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Video Marketing for the Equipment Business
So We’re Not Video Experts…
Then again, neither are most people that post videos. If you’ve seen the videos that have garnered millions of views, more often than not they are not made by experts. They are often spontaneous, without a thought to optimizing video for the search engines. They go viral because they are funny, shocking or have that hard-to-define quality about them.
Good, strategic video marketing in our business likely will never have that same effect, but we can drive in substantial traffic to our site and build followers of our business with a few simple, practical strategies. Good marketing service companies should have a comprehensive plan for this as part of your online marketing strategy.
Practical Steps to Own Your Online Space
Video marketing is becoming more important literally every day. The video marketing post last week highlighted why this is so important. We’ll have more posts coming topic, but for this post, we’ll focus on a few more tips and video marketing strategies to help you visualize more of the steps required to build your online presence:
Five Basic Rules to Follow
- Good Lighting: Keep the light source at a 30-45 degree angle in relation to the subject
- Background: Don’t have a distracting background, show only what is important
- Hold Still: Limit the movement and running around, keep the shots simple and well framed
- Come From afar and Get Close: Establish the setting, then move in closer
- Sound: Try and get natural sounds (no background noise) when interviewing a customer for testimonials
Edit Your Video and Make it Short
There is some of great, easy-to-use software to do this by yourself, or assign to a talented person within your organization. Beware the perpetual “snackers”, a term used for those that seldom watch the end of a video:
- iMovie: An Apple product that comes with any Mac computer
- Windows Movie Maker: Similar to iMovie, it comes free with Windows
- Final Cut Express: A bit more advanced for those that have to have it just right
- Adobe Premier: A professional level editing product with lots of features
- Under Two Minutes: Professional service firms recommend this as the optimum length
- Cool Tip: Put your website address on the bottom so the prospects know how to reach you
Video and Search Engine Optimization
This will be another upcoming post, but keep in mind search engines LOVE video. So, when you make your video and upload it to YouTube, the basic strategy to get your video and company found is to properly tag, title and describe your video so it becomes indexed properly by the search engines.
Details Make a HUGE Difference
Once you get into a routine to share your story using video using the described techniques, the power of video often becomes as important as having an entire website optimized for the search engines. One video done right can be a lethal tool in your equipment marketing tool kit!
To Your Success…
5 Facts About Lead Managment
Five Facts About Lead Management
Sometimes lost in the purpose of equipment marketing (branding, messaging, websites etc…) is the importance of metrics to understand where leads come from and why they fill out a contact form. Filling out a contact form is the holy grail of “Inbound Marketing”. It’s what allows our equipment marketing departments, or equipment marketing service partners, to follow-up and communicate responsibly. See these alarming statistics published by Leads360, a leading online lead service:
- Leads convert 22 times more often when you make contact within the first 5 minutes
- 78% of prospects convert with the company that first call them
- The average lead takes between 5 and 6 attempts to contact
- Changes in sales process can impact close rates by more than 35%
- 40% of leads eventually convert with consistent, long term follow-up
So, when you plan your equipment marketing for 2012, make sure your lead generation and management processes are tight and visible. If you’d like a complete Lead Management Checklist, stay tuned or email me at steve@equipmentfx.com and I’ll send one right away.
To Your Success…
Lead Response Processes from The Big Guys
The Importance of 4 X 48 Hour Response Mechanisms
One lead that turned into a $4.5 million sale over a period of years left an indelible impression on me and our company and drove us to make sure EVERY DETAIL MATTERED. After we closed the initial sale, and secured ongoing after-sale business, I called the decision maker to ask why they chose us. His response…”You were the first we found online, the first to respond and we felt that was a good indication of how we’d be treated by your organization.” Wow. Simple but powerful.
The Detail That Matters
So, we committed to sound process development, both online and offline, to make sure we made as many positive first impressions as we could. From direct mail, to an optimized website, to iron clad lead generation and response processes, we hammered out the detail on every level.
We studied industry leaders such as Amazon.com, Expedia.com, and Fairmont hotels. We stole ideas from the plumbers and pizza delivery companies and put together a system that insured we left a great first impression.
