Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? (HubSpot, 2012)

You can’t deny it – we love pictures. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. Facebook recently reported that their users upload an average of 300 millions photos everyday, and the rise of photo sharing social media sites like Pinterest – now the third largest social networking site, behind Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram – bought by Facebook for $1 billion this year, tell us that there’s real power behind pictures.

So what does this mean for B2B marketing? It means that pictures are a viable content opportunity for your marketing mix of web pages, white papers, videos, webinars, case studies, and blog posts.

Read on to learn 4 quick ways to optimize and effectively integrate photos and visuals in your B2B marketing activities.

1. Name the file appropriately. Pick a related keyword for your web content and use this in your file name. Many users will name their image as “image1” or “logo.png” or “screen-shot 2012-10-22.” Is this you? Search engines, like Google, rely on textual cues to understand what the image is about. So if you leave your image file name like the examples above, Google will not know what to do with them.

2. Add alt text. Use keywords in the “alt tag” text box when you upload an image to your blog or website. By adding descriptive alt tag text, search engines can better identify what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

The image below shows how a blog, dynamometermanufacturers.com, found an image of TREW client, Wineman Technology’s dynamometer system via Google search and used it for a blog post. The blog attributed the image to Wineman Technology by linking to winemantech.com, which generated web traffic that spent more than 11½ minutes on-site and viewed an average of 6 pages per session. This cyclical effect of posting and tagging images helps increase your backlinks, gain third-party credibility, and generate highly engaged web visitors.

3. Add context for the image in the page text. In addition to naming the file correctly and adding keyword rich alt text, Google also recommends you add text on the page where the image is located. Referencing the image in the page text ensures that Google understood your alt text correctly. See tip #2 above for an example of referencing an image in your page text.

4. Use rich visual snippets for Facebook posts. Using visual content for Facebook helps increase fan engagement with your page. The more engagement you receive on your page, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts, thus expanding your reach.

TREW Marketing tracked our Facebook page content metrics to learn what content generates the most engagement. The results are very telling of engaging visual content on Facebook. Updates with photos receive 2X more total impressions versus posts with just a link. Additionally, our photos receive 12X more engaged users (people who like or comment on the image) over the link posts.

So here’s what you can do. By snapping a quick shot of a chart or image used in a blog post, you can upload it as an individual image and link to the blog post. This makes your Facebook post stand out more in the newsfeed and in the timeline. Below is an example of this, from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at Inbound 2012.

Contact us today to learn more about TREW Marketing social media and search engine optimization programs.

Related blog posts

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Lasting SEO Results, Part 1: How PR Affects SEO

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

Remember when you were young, and there was that kid who spent more time dissing you or others than making something of themselves? Maybe you wanted to let them have it, but you knew (or maybe your parents gave you some advice) that it was best to take the high road and focus on your strengths and success.

There is some wisdom in this childhood scenario for grownups running businesses, product lines, and service areas, who are competing for awareness, customers, and marketshare. In every market, every town, every application space, you are going to face competition. And that’s a good thing – for companies and consumers. But maybe you are considering making a move to directly market against your competitor. Is this a good idea? The answer is, maybe, but be careful.

Let’s look at a a recent example to help illustrate some upsides and downsides for consideration: Microsoft’s recent ad campaign against Google in the mainstream business press. Here is one of their ads:

Microsoft ad, Text to the right

What I like about this ad:

1. They effectively create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about breaches in personal security if you use Google’s products: “…the way they are doing it is making it harder for you to maintain control of your personal information.”

2. They were timely. The ads hit just as Google announced it was trimming down its privacy policy and sent a letter to the U.S. Congress

3. The tone is serious, professional, and clear: you can’t trust Google, and we’re doing it better.

4. The ad is designed to catch my eye and call out the controversy, and it did: I immediately saw it was a Microsoft ad directed at Google and I wanted to know more; it’s easy to read, my eyes are drawn to the product boxes, and I got the message – FUD about Google.

Three things I don’t like in the ad:

1. The language they used in certain areas. They took several “below-the-belt” jabs that I don’t think were needed, such as “Google is getting ready to make some unpopular changes to their most popular products” or “…Those changes, cloaked in language like ‘transparency,’…are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search…”. I know they’re trying to create FUD, but I believe they could have gotten the point across without taking these direct jabs. Because they did, they lost a little of my respect along the way. It seems some in the media – who influence the market and their customers’ perceptions – agreed:

In a later ad, they modified their tone and I liked it a lot more: “If you’re not comfortable with the potential of private email content or information in your private documents being used to serve you ads, we’d encourage you to explore our award-winning alternative: Hotmail and Office 365.”

