TREW Marketing is pleased to announce the launch of a completely redesigned website for the Children’s Medical Center Foundation of Central Texas, who raises funds for Dell Children’s Medical Center.

TREW Marketing played a critical role in this redesign by developing a strategic marketing plan – starting with a focus on the website – that would create a strong, consistent foundation for the many fundraising programs they lead and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of donor outreach and engagement.

Snapshot of new Children’s Medical Center Foundation website

Snapshot of Former Children’s Medical Center Foundation Website

Armando Zambrano, Annual Giving Director of the Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, said “TREW Marketing took a strategic and thorough approach to strengthen our marketing efforts at the foundation.  And best of all — I gave direction and they went to work, requiring very little time during the project.  We are thrilled with the results.”

TREW Marketing provided numerous project deliverables, including:

• E-marketing SWOT analysis
• Web goals and strategy, including visitor experience, content categorization, prospect capture, and internal efficiency gains
• Detailed web redesign plan, including navigation, content management and measurement
• Future e-marketing investment prioritized plan

TREW Marketing and the Foundation engaged web design firm Monkee-Boy of Austin Texas to execute the web plan.  Their work included design and programming, including comprehensive content management and the installation of online giving and “my fundraiser” technology solutions.  Moving forward they will provide on-going maintenance of the site.

Are you considering redesigning your website?  Contact TREW Marketing today to discuss your goals, explore options, and get rolling.

It looked easy.  I chose a few keywords, gave Google my credit card number, and BAM!  My website should be crawling with qualified prospects, right?  But instead my website bounce rate skyrocketed and I quickly spent my monthly marketing budget with nothing to show for it.

Sound familiar?  If so, it is time to better understand the 5 steps of building an outrageously successful paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.  But first, why should you invest in PPC instead of improving your natural search results?

Search engine optimization is a journey, and the destination can sometimes be far in the distance, especially for small start-ups.  While working to improve natural relevancy, PPC can be a good bridge marketing activity.

PPC is a highly targeted marketing activity with excellent accountability.  For example, you can purchase  ”long tail” terms, very specific to exactly who you would like to target.  You can measure exactly how many prospects saw and clicked through on your ad.  Then measure their behavior on your website.

Let’s Get Started!

1.  Keyword selection

You’ll likely invest a good deal of time determining which keywords to purchase.  I recommend selecting fairly specific keywords.  They may not be quite as well-trafficked as more general terms, but those seeking these keywords will be a more qualified audience, and your return-on-investment will be higher.

Give some thought to how your target audience seeks information.  Will they search by typing in their challenge/problem, or will they seek a solution?  Test keywords both ways and see which is more fruitful.

As you pull your preliminary list together, give thought to your budget.  You can quickly run up the tab by selecting very popular words, or by trying to be in the #1 spot.  We do not recommend these tactics.  Choose less crowded search terms, and embrace the bargain #2 or #3 position, knowing that you will be every bit as successful at #1, but pay much less for your results.

2.  Driver (Ad Text)

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, each will need a catchy title and ad text that drives the reader to visit your site.  Focus on what you offer, and be specific.  Try to capture qualified leads, and steer away everyone else.  Otherwise you’ll pay for undesirable visitors to click and bounce away — not a good use of your marketing dollars.

Take some time to study other companies’ adwords.  You will quickly obtain ideas of the good, bad and ugly.  Here is a recent ad run by TREW Marketing:

On one hand, this ad is specific.  If you were reading and not a test and measurement company, or not interested in marketing, you would probably not click.  The ad could be improved by utilizing a more compelling offer, such as a white paper.

3.  Landing Page

I’ve clicked on your ad…where do you send me?  To your home page?  Or is there a more specific area of your site that provides targeted information?  The most important thing is to deliver on whatever offer you’ve promised.  If you have a general ad, sending someone to your home page is fine.  If your ad offers a white paper on the latest changes in industry test standards, make sure the visitor can easily find the white paper after they click .

Often our TREW clients will run ads specific to an industry or application, and then drive traffic to that specific landing page on their site.  This is very effective to retain visitors and compel them to learn more.

