real tools and information that actually help the people we’re trying to reach. If content is king, we need a coup. Those of us this business should take it upon ourselves to stop playing herd ball, step back, and think about how we can be helping our clients and their customers. If we do that, content marketing will be just fine.

*Kyle Fiehler received no compensation, monetary or otherwise, from Weber Grills for the writing of this piece

A shout-out from our friends at Hubspot

Thanks to Brian Signorelli at Hubspot for the endorsement! Your support means much to us.

“When I started working with Gorilla in 2013, I was most impressed with two things. First, they had 95th percentile knowledge of Inbound Marketing and Lead Gen relative to the other thousand agencies HubSpot was working with.

Second, they had already come to the conclusion that specializing in an industry vertical – Industrial Sector B2B Companies — for their services would be critical to their own success and their clients’ success.

Over the past 3 years, I have used their own site as well as their clients’ sites as “best in class” examples of what effective Inbound Marketing looks like for Industrial B2B companies and other agencies aspiring to achieve predictable growth and scale continuously. I would highly recommend any sales or marketing leader in the Industrial B2B space leverage the knowledge, experience, and flawless execution capabilities that Gorilla 76 brings to the table.”

– Brian Signorelli, Principal Sales Manager at Hubspot

Doctor’s orders for smarter work

No one likes to take orders. Well, maybe a few do, but certainly not many of us, and especially those of us that are business owners. It’s probably part of the reason we started a company in the first place. So when a new business opportunity arises, and we start our consultative sales process, and the potential lead tells us what exactly it is they need, we can get a little frustrated.

This isn’t because of ego or anything like that. Instead, it’s because we believe that WE are the experts and that WE know what exactly it is that the business at hand needs.

A little perspective

A lead comes in via our website (we practice all the inbound we preach!) and initially things look like a perfect fit. Industrial, B2B and the company is just the right size. They have a marketing department, but it’s small, and it looks like we’ll be valued for our advisory capabilities, as well as our ability to execute. They have a decent backlink profile and they’re a company with which we WANT to work.

Perfect.

And then we hear something like the following: “I need a new website.” “I need a print campaign.” “I need new branding.”

The requests come in a variety of combinations. And sometimes, they’re not 100% misguided. The business DOES need something they’ve identified. However often, they need something a little different than what they think. And that doesn’t mean bigger…in fact, maybe what they need is smaller.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard “I need a huge new website” when really what a business needed was more leads out of their current website. Or how many times we’ve heard “I need to run a print ad campaign to increase exposure” when really what’s needed is a solid SEO effort in order to increase brand awareness in a consultative manner (think: thought leadership via educational content). The symptoms are thought to be many and the perceived needed meds vary. But from experience (and lots of it at that), if a lead is a B2B industrial company, we can almost always guarantee the path to recovery includes more traffic to a website, more leads for the sales team, and/or a way to nurture cold and lukewarm opportunities until they’re ready to buy. And we know the best tools to do such.

Do businesses know best?

But for some reason, sometimes our potential clients don’t want to trust our expertise. They’re willing to pay us a large sum of money to do work for them, but they don’t want to take our recommendations on what works best. They look at the relationship as if they’re having a really expensive dinner and we’re nothing more than a waiter. Sure, they might listen to our recommendation to try the pepperloin, as it’s a house specialty and the recipe hasn’t been tweaked since the 60s. But ultimately, they’re going to pick what sounds appetizing.

They simply want to place an order. We need them to shift that thinking.

We need them to think of us as a doctor. They present their symptoms, we prescribe what we know is tried, true and tested. Results are good. They’re smiling. We’re smiling. The relationship grows, and business is better for everyone.

Okay, a little more perspective…

When visiting the doctor, do you tell him/her what you need? Or do you explain your symptoms and trust the good doc for the solve? For me, it’s certainly the latter. After all, I can’t even hope to have the expertise that these well-educated folks have.

Don’t get me wrong – I can WebMD with the best of them, but when it comes to a true course of action, I’m not going to trust anyone with my health other than someone who is an expert. Why wouldn’t you do the same with your marketing?

One-off SEO vs. a Long Term Partnership

Historically, different online marketing channels have been siloed to different departments or agencies. In 2010 it made a lot of sense to have a search engine optimization department responsible for building links and optimizing your on-page SEO. However, 2016 is a much different time. The merger of content and virtually every online marketing channel means smart industrial marketers need to rethink how they approach SEO and online marketing on the whole. Just as website RFPs have become a thing of the past, so have one-and-done SEO campaigns.

As someone with a background in SEO, I view SEO as one piece of the larger marketing pie. 90% of the time I’d recommend a long-term partnership that can grow with your online lead generation strategy. But if you’re set on hiring an agency to perform an SEO campaign for your site, let me describe the only situation where I’d recommend one-off SEO services…

You’re a nationally recognized brand that has already built 10s of 1000s of backlinks to your site

Backlinks are the cornerstone of SEO. Links from authoritative domains tell Google your site (and by extension your company) is an authority in your respective field. Backlinks work in tandem with your keyword research, setting limits for what keywords you can and cannot pursue. Want to rank for “car loans” in Google? You’d better have a backlink profile of 1000+ authoritative domains linking to your site, because the competition on that results page does have that kind of authority.

Not sure if your site has an appropriate amount of backlinks to compete in your niche? Download the Majestic plugin and use it on your site to check the number of referring domains linking to your site. Now check 5 of your main competitors domains. If the number of referring domains is significantly higher on your competitors’ sites, chances are they’re dominating Google for competitive terms, and you’ll need to rethink your SEO strategy.

However, if you have more referring domains than most of your competitors, technical SEO changes could have a significant impact. If you aren’t observing best SEO practices, chances are some small tweaks to your site structure, title tags, H1s, site speed, etc. could make a big difference in your rankings. You might have dead links on your site that can be redirected for huge gains in link authority. Or you might have indexation issues that can be fixed with a few tweaks to the back end. In these cases, you’ll find one-off SEO can have a huge impact.

Here’s the problem: Most of the time you aren’t dealing with an authoritative site.

If you’re in the industrial niche, you’re not exactly posting the sexiest content on the web. Unless you’re a huge player with national (or international) recognition, links from other sites are hard to come by in this industry. On average, our clients’ backlink profiles have closer to 100 or fewer referring domains when we first start working together. They’re usually relatively smaller companies that compete with the big boys in their industry.

Here’s the other problem: You’re not just competing with your direct competitors. You’re competing with every Tom, Dick and Harry that wants to write about [insert your keyword here]. Google has an index of over 30 trillion web pages, so you need to take into account every website that writes about your product or service.

Let’s say you’re a HVAC service company. How many web pages do you think exist with the “HVAC” in the title? If you guessed 375,000, you’re right!

Here’s the point: Everyone is competing for organic search real estate, inadvertently or purposefully. One-off SEO services aren’t going to have a big impact unless you’re a big fish. And even if you are a big fish, you’re in a huge pond of 30 trillion fish (and rising).

One last point: If you don’t have conversion paths in place to convert traffic into leads, you’re not going to benefit from ANY increase in traffic. Instead of hoping one-off SEO will act as some kind of magic bullet that ranks your website, you should look into how SEO can function as part of a holistic inbound marketing strategy.

Why a holistic, long-term online marketing strategy is better for 90% of industrial companies

If you’re starting to feel like one-off SEO isn’t quite right, one alternative is a long-term partnership with an online marketing agency.

You probably have a lot of questions about what kind of agency to hire. Should you hire a PPC agency? SEO? Content marketing? Social media? Inbound? Are any of these services right for your company?

But before you start vetting agencies, ask yourself this question:

What do you want your digital marketing efforts to accomplish?

This will make your hiring decision much clearer. Bottom-line: You want an agency that can deliver results that help your business. This usually means a mix of the methods mentioned above. Digital marketing, and by extension SEO, isn’t an “a la carte” service—it’s a holistic approach that needs to integrate with your business.

If your SEO, PPC or content marketing efforts are driving 100% more visitors to your site, but you’re not converting any of those new visitors into leads, there’s really no benefit to that traffic. For example, we used Facebook’s “ad network” to grow our traffic by 25% in 1 month! But when looking at the engagement metrics for those visitors, visitors were bouncing before even visiting another page. Turns out those “ad network” ads were low quality banner ads you see on the bottom of Candy Crush. Point being, an agency needs to promise more than just traffic—they need to promise real leads that can be tied to direct ROI.

If you’re going to hire an agency for the long haul, your contract should explicitly state long-term goals that can be achieved over the course of the agreement. The great thing about digital marketing is that the goals you create are based on tangible results that can be evaluated on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. For example, increase traffic by 50% year over year and drive up the number of consultation form submissions to the website by 75% year over year.

There’s a huge amount of accountability in digital marketing, and your agency can make adjustments to their strategy over the course of the contract to improve results. If the results aren’t satisfactory by the end of the contract, there’s no obligation to continue. If the results are excellent, that might be cause to renew and “put a little more gas on the fire.”

If you approach SEO or any online marketing activity as a magic bullet, you’ll likely be disappointed with the results. If, however, you treat your online marketing as an evolving process that can continually increase awareness, drive leads and fill up your sales pipeline with qualified leads, a long-term commitment is the only viable option.

For more information on marketing in the industrial sector, check out the Gorilla 76 industrial marketing blog.

7 Ground rules for successful industrial services marketing

Let’s face it, selling and marketing industrial services can be a marathon. Potentially lengthy sales cycles, boardroom presentations, bid lists and intense competition — it takes perseverance and a heavy dose of critical thinking to succeed. Fundamentally, providing industrial services has always been about listening to customers and helping them solve problems with value-added insights. Today, industrial services marketing is following suit, with value-added insights baked into the core of marketing strategies.

We’re in the midst of a shift from self-promotional outbound marketing to educational Inbound marketing. Today’s customers have all the information at their disposal online. No longer reliant on sales teams to reveal basic information, the way they discover service providers has fundamentally and forever changed. To stand out, you’ll need a customer centric marketing program — one that meets them on their terms and earns their trust through thought leadership and informative content.

1. Know your customers

Start your marketing efforts with an accurate understanding of your customers and their challenges. Then, you can tailor your message and marketing efforts.

At Gorilla 76, our strategic marketing programs begin and end with the customer. Specifically, we create detailed buyer personas to help define who our marketing efforts are speaking to — these personas include characteristics such as:

Customer pain points and challenges
What they value about service providers
Where they go for information on solutions
Their company and professional roles
How they impact the purchasing process
And other key elements

The process of creating personas typically involves interviews with sales staff and possibly customers.

2. Go where your customers are — online

They say the best way to catch the fish is to go where they’re at. Increasingly, purchasers are researching their decisions online. There’s even significant traffic for niche services, as purchasers now complete more than two thirds of their research online before contacting a sales team.

It’s for this reason we recommend most b2b industrial companies invest in a website that uses proper search engine optimization to draw traffic. While we don’t recommend a website redesign for the sake of having a shiny, new site, investing in a strong website is often a first step in a modern b2b marketing strategy.

3. Give them a taste of your secret sauce to earn their trust and bring them to you

Marketing efforts should strengthen your position as a consultative solutions provider, getting your foot in the door to start conversations in-person or over the phone. In today’s world, that means publishing useful information online. Use your unique expertise to add value, much like you would if a customer sought you out for a consultation and value-added solutions. Publish articles and web pages that answer your customer’s commonly asked questions and help them solve problems.

As you become their source of objective information, you’ll become their trusted advisor — exactly what you want as a service provider. It just may be the difference between having a customer for a day versus having a customer for a lifetime.

Once prospects visit your website, you can generate leads with proper conversion optimization on your website. Over time, you’ll be able to create a steady pipeline of qualified leads coming to you and save money otherwise spent on expensive trade show marketing or ads.

4. Your sales cycle can be long — make your marketing go the distance

Industrial services aren’t like consumer products. It often takes time to establish rapport with your prospects, and making contact is sometimes just the first step in guiding them through a long purchasing process. Your industrial services marketing should go the distance with content that serves customers throughout their purchasing cycle — as they become aware of and study their challenges, consider potential solutions and evaluate solutions providers. We recommend coordinating email lead nurturing and marketing automation with your ongoing, in-person sales efforts. Then, you can provide your prospects useful information at the right time, staying top of mind as they move toward making a purchase.

We’ve seen firsthand how a smart lead nurturing campaign can help close a major deal.

5. Demonstrate results for clients

As prospects move closer to making a purchasing decision, they’ll narrow their possible industrial service providers to a short list. A strong marketing plan will qualify you with latter-stage prospects by demonstrating the results you can deliver. For this purpose, nothing beats a strong library of case studies or an exceptional project portfolio on your website. In addition to qualifying you on the web, these resources can be adapted as sales collateral for in-person meetings.

6. Pick your battles

In the competitive space of web marketing, it takes a focused strategy to achieve results. You’ll need to select a specific topic and keywords core to your business — and you’ll need to own them. At Gorilla 76, we help you hone in on the specific strategies you can use to rank in Google search, draw traffic and generate leads. Learn more in our tried and true Growth Gorilla program.

7. Measure results

No industrial services marketing plan is complete without measuring results. We’ve published a thorough but easy-to-read guide that shows you step-by-step how to measure online Marketing ROI — and prove your strategies work. Click here to download the guide.

Out of the office reply: A few thoughts on building a Gorilla

I’m writing this post as I sit in the backseat of a Ford pickup on my way to Nevada…Missouri. It’s pronounced Ne-VAY-dah around these parts. Don’t ask – it’s a “Missoura” thing. I’m going snow goose hunting. It’s late winter. The temps are trending up. And the birds are moving north for the Spring. It’s Tuesday. I left work early. And I’m not going to the office tomorrow. Or Thursday.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m one of THOSE “bosses.” A real “work from the golf course” type. And you know what? That assumption is fair this week. I think my employees would agree with me when I say it’s not the norm though. But this week – I’m putting my trust in them.

You see, with each hire we’ve made at Gorilla, we’ve made ourselves stronger. Not stronger in the sense that we can only take on more work and spread tasks out amongst more folks, but stronger in the sense that we have the right people in the right seats as well.

When Joe and I started Gorilla, it was just the two of us. I wrote. He designed. We both serviced accounts. We wore lots of hats. And while most of them fit, they didn’t all fit the way they should. For instance, project management. While I’m a relatively organized person, I wouldn’t put myself in the category of being detail obsessed. Which is an issue when you’re managing a big website build. Joe, he could hack his way through code, and even did at times, but again, not an area of expertise or passion. We were wearing the hats. And lots of them at that. But we didn’t look good in them. They weren’t our style.

Today, our roles continue to evolve. Sure, I’m trained in writing; however long-form isn’t my specialty. But our writing team – they excel in this format. So our clients are much better off if their content is written by one of our writers than if it was written by me. Furthermore, our clients benefit if I can keep an eye on their strategy from a macro level, as well as make sure that their Gorilla team is happy, well-trained and up-to-speed on best inbound practices and technology. That’s where my time is now best spent.

So even though the day-to-day of the founders / owners has changed, Gorilla still marches on. The copy is still being written. And it’s better than ever. The design is still being done. And it’s stronger than ever. The accounts are still being managed. And in a more organized fashion than ever. Joe and I are focusing our time on making this place better each day. Our goal is to become the absolute best industrial marketing agency in the land. We’re pitching work, negotiating contracts, building company culture, training employees, modifying curriculum, coordinating client strategy and even still taking out the trash (a duty that, believe it or not, I want to keep until the day I depart from Gorilla). We’re running this agency in the manner we best see fit and we’ll do whatever it takes to build the best, strongest Gorilla in the industrial marketing space.

Fast-forward a few days

As for the snow goose hunt, not a bad trip at all. I kept up with email from the field and came home with a cooler full of fresh, organic, farm-to-table eats. All while trusting my team every hour I was out of the office and in the field.

Tactical guide for B2B companies to getting content picked up by industry journals

So, you’ve put in a great deal of time and work into a new piece of content that you’re positive will drive traffic. You’ve done everything you’re supposed to do with an SEO-focused piece. You’ve read up on the importance of B2B writing that informs, you’ve researched exactly how link building for industrial companies works, and you’re sure none of your competitor’s pieces can even compare. Maybe you’re already dreaming about the number of leads that will start coming in. There’s no way that it won’t be picked up by industry journals, RIGHT??

Well, it’s not as simple as that. There are a few more pieces to the puzzle of getting content picked up.

Why you need to get content picked up by industry journals

For your B2B company, creating informative, timely content for industrial journals should be a part of your marketing strategy. Think of it this way: Create high-quality content for high-quality industry publications that will link back to your site. Getting more authoritative backlinks will improve your rankings in a Google Search. This is also an opportunity to grow your audience by reaching those who visit industry relevant journals. You get to expand your reach and have fresh new eyes on your content. It’s important to become well-known in the industry and position yourself as an authority in your niche to help drive traffic. This should all be a part of your link building strategy.

Now let’s dig into the actual process.

1. Do your research

What is the very first step of writing any great piece of content? Research, research, research! The same step applies to pitching your content. This key stage seems to be overlooked A LOT. Take some time to actually research what the publication is about so that: 1. You get high-quality, industry-relevant publications that you can get authoritative backlinks from. 2. When pitching to the editor, you’ll be able to customize and make the pitch more personal. 3. You won’t look like an idiot who’s pitching content to a site that covers nothing about that subject matter.

Know who their target audience is

A great starting place is the “About Us” section of a site. This part typically summarizes exactly who their audience is, what type of content they include, and whether or not they will accept outside content. If this site seems relevant to your piece of content, keep researching the site. Once you find the editor (an actual name!), take a look at their Twitter and Linkedin profiles to get an even better idea of who they are. Take note of anything that could be attention grabbing and worth referring to in your email.

Read through some of their articles

This is self-explanatory, but reading through past articles will give you further clues as to what type of content they want featured on their site. You can also figure out what section your piece of content would make sense under. For example, would it make sense under the “News” section? Or maybe it belongs somewhere a little more specific? Take note of this to use in your email pitch that we’ll talk about later.

Use Google Search Operators to see if they’ve covered your topic in the past

These search operators will help you get more specific results and will save you a lot of time in your research process. Let’s say I want to know if a site covers plastics. This is what I would type into Google:

site:www.manufacturingglobal.com “plastics”

The very first Google result is exactly what I was looking for on the site, a page about plastics. Therefore, I know that Manufacturing Global definitely covers this topic. There are a variety of search operators you can use to make your research process run smoothly.

Once you’ve built a list of relevant, high authority publications that you can pitch your content to, you can move on to actually writing the pitch.

2. The nitty-gritty of pitching

Has a stranger ever come up to you and asked to borrow your car and your immediate response was “YES, of course!!” and you threw your keys at them without even batting an eye? No? You would never do that, right? No, that would be crazy. So, let’s start from the beginning before we ask any favors.

Introduce yourself

It’s as simple as that. Start out by introducing whom you are. Imagine a face-to-face conversation. Tell them your name, let them know who you’re working with, and even ask how they’re doing. Start out each cold email pitch in this way.

Keep it conversational

In most cases, there’s no reason to sound like you’re speaking on behalf of the Queen of England. Write in your own voice to make it sound more personal and sincere.

