We have a motto at TREW Marketing: “Trust Drives Results.” TREW started with humble beginnings at one of the worst possible economic times – early 2008, just before the Great Recession began in earnest. Despite this, we’ve achieved a new milestone that less than half of all small businesses ever reach – the 4-year mark. It’s been a year of building trust and driving results for our growing clients, and here are a few highlights:

• The Wall Street Journal selected TREW as one of ten most innovative small businesses in America
• We self-published a new e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers, and our promotional campaign won the Gold MarCom Award
• TREW revenue is on track to grow 34% YOY in 2011
• 179% more visitors came to trewmarketing.com and spent more time once there
• Our Twitter followers have grown by 4x in just the last 5 months of 2011

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But books and awards can only carry a company so far. What really counts is driving results for our customers. Here are some highlights from their marketing successes in 2011:

Branding and positioning success

TREW developed client DISTek's branding "brain", including clear visual branding online and offline, and differentiated messaging that distinctly positions the company in the off-highway engineering markets.

TREW also created a “brain” for new client, Adaxa USA including a positioning statement, long pitch, tagline “Guiding You Through ERP” and company-level messaging such as, “Adaxa develops powerful ERP solutions for mid-size companies that need to order, shelve, assemble and ship their products efficiently.”

New website launches

TREW created new websites - including design, development and CMS - for clients DISTek and Bloomy Controls.

Growth in website traffic

Through ongoing integrated marketing management and execution, TREW client Wineman Technology had continued website traffic growth throughout 2011.

Optimized search advertising

Results from various paid search programs we managed for clients in 2011, including lowering costs while driving up clickthroughs and time on site

Awareness through targeted PR outreach

From news release development to major product launches to ongoing media relations outreach, TREW helped many clients drive results with their PR investments.

With this success, we continue to build trust with our customers. With this trust, we are honored to be working with many of the same customers as well as nearly ten new ones in 2011:

We believe this success is due to three key advantages TREW uniquely brings to our clients:

1. We know engineers and scientists.

We are focused. As one of the only marketing agencies in the world whose sole focus is working with B2B companies and organizations targeting engineering and scientific markets, we know the unique challenges of marketing to technical audiences:

• Engineers and scientists are skeptical of marketing.
• They need a wealth of technical information that is easy to find and read.
• They want to know a solution is proven – that they can trust your expertise and specs.

2. We plan broadly and then go deep.

The key to smart marketing is to start with a plan tied to business goals and with defined measurable objectives.  As a full-service marketing agency, we have a broad understanding of all aspects of marketing and how to integrate across media for the greatest impact. Once a plan is in place, we then go deep into each media to create thorough programs that leverage each other.

3. We believe Trust Drives Results.

We at TREW Marketing firmly believe that trust – with each other as employees, with our clients, and ultimately with our clients’ audiences – is the key factor for producing consistent marketing success.  That trust also drives loyalty, such that nearly 100% of our science and engineering customers who came on board in 2008 are still with us today.

With our proven record of thriving partnerships, more and more companies are coming to us for our unique expertise marketing to technical audiences. We look forward to delivering continued smart marketing and outstanding results to our customers in 2012, and wish all of you a joyful holiday season! To learn more about why engineering and scientific customers consistently choose TREW Marketing, see our video TREW Stories:

November and December is not only known for the holiday season, but also for budget planning for the upcoming year. One of the challenges small- to medium-sized companies face is how much to spend on marketing. You know that marketing is important, so the question becomes how much investment to make when it can be difficult to pin down a concrete return on investment (ROI).

While TREW Marketing does not have a hard and fast rule, our past research has shown a good starting point for B2B technology companies is 6% to 14% of forecasted sales. From there, that number will need to be fine-tuned based on several considerations:

1) Margins
The higher your margins are, the greater your ability to reinvest in the company. However, even businesses like computer manufacturers, who tend to have razor thin margins, must still invest in marketing to be competitive in the marketplace.

2) Products Versus Services
Your core services may not change very frequently, and therefore once the foundational marketing material is created, less updating may be needed from year to year. In contrast, every time you release or make a major update to a product, fresh content – such as news releases, landing pages, data sheets, and demos – must be created and maintained.

