If you have a compelling product or an interesting service, you may grab the attention of a potential customer or a respected journalist. However, what do you do when they ask: “Can you tell me about someone who is actually using this?”

You can have the world’s greatest product, but if you can’t show how customers are using it and benefitting from the results, you don’t have much ground to stand on. Rarely do potential customers – and especially engineers and scientists – want to be the first to use a new product, and journalists will tell you to call back when you have a customer example they can share with their readers.

When you have those key customers who are benefitting from what your product offers, write a case study about the customer’s experience. Your case study will help you tell others about your product through a real-world example that illustrates how it was implemented and the benefits your customer is realizing.

Here are eight tips to make your case study be a great sales tool for you:

1. Be choosy when possible

When you are selecting a case study to write, choose a customer who will tell your story well. Find a customer who has significant, quantifiable results in an application that is relevant to the most people that will show other potential customers the value of your product or service.

2. Get ready for the ask

As you’re helping your customer solve their application with your products or services, mention that you’d like to complete a case study of their finished project. You may even ask if you can include a case study in your sales contract during negotiations before the sale is closed. This is especially helpful in the negotiation phase when your customer is asking for a discount or “freebies” throw in; you can compromise by including a case study that benefits you.

Also make sure that you communicate the mutual benefit of a case study for you and for your customer. Often times, the case study will highlight the benefits of your products or services, but it will also help the customer showcase their success. By later putting the completed case study on your web site, you help improve the customer’s web presence and further their company name.

3. Do the work

If you want a case study that showcases the benefits of your products or services, you’ll need to write it yourself. By writing it yourself, you can easily include key messages that you’ve defined for your company.

Write an outline of your case study and then conduct an interview with your customer to fill in any gaps. Make sure you can articulate:

• The problem your customer was trying to solve
• Other solutions they considered before choosing to partner with your company
• The new functionality or solution they now have because of your product.
• The results they’ve seen as a result

4. Get to the specifics

Write your case study in a way that relates to other potential customers and shows a quantifiable result. This case study for NASDAQ shows Charles Schwab’s success after switching to the NASDAQ Exchange. Although the case study is about a financial institution, NASDAQ conveyed Schwab’s successes in a way that made them relatable to any publically-traded company, showing that with NASDAQ, Schwab received a superior market model, lower trading costs and listing fees, and greater liquidity.

NASDAQ also shows that Schwab investors will save $2.9 million because of the company’s switch. This quantifiable result quickly and easily shows a potential customer the value of NASDAQ’s services.

5. Provide compelling first-glance content

Use prominent content in your case study to catch a potential customer’s interest. In this case study, a headline with a quantifiable result quickly catches a potential customer’s attention and draws them in. A reader wants to know how a large, successful company saved $100,000 using social media, what their strategy was, and what tools they used to do it.

Draw readers in with quantifiable, results-focused headlines.

6. Make approval easy

After you draft your case study, you’ll want your customer to review it. When sending it for review, highlight specific areas for them to look at, and include all images or screen shots you want to use, so that you can get all of the content reviewed and approved at once.

In addition, draft a specific quote that they can review and approve so that you can use that quote and its attribution on your website, in a flyer, or in a news release in the future.

7. Create a finished document

Make sure you have all the necessary elements for a compelling, effective case study.  Elements you need, are well-written, customer approved content and additional images or graphics, laid out in a finished document that clearly communicates the customer’s challenge, solution, goals or key factors, implementation, and results.

Put together all of the content you’ve created to form a branded, finished document.

8. Share, share, share

Lastly, share your success in all channels. Put the case study on your website, blog, share on social media accounts, and link back to your product or services pages. Bring it to sales meetings and include it in corporate slides. Write a news release around it and send it to relevant media, or put on the wire. Use your proven successes to generate new business.

Related blog posts:

Four Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations

Content IS King – 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

Summary:

See how an IT company with an emerging product in an undefined space used a number of different PR tactics to improve a key performance indicator – feature article coverage – by more than 125%, and achieve record web traffic and target media engagements.

Challenge:

The company wanted to create awareness of a new product in a quickly evolving, noisy, and undefined IT/networking space with aggressive competitors.

