B2B and Industrial Marketing Blog
“I think the reason you don’t see a lot of kids on unicycles is that they don’t come with training wheels.” –Seth Godin
More here: Seth’s Blog: Training wheels (July 5th)
(I was originally going to do my own personal take on this post from Seth, but the quote seems so much more poignant when you have to ponder it yourself. Which leads into the next post I am working on.)
Robert J. (no relation!) just found my blog and left an interesting comment on my last post. In it he left a link to an article called:
Industrial Search Engine Marketing – Industrial Search Engines and Directories.
The author, Mark Forst, offers to “review the major industrial search engines and directories to provide some of my personal experiences and opinions on their quality.” He goes on to give pretty fair assessments of ThomasNet, GlobalSpec, KellySearch, and some others. He errs on the side of being polite, but is more judgmental about cost. Oh, and he does name prices, in case you didn’t know how much these services can cost.
Mark, if you keep writing handy articles like this, you’ll put B2Blog out of business 🙂
Us poor B2B marketers…the top three things buyers look for in a product aren’t under our direct control…price, service, quality. We can add sizzle to these, but ultimately, the buyer will discern the truth.
So what is our #1 marketing tool? Amazingly it is something we’ve only had for ten years…our websites. Results of a user survey by ThomasNet were summed this way:
“Of course, competitive pricing, good customer service and high quality are a given, but the next single most important thing buyers mentioned is a detailed, user-friendly Web site. “
The article has lots of other handy tidbits from the survey:
Comments by users like this:
“Provide enough information within their Web site for me to make an educated decision-? comparative product details, listed prices, and list of distributors that I can purchase from if they don’t sell direct.”
This factual gem:
36% of the time users will seek out new suppliers for a new purchase.
Look at the top two of ’10 Things Buyers Look For In a New Supplier’
1. Easy-to-navigate Web sites with accurate, detailed product and pricing information
2. Companies that are easy to find and have a strong Web presence
This shouldn’t really be news to us B2B marketers…but after ten years, we may have grown complacent about our websites. From the details of this survey, I say our target audience has become even more discerning and faster to pass on poor (to them) websites. We can’t become complacent!
Read more: It’s Not Who You Know. It’s Who Knows You
Do have customers that you wish you didn’t? Ones that flip-flop what they need halfway thru the project. Or worse, at the end. The revenue seems hardly worth the effort.
We had one recent client who said that we were complying with their safety rules for the equipment we were building. Until suddenly we weren’t complying. “This needs to be resolved now”, etc. Ugh!
Well Sean De’Sousa of Psychotactics.com made this suggestion in his recent newsletter titled How To Get Rid of Cancer Clients: The Riot Act:
“‘Ms. Client, we have a clause, called the Riot Act. We’ll do everything in our power to do all of the above. And you in turn should do all in your power to help us do our job. The moment you run into issues with us, you have the right to fire us. The moment we run into issues with you, we have the right to fire you. Is that fair?’
Watch for the client’s eyes to pop.
Watch as her jaw drops.
Watch as the pencil tumbles in slow motion to the floor.”
Sean may have more flexibility to fire a services client than we can, because we are building something physical as a one-time project. But his point should be valid: the terms of the relationship need to be more explicit than seems necessary at the beginning.
Quotations, fine print, and unseen ‘policies’ are often used as CYA tools after the fact. But is there a step in your business process that outlines what you will and won’t do?
I think it could be as easy as the salesperson highlighting lines in the quote prior to taking the order. I’ve felt better when salespeople I am buying from warn me about what will or won’t happen ‘back at the office’. At least I know where I stand.
But fear of losing a sale may cause them to keep their mouth shut. Then you are stuck with the ‘cancer client’. That’s why adding the ‘riot act’ as an explicit step makes sense. Maybe its smarter to have it come after the order, and from the ‘home office’, to squelch whatever the salesperson may have implied or promised, and to establish a tone of control. (Just don’t sound evil when you do it, as I think that’s a real risk.)
YAD? Oh that’s my acronym for “Yet Another Directory”. I don’t comment on everyone I see, unless there is something to talk about.
Today’s YAD is OpenFos.com (named Focus On Sourcing), which I found in my monthly review of referring websites. It was hard to miss, as it was ranked right after Google! A closer look at my stats showed four different directory listings for our company with similar traffic numbers each.
I suspect the high referrals from their site is due to the screen-shot they show on the listing pages. One listing record is interesting because it identifies US Government ‘Contract Listings” that we have recently won.
Googling openfos, I started finding sites like Office Supply Leads which offers a (paid) subscription to searches of government bids for certain commodities. Apparently, that is where this company is focused for revenue.
As far as a directory, OpenFos has a long way to go. For the category of three-gas incubators, they list a number of unrelated ‘suppliers’ like “Affordable Treasures”.
Once again my acronym proves true: Yadda, yadda, yadda. (Well, assuming all those hits are junk, anyway.)
My secretary won passes to a local fair by visiting our local WZZM-TV website, noticing the contest, and entering.
I’ve been subscribed to their RSS feed for maybe a year. Had no idea the contest was being offered.