Provide something of value

Remember this key point: it’s about their audience, so your content should provide immense value to them. Explain to the editor what value your piece of content will bring. How will it benefit and help their audience? Why should they pick up your piece? Explain these details to the editor. Remember those notes you took earlier on the editor? Now’s the time to bring those up. Mention the specific section you think your content should live under. Did you learn from her Twitter that what inspired her to enter into this profession was a life-changing trip? Don’t be afraid to mention that you saw her Tweet about it! This is your chance to make a lasting impression and create a long-term relationship.

End with a question

Every email sent between you and an editor should end in a question. This is your chance to ask for a specific call-to-action. For example, you can ask: “Would you be interested in publishing this article in the industry news section of your site?” or “I would love to hear from an expert, could you give me some feedback on this article?” Asking questions like these is a way to make the editor feel more motived to respond. Does that make sense?

Attention grabbing subject line

This is one of the most important parts to pitching. I like to save this part for last. It’s the first thing that editors will see in their inbox. It takes a fraction of a second to determine whether an email is relevant or not. This is your opportunity to capture an editor’s attention long enough to make them want to open your email. Spend some time thinking about how you’ll do that and look at more tips to improve your email marketing subject lines.

Keep it short

Editors are bombarded with hundreds of emails a week. The quicker you can get to the point, the more likely they’ll read the whole thing. Oh, and they’ll appreciate that you didn’t send them an essay-length email. Check out one of my favorite articles on how to email busy people.

3. Follow up!

So, you’ve gotten some replies and maybe even some industry journals have agreed to pick up your content, congrats! But don’t stop there, there’s more work to do.

For those who haven’t responded

Follow up about two days later. Remember that editors are busy and they may have overlooked or meant to come back to your email later. Send a follow-up email saying that you wanted to “check in to see what their thoughts were on that article.” Don’t forget to end the email with a question like we talked about above. Be sure to keep this email on the short side as well.

For those who have responded

Congratulations! You’ve built a new relationship and have opened the doors to keep the conversation going. Whether or not they’ve picked up the piece, mention that you’re currently working on creating another great piece that you think their audience will absolutely love and you’ll be sure to send it over. They’ll be more likely to pick up pieces from you in the future if they’ve deemed you as an industry thought leader.

Getting started

Getting content picked up by industrial journals is an art. There’s a great deal of time and effort needed to be placed into the promotional side of each piece you plan to push out. Having a great piece of content just doesn’t cut it anymore. An inbound marketing company can help you reach out to these publications and generate the right kind of website traffic. Gorilla 76 is an agency that offers both content writing and promotion services. We can work with you to build a targeted content strategy that is results driven. Click here to request a free consultation.

Link Building For Industrial Companies

What is Link Building?

Simply put, link building involves getting backlinks to pages on your site from other sites. If you’ve ever linked out to another site from your site, you’ve effectively “built a link” to that website owner’s site. External links from other websites, or “backlinks” are an important part of Google’s algorithm. Backlinks are essentially “votes” for your website from another website. Let’s see how this plays out with an example from the industrial world.

If you do a quick Google search for “construction equipment” you’ll see John Deere’s construction equipment page ranking 2^nd or 3^rd for the term. You might think John Deere ranks because it’s a well-known brand, or because John Deere provides some useful information about construction equipment that’s relevant to the searcher. What you might not realize is that this page has over 3,000 backlinks pointing to it, and the John Deere domain (deere.com) has over 6 million backlinks. That’s not just correlation, folks; backlinks are an incredibly important ranking factor that function under the hood of your site.

Let’s dig further into exactly why Google uses backlinks to rank pages and how link building has changed over time.

Why Link Building Matters: PageRank

Clearly links help sites rank, but are they really that important? One of Google’s original algorithms, and what separated it from other search engines in the late 90s, was PageRank. While other early 90s search engines were only using on-page factors like keyword density to determine rankings, Google used PageRank to use information from other sites to determine a pages rankings. The geniuses at Google came up with the following algorithm:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn/C(Tn))

Before you smash your head into your keyboard, here’s the big takeaway:

Google uses PageRank to get input from other sites about your site. Each link from another site is essentially a “vote” for your site, meaning that site is endorsing your site for whatever their web page is about.
They tally up these “votes” and assign your page a PageRank, which is a major factor in their overall ranking algorithm.
More links = more PageRank = higher rankings.

PageRank is arguably still the most important ranking factor, but almost all SEO experts agree that backlinks in general are still incredibly important. Google cares about the quantity of backlinks pointing to your website, but Google also cares about the quality of your backlinks.

Link Quantity vs. Quality

Google wants to provide the best search results possible. Their business model doesn’t work if their search results aren’t excellent. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on Google, chances are you’ll switch to another search engine like Bing or Duck Duck Go. That’s why bad search results caused by people gaming Google’s PageRank system are detrimental to Google’s business model. PageRank was the foundation for Google’s search engine, but they certainly didn’t stop there. Dubious marketers and SEOs who abused the PageRank algorithm forced Google to consider both the quantity and quality of backlinks.

How nefarious marketers capitalized on backlinks affecting SEO

People quickly realized PageRank was an important ranking factor and developed spammy strategies to manipulate rankings. Link exchanges, link farms and other link schemes became rampant. If you’ve ever seen comments sections with nonsense anchor text like “Buy Louie Vuitton Purse” spammed 100 times, you’ve seen a link building scheme in action. The idea is to get thousands of backlinks to specific pages using keyword-rich anchor text (the blue text containing the hyperlink) by whatever means necessary.

Google cracked down on this sort of spam manually, but eventually they developed the Penguin algorithm in 2012 to detect link building schemes and penalize perpetrators algorithmically.

Now-a-days, good digital marketers are hesitant to engage in blackhat SEO activities, because we’ve seen Google crack down on link schemes to better their search results.

Here’s the problem: PageRank still matters in 2016. In fact, according to an industry survey done by Moz, page-level link features (e.g. PageRank) are the second most important ranking factors. Google has evolved, and now the quality of your backlinks matters as well; a link from a crappy directory carries less weight than a link from an industry publication referencing your site as a credible source.

The bottom-line is you still need to build links in order to rank pages, but you need to be smart about how you build them.

Building backlinks the right way

Backlinks can’t be bought anymore (well they can be, but don’t—just don’t). Instead, smart marketers are using content marketing to build links. The idea is simple: create amazing content that people will want to link to.

However, you can’t stop there. 2 million blog posts are written every day, so you’ll need to make amazing content AND promote it. There are hundreds of link building tactics, but I’m going to share the most effective tactic for industrial companies: guest publishing.

What is Guest Publishing and Why Should I Use it?

Effective guest publishing entails writing content for high-quality industry publications and getting links back to content on your site. This has two huge benefits. First, you can link back to your content with keyword-rich anchor text, which will help content on your site rank for specific terms. Second, you’ll get highly qualified referral traffic back to your site from the links on these industry publications—which is where your audience lives, after all.

We’ve seen clients get 5+ leads directly from a single guest article on an industry publication. If your guest content is informative and useful, referral visits will naturally occur, as potential customers look for more information from your company to solve their problems. You establish your brand as a thought leader, with the added SEO benefit.

Here’s how this looks in action, using “construction equipment” as an example:

Write an excellent piece of content about construction equipment. Include your keyword in the title tag, h1, h2s and sprinkled throughout your copy.
Write a timely article that talks about how construction equipment has changed over the past few years, trends and advances in the technology. Make sure to insert a link to the construction equipment piece living on your site.
Find relevant construction industry publications online that cover different kinds of construction equipment.
Pitch those publications your article. Ideally you’ll get 10-15% of the publications to pick up the article.
Keep an eye on your rankings—you should see some movement!

Guest Blogging vs. Guest Publishing

Guest blogging, a close relative to guest publishing, has come under attack from Google in the past couple years. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, explicitly denounced guest blogging in a 2014 article, and many content marketers and SEOs swore off guest blogging. However, I’m going to make the distinction right now; guest publishing is not guest blogging. Cutts is referring to spamming guest blogs on low quality sites, which falls within the category of a link scheme. In many cases, guest blogs end up on irrelevant sites and won’t bring in any referral traffic.

The key difference between guest blogging and guest publishing is that you should want to be published on a guest publication. These are the kind of sites you get to brag to your boss about (pro tip: when you get published, throw out the buzzword “thought leadership” for nods of approval from the higher-ups).

Guest blogging is hazardous and ineffective in the long term; guest publishing is a safe and effective over the long haul.

Getting Started

As you’ve likely gathered, this tactic takes A LOT of work. You need a steady stream of high quality content to really get the “link juice” flowing, which is where an inbound marketing agency can really shine. We happen to be such an agency, offering both content writing services and promotion. We’ve seen this strategy work, and we’d love to develop a similar plan for you. Click here to request a free consultation.

How to achieve industrial marketing success in 2016

IHS Engineering360 recently published a fantastic study called “2015 Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector” (which I’d highly recommend downloading). Their data – drawn from a survey of 1403 technical professionals in the industrial sector – supports the main point of this article:

As industrial professionals spend more of their time gathering information online, those of us who sell our products and services to industrial professionals MUST begin shifting our marketing spend online accordingly.

Sound intimidating? Well, here’s the good news. Industrial marketing in a traditional sense may have focused on subjective goals like “grow awareness among our target audience” or “improve our brand image”. But the measurability of online marketing initiatives allows us set more concrete, tangible goals like “grow targeted website traffic by X%, generate Y sales-qualified leads/month through our website and attribute Z dollars in sales to contacts that originated through online media sources”. Here’s how this looks in practice: “Target the term wood plastic composite to grow search engine traffic by 100 visits a month, convert 5% of those visitors into leads, convert 5 of those leads into 1 $30,000-$50,000 contract.”

In theory, that should be music to your ears. Real numbers mean measurable ROI. But often, the challenge lies in simply getting started. So let’s help you do just that. I want to start by taking a look a two specific stats from the IHS Engineering360 study:

77% of engineers use digital media to find components, equipment, services and suppliers
66% of engineers use digital media to compare produces across suppliers

Here’s what those two stats should mean to you:

More than three out of four engineers are looking online for something you can offer or some kind of problem you can solve. Your prospects are searching on Google, Bing and Yahoo. They’re utilizing their LinkedIn networks. They’re browsing industry directories. You job is to make sure they discover YOU.
Two out of three engineers are researching and evaluating their options online. So under the assumption those potential customers can discover you in the first place, will they find the content on your website more helpful than that of your competition? Is what they find enough to prompt a real sales conversation with you?

Illustrating the solution

Taking into account the two statistics we just examined, here’s how a scenario with a new prospective customer might play out under the guidance of a smart industrial marketing strategy:

Your prospect (since we don’t yet know his name, we’ll call him Prospect) has a business problem. And Prospect’s problem happens to be one that your company is really good at solving.
Prospect searches Google, using a variety of different keywords in attempt to find information and resources that will help him solve that problem.
Because your company is an expert on the topic, you’ve written a handful of related articles on your website. Prospect discovers one of these articles in his Google search and clicks through to read it.
He finds the article helpful – like a few of the other information sources he’s found online. But he needs more than this 500-word intro to the topic he’s researching.
Because you’re a smart marketer, you’ve left a big call-to-action button at the bottom of your article, suggesting that Prospect downloads a more comprehensive 10-page PDF guide to learn about that topic in greater detail.
So Prospect fills out a form, providing his name, company name, email address and phone number in exchange for the guide.
Just like that, Prospect now has a name. It’s Jim. And your salesman gets an immediate email alert that Jim has downloaded your guide.
Your salesman does a quick search for Jim and his company and determines that he looks like a qualified lead for your company.
So while Jim’s digging into your guide and the other resources he’s gathered online, your salesman calls and leaves Jim a voicemail, offering a short consultation. Jim receives an email follow-up with similar message.
Because Jim doesn’t feel like he’s being bombarded by a pushy salesman, but rather, an industry expert who’s offering to help, he happily replies to the email and schedules a consultation.
In the meantime, none of your competitors call Jim because they’re busy putting address labels on direct mailers and hoping someone calls them with a purchase order.

This is no secret recipe. The idea here is very simple. Your buyers ARE looking for information online – solutions to problems, product specs, specific services, suppliers, partners. The data tells us this is true. And you can help them. So in 2016, begin channeling your time and marketing budget into becoming the best information source possible for those buyers. Our complete guide for B2B industrial marketing details how to become an educational resource for your customers on page 22, and you can download it below.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

5 ways to get started with online industrial marketing in 2016

Answer five common questions your sales team gets from customers with short 500 to 1000-word articles on your website. You already know what those problems are. Put them in writing and publish them.
Create your first opportunity to capture a lead through download of a white paper, product catalog, case study or informational guide. Give an anonymous website visitor who’s in the research phase of the buying process a reason to give you his contact information so you can take control of the sales conversation.
Pitch an educational article to an industry publication. You probably share an audience with a lot of industry journals. And many of those journals are hungry for helpful content to publish both in their print and online media sources. Offer to write a guest article about one of those problems you commonly solve. Make sure it’s educational – not promotional.
Take three hours to educate yourself on SEO (search engine optimization). If you play any role in marketing and your company and you haven’t yet read The Beginners Guide to SEO on Moz.com, there’s no better use of your time.
Spend 20 minutes/week inside Google Analytics. If not yet installed, ask the administrator of your website to install it for you. That’s a 10-minute job. Google Analytics will help you understand the content your visitors are actually viewing on your site, how they’re discovering you and what’s contributing to them becoming (or not becoming) real leads.

In Summary

The industrial sector is ripe with opportunity for online business development. Industrial buyers are getting younger, and as the data shows, more of their time and energy is being focused online. Whether you hire an outside B2B marketing consultant to help design your strategy and execute your plan of action, or go at it alone, make 2016 the year you shift that marketing budget online and get a step ahead of your competitors.

5 B2B Marketing tactics to rethink for 2016

The end of the year is creeping up on us. The latkes have been eaten and the candles have been lit. Last minute online Christmas shopping is taking place during lunch breaks. New years plans are being finalized. I’m personally buying swimsuits on sale as I countdown the days I leave for Mexico for the holidays. Season’s greetings indeed 😉

But before we rush out the door for our holiday plans it might be worth reviewing 2015 and rethinking some outdated marketing tactics. What better time to ditch the old and welcome the new than January 2016. Here are 5 B2B marketing tactics you might want to update for the New Year.

Puffed up press releases

Press releases shouldn’t be eliminated from your marketing strategy, but they definitely have a specific time and place. The purpose of a press release is to make an announcement boosting your brand, and although it allows for bragging rights, it doesn’t do much to fix your consumer’s problems. A reader may be impressed by a press release, but they most likely won’t read it more than once and they do very little to attract new followers. And as for less established brands major publications and people in general just aren’t as interested.

What you can do instead

Blog. If you have a blog not only can you post your announcement you can include useful and relevant information to your reader. You can add value to the information. And value makes people read, click and share. When you have an active blog you don’t have to rely on others to get the message out – you get to control it.

Costly tradeshows

I understand the impulse to attend tradeshows. In person events allow for relationships to grow. You feel accomplished as people approach you and you hand out more and more business cards. The problem is people aren’t attending tradeshows. In fact, more than half of all industrial professionals (53%) did not attend in-person tradeshows. Is it really worth the expense (and yes it is very expensive) if no one is going?

What you can do instead

Webinars are filling the in-person tradeshow void. It still allows interactions between technical professionals and vendors without the additional cost of booths, hotels, and travel. Webinars were the second most effective B2B tactic in 2015 and they will most likely continue to increase in popularity in 2016. These online events allow for a face-to-face interaction without all the baggage (literally).

Print trade magazines

If you’re still buying ad space in print trade magazines that’s a problem. I get it; you want to stay in front of your audience. Well, guess what your audience isn’t even subscribing to printed trade magazines. Across all age groups (yes all age groups, not just millennials) readers are subscribing to digital publications instead of print magazines. “In 2015 technical professional are subscribing to an average of 4.4 digital publications versus an average of 1.4 printed trade magazines, a difference of more than threefold.” THREE-FOLD (I decided to bold it just in case you missed it). And no offense but even those that are subscribing to print magazines are most likely breezing through your ad space.

What you can do instead

You should build links back to your website by having digital publications publish your posts (you know the ones I talked about earlier). Many publications are starved for content and you might already have something relevant from your blog that you can offer. This not only allows you to be in front of your audience in a meaningful way, it also helps increase qualified traffic to your website. And it doesn’t have to be just a blog post. You can also offer visual content, such as an infographic. Creating and promoting infographics was the B2B marketing tactic that had the greatest increase in usage in 2015, and digital publications have been eating them up.

Content with no strategy

Writing a bunch of blog posts is great. You could write thousands and thousands of words, but without a strategy, it will have no impact. It’s not just about content; it’s about the personas, the channels, and the keywords. Your content needs a purpose and you won’t achieve your goal without a content strategy.

What you can do instead

Document a content strategy. It’s not enough to just say it because let’s be honest it will be forgotten. Not only will the content strategy be forgotten, the thinking behind the strategy will also be overlooked. And the thought process is the most important part. In the B2B world, 35% say they have a documented strategy and those who do, rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness (60%). “If you want to be an effective content marketer, you need a documented strategy (not just a verbal one!)”

Catering to your aging audience

A lot of the B2B marketing tactics I’ve listed above still exist because there is a misconception that older generations are “stuck in their ways”. They like tradeshows and print publications. Press releases are a sign of success and content strategy is a made up marketing term. Maybe some of that is true, but people over 35 are using digital channels for a plethora reasons including research and purchasing decisions.

What you can do instead

You should always try to cater to the most important people in your audience, but it is also worth fostering new relationships with the younger generation of technical professionals. To end my blog post, I will quote IHS engineering research for digital media. “With almost half of the engineering workforce becoming eligible for retirement in the next few years, you must build digital channels to gather information.”

I hope you consider some of these ideas for your marketing plans in 2016.

Happy Holidays!

There’s no killer content without killer strategy

It’s maddening. You’re publishing great articles on your website but not seeing results. Maybe traffic has spiked but that hasn’t translated into leads or customers. Before you throw in the towel, let me just say, I get it. I’ve been there when results don’t seem to roll in despite the best writing efforts.

But I’ve also seen the results brands can achieve with a little strategic brainpower. Content can and should lead to new business. If it doesn’t, the content strategy is probably lacking. Many companies try to do too much with any given blog post. And the content isn’t serving a specific purpose tied to one, tangible marketing goal. Each piece you publish should help you do primarily one of three things:

Build a targeted audience by growing website traffic
Convert website visitors into leads
Turn those leads into customers

Building your targeted audience

Traditionally, most b2b brands have built awareness through print ads, trade show attendance, targeted sponsorships and the dogged pursuit of press coverage. But with so many ways to disseminate branded content today, publishing has never presented more opportunity. Now’s the chance to “own” an audience, not just rent one with ads or hope a news feature brings customers. Owning an audience means creating a steady pipeline of potential new customers who visit your media assets. For most b2b industrial companies, the most important asset is the tried and true company website and blog.

But what content brings the right people to your website? While there are a thousand and one ways to skin this cat, I’ll cover three of the most popular ways, the ones most relevant to the majority of b2b industrial companies:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Guest publishing
Your business’ social media pages

SEO-focused content

With so much traffic online, you could develop an entire brand awareness strategy on SEO alone. According to a recent, comprehensive study from IHS Engineering360, 58 percent of technical professionals don’t make contact with suppliers until the latter stages of the purchasing process and 89 percent turn to Google for purchasing information. That means people are researching decisions without the help of a sales staff. Unless you publish informative content, not just promotional content, you won’t reach the majority of those looking into a purchase. So, if you’re trying to draw website traffic by ranking for specific searches, you’ll need to publish content that’s educational and fully SEO-focused. What does that look like?