Goal:

The goal of the product launch was to create product awareness, garner media coverage, and begin to build relationships with key editors and analysts in the industry.

This was the most successful product launch in the client’s company history. As a result of this launch and ongoing outreach, the company now has a strategic and measured PR program, it’s visibility and coverage have increased,  and it is gaining on its competitors.

Campaign:

TREW Marketing sought to create a PR program for this IT company that would quickly address their known challenges – their product was emerging in an undefined market, the market is fragmented and crowded with many tools providers, and their primary competitor was aggressive in its messaging. To achieve success and address these challenges, TREW created a tiered media list of publications and editors, drafted targeted high-quality content, reached out to prioritized media, executed a major product launch, and now continues to build on the newly-established relationships and company awareness.

Step 1: Develop a Targeted and Tiered Outreach List

TREW sought to develop a strategic media list for the IT company. Developing the list involved extensive research including tracking competitor coverage, searching for new publications, categorizing journalist beats, and identifying the data and articles that had been the most influential for the IT industry. This research resulted in a list of more than 25 media contacts who write for an audience relevant to the IT company’s existing product offerings and soon-to-be-launched ground-breaking new product.

To prioritize efforts with journalists, TREW ranked journalists as high, medium and low priority, and established interaction goals with each group of journalists. TREW, with the help of the IT company, then executed both proactive and reactive outreach  based on occurring events such as new articles, blog posts, and company and industry news, and introduced the IT company to the journalist when the company and its expertise could be helpful.

Step 2: Plan and Create Quality Content

For the major product launch, TREW created several pieces of targeted content, starting with the news release. Based on TREW research and several launch messaging meetings, the release focused on the product’s unique benefits for the market and application-leading specifications that factually ensured the product would stand out prominently over aggressive competitors who had a larger voice in the market, yet a technically inferior product. In addition, TREW created a one-page flyer that highlighted specific pain points of potential customers and used diagrams and explanations to show how the new product saved time, cost, and set customers up for future success.

Alongside the news release and one-page overview, TREW helped develop the slide content, flow, and messaging that positioned the company and introduced the product. In addition TREW created article abstracts that company experts could write for publications. The IT company presented the slides in run-throughs of the presentation, each time making changes and adjustments so that their messages were clearly and accurately conveyed.

Step 3: Reach out to the Media

A few weeks before the launch of the product, TREW began to contact journalists it had begun developing relationships with since Step 1. TREW introduced the product and invited journalists to meet with the company leadership and technology experts to learn more about the product and how it would meet the needs of the journalists’ audiences.

Since the PR launch process began with researching the best contacts and building relationships, as outlined in Step 1, TREW already had a start on raising the company’s visibility with key journalists which helped ensure they would more easily accept the invitation to hear about the new product at the time of announcement.

Step 4: Launch the Product

The week of the launch, the news release was distributed via wire and the IT company met with journalists across the country. They presented slides, answered questions, pitched article abstracts or offered assistance with other articles where applicable, and TREW continued to watch the targeted publications for places the new product could be included.

Step 5: Sustain the Media Relations Program

With a successful launch underway, TREW continues to build relationships with key media for the IT company. By consistently staying in touch with top media and making valuable offers of expert spokespeople, new content, and company news, overall engagements (i.e., journalist responses) are growing. As TREW and the IT company look to build on this success into 2012, a key focus is on additional compelling content and ideas to strengthen relationships with editors and grow the IT company’s image as a leader in the markets they serve.

Results:

With the PR program development and strategic product launch, the IT company secured 125% more coverage than prior launches. Throughout the launch, the company received:

• Six times more feature article coverage than their top competitor in the launch month
• Strong feature article headlines and product messaging
• Industry analyst quotes in multiple top-tier publications
• Feature coverage in four of the targeted publications
• Article headlines that included key messages promoted through the presentations, news release, and additional information materials

As Google’s search algorithm has evolved to emphasize trusted, well-established domains and unique content, the debate is heating up on the marketing value of microsites. Some experts believe that creating a microsite is never a good idea, diluting the brand and hurting coveted search results, while others think they still have a place in a targeted, strategic marketing campaign.

A microsite is loosely defined as a small cluster of web pages that are differentiated from a parent website through unique design and layout, limited navigation options, and a unique domain URL to set the site apart from the parent domain. Many companies have implemented microsites to promote specialized, short-term offers, product launches, or wholly new segments to their target audiences.