4.  Call to action (offer)

Use your landing page to continue a relationship with this new visitor.  What action would you like the visitor to take?  Subscribe to your newsletter?  Call your sales team?  Craft one or several calls to action, placed prominently on the landing page.  Set goals for conversion to next activity, and measure how well you are doing.  If this is an area of weakness, consider creating new offers, such webcasts or white papers.

5.  Next steps

After all the work that you’ve done, be sure you follow through.  If you’ve promised a sales person will call, be sure that information is passed to the sales team.  If you’ve offered a newsletter, be sure they are added to the list and you actually send something out.  And so on.  This is your opportunity to close the sale.

PPC campaigns do not run on autopilot.  We recommend measuring often, experimenting and tweaking your keywords, ad titles, ad copy, landing pages, and offers.  Other areas to test include frequency, languages, and 3rd party Google ad feeds.  It is a busy job managing Google adwords, but the payoff can be quite outstanding.

TREW Marketing has deep expertise in PPC, and offers monthly retainers to manage paid search campaigns.  Interested in learning more?  Contact us today at info@trewmarketing.com.

Webcasts are an effective, low-cost marketing tool to deliver content to your prospects and customers. In a recent workshop, sponsored by the Austin Entrepreneur Network, I presented an overview and best practices for creating webcasts.  (The full presentation is available on SlideShare).  Below is a how-to guide to help you create webcasts based upon the presentation.

Where do I start?

There are five steps to the webcast creation process.  I’ll walk you through each step of the process, and point you to additional resources to learn more.

Goals

As with any new marketing project, it is important to identify why you are engaging in this activity and how to measure the outcome.  Sample goals for webcasts include capturing leads and moving prospects closer to purchase.  Sample metrics may include web visits, webcast registrationts, webcast attendees, percentage close rate to next activity, and cost per lead.

Content and Presenter

Creating a compelling title and meaty content is paramount to the success of your webcast.  Think from the prospect’s point of view:  what problem can you help them solve?  What innovative new approach can you educate them about?

As you begin to assemble your powerpoint slides and dynamic elements, such as videos, demos, etc. for the webcast, follow presentation best practices such as limiting the amount of text per slide.  See my checklist, Top 12 Webcast Presentation Tips for more details.

Select a presenter who performs well in this environment, and set them up for success through preparation and run-throughs.  In the Top 12 list, you’ll see advice for this presenter, such as energy, variation in tone, and first-person language.

Delivery Platform

There are many technology platforms available for webcasts.  If you are a small business and/or not sure you are ready to make the webcast technology investment, considering starting off with a 3rd party host, such as an industry publication with a robust online presence (example:  TechOnline) or an industry association with webcast opportunities.

If you are seeking a technology solution, begin with your list of requirements and then match possible vendors to these requirements.  While there are clear industry leaders for webcasts (Adobe Connect and Cisco WebEx, among a few others), there are also smaller vendors who have robust features and a low monthly price tag. Gartner recently published a study of technology providers called The Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing that may be helpful in your evaluation.

Promotion

There are many ways you can promote your webcast.  First you need to determine whether or not the webcast will be live, as this time constraint adds an important dimension to your marketing efforts.  Another question to ask is whether this webcast is a call-to-action from another marketing activity, such as a trade show.  The slide below provides ideas of what activities you might take advantage of when promoting your webcast.

It is key to communicate to your webcast attendees not only to invite them, but to provide important logistics information and reminders.  Once the webcast has taken place, you should follow up immediately with two key items:  a short survey (so that you can determine whether you met their expectations) and a….

Call to Action

Once your attendee has participated in the webcast, what would you like them to do next?  How will you move them closer to purchasing your product or service? Some sample calls to action are included below:

By following these steps and utilizing marketing best practices, you can create webcasts that are extremely effective and low-cost.

Need help kicking off a webcast program?  Contact TREW Marketing today.

I recently attended a local meeting of the Austin Social Media Breakfast Club where I had the pleasure of hearing John Moore talk about – or more accurately, test us on – the power of Word of Mouth Marketing from his years in leadership roles at companies such as Starbucks and Whole Foods. Based on the findings from research conducted by Keller Fay in June 2009 in the US, I thought John did a good job of testing our knowledge while also incorporating social media and word of mouth tactics into this talk, so I’ll do the same here in this post.