For one article, select one keyword and give people searching that term the information they want. Think of it this way. Billions of people search for answers to their questions each day. Search engines have a mission to show only the best answers. To rank on page one of Google for a keyword and draw website traffic, your blog posts must provide the best answers. If you want to rank for “building demolition costs,” answer the who, what, where, when, how and why of building demolition costs. Don’t muddle your posts and hurt your rankings by making your SEO-targeted content promotional, turning it into rants about misperceptions of your industry or using them as arguments for why customers shouldn’t skimp on budget. SEO-focused content is about giving researchers the information they want. And when you do, you’ll get results.

The other common mistake people make is assuming that simply writing a good article will get you traffic. Sometimes, it can. But for the best results, you’ll first want a well optimized website that’s built on a solid structure with the right core page content.

Guest publishing

Guest articles present another great opportunity. By submitting articles to industry publications, journals or blogs, you can tap into their audiences to grow your own. Put a link in those guest articles and drive readers back to informative content on your website. Not only will you draw traffic, the links back to your website will help your content rank higher in Google search results. To get an article picked up, you’ll need to follow publisher guidelines, pitch content to an editor and submit something worth publishing — something informative and tailored to the publication’s audience. But the rewards are worth it. In addition to growing traffic and improving rankings, you’ll become a thought leader in your industry and gain trust with customers. One key here is to find the right publications — online industry journals are a great place to start.

Social media

I’ll spare you the typical, “be engaging, don’t just promote yourself, have a voice, be human” advice you’ve already heard about social media. Broadly speaking, for most b2b industrial companies, we advise focusing first on your website, SEO and email marketing as a means of driving real business. If you do invest in social to grow awareness, remember, the goal is to bring people back to your website where you can generate leads. But you’ll see more success on social by stepping beyond the technical, specialized content that helps you rank on Google, and instead sharing content people will send to their colleagues. Survey results, info graphics, trends pieces, stances on industry issues — these are more likely to earn shares and website traffic, largely because they grab the attention of bloggers, publications and industry influencers who disseminate content. But these pieces usually require more time or money to create than it takes to post keyword-targeted articles that directly drive business.

Turning those visitors into leads

You’ve got visitors to your site, but how do you turn them into leads and business? At any given moment, the vast majority (likely more than 90 percent) of visitors on your site aren’t ready to buy. And most aren’t ready to fill out that contact form or call you either. Instead, they’re independently researching their problems and potential solutions. That means to turn them into leads, you need to give them useful information worth filling out a form to access — so you can then email or call them.

Some of your content must be focused specifically and entirely on lead generation. At Gorilla 76, we publish white papers and other premium pieces for this purpose. Using calls to action, we direct site visitors to download these premium guides and require them to fill out a form to access them. The key here is to understand what your customers want. Premium guides are highly educational and answer the key questions. Some examples are our guides to launching an effective industrial b2b website and evaluating online marketing ROI. These pieces help our potential customers as they’re learning what they want to accomplish and how to go about it. And similar pieces have worked for our clients. Ultimately, you’ll need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think of the key questions they ask at the early, middle and latter stages of their purchasing process.

Nurturing leads into customers and repeat customers

With their contact information, you can call or email your leads. But most probably need buy-in from others and have a long purchasing cycle. Now’s the time to provide insightful articles that help your potential customers answer the questions that arise later in the purchasing process. Some of these might be related to costs, schedule, logistics and justification for a purchase (which they may need to convince decision makers in their organizations). Publish content you can use in e-blasts to stay top of mind and bring your leads back to your website.

This is where you create content arguing for a purchase, showcasing your work (possibly using case studies), building goodwill with brand journalism, highlighting your sponsorships and yes, promoting yourself. This content helps you re-engage with leads, get them on the phone and lead them to finally make a purchase. We’ve seen this process generate business, even the largest purchases.

One common problem is burdening this content with keywords. This content’s purpose isn’t primarily to draw traffic; focus on making it compelling, useful and interesting. If a keyword happens to fit, that’s great, but don’t waste time and compromise your content by force-fitting one. Another common problem many brands have is they only create this content. The reason? Most branded content has traditionally addressed only these topics. But today, that doesn’t cut it. You won’t generate traffic or leads if this is all you publish.

Create content with purpose

Don’t just publish content. Publish content that’s tied specifically to marketing goals — content that helps you grow your business.

Industrial marketing trends in 2016

Almost weekly and almost always on Friday mornings, we sit down as a team for “book club.” It’s a chance for one of our team members to lead discussion on reading that they think is important and relevant that they assigned the agency.

We’ve covered a variety of topics thus far (all marketing related of course), but until this week, I really hadn’t been compelled to write about any of them. Not because they weren’t interesting or inspiring or anything like that – but I don’t know, I guess I was just “busy” (read: Fantasy Football league trade deadline had not yet hit).

This week, however, I’m compelled. Compelled by the statistics within the IHS Engineering360 Research Report “2015 Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector.” Following are the findings that I thought were extremely important to know if you work in the industrial sector and have anything at all to do with marketing. Kudos to the folks at Marketing Maven for compiling. Great stuff. And lots of confirmation for what many of us marketing folks have been saying. Make sure to download the full guide here.

Time on the web

More than 50% of technical professionals spend six or more hours a week on the web for work-related purposes, and one out of three spend nine-plus hours online. Young adults account for the largest percentage of people spending more than 12 hours on the Internet for work-related purposes.

To me, these numbers speak for themselves. “My buyer isn’t online” simply is no longer a valid argument and we now have the data for rebuttal.

Moving on…

Why the web is used

The main reasons technical professionals use the web are…

To find components, equipment, services and suppliers (77%)
To obtain product specifications (73%)
To find product availability information (70%)
To perform research (67%)
To compare products across suppliers (66%)

So in layman’s terms, people are using the web to do their own research. Me personally, I avoid the salesperson until the last possible moment. I want to do my own research on my own schedule with my own agenda. I want to be as informed as possible before entering the buy/sell arena.

That said, the survey did report that while 58% of engineers wait until the comparison/evaluation or purchase stages of the buying process to contact a vendor; 42% make contact in the earlier research stage. So there are still a good amount of folks that are reaching out sooner than later.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

First stops on the web

When looking at work-related digital resources, things haven’t changed much from year to year. General search engines (89%), supplier websites (75%) and online catalogs (74%) are the first three tools that technical professionals are reaching for. Additionally, online communities have seen a significant growth among younger engineers, with 39% now using them.

What’s that tell me? You need to get your www optimized for search, your site better be user-friendly and professional, and getting placed in online catalogs and directories probably isn’t a bad idea either. And if there is a group dedicated to your service offering, it’d be smart to make sure you’re well represented and actively participating.

Tradeshows are dying

More than 50% of all industrial professionals attended ZERO in-person tradeshows in 2014.

To me, that’s a powerful learning. Tradeshows are expensive. Really expensive. There’s the price of admission (whether attending or simply walking the floor), the travel, the meals and entertainment, and the time out of the office. Not to mention, they’re not always the best time. Don’t get me wrong – a Hawaiian-shirt-themed networking hour at the hotel bar has a chance of being as much fun as advertised, but typically, it won’t be.

On a related note (to tradeshows, not Hawaiin-shirt-themed networking hours), my business partner Joe Sullivan actually wrote a blog post comparing the cost per lead at a tradeshow versus on your website. You can read it here.

Think twice before advertising

Digital publications are now favored over traditional printed trade magazines as an information resource. The IHS Engineering360 Research Report found that technical professionals are subscribing to an average of 4.4 digital publications (including e-newsletter and digital trade magazines) compared to an average of 1.4 for printed trade magazines.

Don’t just buy that ad because you have in the past. First, make sure someone is reading the publication. And if the answer is “no” or “I don’t know”, maybe think about some more progressive forms of working with the publications. Guest content and link building are a great place to start. Imagine getting placed in a publication at no cost. Yep – it really happens. As long as your content is good and educational (and not promotional at all), you’ve got a chance.

Read the survey yourself

Take a look through the survey. Download it. Print out this blog post. Share it with your marketing team. What are your thoughts? What did you find interesting? Share in the comments section below.

And again, kudos to the Marketing Maven team on a nice piece of valuable content. This time next year, it’ll be interesting to see where we’re trending.

The importance of B2B writing that informs

One of the greatest ad men in history saw it coming. I’m convinced.

Many ad nerds remember David Ogilvy’s 1958 Rolls-Royce ad for the headline:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

Continue reading “The importance of B2B writing that informs” →

Website visitors converted into real sales leads for leading flooring contractor

Spectra Contract Flooring is the largest commercial flooring contractor in the United States. Founded in 1996, they have more than 350,000 projects in their portfolio and more than 100,000 happy customers.

Issue and importance

Spectra Contract Flooring came to Gorilla with a website that wasn’t built for capturing leads and converting them into customers. Despite having plenty of monthly visitors, there wasn’t a system in place to convert these visitors into new business. Enter Gorilla.

Solution and results

We worked with Spectra to create content on the site that educated prospective customers. By creating informative pieces like the “Trends in flooring” white paper and “The Buyer’s Guide to Hiring a Flooring Contractor,” we were able to convert website visitors into leads that otherwise would have bounced from the site. From our initial work in March of 2015 to the end of September 2015, we saw significant results:

Total visits to the site increased by 18% from Q1 2015 (pre-Gorilla 76) to Q3 2015
Total monthly leads increased by 77% from March to September
Organic leads nearly doubled from March to September; this was the result of identifying existing conversion paths and creating top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel conversion opportunities
By capturing leads that weren’t ready for a consultation, we were able to create more sales opportunities later in their buying cycle

Industrial inbound marketing: A case for Hubspot

We’re big on results at Gorilla. If a company is going to spend money on marketing, our belief is that said company should expect to make more money. After all, marketing is an investment. And that return on investment (ROI) is the entire point of marketing. Spend money to make more money. It’s a pretty simple concept. But surprisingly, it seems to be ignored by many.

While we’ve detailed success that we’ve seen with some of our clients in our industrial marketing case studies, I wanted to share how Hubspot, paired with our marketing philosophy and practices, is helping us make strides in industrial inbound marketing. In this particular case, we’re going to look at our client TruQC. They’re a quality control app for the iPad.

A cold, hard case for industrial inbound marketing

TruQC provides integrated, real-time quality control documentation for the iPad. They’ve been a client of Gorilla since their inception, and they’ve been on the Hubspot platform since February 2014. As of August 2015, they’ve seen a 125% return-on-investment.

Since starting with Hubspot, TruQC has landed 54 customers that originated as leads in Hubspot, at an average value of $3,600 per customer. In total, they’ve spent $86,500 (both agency fees and software fees included) since starting on the Hubspot platform. They’ve acquired 18 customers through organic search, 1 through referral traffic, 2 through social media, 5 through email marketing and 28 through direct traffic.

In February of 2014, TruQC’s baseline for organic traffic was 289 total visits. In May, June and July of 2015, they received 817, 922 and 918 (respectively) visits via organic search. Contacts acquired from search went from an average of 6.5 per month in 2014 to 17.5 per month in 2015. In February of 2014, the baseline for total traffic was 1,025. In July of 2015, total visits were at 1,822.

Using the Hubspot platform and industrial inbound marketing best practices (hey – they work with us!), TruQC, a company of fewer than ten people, has been afforded the opportunity of always having leads come to them. Additionally, the lead data that Hubspot provides has been invaluable as well. There has certainly been off-line success, but inbound leads have been significant and fruitful, and important to the growth of their business. TruQC has not only seen domestic success, but international success also. Without the web, and the practice of inbound marketing, such growth would have been much more difficult.

Hubspot works well, but it’s just a tool. A company must still understand, follow and implement best inbound practices. That’s where we come in.

5 things I learned from ICUEE

As I have recently relocated to Louisville, I had the opportunity to attend the International Construction and Utility Equipment Exposition (ICUEE) in Louisville, Kentucky this past week. First, a big thanks to Gorilla for sending me. ICUEE is one of the biggest and coolest trade shows in construction, and I recommend it to anyone in the construction industry.

In addition to speaking with a few folks about industrial b2b marketing, I saw the unveiling of innovative equipment, startup launches and fascinating demos (rubber tires do conduct electricity, and stay far away from any downed wires, trust me). The learnings I’ll share from ICUEE fall into two categories, one, where construction is headed, and two, my observations of the most successful trade show booths.

1. Everything that can be automated will be automated

Many of the innovations unveiled at ICUEE would automate elements of the construction process. Whether through “smart” utility vehicles that come with advanced on-board software, remotely controlled and operated cranes for Tilt-Up concrete or automated trench shoring machines that eliminate manual digging — jobs of the future will require less labor. The job site will feature more trained operators and machinery, and projects will take less time.

2. Everything will be mapped, logged and put into a database

Assessing a job site and locating important features can slow down a project, while keeping track of the information can be inefficient and expensive. ICUEE saw the unveiling of software and database platforms that will make it easier to map every element of a job site and provide cheaper and faster information access. As much as we’re in the information age already, there will soon be even more data available in easy-to-use, on-demand platforms. In fact, one of our clients is leading the charge here with quality control documentation software that streamlines projects.

3. Every job should get safer

Each year, workers die and sustain injuries from preventable job-site accidents. It’s one of the biggest problems in the construction industry, so I find the possibilities of new technology particularly encouraging. Much of the equipment unveiled at the exposition would keep workers further away from harm and make jobs less dangerous.

4. Everyone thinks magic is cool — except maybe your neighbors

Switching gears, ICUEE was big enough to have intense booth competition. I’m talking massive utility vehicles suspended in mid-air, uniformed models, plus every kind of shiny light and gadget. How do you grab attention if you don’t have the budget for a massive floor space or heavy machinery for your booth? Bring a magician. Two small booths had magic and regularly drew an oversized audience. It was borderline shocking to see the promotion audiences would give them. One negative, their neighbors did seem a bit exasperated after seeing so many people at the magic demos, but even they seemed to appreciate the magic tricks.

5. Everyone listens to the loudest speaker

I’m not saying you should yell at people going by your booth or blare music louder than your trade show allows. But there’s nothing wrong with using a microphone. Somehow, the sound of a person speaking into a mic, whether it’s handheld or a headset, attracts a crowd. I saw it time and again at ICUEE.

Why should a marketing agency send someone to a construction exposition?

For one, ICUEE presented an opportunity to meet people in our target audience, interact with them and share a bit about industrial b2b marketing. Two, Gorilla 76 isn’t your typical marketing agency. For many of our clients, we plan and execute the majority of marketing initiatives, functioning as an integral part of their companies. Our clients, many of which are in the construction industry, depend heavily on our ability to understand their businesses and create accurate, technical content. We interview key players in our client companies, read industry publications and attend events like ICUEE to learn their businesses and industries. It’s all part of our effort to help our clients generate construction leads through inbound marketing.

Industrial marketing vs. consumer marketing

Industrial B2B companies have a tendency to not embrace marketing. And if they do, marketing usually means print ads in trade journals or direct mail campaigns – neither of which tend to generate much of a measurable return on investment.

To these industrial companies, marketing is an overhead expense, plain and simple. Write a catchy headline, add a few paragraphs about superior service and a wide selection of products, write the check and call it a day.

But here’s the problem. Industrial marketing is (or at least needs to be) very, very different than the consumer marketing we experience around us every day on tv, on billboards, online and in our mailboxes. After all, we’re not selling cheeseburgers here. We’re selling highly technical, typically very expensive niche products and services for very targeted audiences. The bottom-line, getting more qualified leads that convert into customers, is the name of the game with industrial marketing.

Industrial marketing vs. consumer marketing: 5 key differences

Let’s take a look at five reasons industrial marketing needs to be approached differently than consumer marketing.

1. The industrial buyer is looking for something (very) specific

Your buyer might be looking for steel pipe. But more likely, he’s looking for carbon steel pipe. And even more likely, he’s looking for A-106 carbon steel pipe. The point? Mass marketing doesn’t work when each buyer has such specific (and technical) needs and requirements. A successful industrial marketing strategy requires a much more targeted, niche-specific approach.

2. Research (lots and lots of research) precede the purchase

Long sales cycles often accompany big industrial B2B purchases. Lots of money is involved. Often lots of people are involved. And sometimes lots of office politics are involved. As a result, this kind of big purchasing decision is typically accompanied by a significant amount of research by the buyer.

You might argue that many consumer purchases also involve a good deal of research. A new home. Expensive furniture. A car. A computer. But rarely do even these biggest of consumer purchases take the good majority of a year (or multiple years). That leads into the next point…

3. Purchases mean partnerships

When the sales cycle does take months, or a year or more, staying top of mind, earning trust and qualifying your business are all critical steps in the buying process. Successfully catering to these steps is what we call “lead nurturing”. The industrial buyer needs to feel confident in you and know that he is being taken care of.

Often a B2B purchase means that a relationship is about to form. Your buyer may have to work closely with you for months or even years to come. He doesn’t want to start over again next year. He wants to make the right decision, right now. So the relationship matters.

4. The researcher often isn’t the decision maker

The person who discovers you is not always the person writing the check. Maybe a car salesman needs to convince both you and your spouse that this minivan with the built-in tv and vacuum is exactly what you need to effectively transport your kids to soccer practice. But the industrial marketer needs to equip an engineer or procurement staff member with the knowledge to sell a product or service up the chain to his or her boss, and his or her boss’ boss. That’s no easy task.

5. Contact information is the currency of an industrial marketing transaction

Industrial sales and industrial marketing are closely tied together. But they are NOT the same thing. Here’s how I’d describe the difference in one short paragraph:

The job of marketing is to generate awareness among a niche audience, educate them, qualify your business in front of them, keep them engaged and convert them from anonymous prospects into hard, qualified leads with names, phone numbers and email addresses. The job of sales is to turn those leads into paying customers.

The currency of an industrial sales transaction is of course the dollar. But the currency of an industrial marketing transaction is contact information. The perception of an equal trade occurs when your website visitor fills out a form – whether to download a white paper or case study, or to request a quote or consultation. This person is giving you his or her contact information in exchange for some piece of information that he or she perceives to have equal or greater value.

And by doing so, this person is moving from “anonymous website visitor” to “potential sales target”.

Each of these transactions fits into a different stage in the industrial buying process. And this is just one reason why it’s so important for marketing and sales to work hand in hand.

So where do you get started with industrial marketing?

Try our Tactical Guide to Industrial Lead Generation. This guide takes the industrial marketing concepts above and shows you how to put them into practice. And if you’d be interested in a consultation with a B2B marketing consultant that specializes in industrial marketing, click here. We’d love to talk.

What I learned about B2B marketing at Inbound 2015

It’s Friday afternoon. I’m still playing catchup from some recent traveling. And I’ve got a 6 pm tee time (no, not really, but it seemed like a good way to wrap up that thought). BUT, I also have some learnings from this year’s Inbound conference that I wanted to share and I want to get them on the blog before the week’s end.

What you’ll read below is a little all over the place. Don’t say I didn’t give you a heads up. But bear with me and give each point some thought. I think you’ll find them all relevant and helpful.

Let’s go. I’ll make this quick.

Read the greats

This year’s Inbound conference kicked off with a keynote by none other than Seth Godin. If you’re not familiar, get familiar. This guy is smart. Inspiring. He’s world renowned. And for good reason.