We’ve put together some practical guidelines on when to use — or avoid — a microsite strategy for your business.

Don’t Build a Microsite to Improve Search Rankings

Ever since Google began cracking down on link farms and giving more prominence to well-established domain names with numerous backlinks and unique content, the argument that a microsite can help you show up higher on search engines has fallen flat. Google’s focus on unique content, domain age, and backlinks are an effort to include metrics such as trust and relevancy in their rankings.

A microsite can hurt your SEO for the following reasons:

1. Microsites that live on a separate domain than your main website will not share any of the “domain credit” that Google gives your primary website. Google sees the microsite URL as a wholly new website, forcing you to build up its search value with new backlinks and content updates, which can take time and resources that are better spent improving your main site.
2. If microsites have identical content to any pages on your primary site, Google will not regard it as unique content, resulting in low ranking . All microsite content must be unique, fresh and updated often for good rankings. Simply put: there are no shortcuts for good SEO.
3. If you are targeting the same keywords in your microsite as you are in your main site, you’re simply splitting your resources and your sites are competing with each other for rankings. You’ll be spending double the time and resources required to achieve high search rankings, and competing against yourself. Don’t do it.

If you manage to climb the natural search mountain and achieve high listings on Google for your microsite, ensure that you’re ready to maintain and update it for the long haul. Short-term microsites that are scheduled to go dark after a set period of time don’t do you any good in search, because once they’re turned off they become broken links on the search listings.

Don’t Build a Digital Band-Aid

Imagine that your existing website is outdated, messy and hard to use. But the idea of starting over – rebuilding the site’s architecture, design and content flow – is just too overwhelming, not to mention the budget you’ll need to pull it off. You may be tempted to consider a microsite as a quick fix to this challenge. A small number of newly-designed pages, free of the confines of your existing, hard-to-navigate site, can be very tempting because it’s limited in its scope.

Avoid the temptation to remedy an outdated site with this digital band-aid. Here’s why:

1. As mentioned above, Google places value on older domains and existing backlinks, so investing in your main site is paramount for good SEO. You’re just making more work for yourself when you reinvent your existing site in a microsite’s new wrapper.
2. From a branding standpoint, it’s never good to look scattered to your target audience. Having two separate sites to address the same users can be confusing and doesn’t present your brand as organized, strategic or focused.

If you’re already too resource-strapped to maintain a great user experience on your existing site, the same can probably be said for a microsite. Though it may be limited in scope, a microsite still requires time and resources to plan, build, and most important, to maintain and keep fresh. That’s time better spent improving your main site if you really want to see a return on your web investment.

It’s also worth noting that microsites that are linked to from your main site can cause what we at TREW like to call “digital whiplash”. Web visitors on your site have the expectation that as they navigate your content, they will stay within the structure and feel of your site. If they click on a link that suddenly delivers them to an new site with an entirely different navigation, with no easy way to get back to where they were, it can be disorienting. If the visitor feels lost, they’re less likely to remain on your site or come back.

So, when are microsites a good idea?

As a Short-term Promotional Vehicle

If you’re planning a quick promotional campaign that doesn’t easily fit into your existing site, and you want to limit your web visitor’s experience to emphasize your campaign message, a microsite can offer:

1. A focused, clean, task-based user experience
2. No risk of distracting the web visitor away from the desired task, because the corporate site content is not accessible
3. Specific metrics tied directly to your campaign, because your web analytics are separate from your corporate site

Quanser Academics, a leader in the development of real-time control design systems for academic research and teaching, wanted to increase adoption of their products among university teaching staff throughout North America. They developed a short-term campaign promoting a free inverted pendulum to professors who purchased a workstation for a limited time.

With TREW’s help, Quanser developed a specialized microsite, as well as a targeted direct marketing push to promote the sale and the microsite. The focus was not on SEO or long-term gains, but on specific sales goals within a limited period of time.

Quanser's Microsite

Because the Quanser campaign had a specific goal of compelling professors to purchase specific products, the microsite provided a more seamless experience than the Quanser parent site, because it only offered links to those product options, and didn’t distract web visitors with ancillary content.