The Steps to a 4 X 48 Hour Response Process
After committing to a to a Search Engine Optimization strategy that insured we had a plan that was current, relevant and better than the competition and gave us multiple first place positions, we followed a step-by-step plan.
First, for every visitor that completed a contact form, we had a landing page redirect just like Amazon.com that said… “other visitors also enjoyed these products and services”, insuring additional traffic and awareness of what we sold and serviced.
Second, for every contact form completed, each inquiring party received an email containing links to other departments, products and services. Just like Expedia does with hotels, cars and other services. Simple and straight forward.
Third, we called all leads in 30 minutes or less. We created a “wow” factor early and often, sometimes calling back in seconds, not minutes, after all leads were routed to our handheld devices, by rep and territory.
Fourth, we sent out a product brochure every night to the prospects with a business card and magnet that people for some strange, odd reason are loathe to throw away (think plumbers and the pizza delivery company).
Our follow up processes consisted of capturing all e-mail addresses and distributing relevant, helpful, timed information on a consistent schedule so the prospect got to know us before they bought something. We grew our customer base by 27% over a 5 year period, much of it attributed to simple process improvement just like this. Simple and straight forward.
We planted seeds of a professional image at every opportunity so when they thought of buying (minutes to years in a sales cycle, literally), we were the first to be thought of when they got serious. No magic to this process, just simple business process improvement and a relentless focus on detail.
To Your Success…
Steve Smith
Social Media ROI & Digital Marketing
A Look Back… and a Look Ahead…
In our industry, it’s easy to look at ways to cut spending, and not plan for lead generation activity, including Social Media. After all, Social Media IS a bit of a mystery isn’t it?
If you go back to the late 1990’s, companies in our industry struggled with cutting spending on traditional media spend, including Yellow Pages. Where were the leads going to come from if we did that? And slowly, we embraced the Internet and forms of email marketing (digital marketing). We did a “little of this, a little of that”. If we really stayed on task, we’d even track customer creation and ROI to these activities (web forms that turned into customers, or email open rates that turned into customers).
5 Stages of Social Media Planning
But even that was time consuming, and certainly not an exact science. Then comes Social Media. What to do now? If you believe that this trend is here to stay (and it is), then you can look to five basic stages of beginning to measure Social Media ROI:
1. The Investment Stage – This is the first necessary step. It’s a great time to really look hard at how you are investing your current media spend, trim the fat and look hard at an investment amount that you can live with. Then, plan the mediums (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, for example) and execute relentlessly.
2. The Action Stage – This can be the most fun stage. The investment you make, if well thought out, will create a platform for you to engage your audience, offer value and pulls users or visitors into your process. You can start slow and small (a Facebook page, for example) or do all of it at once.
3. The Reaction Stage - This is where the public forms a perception of your efforts, message and company. This may lead to a positive or negative perception. Either way, you need to be ready to handle this and REACT to the feedback you get. A positive reaction will increase the non-financial outcome of a given campaign. This stage is the measurement of brand engagement and digital advocacy.
4. The Non-Financial Impact Stage – This is where you see an increase in likes, comments, fans and followers. How effective was your campaign with the public? How effective was your reaction stage from a brand awareness measurement? Did you have an increase in Twitter followers or “Likes” on your Facebook page? Did you have an increase in email newsletter subscriptions? Things like this can lead up to sales, profit and share gains, the “tangible” stuff we all want to see more of.
5. The Financial Impact Stage - This gets difficult but it IS possible! Did you see an increase in web visits, an increase in email subscribers, web contact forms filled out, leads or credit applications? Did you see an increase during the four previous stages? This may take longer to realize the full return of your investment. Did Twitter actually drive revenue?
While this may sound like a lot of work, it can be. But, not acting on this new medium in a methodical, scheduled way will leave you behind the curve. The train has left the station… are you on it or watching it pull away?
To Your Success…
Steve Smith
Facebook Changes and What It Means to Your Business
Recent Changes to Facebook- What it Means to Your Equipment Business
Question #1 should be… does this mean anything to our business?
I ask this because most equipment companies see Social Media as a waste of time. There is general awareness of it, even a few Fan pages popping up, but how well are they being utilized to drive in and engage prospects? And… what about capturing the leads?