To start, my first question – what is Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing? Give this some thought and tweet your answer now using the hashtag #smbaustin. We’ll come back to this later.

And now a few quiz questions:

1. 76% of consumers believe companies are untruthful in their advertising – True or False?

2. 68% of of global consumes say recommendations from other consumers are the most credible form of advertising – True of False?

3.

4.

5. 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity on Twitter – True or False?

6. 22% of all brand-related conversations are sparked directly from advertising – True or False?

One of the greatest takeaways for me from this discussion was the power of the total customer experience in reinforcing your brand promise and creating great word of mouth buzz about your company, product, or service. If the brand promise of your company or service is marketed one way, but the real life customer experience is contrary to this, then your brand will suffer. At the end of the day, while having a thoughtful and well-executed marketing strategy is critical, if every employee and every customer interaction is not aligned to the brand, not only is a huge opportunity missed to reinforce the marketing message and strengthen the brand, but likely the brand will be or is already damaged from the broken promise.

This power of real-world customer interactions also reinforces a key finding made by Keller Fay COO Brad Fay in this article by Marketing Daily, “…more than 80% [of WOM] relates to the experiences that consumers have with brands.” So while Twitter and Facebook are all the rage (and they can play an effective, complimentary role in employee, customer and community engagement), good old in-person and phone conversations are still king.

OK, so now for the answers. First, a definition of WOM Marketing. The one I wrote down was “When someone passes along information about a company, product or experience.” John offered this at the end, “The act of giving consumers a reason to talk about your company/product.” He followed this with another take which I thought was very cool – “earning an opinion” – and offered that if you’re doing something polarizing in the market, it’s good. Some will love and some will hate, but you have earned an opinion, and that builds awareness and discussion, which marketers can then turn into action.

Here are the other answers:

1. True

2. False – it’s 68%

3 &4. I’ll report on this in a week after the poll closes and the votes are tallied

5. True

6. True (which means 78% of WOM is sparked by something other than advertising, such as great customer experiences as noted above)

A big thanks to John Moore, whose talk was as good as his website and blog. For anyone interested in WOM marketing, I highly recommend a regular visit to his site to hear great stories, learn about new books, and be entertained while becoming more knowledgeable. I am getting ready to start reading one John gave to me at the meeting, I Love You More Than My Dog. I’ll report out on it in a future post.

If you are like me, owner of a small-medium-sized business, you want to know how your website is performing but have limited time on your hands.  Most likely you use Google Analytics as your reporting tool, but don’t spend much time understanding all the details in the basic dashboard or digging into some of the more advanced reporting features.

In this blog I’ll describe some metrics that you may not have taken the time to understand, and highlight a few more advanced features.  To do this, I’ll walk you through a recent experience of mine when catching up on our TREW website.

My goal was to refresh some of our web content, but first I needed to dig in and measure how well my site was performing, as this informs some of the changes I should make.  I was also curious how a recent Google Adword I purchased performed.

When our website was developed, we included some code from Google which enables me to gather data via Google Analytics.  As you may know, this tool is free, easy to read, and provides a nice dashboard to show how your website is performing.

The basic dashboard from Google Analytics quickly provided me with the overall health of my site.  It showed me how people found my site, how they navigated through, and ultimately how they converted.

Most of the metrics are self-explanatory, such as visits and average time on site, but in seeking more context to these metrics, here is what I learned:

• Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your site and immediately leave.  In other words, they found your site irrelevant.  This could indicate an issue with your home page content, or the manner in which you drive traffic to your site.
• Sites with blogs tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on site.  Visitors will quickly “stop by” and see what the blog topic is, perhaps read the article quickly, and navigate away.
• The data on referring sites was wonderful.  I found out about new sites who are recommending TREW Marketing, and can monitor referrals from sites where I have established relationships.
• The list of keywords gave me an idea of my site’s search performance with my desired keywords.