One additional note on the short-term microsite approach: Be sure to develop a redirect strategy when the site is taken down. It should address where the links to the microsite will go, and you should ensure that your IT staff create 301 redirects when the site goes dark.

As a Vehicle to Establish a Wholly New Segment or Product Area

If your company is planning to launch a new business segment or product offering that stretches beyond your typical target audience, you may discover that fitting it into your existing website is like the proverbial square peg in a round hole. When your site is clean and usable, performs well and has a logical site structure, adding a completely different segment to the web mix can prove to be a real challenge, especially if you want to make a big splash.

A microsite can be a good approach if:

1. You’re marketing the new product/segment to a target audience that your corporate site doesn’t address directly. A microsite allows you to speak directly to the target audience with industry-specific vocabulary and build credibility immediately.
2. Your new product/segment is innovative and very new, and the design and navigation needs can’t be addressed in your corporate site’s design templates.
3. The new segment must distinguish itself from the corporate site because it’s approach, strategy or focus are so different and new for the company.

When Nissan decided to introduce their new electric car, the Leaf, they wanted the innovation and cutting edge technology of their product to be evident in their web promotion of the car. Taking a microsite approach afforded Nissan that freedom. The navigation and design of the Leaf web pages are like no other product page on the Nissan site. And since this is a long-term microsite, Nissan built it into their existing site architecture, ensuring that the Leaf web pages enjoy the SEO benefits of the Nissan.com domain.

The Nissan Leaf Microsite

TREW client Bloomy Energy Systems recently launched as a new division of Bloomy Controls, who provides automated test, data acquisition and control systems for product development in industries such as aerospace, automotive and consumer electronics. Because the new energy division at Bloomy targets the energy storage techonology audience, with very specific vocabulary and product needs, the company wanted to approach their marketing strategy with this in mind.

TREW built a microsite for Bloomy Energy Systems that is completely focused on energy storage needs and solutions. The microsite approach gave Bloomy the ability to offer a clean, industry-specific experience for their energy storage audience, a segment that doesn’t easily fit into corporate site’s structure and focus. In addition, the Bloomy corporate site is still able to address the full range of solutions and industries it always has.

The Bloomy Microsite

Final Thoughts

A microsite can be a smart approach for specific campaigns and product introductions. It is not appropriate as a short-cut for SEO or to skirt poor performance on your main website. It can provide a truly seamless, easy-to-navigate, task-based approach to your target audience. And that’s a customer experience that’s worth the effort.

Ready to get started on your website project? Contact TREW Marketing to get started today.

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

(click images to enlarge)

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:

Theory x Practice is the motto of the University of Texas AdGrad program. I should know, as I’ve lived it everyday for the last year as a full-time Masters student in Advertising and intern for TREW Marketing. Over the course of 2011, I’ve been a student of all sorts, learning things like Social Cognitive Theory, media calculations – CDI and BDI, social media applications, and the process of developing marketing plans. I’ve been fortunate to have a hands-on education through the AdGrad program and with TREW Marketing.

So what have I learned this past year? Summing it up in 5 lessons, here it is:

1. Master the message. One of the first things Rebecca and Wendy taught me was the importance of being able to write like a marketer. This was a refreshing crash course on how to be brief and be smart with all writing projects – from emails, blogs, presentations, case studies, and everything in between. Concise and compelling writing is important, because you can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate your ideas, it doesn’t matter.

2. Revise…revise….revise. This goes in tote with lesson #1, but it’s so important, I figured it deserves it’s own lesson number. TREW Marketing has taught me patience and to embrace the process of revising and editing. Many times, I’ll submit work that will undergo two to three rounds of revisions. This process is long and tedious, but also smart and collaborative, producing the best messaging results.

3. Go all in. There hasn’t been a dull moment over the past year as an intern. Rebecca, Wendy and all the project managers have consistently come up with new and exciting projects for me to work on. It would be impossible to write out every project on this blog, so I’ve wrapped up a year in review of internship projects with TREW Marketing in the Slideshare presentation below. (Use full screen mode to read)

4. Be resourceful. Being part of a virtual team requires a unique set of skills. Specifically, being resourceful to educate yourself and the team on latest trends, virtual tools, and interesting articles. The virtual aspect of the job requires a balance of independence and collaboration. For me, it was an acquired skill, but it’s been such a blessing to gain more independence and a work-life balance from it.