How Recent Changes Impact Your Business
Part of what makes social media so exciting is that it is constantly evolving and changing. While even casual Internet users are aware of the big changes, it’s vital for every marketer tasked with lead generation to pay careful attention to the subtle ones too! Facebook is especially quick at tweaking their platform and the social networking giant recently launched a few new features that are must-knows for anybody leveraging social media for their business.
New Pages Layout
Facebook rolled out a new appearance for Facebook Profiles and company Pages this past month. The most noticeable change was moving the tabs from the top of the Profile or Page and replacing those tabs with a row of pictures. The tabs are now links along the left edge of the Page.
These tweaks were merely aesthetic, but another less noticeable change is that the posts on your wall may now be sorted by “Most Recent” or “Top Posts section to cut back on Spam and general noise on Facebook pages.
From FBML to iframes
Without too much technical jargon, Facebook’s move from requiring designs for custom landing pages to use Facebook’s own mark-up language (FBML) to allowing iframes makes creating these custom pages within Facebook much easier for designers.
iframes are standard HTML tags which allow one page to inserted into another – in this case, Facebook. This means that designers may now create dynamic web applications using standard HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Javascript, Flash etc.
Sound technical? It is, but planning for and executing on these strategies will position your company for a solid customer service and lead generation strategy for years to come.
There are some other technical changes I’ll cover in the next post, so look for those as well…
To Your Success…
Steve
Marketing Plan for 2011
Glad that’s OVER!!!… and Welcome Back
Marketing in 2010 was a tough year, along with 2009, and 2008. 2011 is filled with promise, however, but it’s still easy to lose focus on what is important to create and satisfy customers. So this post is dedicated to a quick reminder of things old and new, then the posts are coming at you fast and furious.
We deliberately took a break, focused on building some things (Social Media Services, for example), hell bent on Research and Development on the most important ways to get ranked on page one, create the best first impression and generate leads, leads, and more leads. All that said, the most important things STILL remain:
- Have something good to say: You’ve innovated your business to warrant consideration from an increasingly demanding buying public
- Say it well: In your copy, your website, your Social Media platforms, everything that can potentially create a first impression of your company
- Say it often: If the average prospect needs to see, hear or think about you between 12 and 18 times each year, what is your plan to address this
- Say it to the right prospects: Don’t mindless blast out emails, mailers or create content the wrong way.
Slow down, think about it and do something about it. Plan, execute, don’t get bogged down into too many details. We’ve got over 200 free videos, white papers, checklists and anything you can think of to jump start your meeting. Simply give us a call or drop us a line and we’ll give it away, no questions asked!
To Your Success and a great 2011
Steve Smith
For those free videos, cheap drugs online Marketing Channel” href=”http://www.youtube.com/stevesmith2211″>CLICK HERE
The Upside of the Downturn: Strategy #11- Understand All Your Risks- Seize the Moment
Overview of The Upside of the Downturn- A Must Business Read in Bite Size Pieces
This is one of the great “lemons out of lemonade” business reads that CEO’s, high level positions or anyone tasked with improving a company’s performance should read. It’s also designed for those the KNOW they don’t have all of the answers. It’s not f those that are completely and utterly happy with sales, share, vision and execution.
Part of what we do is to thoroughly understand the detail and GAP between where you are and need to go. To that end, we are providing a short series of posts, objectively recorded for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
Chapter Summary:
- The Greatest Opportunity & Set of Possibilities
- The New Normal- The Strange Story of How We Got Here
- Reset Priorities- Your Critical First Response to a New Reality
- Protect Your Most Valuable Asset- Your People
- Engage the Outside World- The Nature of Relationships are Changing
- Reexamine Your Strategy & Business Model
- Manage for Value- Most Companies Don’t
- Create New Solutions for Customers New Problems
- Price With Courage- Don’t Assume You Have to Mark Down
- Get Fitter Faster- The Right Kind of Operational Discipline Pays Off
1) Understand All Your Risks- Seize this moment to take a broader view of what might go wrong in your business
- Most businesses give themselves high marks for being prepared for a crisis, but were proven wrong during this recession.