After moving past the basic report, I noticed that I can set up goals and funnels.  Hello, wonderful Google engineers, what is this?  It seems that you’ve taken the basic marketing principles of funnels and conversion rates, and made them easy to customize and track for my website.  This too is free and convenient.

Here is how it works:  first you define a goal for your website.  As an example, let’s say your goal is to increase subscriptions to your newsletter.  You then identify the before and after pages where you a) ask for the subscription, and b) measure completion of the subscription, such as the exit page “thank you for subscribing to my fabulous newsletter.”  Congratulations, you’ve just now completed a goal, and part of your funnel.  You can now easily monitor this goal through your Google Analytics reports.

To create the entire funnel, you identify several different goals that are linked together, designed to usher a prospect through the buying cycle.  Think of this as a mini funnel to your overarching marketing funnel of activities and conversions.  It may not fill in every datapoint you need, but it brings you a long way down the road.

Google has a great resource on their site called Conversion University.  Here you can find more in-depth information on all the Google Analytics features and capabilities in the form of online tutorials.  I have just scratched the surface in this blog.  In particular, If you sell products or services through your website, you’ll want to take a deeper dive.

Need help interpreting your Google analytics report, taking your website performance metrics to the next level, or building a comprehensive marketing funnel?  Contact TREW Marketing today.

Last week on 60 Minutes, a popular TV news magazine program, they featured the new DEKA Arm, a innovative new robotic arm for victims of amputation. They showed the behind-the-scenes engineering and creativity required to overcome extremely difficult design obstacles, including the amputee’s control, comfort and precision of movement (think of the precise movement and control needed to pick up a grape and put it in your mouth, as demonstrated in the video). It is a moving story, and one that once again illustrates the incredible impact engineers and scientists have on society.

So what really inspires someone to become an engineer or scientist? In my experience, those I’ve had the honor of working with and for through the years were inspired by an adult or a real hands-on project that ignited their interest. What if there was a program that offered both for kids – inspiring professional engineers and scientists working with them and hands-on, real-world projects like the DEKA arm to solve.

Well, there is such a program, and it was coincidentally invented by the same person who showed off his team’s engineering talent – Dean Kamen. When Kamen and his team at DEKA Research and Development are not inventing the next robotic arm that brings movement to victims of horrific war battles and tragic life accidents, he is working to inspire the next generation through is non-profit, FIRST. One program, FIRST LEGO League, geared toward kids ages 9 to 14 is part of a pipeline of programs for kids ages 6 to 18 that combines both mentorship by professional engineers and scientists with a hands-on approach to solving real-world problems.

So let’s hear from some kids what they like about FLL:

Hows that for some deep thoughts on engineering and science? What’s so great about FLL is just that – kids can be kids, have fun, and do engineering. They love playing with LEGOs, of course, all the while studying topics like transportation (ie, this year’s theme – they are studying jetpack travel as their focus) and designing and programming robots to solve various missions.

I am a proud robotics FLL mentor, going on my 5th year working with Austin-area students to help them solve their FLL challenges. And we are so fortunate to have professional engineers and scientists like Siddharth from National Instruments and Paul from IBM, who were inspired to follow their education and career paths from the hands-on, real-world experiences they had as kids.

Here is what Paul and Siddharth think about spending their time with kids (slightly cut off at the top after the YouTube upload – sorry about that!):

Thanks to Paul and Siddharth, IBM and National Instruments, and all the other engineers and scientists and their employers who allow these talented professionals to spend time with our kids.

You can check out FLL online to learn more about this inredible program and find out how you can become a mentor or start a team.

Just as companies develop their business plan to define their markets, strategy to compete, and operational structure to succeed, it is also a great idea for companies large and small to develop mission and vision statements. Done right, they can provide alignment and direction across the enterprise and inspiration for all employees.

I will discus these benefits more in a moment, as well as share a few examples. First, however, let’s define what they are and how they are different.

A mission statement defines the fundamental purpose of your organization. It is not measurable, per say, but rather a statement defining your company’s reason for being. It’s best when kept brief, long-term oriented, and inspiring. For example, the Intel mission statement is to: “Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.”