5. “Listening is 51% of communication.” This motto, borrowed from Rebecca, describes the TREW approach to marketing planning. Careful listening entails precise note-taking, and consideration of the tone of voice, personality, and dialogue. Over the last two months, I’ve been honing in on this skill, listening to clients explain their pain points and marketing goals, then taking this information to develop marketing plans that best fit their goals and needs.

As I graduate this early December, and begin a new chapter, I reflect on the last year with TREW and year and half as a Masters student. The decision to go back to school was very tough, but I did it to be prepared for opportunity. Graduate school and TREW have prepared me with the right marketing knowledge for a career in this fast-changing digital industry. Then at the beginning of this semester, TREW also came with a great opportunity, to stay on board as a full-time Marketing Specialist. So at the beginning of next year, I will be returning and re-iterating all five of these lessons I learned during my time as an intern at TREW Marketing.

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.

In part 1 of our social media series, we reviewed the benefits of using social media and dispelled common myths using real-world examples. A key data point to know is that for the first time, internet users are more likely to visit social media sites than corporate sites for information about a company’s products. However, 65% of companies have little-to-no social media strategy. If you are in that 65%, this post will help you create a social media strategy through taking the steps to define, act, measure, analyze, and improve.

1. Define: Choose content that meets your objective

Feature hot industry topics – browse your favorite industry publications and identify what topics are being published and discussed. Do you have interesting views on this? Social media is a great channel to state your opinion and ask for others’ feedback. This is also a good way to collect feedback that will help you develop the content that you’ll use in your traditional channels.

Use existing assets – use content such as white papers, core slides, and customer testimonials. Below are a few examples of taking your current content and using it in social channels, directing people back to your website to learn more.

• Create a series of Tweets sharing insights from a white paper, include the URL to download the entire paper.
• Share your customer success stories on Facebook, and be sure to “like” your customer’s business page, and include them in the post. 
• Post all publicly available slide decks showcasing your industry expertise on Slideshare. Remember to edit your slides before posting, so they capture key verbal comments.
• Include a link in YouTube videos to a specific page on your website to direct people where to find more information.

Company culture – What makes you different from your competitors? Social media is a casual communication space, and being personal helps you connect with your audience. Take photos of employee luncheons or company outings and share with your followers. It will make them feel special with an “insiders look” at your company.

Conferences and events – Are you planning to attend trade shows this year? Use the conference hashtag to target attendees and media covering the event, engage in discussions around the conference, drive traffic to the booth, and launch your product to valuable social contacts. The example below is from AWEA’s Windpower conference, where Wineman Technology inserted hashtag “#Wp11″ to ensure their content was pushed to their target audience of Windpower attendees. 

2. Act: Balance scheduled content with on-the-fly responses

Scheduling your activity – Use a shared company calendar to delegate and schedule content. Start small with a few posts a day and increase once the processes are in place. Map out content for the first month, measure, analyze, and then find ways to improve for the next month.

Monitor conversations and be ready to respond – Know where your content is located so that you can easily answer questions or provide social media users with additional information. For technical companies, it’s always helpful to have an engineer who is involved in the social media team, so they can provide helpful, specific answers when you get specific questions via social media. And remember, people who ask questions through social channels expect immediate answers. Free tools like TweetDeck allow users to monitor tweets, including providing real-time, ongoing search results:

Share more than once – Research from Bit.ly, a link shortening and tracking service, looked at over 1,000 social media links’ lifespan. The results indicate the average life of content shared on social media is 3 hours, with the exception of YouTube, which gets you more than twice the lifespan: averaging 7.4 hours!  Ultimately this shows that the content of a link means more than where you share it, backing up Marketing lessons 101: content is king.

3. Measure: Track progress with key metrics

The metrics below are key measurements of progress. You can track these on a spreadsheet week to week, or monthly, whichever fits your schedule. By recording these metrics in a spreadsheet, it will eliminate time spent later creating trend graphs to present your efforts.