What I realized as I heard him talk was that I hadn’t REALLY read any of his books. “Really” meaning “from start to finish.” Yes, any of us in B2B marketing have read excerpts from his works here and there, but I’ve never really jumped in all the way. Now I’m ready to do such. Mr. Godin, you’re very much on the reading list. I want to keep getting better and better as a B2B marketer.

Learn to sell

We’re in the business of marketing. And good marketing ultimately culminates in selling. After all, that’s the purpose of it all. People don’t market for fun, they market to sell. To make more money. The idea is to invest a little in order to make a lot (hopefully). So if that’s the case, why are we as B2B marketers so bad at selling? The majority of us (myself included) just plain suck at selling. Why? Shouldn’t we be good? Shouldn’t we focus on developing in this area of business?

For our own good, for the good of our clients, we all need to become better at sales. We can do better. Our clients deserve better. And their clients do as well.

Don’t use overly thick business cards

I love our business cards. They’re cool. They’re well-designed. They’re thick.

But, because they’re thick, I can only carry a few in my wallet at a time. And because I can only carry a few at a time, I’m almost always out of business cards. At a huge conference like Inbound this is never a good thing.

I know this is an odd “learning”, but hey, to me, it’s important. I thought you might appreciate it as well. Joe, we need thinner business cards.

“It’s not the critic who counts…”

There’s a classic quote from Theodore Roosevelt. One we’ve all heard before. One that’s made it into numerous self-help books and business presentations. Brene Brown included it in her Inbound keynote (best keynote of the week in my opinion) as a way to state that if you live a life worth living, you’re going to get kicked in the teeth once in awhile. And that’s okay. It’s admirable actually and it needs to be embraced.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Brene talked a lot about the idea of vulnerability and putting yourself “out there.” I think this is why I struggle with sales. None of us like rejection. None of us like an awkward phone call, especially one with awkward silence. But as B2B marketers, we can’t be intimidated by vulnerability. We need to embrace it, take chances, and remember that doing such almost always pays off.

Agency lesson #22: The greater your expertise…

… the less great you have to be at customer experience. Obviously, in a perfect world, you excel in both. But building a company that is built solely on customer experience and NOT on industry expertise is building a company that is destined to fail.

As David Maister points out in “Managing the Professional Service Firm“, if you take your car to a mechanic, and the shop is clean and the staff is friendly, you’re going to be happy. And you’re going to be even happier if in six months your car is still running the way it should be and you have not had to return to the mechanic. A good experience is important – but it’s not everything. The core service has to be strong as well.

Direct mail vs. junk mail

“Direct mail is what a creative director signs off on before he leaves for the day. Junk mail is what he gets when the piece he worked on arrives at his house.”

Think about that one.

“Market to others as you would want to be marketed to” was a leading theme in one of the presentations. And that idea really resonated with me. Not just because it makes my life easier, but it makes more sense for the companies doing the marketing.

Today, in the mail to our office, came a very well-designed and very well-produced direct mail catalog. It’s big, beautiful, and it was likely VERY expensive to produce. Oh, and it’s for convenience store owners. I don’t own a convenience store. I’ve never worked at a convenience store. I don’t do work for any convenience stores. I have absolutely no idea how our office was deemed a convenience store. But at some point it was, and because of such, a publication wastes lots of money every month to send us a catalog.

Did you go to Inbound?

If so, what were your takeaways? What did you enjoy? What did you learn? I’d love to hear about your experience. I’m already looking forward to next year.

Why you can trust a content marketing agency to write highly technical content

Nearly six years have passed, but I can still vividly remember that day. It was my first story review at the University of Missouri School of Journalism — the top ranked journalism school in the country. A couple students could be seen sobbing after their story presentations were cut to shreds, and I could feel the smug satisfaction coming from my professor. That day, she instilled an important lesson upon a group of young, aspiring writers: BS doesn’t cut it in “the real world.”

Why am I telling you this story? Because that’s the kind of intense scrutiny journalistic writers have to survive each day. And as marketing moves away from flowery buzzwords, catchy jingles and BS, you need one of those writers — a hard-nosed researcher who creates meaty content instead of fluff. The good news is, if you work with the right agency, that’s exactly the writer you’ll get.

The modern breed of copywriter

Marketing is no longer defined by the traditional model of interruptive advertising, but instead by a customer’s ability to independently research purchasing decisions. According to a comprehensive study conducted by CEB and Google, 57 percent of the B2B purchasing process is completed before customers reach out to a salesperson. While gathering information, your customer is searching, often online, to learn about business problems and possible solutions before contacting companies. To reach your customer before your competitors do, you need to be the one educating them while they’re researching. Yes, you still need to communicate the value you deliver and ask for the sale. But a big part of modern marketing is publishing targeted, informative content on your website — and making that content show up in Google when your customers search for it.

The smartest marketing agencies are helping brands make the transition to educational, online marketing. In the process, they’re hiring research-oriented brand journalists who aren’t afraid to dive into technical white papers, read industry publications and interview subject matter experts. The modern b2b copywriter can not only write punchy headlines but also quickly get up to speed on an industry. The resulting content is authoritative, long-form and technically accurate.

Agencies provide professional writers and a dedicated team

When you hire a content marketing agency, you’ll likely work with one writer who is assigned to your account and a handful of other accounts. Your writer will be a professional with a four-year degree who has written hundreds or even thousands of articles for publications and client websites. He or she will continually learn about your industry and eventually become an expert on your company. Along with a writer, you’ll get a team of strategists, project managers, creative directors and account coordinators who ensure all content is on-brand, on-voice and on-strategy.

Why using an agency writer is better than doing it yourself

It’s one thing to have a writer who’s competent enough to write about your industry. But what about one who has the marketing expertise to deliver results? Agency writers are skilled in creating content that supports a variety of marketing goals. Your writer should understand the intricacies of writing for the web, have experience in content strategy and know how to measure content marketing results.

Generating traffic through SEO

Good agency writers know how to target keywords throughout an article to help you achieve SEO results and draw qualified traffic to your website. That includes writing for user intent, so that when your article ranks in search results and your potential customers click on it, they get the information they want.

Converting visitors into leads

Quality agency writers are trained specifically in lead generation. By writing quality, targeted content, your writer engages your site visitors. And with audience-specific, persuasive copy, your writer gets visitors to sign up for your newsletter, start that product demo or reach out to you for a consultation.

Nurturing leads into customers

Email marketing helps you nurture leads into customers by keeping you top of mind throughout long sales cycles. For email marketing to be effective, you need quality content and analytical results tracking. This involves detailed collaboration between writer and strategist — a specialty of agencies. And it takes a versatile writer who can both create engaging, long-form content and craft compelling e-blasts that get clicks.

Sticking to your content calendar

Even for companies that have the web-marketing expertise to create quality content, staying on a consistent publishing schedule is a big challenge. One that’s not usually overcome, especially in companies where senior buy-in is not a given. Hiring out your writing to an agency ensures you stick to your content calendar and work toward your marketing goals.

How to follow up with B2B inbound leads

A B2B inbound lead is a special type of lead. As we detailed in this article comparing inbound leads to leads from an acquired list, the former has already raised his hand and said, “I need something.” So why do we let so many of these leads waste away in our CRM software after one attempted phone call or email? Why do salesmen so often jump to the conclusion that “If he wants to talk, he’ll call me back?”

The reality is that most inbound leads aren’t yet sales ready. They don’t want to talk to you, just like you don’t want to talk to a car salesman the day you begin your search. They’re researching, seeking solutions to problems, learning, comparing, weighing options, qualifying potential partners, etc. In short, they’re too busy for your sales pitch, and they have no reason to trust you yet.

So if you want to attract their attention, you’ll need a plan that includes two important components:

Something of value to offer your lead
A set of follow-up tasks that deliver that value on a timeline

Let’s take a look at both.

1. Something of value to offer your lead

When your competitors call a lead, they probably spend 90% of the time talking all about their value proposition and why they’re the best. So when you call on a lead, set yourself apart and take the opposite approach. Your lead has a problem to solve. So start by earning trust. Bring value to the table to help him solve it.

If he dowloaded a product catalog, did he find what he was looking for? Could you offer a free consultation to help him compare products or services and figure out which would best fit his needs?

If he downloaded a white paper, ask if you can answer any questions or elaborate on any concepts. Can you explain any of the content in more depth? Are there any related resources on your website or elsewhere that you could send along as well?

Be clear that you’re here to help, not to hard sell. The sell will come naturally.

2. A set of follow-up tasks that deliver that value on a timeline

The assumption that “if he wants to talk, he’ll call me back” is just plain naive. If he’s doing his due diligence during his research phase, your lead has probably explored 5 or 10 or 50 other companies like you. Why should he call you back instead of someone else. Persistence is key – BUT, persistence that delivers value is the secret. “Hey, remember me? I’m trying to sell you something” won’t cut it. Remember – add value. Every touch point with your lead offers the opportunity to bring value to his buying process. And most importantly, BE SINCERE. No salesman BS allowed. Come to the table prepared to help. Realize you’ll probably give away some free advice in the process. But if you’re truly sincere from the beginning, you’ll start to establish trust from day one.

Here’s an example of persistence with value (and sincerity).

Let’s say a new lead just downloaded an informational white paper from your website. You received an email alert with his name, phone number and email address. So what next?

Day 1

Pick up the phone and try to connect within a few hours of the download. We’ve found that a lead is most receptive to talking right away. Why? Well, because if he just downloaded a white paper, the topic of that white paper is on his mind right NOW, at THAT moment. Tomorrow or the next day, that may not be the case. He’ll get busy with other things just like you and I do.

Four out of five times you’ll get his voicemail, so leave a message and follow up immediately with a similar email. Some people like to respond by phone, others by email. Create options for him. Try something like this:

“Bill, I saw that you downloaded our ___ guide today and hope it was helpful. I thought I’d reach out to see if you have any questions. I’d love to set up a free consultation if you’d be interested in talking. No hard sales pitch – I promise. We can talk about what you’re looking for and if we can help, great. If not, I can leave you with some tips and point you in the right direction.”

Day 3

Call again and follow up with another email. We’ll sometimes use a subject line like “Email buried” (we learned this tip from our friends at Hubspot). Open up the message by saying something like, “Bill, I just wanted to follow up in case this email got buried”. This will often generate a response where he’ll say, “No – I have it flagged, but didn’t have time to get back to you yet”. Then you’ll at least know you’re on his radar.

Day 5

Seem too early for another follow up? It’s not. You have nothing to lose (other than a sale). Call again. Follow up with an email again. At this point, we’ll usually start including links to some helpful related resources in that email. For example, since he downloaded your ___ white paper, you could let him know your blog has a bunch of related educational articles that might be helpful as well. Include direct links to those articles. Just make sure you’re sending him links to educational content, not promotional content. Remember, now’s the time to help, not to hard sell.

Day 10

Similar follow up. Include some other resources. Maybe this time you link to a case study or two that feel relevant to this particular lead.

Day 15

At this point, I’m almost ready to give you permission to call it quits. But before you do, try a “break up” phone call and email. Something like this:

“Bill, I’ve reached out a handful of times, but haven’t heard back from you. I’m guessing right now isn’t the best time to connect. But I’m here if you have any questions or could use some help. I’ll go ahead and add you to our monthly newsletter, which is filled with tips and educational content on ___ topic. Best of luck and hope to connect at some point down the road!”

I think you’ll be surprised that it’s often this email that generates a response. Remember, your lead is busy like you are. He very well may have your email(s) flagged, but hasn’t had time to respond yet.

And at the end of all this, in a worst case scenario, you don’t connect. So you lost a bit of time. But guess what? You lose time when you’re churning through cold calls lists as well. And those “leads” are usually much less qualified than their inbound counterparts.

Interested in talking more about inbound marketing and sales strategy? Let’s set up a consultation – where we’ll offer helpful, sincere advice of course!

3 reasons to hire out your industrial content marketing

Often, when we first start courting a potential client, one of the things we hear is “Well, there’s no way you can write for us because what we do is very specialized and you can’t possibly learn it. It’s too technical.”

That’s fair. As I’m sure it is often very technical. That said, I’m a strong proponent of hiring out for content marketing work. Don’t get me wrong, the best content often comes from inside the company. But when you find the right industrial content marketing agency, they can get you where you need to be faster, more cost effectively and much more strategically. While certainly not a comprehensive list, here are three quick reasons I think it makes sense to hire out your B2B content marketing.

1. Get out of the weeds

Your team is smart. There’s no doubt. We completely understand and believe you. However, are they too smart?

One of the biggest issues we find with B2B industrial companies is that when they try to write their own website content, they write too technical. Technical is great, but the buyer is not always at that level.

For instance, if you’re a construction company targeting a healthcare CEO, what do you think he cares about? In-depth analysis about the best concrete to use on his new ambulatory clinic? Or a more top-level article on the methods a company uses to deliver their project on-time and on-budget, meaning a successful construction project at ribbon cutting?

A theory in which I believe, one that has been proven right again and again and again, is that sometimes, like in the case of content marketing, less is more. I’ve found that it’s harder for an expert to write intermediate-level, but still very good, content. In journalism school, we were often told to write at a fifth-grade reading level. The same is true when trying to provide content for marketing purposes. Sure, fifth-grade might be too elementary, but the idea is that simpler content is often better content.

2. The cobbler’s kids never get their shoes

I don’t know what it is, but when we try to do work for our own company, it never gets done. BUT, if we hire that work out to a vendor, we make sure it gets done. On-time, every time. The same is true with content marketing.

As you know from reading this piece, we’re a content marketing agency. We have, at time of writing this post, four Mizzou journalism majors on staff. Yet…we struggle to keep up with our own content needs. In fact, this blog post, a short “three-reasons” why post, has taken me three weeks to write! That said, when it comes to our clients, we meet deadlines and often deliver early. Why? Well work for oneself is often not a priority. But, when we pay for something, we make sure it gets done as promised.

When you hire out your content marketing, part of what you’re paying for is accountability. That alone can make the engagement worth the price – provided the work is strong and good and professional and all that stuff.

3. Get more for your money

When you hire out for content marketing, you get a professional writer that understands the ins and outs of writing for the web.

You also get a strategist, an account person, a designer, etc. For the price of the one-employee you’d absolutely have to hire to do content marketing correctly, you get an entire agency. An agency that’s constantly staying up on web trends, search engine updates and more.

To me, that alone is a compelling reason to hire out for your content marketing needs.

So, tell me what you think. What other reasons do you know of to hire out for your content marketing needs? What reasons do you have for keeping it in-house?

Why inbound lead generation beats cold calling

Inbound leads are very different than leads on a cold calling list. From their readiness to buy to their receptiveness to your call to their level of qualification, they really couldn’t be much different, in fact. In this article, we’ll compare the two and explain why we prefer the inbound lead.

The cold call lead

When you’re in cold calling mode, you’re probably prospecting from some list of leads. Whether you bought a list or built one by scouring the internet and industry directories, these leads aren’t expecting to hear from you. And when you pick up that phone and start working your way down the list, you’re taking a leap of faith that some small percentage of those you call on will:

Answer the phone
Happen to need what you sell
Happen to need what you sell at that exact moment in time

Even though you know you have something valuable to offer, a majority off these people just don’t care. They don’t want to talk to you because as far as they’re concerned, you’re just a spammer. So sorry to break the news. 🙁

And as far as making a sale goes? Well, that’ll depend on some combination of your list quality, the amount of time you invest in this cold calling session and how lucky you are that particular day. None of this is news to you.

The inbound lead

An inbound lead is the near opposite of a cold call lead. This lead willingly came to you, rather than you hunting for him. He called or filled out a form on your website because he was proactively looking for something.

If he found you through a Google search, it means he asked Google a question and Google gave him your site to help him find the answer. So he visited your site. And then he filled out a form.
If he found you on LinkedIn, it’s because he saw something that seemed to fit a need he had. So he clicked a link and visited your site. And then he filled out a form.
If he came directly to your website, it’s because somehow he learned about you and decided you were worth exploring. And he confirmed that you were worth exploring further when he filled out a form.

And don’t forget – he wasn’t forced to fill out that form. He did it because he chose to do so.

He may have downloaded a white paper because he was trying to learn something – trying to solve a business problem. He may have downloaded a case study because he’s vetting you – trying to determine whether your company is legit and capable of fulfilling his need. He may have downloaded a product catalog because he’s looking for a specific item.

One way or another, this inbound lead has already raised his hand and said, “I need help. I may or may not be primed to buy at this exact moment in time. But I need help, and you can help me.”

So what do you do with an inbound lead who needs help?

Help him. Be a consultative salesman.

He gave you his phone number when he filled out that form, right? Pick up the phone and ask him what questions you can answer and what you can do to make his day easier. Look at this as an opportunity to earn trust and start a relationship with a potential customer.

Not every inbound lead is qualified or course. But wouldn’t you rather start your prospecting from a list of potential customers who have already identified a need you can serve than a list of people whose demographic characteristics indicate they might be interested in what you sell? I certainly would.

Building a pipeline of inbound leads is tough work, but so is cold calling. We prefer the former and that’s why we practice what we preach for our own company and for the work we do for our clients. Build yourself a pipeline of inbound leads and you’ll be a spammer no more. Click here to learn more about online lead generation.

Translating consultative sales to consultative marketing

The following is what I hear from 90% of B2B companies that I talk to:

“Our company is all about a consultative sales approach. We’re good at what we do and have years of experience, so we’re able to help our potential customers identify the right solution for them before we sell them anything.”

Maybe this consultative sales approach sounds familiar to you too. Your company isn’t just a seller of a commodity product or service. Instead, you’re a solution-oriented partner for your potential customers. You help them solve their business problems. And by doing so from day one, you kick off long-term, trusting relationships. In short, you earn trust by being HELPFUL.

But when I ask these same B2B companies what their marketing approaches look like, I usually hear something like this:

“Promotional print materials that show our capabilities. Print ads about how long we’ve been in business. Press releases about things happening at our company.”

Think about that for a second:

Your potential customer has a problem he needs solved
Your sales approach is about helping him solve that problem
But your marketing approach is about telling him how awesome your company is

Something is very backwards here.

Just as trust needs to be earned DURING the sales process, trust needs be earned BEFORE the sales process begins. Before your prospect has ever had a conversation with you. Before he truly believes that you’re a knowledgeable, experienced industry expert that wants to help him find the right solution. And certainly before you’ve established the right to tell him how great your company is.

Here’s what consultative marketing looks like:

Instead of printing a fancy capabilities brochure, build a knowledge center filled with helpful articles on your website that address common questions. Instead of cluttering your prospects’ inboxes with another braggadocious e-newsletter, send an email filled with insights and helpful tips catered to their needs. Instead of running a costly print ad, reach out to an industry journal and offer to write an educational guest article about a topic that will pique the interest of both your audience and theirs.

And when leads result from this kind helpful marketing, you’ve already begun to earn trust – before that potential customer has even met you. You’ve already distinguished yourself from your competitor that’s done nothing but talk about how great his company is. Thanks to your consultative marketing approach, your consultative sale is already underway.

You can learn about every facet of industrial online marketing on our blog.

Inbound marketing immediately delivers new leads for geotechnical contractor

Subsurface Constructors Inc. is a St. Louis-based, full-service geotechnical contractor with complete capabilities in deep foundations and ground improvement. They’re among the nation’s leading full-service foundation contractors and have more than 100 years of experience.