- See the risks you never imagined, turbocharge your imagination, creation of “risk committees”
- Two reasons to re-imagine dangers: 1) Scale of global recession reminds us how connected we are to the variables, 2) We can look back and identify voices that were pointing out the impending crisis, and find new voices of reason going forward
- Imagining sequences, it’s never just one event. Build scenarios of what can happen.
- Think in probabilities, realizing their limitations, use the power of markets (prediction)
- Create an organization and culture that adapts quickly to new realities
What EquipmentFX does About This
We perform a rigorous assessment of your entire marketing efforts, your position, your plan and provide you with completely objective, unbiased feedback with a specific plan on what to do with the recommendations.
We’ll be happy to send you a few demo videos to our assessment, output reports and online plan.
To Your Success…
The Upside of the Downturn: Strategy #10- Get Fitter Faster
Overview of The Upside of the Downturn- A Must Business Read in Bite Size Pieces
This is one of the great “lemons out of lemonade” business reads that CEO’s, high level positions or anyone tasked with improving a company’s performance should read. It’s also designed for those the KNOW they don’t have all of the answers. It’s not f those that are completely and utterly happy with sales, share, vision and execution.
Part of what we do is to thoroughly understand the detail and GAP between where you are and need to go. To that end, we are providing a short series of posts, objectively recorded for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
Chapter Summary:
- The Greatest Opportunity & Set of Possibilities
- The New Normal- The Strange Story of How We Got Here
- Reset Priorities- Your Critical First Response to a New Reality
- Protect Your Most Valuable Asset- Your People
- Engage the Outside World- The Nature of Relationships are Changing
- Reexamine Your Strategy & Business Model
- Manage for Value- Most Companies Don’t
- Create New Solutions for Customers New Problems
- Price With Courage- Don’t Assume You Have to Mark Down
- Get Fitter Faster- The Right Kind of Operational Discipline Pays Off
1) Get Fitter Faster- The right kind of operational discipline pays off powerfully in a recession
- Understand the new economic profitability of all your business segments
- Look at your world through a “green lens”: cost saving opportunities, marketing leverage, good impressions of your company
- Think twice before cutting the easy expenses: R & D, advertising, entertainment, do a thorough investment analysis of long term effect
- Take good risks and stay the course: top performers increase investment to promote their business during bad times
- Research is clear: the most successful companies play offense, not defense, during a recession and see the opportunities to build competitive advantages
- Ask: “What would we do if we had to sell this business?
- Focus intensely on a few clear goals, identify KPI’s, stick with the measurements that matter
- Ask the employees where the opportunities are, they have most of the answers
- “The Discipline of Market Leaders” classic read, every company can focus only on one of three key things: order drugs online 1) Operational excellence, 2) Product leadership, 3) Customer intimacy
What EquipmentFX does About This
We perform a rigorous assessment of your entire marketing efforts, your position, your plan and provide you with completely objective, unbiased feedback with a specific plan on what to do with the recommendations.
We’ll be happy to send you a few demo videos to our assessment, output reports and online plan.
To Your Success…
The Upside of the Downturn: Strategy #7- Manage for Value… Most companies don’t
Overview of The Upside of the Downturn- A Must Business Read in Bite Size Pieces
This is one of the great “lemons out of lemonade” business reads that CEO’s, high level positions or anyone tasked with improving a company’s performance prescription online should read. It’s also designed for those the KNOW they don’t have all of the answers. It’s not f those that are completely and utterly happy with sales, share, vision and execution.
Part of what we do is to thoroughly understand the detail and GAP between where you are and need to go. To that end, we are providing a short series of posts, objectively recorded for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
Chapter Summary:
- The Greatest Opportunity & Set of Possibilities
- The New Normal- The Strange Story of How We Got Here
- Reset Priorities- Your Critical First Response to a New Reality
- Protect Your Most Valuable Asset- Your People
- Engage the Outside World- The Nature of Relationships are Changing
- Reexamine Your Strategy & Business Model
- Manage for Value- Most Companies Don’t
- Create New Solutions for Customers New Problems
- Price With Courage- Don’t Assume You Have to Mark Down
- Get Fitter Faster- The Right Kind of Operational Discipline Pays Off
1) Manage for Value- Most companies don’t- an error that can be fatal in this recession
- Your real goal: how to understand capital, what constitutes revenue and profit producing initiative vs old models.