• Activity- Opting into a social network, friend, follow, or fan is a positive sign of interest. These users are eager to learn more about your product/company.
• Clicks- Using link shortening tools, such as bit.ly or Hootsuite allows you to track links, so you know what content is being consumed and what isn’t.
• Re-tweets (RT)- Re-tweets amplify your social media message, think of this as a personal referral for your company.
• Source traffic- Tracks how visitors get to your website. This provides insight into where your users are and where they are not. Track this month to month, and adjust your strategy if necessary. The charts below are from a 3 month report of TREW’s social media.

4. Analyze and Improve: What to do next…

Through this data, TREW can adjust our strategy to:

• Maintain a strong Twitter presence, it’s the highest source referrer among the social media channels to trewmarketing.com
• Encourage employees to expand and maintain their social networks. High average time on site shows quality contacts are coming from LinkedIn and Google+, which are likely coming from personal employee profiles, and consuming content on the Spotlight blog.
• Reduce resources or switch up the content strategy for Facebook, it is not generating traffic or time on site

On Monday, November 14, the Wall Street Journal named Rebecca Geier and Wendy Covey, co-founders of  TREW Marketing, one of ten “Most Innovative Entrepreneurs” in the Small Business, Big Innovation competition. TREW is featured in a Wall Street Journal special report that hit newsstands November 14 and is online at wsj.com. Finalists were chosen from a pool of over 100 entries by a panel of WSJ judges, who selected ten small businesses that demonstrated an innovative solution and thrived during the economic downturn by finding a new direction and market – that is for TREW, turning business away and narrowing our focus to uniquely serve B2B science and engineering companies.

WSJ print coverage on November 14, 2011:

The competition began in September 2011 with an online voting period for the “Readers’ Choice” award. Readers were encouraged to vote online for the business with the most creative, imaginative or cutting-edge solution for overcoming a major recession-related headache. Thanks to all the TREW supporters who voted and posted our story on their Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and wrote/forwarded emails, we consistently ranked in the Top 5 Most Read articles during this time.

TREW qualified as a finalist for the competition with our innovative solution – to dominate our niche by turning business down and bravely narrowing our focus to uniquely serve small to medium size, B2B, science and engineering companies. We crafted a new business development approach, enhanced our website optimization and social media plan, and wrote a free downloadable book, Smart Marketing for Engineers. The result: we thrived during the recession and are on track for 194% revenue growth in 2011 over 2009, web and blog traffic up 303% in the same period, and doubling our team of experienced marketing professionals from coast to coast.

In addition to the coverage in Wall Street Journal, the Austin Business Journal recently covered our WSJ recognition and ebook, Smart Marketing for Engineers.

This week, the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP) awarded TREW Marketing a MarCom Award. With more than 6,000 entries from around the world, the 2011 MarCom Awards were given to organizations including Burson-Marsteller, Northrop Grumman, Princeton University, Seimens, US Airforce, United Healthcare, Vistaprint, Weber Shandwick, Wells Fargo, and TREW Marketing.

TREW Marketing won its Gold Marcom Award for a promotional campaign around our downloadable e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers. We stood out for our resourceful and creative approach to marketing a professional, well-branded publication.

To promote the book, the TREW crew used a variety of channels including web marketing, public relations, social media, email marketing, and a video, all timed around a global, technical industry conference.

“We pride ourselves in creating custom marketing plans and activities for our customers that support their business goals,” said Rebecca Geier, Principal of TREW Marketing. “It was only natural for us to create a successful campaign to promote our own product using the marketing strategies, channels, and activities that we recommend and implement for our customers.”

Results of the award-winning promotional campaign included:

• 600% in web lead growth during the book launch
• 217 news release postings in the first two hours
• 47 media views of the news release by journalists within the first two hours
• 4505 Twitter users reached with news of the book and a link to download
• Average visitors to trewmarketing.com from Twitter during the launch spent more than 15 minutes viewing more than 10 pages on the agency’s site
• 60% of traffic from LinkedIn to trewmarketing.com during the launch came from first-time visitors to the agency’s site
• 35% higher email open rate from email marketing than the industry average
• TREW email marketing for the book achieved double the industry average for clicks through email
• 10 engineering firms interviewed at industry conference to personally promote the book and TREW’s services to potential clients
• 65 YouTube views of the video