Issue and importance

Subsurface Constructors Inc. approached us as they started to evaluate their marketing spend. They knew that the traditional methods of advertising they were using were not as measurable and effective as those on the web, and they were starting to question their return.

Solution and results

After talking with the head of business development at Subsurface and looking at their goals and objectives, we recommended that we explore inbound marketing to capitalize on the brand that they’d worked years to establish. We built out a strategy with which to move forward. The first content piece we executed for them was a downloadable educational guide.

In the first two months of the campaign, Subsurface received more than 50 downloads of their educational guide, complete with a name, email address and company name
Of the 50+ downloads of the guide, more than half were from sales qualified leads
Subsurface began to build the foundation for future email marketing efforts

Niche marketing: your customers really are looking for you on Google

Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying Likes and Sponsored Posts on Facebook. Others invest in multimillion-dollar Super Bowl ads while many put countless hours into tradeshows and cold calling. At the end of the day, you pick the marketing platform that works best for your company. Go where your customers are, and you will find business — that’s what common sense and business school tell you.

The numbers will tell you that with few exceptions, almost every company’s customers are on Google, searching for their services. Odds are, even your customers are searching for your business online, and your niche marketing efforts should incorporate a sound website strategy. Skeptical? I’ll prove it.

The search numbers don’t lie

Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second. That’s 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. So there are a lot of searches in general. But you already knew that. What about niche services?

Well, here are a few search terms that can directly relate to real marketing efforts in specialized industries, with real monthly search numbers from Google:

Structural engineer: 27,100
Injection molding: 18,100
Steel fabrication: 5,400

Those terms are still a little general within the fabrication, construction and engineering industries. So I’ll dive a level deeper. People are even searching these terms:

Electrical engineering company: 260
Shooting range construction: 70
HVAC St. Louis: 170
Safety equipment supplier: 140

A brief Gorilla case study

At Gorilla 76, we don’t just talk up SEO and Inbound (pull) marketing like some overzealous marketing cheerleader. We walk the walk and use them to generate real leads for ourselves (and our clients of course). To show you how these search numbers apply to your marketing efforts, I’ll very briefly walk you through how Gorilla 76 turns search terms into real business.

We did a little keyword research and found out that the term “construction advertising” gets 260 searches per month, according to Google Adwords data.

We then wrote this blog post on construction advertising (and followed the full range of SEO best practices). Now, Gorilla 76 ranks number one in organic (non advertisement) search results for the term “construction advertising” in Google.

As a result, we get a steady stream of highly relevant traffic to our website. That’s the beauty of search marketing. The people who type in that highly specialized term are looking specifically for information directly related to our business. At the end of the day, we’re a niche business, and we want highly qualified traffic and leads. Because of our business model, it only takes one closed sale to more than pay for all search marketing costs. If you’re in a niche, B2B industry and work with clients on bigger projects, you can probably cover your marketing costs with one sale that results directly from your marketing efforts. That means you can help your business by ranking for highly relevant keywords — even if they’re only searched 10 times per month.

See the numbers for yourself

Still not convinced your customers are looking for you online? Here’s how you can know that SEO and Inbound marketing can bring the right people to your website.

Search for the “Google Keyword Planner tool”
Click on the first result (you’ll need to set up a Google Adwords account)
Click “search for new keyword and ad group ideas”
Type a number of terms directly related to your business into the search box at the top — separate each term by a comma
Click the blue “Get Ideas” button at the bottom
Click the “Keyword Ideas” tab
View the numbers

Or better yet, click below and download our Inbound Marketing Guide to learn how to generate leads through your website and other online marketing tools. Learn what industrial marketing using the inbound methodology can do for your company.

Using real marketing numbers to meet your revenue growth target

If you have no idea what kind of ROI your marketing efforts are producing for your B2B company, you’re not alone. In our agency’s experience, this statement especially holds true among manufacturing and construction businesses who have traditionally spent heavily on trade journal print ads and trade shows.

Thankfully, this kind of uncertainty goes away with online/inbound marketing, where everything is measurable. And in 2015, your industrial marketing efforts need to show tangible results that can be measured over time. In this article, we’ll take a look at some key numbers:

Your specific revenue growth target and associated customer acquisition target
The number of leads you’ll need in order to reach those targets
The number of website visits you’ll need to produce those leads

First, set your revenue and customer acquisition targets

Let’s start with the end goal in mind: revenue growth. By how much are you looking to grow your business in the next year? Let’s use a square number for our example and say $2M is the growth target.

And what’s the average value of a new customer to your business over the next year? Let’s say $200,000 for now.

So with a $2M revenue growth target and an average customer value of $200,000, you need 10 new customers in the next year to meet your revenue goals. Pretty straightforward.

Next, set your lead generation target

Time to work backward from revenue and customers. Next let’s talk about the effectiveness of your sales / business development team. On average, what percentage of qualified leads do they close as customers? If you have that data, great. If not, talk to them or take your best guess. For this example, we’ll say 1 in 5 good leads close (20%). So to acquire those 10 new customers, you’ll need to give your sales team 50 qualified leads this year.

Let’s also assume that about 1 in 5 leads generated through your website are truly qualified. Why? Well, realistically, not everyone who reaches out to you will be a good fit. So to acquire 50 good leads for your sales team, we’ll need to find them 250 total leads over the next year (or about 21 leads/month).

Finally, set your website traffic target

Now it’s time to look at your website’s effectiveness. Based on our experience and benchmarks set by marketing software leader Hubspot, an effective B2B website should convert at least 2-3% of visitors into leads. Let’s split the difference and use a 2.5% conversion rate for this example. Time to put those 8th grade algebra skills back to work.

0.025x = 250 (translation: 2.5% of how many website visits will produce 250 leads?).

x= 10,000 website visits over the next year (or 833 website visits/month).

Let’s recap what we now know

You’re looking to grow revenue by $2M next year
Your average customer is worth $200K
Your sales team can close 1 in 5 qualified leads
We need to give your sales team 250 total leads/year (or 21 leads/month)
At a 2.5% website conversion rate, we’ll need 833 visits/month to generate those 21 leads/month

Now go do the math for your company. What’s the level of website traffic you’ll need to produce to enough leads? If you’re already seeing that level of traffic, but not the corresponding level of leads, that means you have a conversion rate problem. Learn about how to fix it in chapter 5 of our Hardworking Inbound Marketing Guide for B2B Industrial Companies. If you’re not seeing the traffic volume you’ll need, start with chapter 3.

A perfect model?

So is this model flawless? No, of course not. But it’s a great starting point for using logic and real numbers rather than uneducated assumptions about marketing’s contribution to your company’s bottom line. Now go do the math and get started!

Gorilla wins two more construction marketing awards

Again this November, I have the very exciting task of announcing two more construction marketing awards we’ve added to the trophy case at our industrial marketing agency on 408 N. Euclid.

The first is a Construction Marketing Association Star Award for the US Coatings blog design. The second is a Construction Marketing Association Star Award for the email campaign work we do for The Korte Company.

We’ve now been awarded seven awards from the Construction Marketing Association. And while we certainly don’t measure our success by trophies and plaques, it is nice to be recognized by our peers.

To read about last year’s winners, click here. And to read about 2012’s winner, click here.

And of course – thanks for letting us pound our chests a bit!

B2B blogging and why you have something to write about

We hear it all the time: “But we don’t have anything interesting to write about. We’re really niche. No one cares what we have to say. Why in the world would we ever blog?! B2B blogging just isn’t for us!”

In fact, we heard this exact same sentiment just last week on a call with a potential client. We asked for a day’s time. We told the guys on the other end of the line that we’d prove that the company did indeed have something to write about, and that we’d provide data from Google to back up that argument.

We did just that. And the discussion roles on.

B2B blogging must be a part of your marketing strategy

I could write a book about why B2B blogging should be a part of your marketing strategy. There are lots of reasons. More blogging means more website pages which means more opportunities to capture potential customers in the search engines. More blogging means a stronger argument that you are THE industry expert and thought leader. More blogging means a more engaged company, utilizing the expertise of everyone that wears your company logo.

You have much to say – I promise

You see, in the age of the web, we all have something to write about. No matter how niche or how boring our industry might seem, as long as there’s a customer looking to solve a problem, there is something to write about. And data, freely available from our friends at Google, proves it.

For instance, we have a process engineering company we do work for that is seeing a surge in web traffic. The reason? They’re blogging, with careful focus on answering questions, highly technical questions, that potential customers are searching to answer with Google.

We have a Design-Build contractor we do work for that is seeing strong results from people searching for a particular warehouse construction method that we’ve written content about.

How about a industrial coating manufacturer ? No one searches for information related to paint manufacturing do they? They absolutely do. And we’ve the data to prove it. Try searching “coatings maintenance plan.”

“Okay, but where do I even start?”

Start your B2B blogging efforts by brainstorming the questions you get frequently. What is your team answering constantly? We always preach that if a question is being asked in person, or over the phone, you can bet it’s being asked in Google as well. This is your chance to answer that question for a potential customer. A chance to help them when they need it most – in the depths of a Google search!

So sharpen your pencil…

In closing, I wanted to share an example of a book that is 218 pages long about how to sharpen a pencil. It’s called “How to Sharpen Pencils.” I own it and it’s incredible. It’s more parody (okay, entirely a parody) than an informative guide – but it’s very entertaining. It’s also proof that even the simplest, most mundane things can be written about in great, informative, interesting, humorous detail.

So what was that again – you don’t have anything to write about?

A manufacturing marketing plan for generating leads quickly

I don’t believe in cutting corners or trying to find cheap shortcuts to success. But I do believe in time efficiency and producing results as fast as possible. Because most of our customers and prospects feel the same way, I wanted to outline the approach to marketing for manufacturers that I’d take if tasked with generating leads on an accelerated timeline. The marketing plan below can be fully-implemented within 1-2 months.

One important note before we jump in: the below is an ongoing process. To be successful with online marketing, it’s imperative that you never stop developing resourceful content to attract, educate and convert prospects to leads. So once you’ve made it through step seven, go back to step one, evaluate what you’ve done, rinse and repeat. This approach has worked consistently for our clients and with commitment, it can work for you too.

1. Identify your three most important buyer personas

Before you dive in and start developing resourceful marketing content, you want to be very clear about WHO you’re writing to and what their needs truly are. Many influencers can play a role throughout the buying process, from procurement to engineers to CEOs. This article about creating targeted buyer personas will help you identify those most important influencers.

2. Identify problems for each persona

Once you know who you’re writing to, identify what each of these buyers/influencers really cares about. What are their pain points and problems they need solved? CEOs might care about high-level company problems you can solve. Engineers likely care about technical considerations. Project managers care about how to improve their daily work. With a clear perspective on your most important buyers’ challenges, you’ll have much less trouble planning content ideas that will help demonstrate your expertise and earn their trust.

3. Do keyword research around those problems

For Gorilla, our potential customers have problems like lack of qualified leads, uninformed buyers and inability to measure marketing results. So we develop our content around these topics and make ourselves helpful resources to our prospects. Doing so builds trust and opens the door to sales conversations when our prospects are ready to have them. What’s the equivalent for your customers and prospects?

4. Create a white paper for each persona

Once you’ve identified the core problems each of your buyer personas face, it’s time to develop your problem-solving content. Start with a white paper written for your most important persona – a tightly-focused 1500-to-2500-word-long article that educates in depth on a topic. Structure it in 500-word, easy-to-digest “chapters” that could have the ability to live as shorter, stand-alone articles later on (hint, hint). Later, you’ll also want to create additional white papers for your other personas.

5. Create lead capture pages, calls-to-action and email alerts

This part gets a bit more technical, but it’s imperative to the manufacturing marketing process if you’re going to generate real leads. So get the help of a web developer to make some updates on your website. Create lead capture landing pages (like this one) where visitors can trade their contact info for the expert white paper you created in step four. Place call-to-action buttons throughout your website that encourage visitors to download that white paper and drive them to the landing page through the simple click of a mouse. And finally, set up alerts throughout your website that fire you an email every time visitors download your white paper. Then you can learn the names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names and any other info you chose to collect through the website form right away. When an alert comes through, and if he or she is a good fit, pick up the phone and make the call!

6. Publish a short blog article once a week

Back in step four, I recommended writing your white paper in shorter “chapters”. Each of those chapters can now live as individual articles on your blog. Why? Because each shorter article provides you with the opportunity to speak to a more specific subtopic individually. And each of those articles gives you an extra page that Google will index as well as the opportunity to target a different keyword or phrase that’s important to rank for in search engines. One really important last step: You know those call-to-action buttons I asked you to create in step five? You’ll need one at the bottom of each blog post too. “If you found this article helpful, download our more in-depth guide on the topic. Click here”. This step is what turns your educational article into a real lead-capture opportunity. Need an example of one of those call-to-action buttons? Look no further than the bottom of this blog post you’re reading right now!

7. Share your content on social media

If you did a good job choosing relevant keywords for your individual blog articles in step six, you’ll start attracting prospects through Google searches before long. But there’s no reason not to proactively promote your new content as well. Social media – particularly LinkedIn – provides a perfect venue for sharing links to your articles in front of a relevant audience. Post them to your feed. Encourage others at your company to do the same. And if you want to get ambitious, seek out LinkedIn industry groups where you can participate in topical discussions and offer your articles as helpful answers to questions of others.

None of the above happens with the snap of a finger. But at the same time, marketing for manufacturers isn’t rocket science. Carve out the time, make the commitment to doing it right, and I’m confident you’ll succeed. Read our article on B2B marketing ideas to keep your brain spinning. Or of course, if you could use the help of an agency to help with your manufacturing marketing plan, schedule a free 30-minute consultation with one of our marketing consultants at Gorilla 76!

Two ways your B2B website homepage can drive more leads

You’ve got a B2B website. You had it built a few years back by someone’s cousin’s uncle’s sister’s brother’s roommate. It communicates what you do with a nice “services” section. It educates visitors on your company’s history with a well thought out and heavily revised “about us” page. It boasts the awards with which you’ve decorated the company’s shelves (or storage room). It even prompts visitors, via a “contact us” form, to send you all their precious information when they want to spend their hard-earned money.

This sound like your site? If so, I have some bad news. It’s likely broken. At least if you’re hoping to generate sales qualified leads it is. At Gorilla 76, we believe a company website is the single greatest marketing tool a company can have. No question about it.

In this blog post, I’m going to highlight two very simple (relatively speaking) things you can do to your homepage that can result in an increase in traffic and ultimately an increase in leads.

1. Pay attention to the title tag on your home page

Most people don’t know what a title tag is. And that’s okay. To be honest, until I started working in web marketing, I certainly didn’t know what a title tag was.

Defined, a title tag is nothing more than the title of a page on a website. It appears at the top of the browser window and it’s also the title of a search snippet when you conduct a search in Google.

Title tags are important for two reasons.

First of all, they tell a search user what a given page is about. So, if I search “industrial marketing agencies in St. Louis”, I’m given the following. Note the highlighted portion.

Second, they tell a search engine what a page is about. So it’s important to write your title tags so that they include a targeted keyword for a page (we recommend focusing on one to two keywords per page) as well as clearly communicate to a user what a page is about.

If you look at your site, and all you see is the name of your company at the very top of your browser window, there is work to be done. Instead, you should be seeing something like the following:

2. Give an offer

We’ve already discussed the fact that your site is acting as a brochure. Services, “About Us”, awards, etc. etc. But that’s no good, because the web allows for massive amounts of interaction. So give an offer or two on your homepage. For instance, maybe you know that if you can get a lead on the phone for 15 minutes, you increase your chances of converting that lead into a customer by 50%. But you also know that inbound leads (people coming to you) are much better than cold leads. So give inbound leads an opportunity to come in the door.

Feature a prompt on your home page that invites a user to sign up for a free consultation. Or a free second-opinion service. Obviously, these are just two examples, as I don’t know enough about your business to accurately advise what offers are best. (But of course, if you’d like to hear my opinions live and in color, well, we just happen to offer a free consultation!)

Or maybe your company is the absolute best when it comes to a certain industry practice and you could talk about it until you’re blue in the face. Well, why not write a guide about said practice, that is free to download (for an exchange of an email address of course) and put a big shiny call-to-action button on your home page that advertises it? This stuff works. I promise. It’s the methodology we use and we’ve seen results aplenty.

Whatever you do, make sure it aligns with your marketing goals

As I mentioned, these are just two quick examples. There are lots of things that can be done to a B2B website’s homepage. But these are both pretty simple and align with two very common goals: driving more qualified traffic and doing a better job converting that traffic once it’s on your site. If you align your activities with your goals, you will see success.

Why your old, crusty, dated B2B website DOESN’T need a redesign

OK – that’s a bold statement and big leap for me to make, especially if we’ve never even spoken. But I’ve had this same conversation with many, many B2B companies. And in the end, most of them come around. So if you’re currently considering a B2B website rebuild project, bear with me for this short, five-minute read. Let me attempt to reframe your mindset briefly. I promise it will be worth your time.

I first want to throw this out there: my company, Gorilla 76 does plenty of B2B website design. But, here’s the thing. We only do them for companies who we believe really NEED them. If we don’t think you need one – we’re not gonna build you one, and we’ll recommend you don’t build one at all. At least not right now.

The first question I will always ask when someone approaches our company about a B2B website rebuild is, “What do you want this project to accomplish in order for it to be considered a success?”. So right now, ask yourself the same. If your primary reason is one of the following, I’ll suggest you might be approaching this project from the wrong angle:

Look more professional
Update your outdated info
Keep pace with your competitor’s shiny new site

Here’s where I’m going with this. The JOB of a B2B website isn’t to look professional, just as your job isn’t to wear professional-looking clothes or drive a fancy new car to work. Nope. Professionalism is a characteristic of how you present yourself. It’s not a job description. Whether you’re a marketer, salesman or B2B company executive, your JOB is to grow your business. Likewise, your website’s JOB, first and foremost, is to grow your business. Results first, cosmetics second. A B2B website is a business tool.

Think carefully. This is a big investment.

A B2B website redesign might cost you $25-50K if it’s done right. That’s not chump change. So what’s a bigger priority? Making sure that website is producing targeted traffic, hard, qualified leads and paying customers? Or looking professional, updated and shiny? Your first thought might be, “Well, if we make it more professional, more people will want to work with us”. And this is the biggest misconception in web design. It just doesn’t work that way. Think about it.

Let’s say you owned a small bakery on a side street, tucked away in a neighborhood somewhere a few blocks off Main Street, and you decided it was time to grow your business. Would your first priority be a costly, cosmetic facelift of your storefront? Probably not, right? You’d build a plan to generate foot traffic off that nearby busy road. You’d promote your business to get in front of the right audience and work tirelessly to generate positive reviews in the food community. And when those patrons started filing through your front doors, you’d do whatever you could to engage them, satisfy them, make sure they told their friends about you, and get them back through the doors the next week. And once you’ve build that thriving, sustainable business around a great product, you might reinvest in that cosmetic facelift to amplify what you’re already doing.

Newsflash: your B2B website is no different

One year from today, what results will you need to report in order to consider your website investment successful? Did you double website traffic? Did you triple qualified inbound leads? Can you directly tie revenue from new customers back to their origins in Google searches that led them to your site, converted them into contacts and formed new customer relationships? These are the jobs of your website. Not looking pretty. And the good news is that you can make these things happen NOW, without blowing your entire marketing budget on that website rebuild. Don’t buy the shiny Cadillac or new suit until you’ve generated the revenue to justify it.