Where a mission statement defines a company’s purpose, the vision statement describes what the company wants to achieve in the future. It is your long-term dream, concentrating on the future, and outlining what the organization wants to be, or how it wants the world in which it operates to be.  The vision statement is more often a source of inspiration than the mission statement, and also can provide clear decision-making and behavior expectations.

For example, the first part of McDonalds vision statement reads: “McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience.” And Nike’s is “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the World.”

So why take the time to do create these statements? Well, as I mentioned up front, the first is alignment. Merely doing the work to get agreement on what a company’s mission and vision statements are can be a powerful exercise in getting everyone on the same page about the purpose of the organization and where it wants to be in the future. In addition, it can be a compass for company behavior. For example, with Southwest Airlines emphasis on customer service in their mission statement, they let all stakeholders know that the behavior they care most about is being friendly and service-oriented to their customers: “The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit”,

Similarly, in a post on Harvard Business Publishing’s blog and republished at BusinessWeek, The Leading Edge blogger Michael Watkins says of vision statements: “It crystallizes an emotional connection between employees and the business.”

In addition to providing alignment, creating your mission and vision statements can be inspiring to you, your employees, and your customers. For example, at Mr. Watkins points out, a unit of Johnson & Johnson that designs, manufactures and markets orthopedic implants, such as artificial hips and knees, has this as their statement of vision: “Restoring the Joy of Motion.” Wow – now that is powerful. Gives you goose bumps if you really think about the impact this company is having on the lives of others.

In another inspiring example, you see the mission statement of TREW Marketing community partner and educational leader, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) “…is to help educationally underserved students develop the knowledge, skills, and character needed to succeed in college and the competitive world beyond.” They clearly state their audience – underserved students – and their vision to prepare them for college and the competitive world. Straightforward and inspiring.

While not all companies and organizations may feel they need these statements, certainly companies who are innovating in engineering, science, and education, and truly changing the lives and lifestyles of so many, are missing an opportunity if they don’t.

Have we inspired you to create your mission and vision statements? Let us know how we can help you. As the TREW mission states,  “We create ideas to promote the innovation of our world’s technical and academic leaders” and we would love to serve you.

We have some great news to share at TREW Marketing. We have been selected as the marketing agency of choice by Markus Tarin, President and CEO of MoviMED of Irvine, California, a leading supplier of integration services for the machine vision market. Our primary focus will be the launch of the first-ever analog frame grabber module for National Instruments CompactRIO platform. The MoviMED AF-1501 analog frame grabber module was previewed at NIWeek and will be formally announced later this fall.

“The AF-1501 analog frame grabber module for NI CompactRIO is the first of many new machine vision products to come from MoviMED” said Tarin. “TREW Marketing was a natural choice to serve as our marketing partner in this launch given their deep experience and relationships in the machine vision space and with National Instruments.”

TREW Marketing will provide a range of marketing services, from initial product launch strategy and goal-setting with partner National Instruments, to content development, media relations, and e-marketing management.

“We are honored and excited to work with MoviMED on their launch of this first-ever machine vision module for the highly successful NI CompactRIO platform,” said Rebecca Geier, principal and co-founder of TREW Marketing in Austin, Texas. “With our long-standing knowledge and relationships in the test, machine vision, robotics and industrial control markets, we look forward to applying our broad set of marketing services to this important launch for MoviMED.”

For more information about the MoviMED AF-1501 analog frame grabber module for NI CompactRIO, contact Markus Tarin at m.tarin@movimed.com.

For more information about TREW Marketing, contact Rebecca Geier at rebecca.geier@trewmarketing.com.

Read TREW Marketing’s past blog post, Top 9 List To Increase Your Product Launch Coverage here.

You want prospects to find your website when searching Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other engines.  You know you need to “optimize” but are not sure what steps to take, or perhaps you wonder why your past search engine optimization (SEO) tactics failed to produce the desired result.

TREW Marketing knows SEO.  We’ve worked with customers to achieve amazing results, and have learned along the way that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.  It takes a thoughtful strategy, a multi-faceted approach, and lots of monitoring and tweaking.

