Forgive me before I start for the potentially circular discussion of ‘demos’. This post comes in two parts, each a different ‘demo’.
Last week, at the National Manufacturing Week et. al. show, I ran across the opportunity to get a T-shirt for ‘doing a demo’. Truthfully, I stopped because I was interested in this for what they were doing, not for the shirt (here I am wearing the T, “Just Demo It”). So I was led to a laptop linked to a website and was shown the product.
(I’ll skip the side-discussion about whether this demo made sense to do in the first place.)
The company: New Equipment Digest (NED)
The product: IndustrialProductDemos.com (IPD)
The demo: A website tour
Essentially, NED is a general digest of new equipment (Wow, just like their name implies). The IPD product is an online service to expand on the new equipment releases it’s advertisers publish.
Here is a link to a IPD demo to give you an idea of what they are like. Essentially, you get a pop-up flash-driven demo, that has 5 pages: intro, zoom, image swap, features, & applications. There is an option to add video, as well, which I liked. Price? $2,700.
IPD reminded me what of ‘CD catalogs’ tend to look like: content crammed into a cookie-cutter window. The image zoom and swap pages are good things that many folks don’t do on their websites, even though the easily could. The benefit hopefully is that the advertisers can rely on NED’s perfection of the cookie-cutter format so that users actually look at the demos.
And that’s the big question–will users actually come look? NED certainly has a readership that wants to learn about new products. But will they slow down and go to IPD? Will they be able to navigate to the content that interests them? Will they actually find the demos useful? Will they ‘just demo it’?
It is a admiral try to fill the existing gap of ‘how do I get my new product info in front of people in the 21st century?’ This approach seems a bit dated, and unless NED can commit to a lot more than just T-shirts to promote it, I don’t see a long future for this initiative.
A B2B marketing blog by an honest-to-goodness marketing manager for an industrial manufacturer.