How and where to start

1. Optimize your old, crusty, dated B2B website in search engines

Start by driving as much possible targeted website traffic as you can to your current website. And do it by generating exceptional, new, educational content for your audience. If you need to update some info on the site to correct inaccuracies, fine. But don’t spend too much time dwelling on little tweaks. Instead, look forward. Create a business blog that targets the most important keywords your potential customers would search and answers the most common questions they ask. Publish at least one resourceful article weekly on your site that helps solve customer problems. When prospects search for those things in Google, guess who they’ll find? If you want some more info on how to make this happen, reference chapters 3 and 4 of our inbound marketing guide.

2. Optimize your site to convert visitors into real, hard leads

Growth in website traffic means absolutely nothing if it’s not producing leads. Create opportunity on your website to convert your visitors into real contacts by trading them something of value, like an educational guide related to your services for a name and phone number. Put hard leads on the table for your sales team. And make sure your sales team takes these leads seriously, calls on them and closes deals. We’ll teach you more about optimizing your site for conversions in chapter 5 of our guide.

3. Nurture, nurture, nurture your leads

Your new, resourceful, educational content is just as valuable for your existing database of contacts as it is for those just discovering you. Use email to distribute teasers for your new content. Bring your existing contacts and leads back to your website. Reengage them, nurture them, educate them, stay top-of-mind, establish more and more trust in your expertise. Learn the power and strategy behind lead nurturing in chapter 7 of our guide.

In the end, start with the revenue generators

As painful as it may be to admit, your website rebuild can wait. Focus first on results and everything will fall into place. If you’d be interested in a free 30-minute consultation to talk through your dilemma, we’re here to help! Don’t hesitate to sign up here. It’s the best first step you can take to developing your industrial marketing strategy.

The convergence of industrial sales and industrial marketing

When the sales and marketing teams within a B2B industrial company don’t communicate, one of two things is probably broken. 1. One of the two groups isn’t doing its job, which creates a lack of respect for that group. 2. The two groups aren’t aware of what the other is doing with its time.

On the flip side, when industrial sales and industrial marketing teams align their goals and communicate, they together form a powerful business development unit. Both groups understand the buyer personas they want to reach. In turn, marketing becomes the greatest supporter of sales. Marketing works to generate awareness and website traffic from within those target persona groups. They put qualified leads on the table for the sales team to pursue. And they help the sales team close more leads by warming up cooler ones while sales focuses on the hotter ones. Not only must marketing and sales coexist, they must work hand in hand with aligned objectives.

Collecting lead intelligence

At Gorilla, we talk A LOT about how to convert website visitors into real leads through conversion paths made up of a call-to-action, a lead-capture page and a form. After your website visitor moves through that conversion path and fills out the form, she enters your marketing database. But if you’re using a marketing automation platform like Hubspot, this is where the fun just begins. Each time that new lead returns, your website will remember her and document her actions and page views within her profile. If she fills out other forms in exchange for different premium content offers, your website will ask her new questions to add additional data to her profile. Before long, this data paints an insightful picture about her that includes:

Her name, company, email address and phone number
Her industry
Which service/product pages she has viewed
Her content interests
How she discovered you
The types of problems she needs solved

You’ll also receive email alerts every time she returns to your site, so you know when she’s in the right mindset. This kind of lead intelligence sets the stage for more informed and effective sales calls that are catered to the needs of that individual. This intelligence also makes possible our next topic – lead scoring.

Building a lead scoring system

When inbound marketing starts working, industrial sales teams get bogged down. Lead scoring exists to help identify which leads are good fits, as well as those who are closer to a buying decision. Lead scoring also helps weed out contacts that don’t need to be on your sales radar, whether those people are vendors, competitors, students or just bad fits. An understanding of your leads dictates where your sales team should spend its valuable time.

So what is lead scoring? In short, it’s a system for automatically assigning “points” to each lead in your marketing database, based on who that person is, what she has done on your website and how engaged she is with your content. Marketing automation platforms like Hubspot build lead scoring into their software.

Lead scores can be constructed around three sets of criteria:

Information a visitor submits though your website
Actions taken by the visitor on your website
The visitor’s engagement with content on your website and within your marketing emails

1. Scoring leads based on information they submit

Don’t take the information you collect through lead-capture forms on your website at face value. You have an opportunity to use the information to score the hottest leads and separate them from the warm leads and those who aren’t in your target audience. Marketing automation software platforms allow you to preassign points to users based on answers they provide. The stronger a lead is, the more points you would assign. You can also assign negative points to those you don’t want to target at all. If your target buyer personas fall within the healthcare industry, you would assign points to any contact that indicates she’s in healthcare. If you target people within the states of Missouri and Illinois ONLY, you might deduct points from those OUTSIDE of these states. If you specialize in delivering a specific service and a website visitor indicates her need for that exact service, you would add a lot of points.

2. Scoring leads base on website activity

Assign plenty of points to those digging around your site. A visitor who returns to your pricing page five times is probably further along in her buying process than others. And if she has also read three of your case studies, she’s likely considering you as a potential partner.

3. Scoring leads based on engagement and re-engagement

Add points when a visitor returns to your site for the fifth time. And tack on some points for every marketing email she opens. Engaged leads who consume your marketing information and return again and again to your site are more likely to close as customers.

Segmenting your leads

Lead intelligence and an effective lead scoring system allow you to segment contacts in a smarter way. While most companies can only segment their contacts by criteria like industry and “qualified vs. not-qualified,” marketing automation software lets us put our lead intelligence to work. We can build automated lists that slice and dice our leads in countless ways.

For example, we might develop a “smart list” of contacts with lead scores surpassing 500, a second list of contacts in the healthcare industry that have also downloaded two or more white papers, and a third list of contacts that are CEOs at companies with 100 or more employees who have also visited our site in the past three days. Construct lists that will help you identify who needs a hard sell right now and who needs the help of a very targeted lead-nurturing campaign to warm her up.

Go get started

In the end, industrial sales and marketing teams have the same goal: drive business. The problem is that these groups often fail to collaborate and equip the other with the tools and information each needs. The first step is open dialogue. The second step is a set of aligned objectives. And the third is the sharing of information in a useful, productive way, as outlined in this post. For more about online business growth for your company, download our Tactical Guide to Industrial Lead Generation.

How to create targeted buyer personas

You know the industries you target. And you know the types of companies that buy from you. But have you truly identified the individuals within those companies who discover you and gather information from you?

And what about the individuals who ultimately make the buying decisions? Where do these people go for information? What do they value about a partner like your company? How much influence do they have in the buying process? Your customers are human beings – not companies. Each is different. Just as you talk differently to your best friend vs. your grandmother vs. your boss, you must talk differently to each member of your audience.

Identify your buyers

We can’t develop a marketing plan to target every single business prospect individually, but we can develop profiles that group together audience members who share common characteristics. These profiles are called buyer personas, and they allow us to cater our marketing approach to each group differently.

Identify your ideal audience members. Who are the types of individuals your business development team consistently pursues? Who are the individuals at their companies that are tasked with choosing vendors? Which individuals become advocates for hiring you within their companies? Which individuals push back and play Devil’s advocate? Who screens vendors, conducts extensive research and collects technical details? Who just wants the facts and intends to make a fast buying decision? Develop a list of these audience members that matter in the buying process. Then narrow it down to the three or four most important groups. Your persona list, for example, could look something like this:

The young innovator
The data-driven engineer
The purchasing agent
The CEO/ decision maker

These groups become your target audiences. Moving forward, your website, blog posts, white papers, case studies, video content, email newsletters, marketing automation campaigns and other marketing activities will now have human beings in mind as your team creates them. Better targeting means better marketing results.

Develop buyer persona profiles

After identifying the personas you’ll target, you’ll need a profile for each. The key members of your business development team – marketing and sales – should collaborate to develop these profiles. Once created, every individual involved in business development initiatives should become ultra-familiar with these profiles. The following list of questions will help you build out your personas. Answer the following questions in writing about each individual persona group.

What are common job titles for this persona?
What is this person’s level of authority or decision making power within the company?
Who are a few examples of existing clients that fit this persona?
What are the types of problems this particular person needs solved?
What kind of buying experience is he looking for? Detail driven? Fast and easy?
What does this person value the most about your company?
How much does he already know about your products/services?
Is a lot or a little bit of education needed to get him up to speed?
Where does he go to collect information? Online? Coworkers? Industry peers? Trade organizations?
How does this person usually discover you? Referral? If so, from who? Past work? Google searches? If online, what is he likely searching for?
In instances when you’re NOT hired by this person’s company, what do you think this individual’s objections to hiring you may have been?

Once complete, edit your persona profiles down, clean them up and get them into the hands of your entire business development team. Let your marketing and content strategy revolve around them.

This article is one short chapter from our Hardworking Inbound Marketing Guide for B2B Industrial Companies. Download the full guide below.

Case study: Lead nurturing helps design-builder win multimillion-dollar job

The Korte Company is one of the largest design-builders in the U.S. In fact, they actually helped invent the method of construction. Like any construction company worth their salt, The Korte Company is well versed in a variety of markets — ranging from Department of Defense work to healthcare and education.

Issue and importance

The Korte Company decided to make a push to pursue more work in the healthcare market in order to capitalize on previous experience and success. This was a significant shift in business for the company. There are two things that are very important to note about this particular case study. First, the sales cycle in construction is extremely long and can range from months to even years. Second, The Korte Company was fortunate to have a large amount of contacts. In order for them to capitalize on this goldmine of data, they would have to rely on email marketing to supplement the daily phone calls and emails their sales team were already making and sending.

Solution and results

After helping The Korte Company segment their healthcare contacts, we built a lead-nurturing campaign to educate those contacts through content and keep them engaged. Within months, the construction marketing work paid off. Results follow:

Seven of nine contacts at the company were highly engaged in the email-nurturing campaigns
The Korte Company was awarded construction duties for a multimillion-dollar, 5,000+ square-foot surgery center

Industrial painter grows website traffic and online leads

Thomas Industrial Coatings is one of the largest industrial painters in the United States. They’re a very forward thinking company and look to technology to solve many common day-to-day problems — including business development.

Issue and importance

Despite being an extremely busy and growing business, Thomas knew they could fill some capacity in their workforce. That would mean less downtime for their team, greater profitability and more jobs for their painters. To create lead-generation opportunities for the right types of jobs, though, Thomas needed better exposure in Google for searches related to those jobs. In particular, they identified tank painting as a particular area of opportunity.

Solution and results

We launched a content marketing and search engine optimization strategy focused on a variety of key markets, with a special emphasis on the tank painting market. Results follow:

64 percent organic traffic growth in the first half of 2014 compared to the first half of 2013
46 percent growth in contacts generated through the website in that same period
126 percent growth in entries to the Thomas website through pages related to tank painting (nearly 50 percent being new visitors)
Ranking on page 1 of Google search results for key phrases, including “tank painting contractors,” “storage tank painting,” “tank painting,” “storage tank coatings” and “water tank painting”
Consistent stream of tank-painting inquiries originated from searches

3 reasons to hire an outside B2B marketing consultant

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way first: I’m a B2B marketing consultant. So yes, I am biased on this topic, of course. But I do have a compelling argument to make, and this article will only take you about five minutes to read. So stick around!

What follows is my case against three common objections I often hear in regard to hiring a B2B marketing consultant:

We already have an internal Marketing Manager
We’re not looking for someone to consult, we’re looking for someone to execute
We already work with someone who does our ads and updates our website

Let’s examine these three objections in detail.

1. We already have an internal Marketing Manager

Awesome! All the better. I’m not trying to uproot them and replace them with my agency – I promise. Quite the opposite. In fact, an internal Marketing Manager / CMO and an outside B2B marketing consultant are a match made in heaven. Here’s why:

The Marketing Manager already has a strong understanding of the company’s business goals and knows the business development team, company resources and past marketing initiatives well. He or she is well-versed in how marketing already happens at the company – including what has worked and what has failed. And most importantly, this person isn’t a project manager, engineer, or someone in another role who inherited marketing duties by default. This is a down and dirty marketing-trained professional. And since marketing is his or her full-time role, this person will dedicate the proper time and energy needed to achieve marketing success.

In a complementary role, the outside B2B marketing consultant brings fresh strategic thinking to the table, along with processes, measurement strategies and results that have benefited other like companies. In many cases – like with us at Gorilla – the consultant also brings a variety of skill sets, including a team of designers, brand journalists, marketing strategists and web developers. Those are all skill sets you’re unlikely to find in one person.

Our client experience shows that companies with internal Marketing Managers or CMOs produce really strong results when we pair up with them.

2. We’re not looking for someone to consult, we’re looking for someone to execute

Fair enough. I can understand that sentiment and I can’t argue with it. My response to this objection has two parts.

First, I agree that a marketing plan isn’t worth paying for if no clear solution for executing that plan exists. This is why it’s so important your outside B2B marketing consultant brings you a team (with the previously mentioned skill sets) to execute the plan as well.

Second, you NEED a sound plan in place before you execute anything. Years ago, marketing was like throwing darts. Spend $3K on a trade journal ad. Hope the phone rings. Spend $15K to ship your team across the country for a trade show. Hope you come back with a few good business cards. Spend $10K printing a few thousand glossy folders with project sheets in them. Hope your prospects are wowed and buy something from you. But that was the old marketing world.

A worthy B2B marketing consultant today will come into your business and rather than saying, “sure, I can get these print ads out the door for you and make them look professional”, he’ll say, “let’s examine your audience segments, identify their needs throughout their buying processes, figure out what problems they need solved and build a strategy to solve them.” That outside B2B marketing consultant will design a blueprint to attract prospects within your specific market niche, convert those prospects into real leads and nurture those leads until they become customers. He’ll help you identify key performance indicators and outline a measurement strategy that will make sure you achieve a positive return on your full marketing investment. And yes, that person will make sure your plan is executed to a tee.

3. We already work with someone who does our ads and updates our website

And that’s quite alright. But make sure you ask yourself this question:

Are you just paying that person to knock out marketing tasks?

Or are you paying them to think strategically about how do generate hard leads for your sales team and grow your bottom line? I have lots of respect for a talented graphic designer (that’s how I got my start, actually). But marketing is much more than a graphic design job. You need to expect results that affect your bottom line from every investment you make in marketing, and a good B2B marketing consultant will give you confidence and proof that’s happening.

Gorilla 76 helps B2B industrial companies generate website traffic, qualified business leads and paying customers using their websites and other online media. Sign up for a free 30-minute consultation for ideas on how to make these things happen for your company.

Online lead generation strategy helps software company grow business

TruQC offers job-site documentation and quality control software for the iPad. They currently work with some of the largest industrial companies in the United States and have recently begun to expand their offering globally and into other markets.

Issue and importance

TruQC hired us for a variety of marketing endeavors, one of which — the focus of this case study — was (and still is) delivering leads via their website. The company has a strong offline presence thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of their management team, but, being a startup and having a small team, it was a top priority to use the web to more effectively promote their product and ultimately increase their lead database. And that’s where we came in.

Solution and results

To generate leads through their website, we developed a variety of offers for their visitors that could be exchanged for contact information. These offers included white papers, case studies, live demo requests and newsletter subscriptions. Results follow:

As of May 2015, TruQC had received nearly 800 information requests via their website since beginning this initiative with Gorilla 76. That includes nearly 250 premium content downloads and nearly 500 live demo requests.
In Q1 of 2015 alone, TruQC had 112 information requests. That includes white paper downloads, case study downloads, live demo requests and a few other conversion opportunities.
TruQC has since closed deals with many of the leads Gorilla helped produce.

Generate better construction leads with these 3 types of website content

In a long-sales cycle industry like construction, lots of information gathering happens throughout the buying process. Whether you realize it or not, your prospects are learning about you before they ever pick up the phone. And that learning process will most likely begin on your company website.

Early on, prospects are trying to qualify you. They’re learning about your services and areas of expertise, as well as your client experience. This is the no brainer website content that you absolutely need – descriptions of your capabilities and summaries of projects you’ve completed. But in this article, I’ll assume you’ve already put those “must haves” in place. I want to instead focus on three types of content that will separate you from your competitors as the buying processes of your construction leads progress.

1. Educational articles

Most of your competitors are all talk. “We’ve built all across the country”. “We listen to your needs”. “No one else could possibly service you the way we can”. Blah. Blah. Blah. The problem with this approach is that your audience is smart. They smell the B.S. from miles away. And every contractor they find says the same thing as the last. So don’t be like them.

Instead of wasting your energy talking all about you, focus on helping your construction leads. Put yourself in their shoes. What problems are they trying to solve? What questions do they need answered on a regular basis? What do they want to learn that will help them make a purchasing decision? Five-paragraph educational articles (AKA blog posts) are the perfect solve. Educate and inform rather than blabbering about how awesome you are at delivering your services.

2. In-depth white papers

Condensing your answer to a common FAQ into a few paragraphs can sometimes be difficult. Your solutions to customer problems are often complex. And some of your construction leads might want to dig deeper, seeking more detailed and technical information. So give it to them.

White papers are like educational blog posts – just more detailed. Dive into to the common topics that lead to long sales conversations and flesh out those topics with 2-3 page (or longer) educational papers. For example, we helped one of our clients – a design-build contractor – produce this white paper called How to Manage A Healthcare Construction Project From Start to Finish. Gather the technical details that your prospects seek from the experts at your company. And turn them into content that will engage your audience and prompt sales conversations.

Oh, and a bonus comes along with writing white papers – they’re great lead generation tools. While you should post your educational articles / blog posts on your website for anyone to read, you should use your downloadable white papers as lead generation tools. If you’d like to learn more about how to make that happen, here’s an article we wrote about how to turn website visitors into leads.

3. Case studies, but written in a smarter way…

I recently read a fantastic book called Same Side Selling: A Radical Approach to Break Through Sales Barriers. (this is a highly recommended read, but the way). The authors spent a few pages talking specifically about case studies and argued that an effective case study should be broken down this way:

10% Client background
50% Client issue, impact and importance
40% Outcome of solution

Most traditional case studies allocate a majority of their real estate to describing a solution. But those solutions are customer-specific and therefore not relatable to many prospective customers. The breakdown outlined above instead emphasizes the client’s problem (or issue), how fixing it would impact them, the importance of fixing that problem and the outcome that was actually produced.

In short, this case study structure demonstrates problem-solving capabilities and the ability to understand the issue at hand for the customer. And it focuses on success, which is just the thing you need to sell.

Generating construction leads is obviously no easy task, but these three types of content will help qualify and separate your business. For a broader look at online lead generation in this industry, read our blog post about 3 smart ways to generate construction leads online.

You’ve earned them, now nurture those leads

Our own Jon Franko is collaborating with Coatings Pro Magazine, delivering a series of marketing strategy posts to their blog. In addition to being featured this month talking lead nurturing, he also contributed content in June and July, talking targeting the ideal web audience and turning website visitors into leads.

Once you’ve got web visitors and you’ve turned them into potential leads, your next steps are pretty straightforward: utilize e-mail to build these new relationships.

We know what you’re thinking. “It’s so easy to hit ‘unsubscribe’ and lose that new connection, just like that.” That’s why we know it’s important to send relevant, personalized e-mails to individuals based not just on their demographic info, but also on the content they’ve downloaded and viewed on your site. Each visitor to your site is unique, and that’s why it’s important to use content specifically targeted for their experience to grow your business

Sound complicated? It really isn’t, and we’ll break it down further for you: click here to read our newest post on the Coatings Pro blog.