Lesson: If you have an RSS feed, make sure you are feeding worthwhile (and promotional) content to the subscribers, assuming that they aren’t otherwise going to go to the website.
Now she gets to go see Tesla in concert and I don’t. Darn. (No, not really.)
(UPDATE: Larry, click on the link for a sample on Tesla’s splash page…sounds like Aerosmith to me. My musical tastes BTW are: 80s pop/new wave, mash-ups, and blues.)
Last week I lamented what some may call ‘blogger burnout’ or writer’s block, or a mid-life crisis. Or I called it ‘settled in’. Blogging has become familiar and unmotivating (and ditto for what my posts actually say, at least to me).
I’ve pondered this and come up with a list of things that keep us energized for projects and roles in life:
Well, guess what…none of these really apply to blogging:
This is true of nearly all blogs. No wonder it is easy to get settled in or burned out. This is a fact of life for a blogger.
What I have resorted to (and was suggested by Ben) is looking at subjects to branch-out to or re-evaluating the kind of posts I make. There is a lot more I could easily write about in my day-to-day job, but I don’t want to say too much about what goes on internally here. (An interesting trap I’ve created for myself.)
The other challenge with new sub-topics is that doing so requires new and more intense focus, as well as significantly more work in creating original content. And because they are new topics, finding exactly what to say can become a cause of writers block. I am hoping that short ‘theme weeks’ could be manageable.
The good news is that sub-topics would be mini-goals…that would create to-do lists, satisfying two of my three motivators! Guess I’ll just have to resort to talking to myself to satisfy the first condition. 😉 Doesn’t completely solve the settled-in feeling, but it does keep things fresh and a little challenging.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Google’s mantra, “do no evil”. I was concerned that their going-public would shift the focus of their company towards profiteering, if not evil. As it turns out, they seem to have been too clumsy (and blessed by Wall Street) to be digging for profits.
Staying squarely in the ‘no evil’ category, the big story this week is that they are testing AdSense payment based on “Cost per action”, or CPA. A click-thru would not be enough, the visitor would have to ‘convert’, or achieve a goal on the website. Advertisers using this model would only pay for traffic that matters, and risk of click-fraud (i.e. evil) would go away. For the sites hosting the ad, a potentially higher pay-off should offset their PPC income.
This sounds great, but there are questions that seem hard to resolve, especially for advertisers like me (which is maybe why Google is only ‘testing’ CPA).
The obvious technicality is that for a lot of smaller & B2B businesses, the most common ‘action’ coming from their website is a phone call. And these are the people who also are paying much more per-click in their current PPC campaigns. Which means they have a lot more at risk for click-fraud yet cannot rely on CPA to help due to the untraceable phone call.
The other problem is simply numbers. AdSense needs thousands of impressions just to create PPC activity worth mentioning. And of those clicks, only another 1-2% are going to convert. And because that conversion for small or B2B businesses is not a sale, we aren’t going to want to pay a high bounty for ‘just a lead’ (unless quality can be determined).
Russ Perkins, at InfoCommerce Group, points out a deeper issue in this week’s newsletter, titled Does CPA Add Up To Trouble? that this would once-again upset the apple cart regarding the job of advertisers and the publishers carrying the AdSense ads:
“If CPA takes off with advertisers, and I think it will, we have to watch it closely. If it remains limited to publishers getting paid (hopefully a lot) for generating hard sales leads, that’s one thing, and a number of us could do quite well in this environment. If it morphs (as I predict it will) to advertisers demanding to pay only when they make a sale, we as an industry have to draw the line. The purpose of advertising is to stimulate interest, not guarantee profits.”
While the CPA program may flourish with e-commerce businesses, I don’t see it gaining a foothold in the B2B sphere.
In addition, I will go one further: As B2B advertisers look closer at their spending and conversion rates with AdSense (as compared to AdWords), they will start to pull out of AdSense.
The next smart place to try is Google’s Site Targeting, which is paid on a CPM basis, but allows you to choose what sites to run your ad. That kind of human selection should provide a greater chance of clicks and conversions.
Globalspec has tried games as a way to promote their website, so you know that ThomasNet has to try it…ThomasNet is sponsoring the “MikeMan” game, which is actually a promotion vehicle for ESPN-Radio’s morning show.
Thomas gets ‘brand recognition’, especially with their famous green color. But the game is just a Pac-man knock off. One that you don’t want to play during office hours (whereas the Globalspec game you could leave up in your browser after each turn to get some work done). I think the presense of text ads under the game only diminishes the recognition value, too.
If I were Thomas, I would go back and read what Globalspec had to say about using games to attract engineers. I think Globalspec was much more savvy about what they were trying to accomplish, if not especially successful.
Here’s the game: ESPN.com – ESPNRADIO – MikeMan
What better to do when you feel down (see yesterday’s post) than to find a proverbial ‘dog to kick’…must mean its time for Dave to anoint a new Marketing Nitwit.
The nitwit today is Thales Components with this lug of a website.
This company is just a subsidiary of their North American parent, who has a very neat, clean website. Looks like Thales has a spoiled, out of control child. So even though the parent looks all together, we all know that unruly kids are products of poor parenting. Time to call in Supernanny, I think!
Dog kicked…there, that’s better.