In this blog post we offer 5 practical tips for marketing your website.

Create an SEO strategy. Set goals.  Why do you care about SEO?  Is it to increase awareness?  Capture leads?  Make sure that you keep your goals in mind throughout the project, as they will drive actions.  Put in some research time, such as noticing those ranking above you.  What reasons can you uncover for their superior ranking, and how does your position change relative to them as you implement changes?

Identify customer segments, applications, or other “keywords” that you want to own.  This might be a product that you supply to the market, such as “solar panel thin film” or an audience that you aspire to reach, such as “solar panel design engineering.”  Be realistic — if you are the small fish in a big pond, you’ll do much better to target a narrow audience that is being overlook by the big fish.  Also, give consideration to the regional reach of your business (i.e. city, state, national, global) as this is another way to narrow your keywords.

Look critically at your website. Does the content on your site reflect the segments you’ve identified?  If not, consider creating new sections or pages dedicated to the segment.  You’ll have much higher success converting web visitors into customers with relevant information that is easy to navigate.

How often do you update your content?  Search engines love sites that change often.  By adding a blog, you will have a hand in guiding your SEO over time and keep your content fresh.

Do you have a way to capture leads on your site? If this is a goal for your SEO project, make sure you set the proper mechanisms into place.

After you’ve written your updated content, then have a web programmer create page titles and metatags, which inform search engines about the content that resides on the page.

Who links to your website? One of the biggest SEO boosters is having other websites link to yours.  The higher traffic on those 3rd party sites, the more it helps you.  TREW Marketing takes a multi-prong approach to this, considering popular general lists, such as Manta, Yelp, and City Search; industry-specific lists, often managed by industry publications; social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; and unique businesses and organizations that partner or associate with your company.

Measure, tweak, measure, tweak. As you make changes, measure improvement.  Know that your ranking will rise over a course of weeks, not days.  If you make major changes to your site, ask your web programming to “submit” the site for search engines to crawl.  Once you know where you stand, makes some tweaks as necessary.  You’ll want to measure weekly at first, then biweekly on an ongoing basis, as things will likely change dramatically over time.

Ready to kick off an SEO project?  Contact TREW Marketing and leverage our expertise in web marketing.

In technical B2B markets, oftentimes through manufacturer and industry conferences, there are associated technical paper contests that recognize outstanding applications in a variety of categories. Participating in these technical contests are great opportunities with potential to bring strong awareness to your company and solution, including onsite and web promotion, opportunities to present your work, and visibility with technical trade editors, who are always looking for new and interesting applications to share with their readers.

In addition to all these benefits, another is the very low-cost. Many paper contests are free to participate in. Your only costs really are your and/or your staff’s time to work with your customer to write and edit drafts, and any costs associated with related images. These may be screen shots that cost nothing other than time for touch-up; in some cases, it may require a professional photographer to capture photos of the system or application area, which does raise your costs. However, this is a good investment because you can re-use these application shots throughout the rest of your marketing, including on the web, in sales presentations, at events, and with the press.

In addition to paper contests, there are also many opportunities to present technical presentations at industry trade shows and company user conferences. Examples include company events such as SolidWorks World or industry-wide conferences such as Embedded Systems Conference, with events held around the world throughout the year. One that was just held just last week in Austin, Texas, the Graphical System Design Achievement Awards at NIWeek, included categories such as Mechatronics, Robotics and Control; Embedded Design; and Communications and Wireless.

A big congratulations goes out to TREW customer Cal-Bay Systems of San Rafael, California, for taking first place in the Production Automated Test Equipment (ATE) category. Their paper, Building a Reconfigurable Motor Life Test System for Medical Device Test Powered by FPGA, details their work for a leading medical device manufacturer to test  “the heart of an insulin pump product – the motor.”

Next time you introduce a new product or secure a customer win, leverage that hard work by turning that success into an educational (non-salesy) presentation, with sufficient technical facts, technology trends, and helpful hints. And be sure to plan ahead – often the call for papers closes months in advance of the event.

Need help creating a paper contest entry?  Call on TREW Marketing to project manage, edit, and promote your outstanding technical application.