- How much capital is in your business? More than you think, and takes on other forms besides inventory, machines, buildings
- i. Beware the companies that don’t value R & D, or other areas that typically get cut out of a budget
- How much does capital really cost, debt vs equity, more people besides CFO need to understand this variable
- Making decisions the right way. Beware all directives to simply conserve cash where it is easiest to do: marketing, training, research. Their true role is CAPITAL INVESTMENTS.
- i. Manage for value, gain a clear understanding of what that means
- Merger & Acquisition: a great opportunity at bargain prices, provided it is done for value.
What EquipmentFX does About This
We perform a rigorous assessment of your entire marketing efforts, your position, your plan and provide you with completely objective, unbiased feedback with a specific plan on what to do with the recommendations.
We’ll be happy to send you a few demo videos to our assessment, output reports and online plan.
To Your Success…
Social Media Marketing: Step 1 of Knowing What to Do
Overview of The Knowing/Doing Gap- A Must Business Read in Bite Size Pieces
This buy fertility drugs without a prescription is one of the great “off the radar” business reads that CEO’s, high level positions or anyone tasked with improving a company’s performance should read. It’s also designed for those the KNOW they don’t have all of the answers. It’s not f those that are completely and utterly happy with sales, share, vision and execution.
Part of what we do is to thoroughly understand the detail and GAP between where you are and need to go. To that end, we are providing a short series of posts, objectively recorded for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.
Chapter Summary:
- Knowing what to do is not enough
- When talk is a substitute for action
- When memory is a substitute for thinking
- When fear prevents acting on knowledge
- When measurement obstructs good judgment
- When internal competition turns friends into enemies
- Surmounting the knowing/doing gap
- Turning knowledge into action
Knowing what to do is not enough
- Little evidence that being staffed by people with advanced education in business is related to outstanding org performance
- 75% of surveyed MBA’s said skills are only marginally used
- No simple answers to the gap
- Knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening or even thinking
- Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn
- It is possible that differences exist in org performance come from differences in what firms know- the quality and depth of their insights about business strategy, tech, products, customers, and operations- rather than from their ability to translate that knowledge into action.
- Surprising now uncommon common sense is in its implementation
- Honda- Kaizen, continuous improvement
- Success at Honda and Toyota have successful implementation because of simple knowledge, applied, than creating new insights or discovering obscure or secret practices
- Knowledge is meant to be gathered, shared and distributed
- Most knowledge management issues emphasize technology and the storage and transfer of information (facts, statistics, presentations), rather than foster working knowledge- how knowledge is used in day-to-day activities
- Reading reports or seeing presentations don’t take into effect the nuances of work methods, failures, tasks that were fun, boring etc.
- Knowledge management systems seem to work best when the people who generate the knowledge are also those who store it, explain it to others, and coach them as they try to implement the knowledge
- Why typical knowledge management practices make knowing/doing gaps worse
- KM efforts mostly emphasize technology and the transfer of codified information
- KM tends to treat knowledge as a tangible thing, as a stock or quantity, and therefore separates knowledge as some thing from the use of that thing.
- Formal systems can’t easily store or transfer tacit knowledge
- People responsible for transferring and implementing KM systems frequently don’t understand the actual work being performed
- KM tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy
- Toyota Production System is about philosophy and perspective, about such things as people, processes, quality and continuous improvement. It is not a set of techniques or practices
First Principle
- If you know by doing, there is no gap between what you know and what you do
- Learn by doing as well as reading, thinking
- Answer to the KD problem is simple- embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing of the task and less in the formal training programs that are frequently ineffective
What EquipmentFX does About This
We perform a rigorous assessment of your entire marketing efforts, your position, your plan and provide you with completely objective, unbiased feedback with a specific plan on what to do with the recommendations.
We’ll be happy to send you a few demo videos to our assessment, output reports and online plan.
To Your Success…
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