Steel pipe distributor more than doubles inbound leads

American Piping Products is one of the world’s largest distributors of steel pipe. They pride themselves on stocking an extensive product inventory, delivering exceptional customer service and fulfilling orders from anywhere across the world — same-day.

Issue and importance

American Piping Products’ website was already well-optimized in search engines, so their traffic volume was strong. The problem? They relied on one buried contact form to convert their thousands of monthly website visitors into real contacts and leads. With a hungry, motivated sales team in-house, they knew they were missing a big lead-generation opportunity by relying primarily on outbound phone calls to generate sales. A well-designed inbound-lead-conversion strategy on their site could grow their business significantly.

Solution and results

Our team pooled our brains to design and build an on-site conversion optimization plan that consisted of a more prominent and visual call-to-action system, live chat function and downloadable resources placed behind lead capture forms. Results follow:

149 percent growth in leads generated through website during the six weeks prior to this case study being published
The live chat function has become central to business development initiatives

You’ve got web traffic, now for lead generation

If you’re familiar with the Gorilla blog, you know that our philosophy is pretty simple and straightforward: create a website that provides value and the customers will come. So, if you’ve got web traffic, great! You’re on your way.

But easier said than done, right? In a post this month (he was featured last month too) on Coatings Pro Magazine’s blog, our own Jon Franko breaks down our strategy of turning visitors into leads. In a nutshell…

You must have great content to offer
You must have strong, visual calls-to-action
Your landing pages must be good to go
And don’t forget to collect the info

Sound simple? It is, and we’re here to help make it happen. Head over here to check out the piece. Click here to start reading!

3 smart ways to generate construction leads online

You’re no stranger to the dog-eat-dog arena of construction lead generation. Competition keeps growing, and as a result, so must time spent developing new business. Here are three ways to step outside the traditional methods of prospecting construction leads.

Equip your website to show up in Google searches

Nobody likes to talk to a salesman until they’re ready or almost ready to buy something – especially when it’s a big purchase. Think about how you buy things in your personal life. Before you shell out a large sum of cash on anything – whether it be for a house, a car or a refrigerator – you’re going to conduct some research. Sometimes that means physically seeing or touching something. Other times it means digging around online. Usually, it’s both.

As of 2012, 61% of global Internet users research products online. (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance,). And I’m confident that percentage is NOT trending down, especially for big purchases.

Remember that your prospects are human beings. Just as they search for products and services online in their personal lives, they’ll go online to research you, your stiffest competitor, and at least a handful of your other 10,000 competitors. Information is so easy to find today, and it’s your job to be sure the information your prospects find happens to be YOUR company’s information. Fill your website with helpful info related to the keywords your prospects are searching for. Strong SEO is an essential part of your industrial marketing.

Help construction leads address their challenges before you even meet them

Let’s talk about buying refrigerators again for a second. When you’re shopping for a refrigerator, what information matters to you? You’re probably interested in what it looks like, the dimensions and specific features like storage capacity and the ice maker. You’ll compare the reputation of brands and might even read reviews of specific models. And you’ll do all this before you commit to spending over $1000 because you want to make the right decision.

Now let’s talk about your construction business. What are the equivalents? Think about common topics of conversation when you’re fortunate enough to land a new business meeting. What do construction leads care about? What areas of your expertise help them understand what they should be considering during this long buying process?

Remember, nobody likes to talk with a salesman until they’re ready. Your leads aren’t buying refrigerators or building hospitals before they put in the due diligence.

So just as you’d answer customer FAQs in a one-on-one meeting, fill your website with rich content that will help educate your construction leads just the same – before they ever meet you. Stand out from your competitors by establishing your expertise before they do.

Keep leads engaged with simple marketing emails

How often do you sell a construction project within a week of your first meeting? If that were common practice for you, you’d probably be sitting on a beach in Jamaica rather than reading this article! I’m stating the obvious, but the sales cycle is long in this business. Lots of people, lots of information gathering and lots of politics play a role.

Email marketing is a highly-effective way to keep all the decision makers in a project involved through that one (or five) year sales cycle.

If you’re already producing great content like we talked about earlier in this article, you should absolutely put that content in front of your open leads. Send them links to your content via email and drive them back to your website so they can read more and re-engage.

Ultimately, online lead generation is about being helpful to your potential construction leads. Just as this article is helping you learn about online lead generation, help your customers learn how to solve their construction challenges. That’s your wheelhouse after all.

Why you should write a customer-centric brand positioning statement

A few years ago my microwave broke, leaving me with a very important life decision between:

Buying a new microwave
Paying more than I probably should to repair this one

Because I have one of those built-in microwaves that’s mounted to the wall and fits perfectly into a crevice between the cabinet to the left, the cabinet above it and the cabinet to the right, I couldn’t just buy a cheap replacement to sit on the counter top. That would leave me with a weird-looking void between those cabinets on the wall where the broken one used to live. And you can’t have that, right? So I had to either go all in and buy another fancy stainless steel microwave that fit that exact space or get my broken one fixed. Since those things aren’t cheap, I opted for route two and brought in the repair guy.

After about thirty minutes, he had the microwave broken down into 100 pieces – spread all across my kitchen and dining room. And then two hours later, it was back on the wall and ready to heat up my leftover chicken from last night. Even though I learned during my time without a microwave that it’s NOT in fact essential to survival in today’s world, I was pretty happy to have it back.

You: I thought this article was about writing a brand positioning statement

Me: Yes, but sometimes metaphors make things more interesting, so I’m telling this exciting microwave story to illustrate a point. Thanks for your patience in the meantime!

When I finally decided to cough up the cash and hire the repair man, here’s the one thing I cared about:

A microwave that worked once he was done

And here are a few things I DIDN’T care so much about:

What tools he used to fix it
His process for fixing it
The parts he replaced

OK – here’s the part where I reveal the metaphor.

Head over to the B2B world where you and I live as business people and ask yourself this question: What do your customers and prospects really care about? Their problems being solved or your fancy tool set, process and tactics?

In my particular line of work (B2B marketing), my clients care about results that help grow their businesses. They want to attract more potential customers so their phones start ringing. They want their websites to convert visitors into real leads they can sell to. They want to close deals faster. Because of all this, we spend a lot more of our time and energy at Gorilla speaking to our customers’ challenges than to our awesome process or our marketing tools like website design, content writing, SEO and email marketing.

Our customer-centric brand positioning statement would go something like this: “We help B2B industrial companies generate website traffic, qualified business leads and paying customers using their website and other online media.”

A less-effective, self-centered brand positioning statement would have been: “We design websites, write blog posts and run email marketing campaigns.”

The first one is a lot better. Why? Because it focuses on the value we deliver for our clients.

So what’s your equivalent?

Your brand positioning statement should emerge from the common challenges you help your customers address and the outcomes you produce for them. Your customers care about themselves much more than they care about you. So don’t talk about you – talk about them. Earn their trust by making them confident you “get” them. Demonstrate that you understand their business problems and that your solutions will be designed to help solve them.

When you get around to writing that brand positioning statement, use it to distinguish yourself from 99 percent of your competitors. Focus on your customer — not on you.

Generating business online

By Ann Marie Steib

There’s no reason to have an online presence if the right people aren’t seeing you. You can create a pretty, flashy website, but if a B2B website isn’t attracting the right audience and generating qualified leads, it isn’t serving its purpose.

Luckily, finding these potential customers is actually a pretty simple concept. Creating a website with well-written, informative content that users find valuable will generate leads if you follow a few simple steps. The more your website has to offer your potential customers, the more likely they are to find you.

Sound easy? It really can be. If you want to get the know on search engine optimization and B2B marketing, our own Jon Franko was featured this week on the Coatings Pro Magazine blog with an article he wrote about this exact topic.

Click here to read “Generating Business Online: How to Attract a Targeted Audience.”

How to restructure your old school marketing plan budget

When did you last evaluate your company’s comprehensive marketing spend? I’m talking about truly examining results and considering what new strategies might produce a more positive return on your investment. As a marketing strategy agency that specifically services B2B industrial companies, we’re all too familiar with the old school marketing spend: trade shows, print ads, direct mail and more trade shows. If you’re thinking about making a change and could use a little help planning your approach, the following steps and sample marketing plan budget will help you get started.

Audit your current marketing spend

Examine where you currently spend your marketing dollars. Are you attending trade shows, sponsoring golf tournaments, running print ads, mailing out flyers? What’s the spend within each individual channel? What’s the total spend?

Evaluate your success-tracking methods

Are you tracking results? If so, how? If not, why? Sometimes traditional marketing activities prove difficult to measure. Regardless, look at any existing measurement systems you have in place. What metrics determine success or failure? These may include:

Website traffic volume
New leads generated
Calls to a 1-800 number
Email inquires
Form submissions on your website’s contact page

If you haven’t implemented such metrics, now is a great time to get started.

Evaluate results for each initiative

Which specific marketing initiatives produce the best results? How much does a new lead cost to acquire via any given marketing activity? In other words, if you spend $20,000/year on trade shows that produce 50 leads/year, then a lead from trade shows costs you $400 to acquire. Crunch the numbers to the best of your ability.

Explore alternative, more cost-effective marketing solutions

We’re partial to online marketing. Why? We firmly believe that online media are much more relevant than traditional media in today’s business development environment. Some supporting stats compiled by marketing software company Hubspot follow:

61% of global Internet users research products online.
46% of people read blogs more than once a day.
By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human.

Consider the following as well:

For the cost of sending three people to three trade shows or the cost of running a full page ad in a local business journal once a month for a year, you could hire an agency with a team of experts to develop and execute a full online marketing strategy including:

Search engine optimization
Social media marketing
Website lead generation
Business blogging
Email marketing
Marketing automation

So how do you break down a revised marketing plan budget?

Every company is different. And change can be tough to implement (click here for article on how to convince your boss it’s time for a marketing overhaul). The example budget below outlines what we’ve found successful for some of our B2B clients – particularly those in industrial spaces like construction, painting and manufacturing.

We’re going to assume a $100,000 annual marketing budget as a benchmark. But wait! Don’t run away yet. I realize this may be high (or perhaps low) depending on the makeup and size of your company. I’ve included percentages so you can scale the budget up and down accordingly

Inbound marketing (66% | $5500/month = $66,000)

Inbound marketing is about attracting qualified prospects to your website, educating them and becoming a resource for them. It’s about converting these website visitors into leads and nurturing them through email and marketing automation until they become paying customers. This marketing approach is designed to move a prospect through his buying process from being unfamiliar with your company to discovering you to becoming an engaged lead to becoming a customer. The process includes many elements working together as a lead development machine – search engine optimization, social media, content marketing (website, blog, white papers, case studies), email and marketing automation.

The absolutely necessary first step in implementing an online/inbound marketing initiative is to lay the foundation for success with a strategic plan. And if the plan itself is all you can afford to do this year, so be it. Budget $10,000, execute the strategic plan alone and look to next year to initiate a full blown inbound marketing initiative.

If you have the internal capacity and personnel to implement an inbound marketing initiative, by all means go for it and redistribute the funds allocated here. If not, hire an inbound marketing agency with this specialty. Whatever you do, be sure your marketing plan is GOAL-driven and not TACTIC-driven. In other words, don’t try email marketing just because it would be something new. And don’t jump into an expensive website rebuild just because yours looks dated.

Instead, nail down your company’s pain points and build a plan that uses a variety of marketing channels to solve those problems. An awareness problem can addressed by generating more qualified visitors in the search engines. A lead generation problem can be addressed by trading valuable resources like white papers and buyers guides for prospective customers’ contact information. A customer acquisition or long sales cycle problem can be addressed with a targeted email marketing campaign and marketing automation strategy.

If you chose to work with an agency, find one that demonstrates how they’ll scale deliverables up and down based both on your budget and the results you’re hoping to achieve. A $3K/month spend (vs. a $8K/month spend) shouldn’t mean services are simply chopped because you can’t afford them. A smart marketing agency will take your budget and develop a cohesive, GOAL-driven plan comprised of the right mix of services that will address your most pressing business challenges.

Marketing software (12% | $1000/month = $12,000)

An inbound marketing approach like that described above will reach its full potential when complemented by marketing automation software like Hubspot. This kind of software pulls lead intelligence into a database through website form submissions, tracks visitor behavior on your site, segments and scores leads based on their engagement and demographics, and allows you to market to each in a personalized, highly targeted manner. This kind of software isn’t cheap, but it significantly amplifies every marketing activity you implement.

Traditional trade journal advertising (10% | $10,000)

We won’t knock traditional media entirely because we do believe it has its place in the mix. After all, trade journals target very specific and relevant audiences. And these ad buys help build relationships with the industry professionals that run them. But printed ads have a limited shelf life. When next month’s publication arrives in the mail, last month’s ads go away.

If you proceed, think about how to generate a return and make these investments more measurable. Instead of a branded message about how great your company is, use the ad space to promote an expert guide or white paper that your company has written as part of your newfangled online marketing plan. By offering something of value to your audience and prompting them to go online to download it, you set yourself up for a lead generation opportunity among targeted prospects. This approach initiates action rather than relying on ad impressions and hoping someone calls you. To go a step further, put a unique URL (website address) on the ad, so you know that everyone who visits your site by going to youcompany.com/guide is a visitor that found you via that specific ad placement.

Trade show materials, other printed collateral (12% | $12,000)

At this point, I’ll make my argument that trade show attendance is a sales expense and should be taken from the sales budget rather than the marketing budget. Marketing exists to support sales and business development, and the initiatives like those previously described are integral to filling the sales team’s pipeline with qualified leads. It’s very hard for me to justify compromising a year’s worth of inbound marketing efforts for a few days worth of trade shows.

If trade show attendance absolutely must come out of your marketing budget, I recommend scaling back your investment in this channel for a year. See what happens. After all, if you’re reading this article, you’re considering change, and trade shows are typically one of the most budget-draining business development spends a B2B company makes.

How about this for a compromise? Use a portion of your marketing budget to develop the supporting materials your sales team will need at those trade shows – booth design, printed collateral, etc. Shift the travel, floor space, meals and entertainment budgets to sales.

Conclusion

No magic formula exists to drive your company’s marketing success. But as the exchange of information shifts online, so do your customers, and for most B2B companies, so should your marketing spend.

Gorilla 76 specializes in helping B2B industrial companies generate website traffic, qualified business leads and paying customers using their websites and other online media. If you’re looking for some guidance getting started, our Marketing Roadmap consultation may be a good fit.

Should the I.T. team be in charge of your B2B website?

Short answer: No.

A B2B website exists to attract your audience, educate them and turn them into real business leads for your sales team. When a company puts its website in the hands of the I.T. department, it’s making a conscious choice to let technical decisions override strategic business decisions that affect the growth and prosperity of the company. A website needs to be a business development tool and therefore must be conceptualized and managed by the business development professionals in your marketing and sales departments.

Long answer: Take a look at the full blog post linked below.

Gorilla was featured today on the Hubspot Insiders Blog with an article we wrote about this exact topic. Click here to read the full post.

15 social media tips for B2B marketing success

In our previous article about social media pitfalls, we focused on ways to remove roadblocks to get results. This section covers some of the core ways you can take advantage of marketing channels. It’s not an all-inclusive guide to social media for B2B; it would take several books to cover that topic. But if you focus on doing these things well, you’ll cut out much of the social media noise and enjoy focused success.

I don’t cover the exact type of content that will work best for your specific company. Ultimately, you should aim to reach the specific people at the specific companies who buy from you. If you want to talk strategy, we offer a free marketing assessment as well as a paid strategy service. In the meantime, focus on these 15 social media dos, and you’ll find it easier to roll out a working social media strategy for your company.

1. Learn web-marketing 101 before you spend time and effort on social media.

We covered this a bit in the pitfalls section, but here’s B2B industrial marketing in a nutshell.

Step 1: Bring people to your website.
Step 2: Get them to give you their email addresses and contact info once they’re on your site.
Step 3: Send them follow-up emails with useful information to maintain contact with them and bring them back to your site.
Step 4: Ask them via email and on your website to reach out to your sales team.
Step 5: Ask your boss for a raise. After all, you’ve helped your company attract real sales leads

I know this process doesn’t sound social or sexy, but it works. If you want to help your business by generating leads that your sales team can convert, this process is your friend. So how does social media play into the process? One, it can help you get your news, information and resources out there to bring people to your website. Two, it allows you to monitor what’s going on in your space. Three, it allows you to directly contact your potential clients and customers so you can nurture them through the buying process. Many B2C companies will use social media for customer service, but that’s generally not an effective use of social media for most B2B companies.

Now, on to the most important facts. Google search sends us 10 times as many site visitors than social media sends us. We also find that email marketing is far more effective as a tool to close sales than social media, and email marketing has a 4,300 percent ROI. Social media isn’t close. So before you put your money, time, energy and your reputation into social media, focus on ROI. Get your website and email marketing strategy in order.

Learn how to grow your business online.

Our free Industrial Marketing Guide will show you how to attract qualified website visitors, convert them into real leads and nurture them through the buying process.

Download guide

2. Publish on your LinkedIn company page — now.

Most companies have a company page on LinkedIn, and most professionals have a personal account. For many years, LinkedIn served as a static listing site instead of as a publishing site, only allowing a select, few “Influencers” to publish long posts that earned clicks, leads and attention. But as of February 2014, anyone can now publish on LinkedIn. So go right ahead and publish posts on LinkedIn just as you would on Facebook.

Get on it quickly, and you’ll stay ahead of many companies who are still learning how to build their presence. It’s the place you can actually gain a strategic advantage. If you want to run social media and you work for a B2B company, make LinkedIn your absolute, number one social media priority. It’s responsible for driving 80 percent of all B2B social media leads.

3. Use LinkedIn’s Showcase pages.

LinkedIn is killing its Products and Services Page and replacing it with Showcase Pages, a kind of product-specific mini-blog. In a move similar to allowing everyone to post on their pages and profiles, LinkedIn is also allowing everyone to post updates on product-specific pages. LinkedIn wants content so they can compete with Facebook and Twitter for attention, clicks, ad dollars and marketing spends. They want to be a truly social, informative platform, not a stagnant listing site. This is another trend you can jump on to actually get ahead of the curve, for now.

4. Start commenting in LinkedIn Groups.

LinkedIn Groups are pre-made marketing communities. If your company specializes in HVAC subcontracting, you’ll do well to build up your name in the construction LinkedIn Groups. Unlike the LinkedIn Company Page, you have to comment as an individual user. If you have a solid LinkedIn profile and genuinely helpful and useful information to share in a group, you can post and start getting people to your profile, and eventually, your website.

Don’t spam everyone with tons of sales messages, but share useful information, get your name out there and meet some people. If you have a budget, you might consider using a tool like Oktopost to reach users in a number of groups. But, it’s free to start posting yourself.

5. When you’ve got a real following, start your own LinkedIn Group.

Once you’ve built yourself a solid reputation as an expert commenter in a number of relevant groups, you’ll find it easier to start your own LinkedIn Group. Keep your Group focused on a particular subject within a particular industry. If you sell IT solutions to logistics companies, then regularly update your Group with information that helps logistics executives navigate IT. Focus it on a narrow topic to attract your audience, and make it deep so you can educate your audience and gain their trust.