3) Foundational Marketing Investments
An increase in budget may be required for foundational marketing projects. For example, let’s say your company typically needs a marketing budget of 6% gross revenue to meet sales targets. However, there may be a year where you need to spend 7-8% in order to pay for a major marketing project, such as a website redesign or a move to a new CRM platform. These foundational projects will benefit the business for several years to come, making them a longer-term investment.

4) Balance Between Sales and Marketing
Companies commonly group sales and marketing together in the same budget. If this is the case for you, it is important to decide who gets how much, and consider where the big versus incremental investments should be. For example, this year should you double the sales force or double down on marketing efforts to launch a new eCommerce system? If you don’t strike the right balance, you may have lots of sales representatives with no leads or tons of leads with not enough salespeople to follow up on them.

5) Healthy Versus Slow Economy
Many people have asked if these budgetary guidelines still hold true in a recession, and the reality is that many companies have dialed down their spending in reaction to tough economic times. In 2011, TREW Marketing saw small companies drop their spending to an average of 3% of sales, whereas medium-sized businesses maintained an average of 8% of sales.

MarketingSherpa has collected data showing that smaller businesses typically spend a greater percentage on marketing than larger companies, but during recent years, small companies have been going into survival mode and aggressively cutting expenses to keep their businesses afloat. However, “marketing is an asset that drives revenue, not a liability that simply incurs costs,” says Inbound Sales Network. Returns may not be immediate, so a long-term, consistent effort to market your company and its offerings is required even during downtimes to make sure customers will still choose you when business picks up again.

In conclusion, make smart decisions and prioritize your marketing dollars to make the greatest impact. For more information on which activities will get the most bang for your buck, download our free Smart Marketing for Engineers e-book.

The marketing priority for small- to medium-sized B2B companies should always be to ensure they are utilizing the web and its global reach before all else. Yet the ultimate goal is to generate leads, create opportunities to engage the customer, and ultimately close the sale. Often this requires face-to-face meetings, product demonstrations, and targeted presentations. In order for your company to really shine at these prospect meetings, you need to be armed with a polished presentation that builds credibility, shows your experience, and conveys a memorable message that doesn’t put people to sleep.

Most often, presentations like this are done in PowerPoint slides. Here are four best practices to create a powerful and reusable slide deck, using examples from a recent project we did with TREW customer DISTek:

1) Design
Hopefully you already have a company slide template, but if not, apply a clean and simple design based on the color palette and font of your brand for visual consistency. Use a minimal header and footer to give yourself plenty of space to maneuver the content as needed.

DISTek uses consistent design between their website (top) and slide template (bottom).

2) Content
Two words: reuse & shorten. If your website is current, effectively designed and includes targeted content throughout, use this as your source material, and then convert it into slides for optimal reuse. You already created it on the web – why recreate it again? Create a cohesive story about who are you as a company, what your offering is and the benefits you can provide, and why your audience should care. Instead of providing lengthy bulleted paragraphs to be read verbatim, use large images and short bullets as visual prompts for the presenter. And build your more complex material with multiple slides instead of animations in case your customer wants to print out the presentation.

Build complex content with multiple slides. Here, the phases of the V development cycle were broken into four slides to show the company’s services from modeling to production test.

3) Script
Everyone in your company has a different way of describing the same diagram or mission statement, so a script is key to making sure all the presenters deliver the same message consistently and coherently. This also allows you to insert pre-planned pauses to engage the customer, ask about their challenges, and bridge back to how your company has the perfect solution.

4) Customization
After all the work to polish and standardize your message, make sure the presentation is customizable for each audience. A simple tweak you can always do is add your customer’s logo to the title page. To make further customization quick and easy, create an appendix with additional case studies, in-depth technical details, and extra images to personalize the slides for a specific industry or application.

Customize your content with images specific to your client.

For more helpful tips on how to create compelling content targeted towards engineers, scientists and technologists, download our FREE guide, Smart Marketing for Engineers.