Ultimately, you want to make personal contact with people who may actually become clients and customers. Don’t start a LinkedIn Group unless you’re really committed to managing it well. That means Groups should be lower down on your social media to-do list, but once you’ve got your website, blogging and email marketing humming, LinkedIn Groups can help you gain leads. If you’re wondering why I’ve focused on LinkedIn so much, it’s because, as I stated earlier, it’s responsible for 80 percent of all B2B social media leads.

6. Use social media to promote your tradeshow booths.

Odds are, if you’re at a B2B brand, your company attends a fair number of tradeshows. What do you need to succeed at tradeshows? Buzz. You want an interesting and exciting booth that people talk about. So, start the conversation on social media, send emails and use all of your marketing channels to promote all the interesting things you’re doing at your booth.

7. If you use Twitter, start with Lists.

Mark W. Schaefer, author of Tao of Twitter, writes that the real power of Twitter is in reaching real people and establishing real, business relationships with them. If — and for some companies, it is an if — your audience is active on Twitter, Follow them, and group users into logical Lists. You’ll want to have a List of the corporate accounts that matter, a List of the journalists you want to reach for PR purposes, and a List of people who may buy from you. ReTweet those actual people, share their content, comment on their posts, Reply to their Tweets, and once in a while, if you’ve built rapport with them, Tweet useful resources directly to them.

8. Put a person’s face and name behind your company Twitter account.

In The B2B Social Media Book, Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen show that (shocker) real people generally have more Twitter success than companies. I say “generally” because there are some notable exceptions. Recognizable brands like Coca Cola, the NFL or Google are so popular that they’re bigger than any one individual at those companies — even the CEOs — could possibly become. But for the most part, an expert value engineer with a real face is more personable and social media friendly than a small, value-engineering company. A great example of success here is Ann Handley, who has her personal name and face behind the highly popular @MarketingProfs Twitter account.

It’s easier for a real person to connect with other real people than it is for a company to do so. Remember, you want to reach real people who use Twitter as themselves, not the marketers managing social media for your partner companies. Tweet to those real people who work at those companies more than you Tweet to the corporate accounts.

9. Attend Tweetchats.

What could be better than participating in a conversation with a large number of people who could benefit from your expertise, products or services? Tweet chats are weekly events where people follow a specific hashtag at a specific time, e.g. 12pm – 1pm every Thursday. Twitter users will comment with that specific hashtag in every Tweet they send, and anyone following the hashtag can see that Tweet. The conversation will center around a specific topic, such as leadership, branding, entrepreneurship or many others.

Leaders, brands and social gurus promote thousands of hashtags every day, and there are established Tweetchats around hundreds of different conversation topics. Find ones that intersect with your target audience here or here . If you see real success with Tweetchats, you might consider starting your own, but don’t start one unless you’ve got the resources to lead a weekly discussion that actually benefits your Followers.

10. Use a social media monitoring and publishing tool.

Dozens of social publishing companies have sprouted up over the past few years. From Hubspot to Bitly to Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, you have plenty of options to manage and monitor all of your accounts. Hootsuite is free, it lets you schedule Tweets and social posts out over time and monitor other people’s accounts. The point is to limit your time on social media and make yourself more efficient at managing and monitoring your accounts. Don’t waste time; get results. Hootsuite is my favorite free tool. At Gorilla 76, we use Hubspot because of its impressive email marketing and website integration.

11. Put an email signup tab on your Facebook Page and Tweet sign-up pages.

You want to use social media to generate leads? Then, put tools in place to capture contact information right on your Facebook Page. As Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen suggest in “The B2B Social Media Book,” Facebook allows you to put custom signup tabs on your Facebook Company Page. Services such as Shortstack make it easy to create those tabs and start capturing email addresses. Don’t spend countless hours making perfect, beautiful tabs, but do integrate a way to get contact information.

For instance, you could make a custom Facebook tab that gives people a chance to sign up for a 30-day course on something informative. The “course” would consist of blog posts on your website, and you would email people the links over the course of 30 days. Be creative with it, but the point is capture contact information directly through Facebook. As you probably know, Facebook also allows you to Pin posts to the top of your Page. There’s nothing wrong with pinning a post that leads to a signup page. For that matter, the new Twitter “upgrade” also allows you to pin a Tweet to the top of your profile that any visitor can see. You could pin a Tweet that links out to a signup page there as well.

And as Bodnar and Cohen say, it doesn’t kill a puppy to Tweet a sign-up page. If you want people to come to your website to sign up for your newsletter and download your guides, Tweet and Post links to those pages. Just remember the 10-4-1 rule: 10 shares of other people’s content, four links to content on your site, and one link to a sign-up page on your site. Start with a ratio of 10-4-1, then tweak from there as you continue to experiment. Don’t turn your social media channels into a stream of selling points. It’s important to build your position as an educational resource.

12. Use pictures and videos because they’ll help you get more “engagement.”

Countless studies on social media engagement suggest that posts with pictures and videos drive more engagement. I.E., if you include pictures and videos in your Facebook Posts, Tweets, and LinkedIn updates, more people click on them, like them, comment on them and share them. Visually engaging content taps into the real power of social media: getting people to share your content with their friends.

Also take into account that Facebook ranks posts differently for different people. If users like text posts the most, Facebook shows them text posts. If others like videos more, their Facebook News Feed will contain more videos. So, different types of content at different times of day will help you spread your message further and wider.

13. Use Facebook to increase reach so you can build your email list.

Ultimately, you want to make real contact with your target audience so you can bring people to your site, get them in your email list and score them as leads. But, even if your target audience isn’t highly active on Facebook or doesn’t always see your posts, you can reach people on Facebook who have direct contact with your target audience. Think about who you can reach and what information they need. Share content not only for your target audience, but also for people who have contact with your target audience. One example might be the entry-level programmer who works with the senior level manager you really want to reach. Write for those peripheral audiences and ask them to share your content.

You’ll find and think of many ways to get seen and grow reach on Facebook, but note that you’re competing for less and less News Feed space. Facebook’s ranking algorithm constantly changes, business pages join Facebook every day, and they publish increasingly more posts. That means you’ll show up in fewer and fewer Facebook users’ News Feeds as time goes on, and as of this writing, most Pages only reach about 3 percent of the people who Like their Page.

Your takeaway? Building a Facebook audience shouldn’t come at the expense of building your email list, because you don’t own your Facebook audience but do have more control over your email list. To combat Facebook’s volatility and still grow reach, you can use your other channels to cross-promote your Facebook presence. The idea is to direct your Twitter Followers, LinkedIn Followers and email subscribers to see and engage with your Facebook messages. Then, as they Like your Page, see your Facebook Posts and share them, their contacts will also see your Facebook Posts. When your existing contacts’ Facebook Friends see and Like your Page, you’ve grown your Facebook reach. Nice work. But your bigger goal is to have them click to your site and sign up for your email list. That’s leveraging the power of your existing network to grow your real reach. If you’re really dedicated to building a Facebook presence to reach new contacts, you could take this concept to its fullest potential with a social media amplification tool.

14. Use Twitter to “meet” journalists.

Journalists use and monitor Twitter more than just about anyone. They’re scouring for story ideas, asking questions, Tweeting their articles and building their audiences. Twitter is a great way to make first contact with a journalist. If you ReTweet their individual posts, send them helpful news tips (not promoting your business) and make contact with them, you can start building a professional relationship (especially if you Tweet from your personal account). Then, you can ask how to best send them your company’s press releases and increase your chances of getting covered.

15. Repurpose blog posts and presentations on Slideshare.

You’ll find an inordinate amount of executives and managers use Slideshare to consume content. LinkedIn bought Slideshare in May 2012 because Slideshare has become a regularly visited site by business professionals. In Q4, 2013, Slideshare boasted 60 million unique visitors a month, a drop in the bucket compared with Facebook’s 750 million users. But, the people who use Slideshare are professionals and decision makers, largely at B2B companies. It’s worth considering, and Slideshare is integrated with LinkedIn Company Pages. It’s not difficult to take existing presentations and blog posts and repurpose them on Slideshare. Keep this low on your priority list, but definitely put it on your radar.

Measure your web marketing

As web marketers, our job is to get real results by taking advantage of the online tools at our disposal. For B2B, that means having a leads-first philosophy and measuring success. To learn how to keep your marketing stats, take 10 minutes to read our free guide on measuring online marketing ROI. It will save you time and money.

13 B2B social media pitfalls you should avoid to save time and get results

Before I became a copywriter for a web-marketing agency, I once ran social media for a great B2B company. As a recent college grad, I was tasked with creating and executing a social media strategy. At that point, I had some ideas I knew could work, but executing is more than just having ideas. As this was a smaller company with almost no existing social media presence, I had more social media knowledge than anyone else in the company, even as a recent grad. I was the social media presence.

That may sound great, until you realize that when you’re the social media presence, you need to educate everyone else about social media, earn buy-in for everything, and prove value at every turn. That’s a tall task, especially if you’re learning social media yourself. And let’s face it, social changes every day, so even the most expert social media professionals learn every day. Truthfully, social media may not make sense for some companies. Investing too much time into social is a pitfall in itself, and while social media can yield real results for most companies, we don’t recommend that every single company out there set up a Twitter account.

With that situation in mind, we’ve put these tips here for you. This post will help you prove value and earn buy-in, make a plan that’s simple and executable, and get up to speed on social media. This is the article I wish I had read when I was my company’s social media presence.

The unlucky 13 social media pitfalls

Here’s what not to do in B2B social media. The common theme here is define success the right way so you can prove value and earn respect. Stay focused on your company’s bottom line and don’t slow yourself down with unnecessary distractions.

1. Don’t assume you know what you’re doing.

Just having your own Facebook and LinkedIn accounts for years doesn’t make you an expert in social media marketing for B2B companies. And even if you are an expert, stay humble and read — a lot. Instead of leaning solely on your own knowledge, be a sponge and constantly soak up all the relevant information you can. We’ve reviewed a number of books that would make great additions to your reading list, and we’ve created a number of guides in our resources section that we think you’ll find useful. We also recommend blogs such as Marketing Profs, Hubspot and Social Media B2B.

2. Don’t hang yourself on social media.

Unless you’ve been brought in specifically to handle social media and only social media, you’ve got bigger fish to fry. You’ll be effective at generating leads and make yourself valuable to your company by posting great content on your company blog and concentrating on excellent email marketing. Don’t focus all of your energy on Facebook Statuses, Tweets or even LinkedIn Posts. Spend far, far more of your time on blogging and email marketing.

3. Don’t ask for a social media budget till you prove value.

Odds are, if you’re reading this post, you either have a limited or nonexistent social media budget. If your boss is already paying you to do it, he probably thinks you are his budget. Prove your value and the value of web marketing before you ask for a social media marketing budget. I know, I know. Really succeeding on social can require a budget, but you can get results without one. This isn’t the first place to spend, and it’s not the first place where you should try to persuade your boss to spend.

4. Don’t send your bosses a super lengthy strategy document.

They have limited time. When you have a plan, make them a short presentation — in PowerPoint or Keynote; they probably don’t use Prezi. Yes, in your research, you may find it useful to write a long document for yourself, but you probably get less access to the decision makers than their mailman gets. I made the mistake of passing on a social media research report, and it slowed down the process considerably. Instead, make your managers an easy-to-absorb presentation and make your information straightforward and instantly understandable.

5. Don’t waste days or weeks making the perfect social media policy.

Yes, it’s possible that your boss will want you to make one because other people may use social media in the company’s name. Yes, it’s important to have guidelines, especially if you work in a regulated industry. But if you follow this 8-word social media policy, you’ll be on the right track. If you truly need to show your managers a lengthy document, tweak some existing ones.

6. Don’t come off like a cheerleader for social media.

As a marketer at a B2B company, your main goal is to increase sales through your marketing efforts. One sale or large purchase order will likely more than cover any time or material costs you incur on social media or web marketing. You want to prove value by providing leads to the sales guys in your company and helping them out. You don’t want to alienate them by putting yourself at odds with them.

Unfortunately, a lot of inside sales guys and corporate executives perceive social media marketers as cheerleaders for Twitter and Facebook. They think you play around online looking at pictures of puppies. While I love puppies as much as the next guy — how could anyone not? — that’s not what I do! I help Gorilla and Gorilla’s clients reach people who become contacts, customers and clients. As Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen, authors of The Social Media B2B Book put it, your blood should be boiling when people regard you as a mere cheerleader for Facebook. We don’t blab away about how cool we are for working on social media; we get stuff done.

7. Don’t try to use every social media network.

When you physically embody your company’s social media presence, and you have to prove value to earn buy-in from decision makers, you need results — now. It’s a lot easier to succeed if you focus on one or two social networks than it is to succeed on seven different platforms at the same time. Pick only the ones that are relevant to your business. LinkedIn generates more B2B leads than all of the other social networks combined. Engagement on Google Plus correlates directly to your website’s search rankings. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Slideshare, and Vine can probably take a back seat, at least for now.

8. Don’t let a total lack of content stop you.

Content from your blog gives you that all-important stepping stone to your website, where you will capture email addresses. It’s true, email marketing pays off your social media marketing, web marketing and blogging. But, amazingly, you can grow your reach and build relevant social media contacts by sharing other people’s content. You can increase reach even if you have an utter, total and complete lack of content, and your company has a highly bureaucratic process for publishing anything on your company website.

Yes, if you can Post and Tweet your own great content, you can bring people back to your site and capture email addresses, and that’s where we recommend you start. But even if you have great content, you still want to follow the 10-4-1 rule on Twitter: 10 shares of other people’s relevant content per four shares of your content and one share of your landing pages. Social media is all about making the most of your resources, so make the most of the vast ocean that is the Internet. Share other people’s content when you don’t have your own to share. Just make sure that content is relevant to your audience, and if you can actually build a relationship with other content creators, they may share your great content when you post it.

9. Don’t brag to your bosses in jargon.

You’re wasting your time if you make reports about Klout scores, Favorites, Likes, RePins and ReTweets. Yes, these are all important measures of influence and engagement, but your bosses probably care more about leads. To generate leads and sales, you have to reach a specific, targeted audience of your prospective clients and customers. Show your managers how you reach potential clients or customers and reach people who spread your message or refer you to clients or customers. Don’t speak a foreign language to them about ReTweets, RePins, Shares, Likes and Mentions.

10. Don’t get legal involved.

This is more of a concern that your boss is likely to have, but don’t bog down your social media posts by involving lawyers. Some traditional companies new to social media will actually have their legal departments review every single social media post. Lawyers charge expensive rates, they don’t care about your social media success and most of them know next to nothing about social media marketing.

If your managers tell you they want lawyers to review your social media posts, or even blog posts, make sure they know lawyers will make your efforts ineffective and far more expensive. If you face this obstacle, try presenting a solid social media policy to assuage their concerns.

11. Don’t create multiple accounts on one social media platform.

You’ll have a tough enough time building up one social media account, so don’t render yourself ineffective by diluting your efforts. Instead of making a separate Facebook Page for your various products and services, build up one Company Facebook Page that features all of them. The same goes for Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other networks.

Unless you’re at a huge company with a massively diverse product and service offering, think GE for instance, you’re not going to crank out so much content that it makes sense to have multiple branded Twitter accounts. You have limited content. Unify it all behind one account to give it more power.

12. Don’t design custom covers unless you’re a designer.

I realize Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter all allow you to add awesome, custom designed photos and art for truly kick-ass business pages. But, if you’re not a designer, it’s a massive time suck with little reward. To start out, you probably have yourself, no budget, and most likely, limited graphic design skills. Pick company photos, crop them to the right size using Cut My Pic, and upload them to your company pages. Keep your pages all unpublished, and ask for one, single review to get them live.

13. Don’t just ReTweet, don’t just sell and don’t post about every topic on earth.

This bullet briefly covers what to post about, and you’ve heard a lot of this before, so we’ll keep it as simple as possible (our form of ASAP). If you use Twitter, just pressing that ReTweet button is lazy! You share no opinions, no insights and none of yourself. It is highly important to ReTweet others, but do it the right way. The same idea applies to posting links on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus. You want to share some form of valuable analysis. You’re not at a news organization that shares purely news updates; you’re at a company whose social media value lies in its expertise.

Share that expertise in a way that genuinely helps and interests your target audience. Social media is all about a two-way conversation where you connect with real people. Don’t make every post about selling something; instead share your opinions and analysis on issues, news and trends that relate to your industry. Share how-to information that helps people in your target audience do their jobs. Your Twitter account and other social media accounts should sound like a real person, not an academic white paper.

Blah blah blah. Lots of articles out there will help you establish your brand voice on social media, and you can read a lot of this stuff on Facebook’s Get Started page. Last but not least, don’t post about every topic under the sun. Find out what information your audience wants and give it to them, that way you stay focused and get results.

Web marketing that works.

Want to get real results through web marketing? You’ve seen our leads-first philosophy in our recommendations. Now, see how we measure success. Click below to download our guide on measuring online marketing ROI.

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So which route applies to your website?

When to put on a fresh coat

When to rehab

When to tear it down and rebuild

So which route to take?

The top right

The top left

The bottom right

The bottom left

So here’s your simplified marketing plan

Let’s put this into context

So can’t your website behave more like a real person?

Three paths to results:

Inbound Marketing

Outbound Marketing

Paid Media

So which will it be?

Does it have to be one or the other?

What exactly do we mean by inbound lead qualification?

A sample lead qualification process

Step 1: Define what characteristics make a lead a good fit or a bad fit

Step 2: Use marketing automation to screen leads based on those criteria

Lead intelligence collection

Lead scoring

Lead segmentation and automated email alerts

Step 3: Manually (but quickly) confirm the quality of the “good” leads

Step 4: Implement a process for further qualifying these leads without wasting your time

Send a qualifying email before you set up a call

Assign some homework before the call

How to get started

Answer the common questions you get from customers every day.

These are what we call “content triggers”.

What types of content to create from your triggers

Cost/price articles

Problem articles

Vs./Comparison-based articles

Content for different buyer personas and different stages of the buying process

So here’s how to get started

Trade show cost per lead

Print advertising cost per lead

Inbound marketing cost per lead

Why cost per lead is deceiving

Problem #1: Cost per lead doesn’t account for lead quality

Problem #2: Cost per lead encourages quick wins over sustainable lead generation results

So how SHOULD you measure marketing results?

Some useful resources

Why now? The reason ABM is making a comeback for B2B companies

Why ABM is a good strategy for manufacturers

Greater pipeline velocity so you can close deals faster

You hand-select each company on your list — so you know each lead will be highly qualified

The quality of the companies you choose

The trust you build throughout the campaign

Account-based marketing ideas for manufacturers

Run a hyper-targeted paid media campaign

Set up automated email nurturing

Add a personal touch with mailers and hand-written notes

CK Power is a Midwest-based engine and generator manufacturer and distributor specializing in custom solutions for its customers.

The problem

The first solution: building a solid foundation for growth

Ongoing solutions: content marketing, SEO and CRO

The results

The B2B Website Planning Handbook

Related resources

Designing industrial websites to convert: User flow maps explained

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

How industrial SEO works and how manufacturers can rank first in Google

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript:

Related resources

Ideal Customer and Buyer Persona Worksheets

How to audit your industrial marketing strategy

The 7 core elements of an industrial marketing strategy

Ideal customer and buyer persona profiles for manufacturers

About The Foundry: Building Better Industrial Marketing

Video transcript:

Why the website design RFP is a bad idea

1. Website RFPs suppress the exact expertise you’re seeking

2. Website design RFPs emphasize tactics over goals

Problems you might need to solve:

Goals / outcomes you might want to achieve