2. Giving airplay to Google. As with any direct campaign against a competitor, you are growing their awareness with your dollars. Thanks to Microsoft, I became much more aware of Google’s security policies, and certainly was not going to trust Microsoft’s word alone. So they caused me to study Google even more by raising the issue. In the end, by creating this fear with users, Google may have gotten more traffic from this campaign than Microsoft.

3. There was no credible call-to-action to drive me to learn more about Microsoft’s presumed “more secure” approach. They were clearly just exploiting their competitor’s weakness, but didn’t have any technical, researched, or third-party information (white paper, webpage, etc) that I could visit to learn more. They just pointed me to microsoft.com and touted their competitive products. Lame!

So, was it effective? Were readers inspired to check out Microsoft’s products? Did the gains of directly exploiting Google’s weakness outweigh the costs of all those ads in very expensive outlets and potential harm to Microsoft’s brand?

Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure the product teams at Microsoft would justify it, but as a consumer, it didn’t inspire me to buy Microsoft, although I will say today, between this campaign and all the mainstream media coverage on the topic, I am more weary of Google than I used to be.

Instead of taking this risky, expensive approach, consider instead some alternatives as you plan your competitive attack:

1. Increase investment in search marketingaround keywords where you directly compete. Place ads, create landing pages, and generate targeted content that drives clicks and organic search to your site vs. your competitors.

2. Don’t call your competitor by name. Rather, generalize with “other + your category”, such as “other service providers”, “other test integrators”, “alternative IT consultants.” You can also indirectly refer to your competitors by using their branded colors. This is a less direct way of calling out your competitors, while still getting the message across.

3. Create comparison tables of specs with your company name in one column, and “competitor 1″, “competitor 2″, etc in follow-on columns. As long as you can back up your data if someone asks, and you are accurate in your depiction, you can communicate your point without giving a nod to competitors by name.

4. Start a FUD campaign around your competitors’ weaknesses by focusing on your strengths. For example, for an enterprise software integrator, a campaign could be “Five Questions You Should Ask When Selecting an ERP Integrator”. Create a white paper, short video or webcast, and push out via social media and your blog to educate the market in a sound, professional manner what they need to consider.

5. Devise a geographic attack. As a challenger with less resources than the market leader, you will not be able to go head-to-head matching the leader’s products, advertising, and price promotions. Instead, be more strategic than your opponent and identify shifts in regional market segments that cause gaps to develop, then swiftly fill those gaps before your competitors do.

6. No matter what, do NOT compete on price. It diminishes your value, lowers margin, and is hard to get the market to move away from once you’ve started

To end on a light-hearted note, here’s the very funny, albeit very risky General Motors TV commercial that ran during the 2012 Superbowl touting Chevy vs. Ford trucks.

http://youtu.be/XxFYYP8040A

Do you like the Microsoft ad? The Chevy commercial? Have you tried some of the suggested alternative tactics? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below. In the meantime, here are a few additional resources to check out for more on this and related subjects:

Allocate Google Pay Per Click Budgets for Maximum ROI

5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

Looking for additional insight? Check out our guide: Smart Marketing for Engineers

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

As one component of a comprehensive Search Engine Marketing program, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers companies a highly-flexible, cost-effective means of offsetting shortcomings in natural search rankings and search engine optimization efforts.

PPC is the cumulative process where advertisers bid on keywords or phrases, develop corresponding ads to be displayed alongside relevant search engine results or networked Website content, and pay only when their ads are clicked. Advantages of PPC:

• Highly-targetable – Ads can be served according to advertiser-specified interests, locations, languages, and other parameters.
• Reach & Relevancy – Millions of Internet searches are conducted every day; PPC messages are displayed in response to specific queries, when Internet users are typically further along in the acquisition cycle.
• Real-time Optimization – Advertisers can modify keywords, ads, targeting parameters and budget allocation within seconds of spotting performance trends; reporting periods, metrics and details are fully-customizable.
• Minimal Waste – Advertisers only pay when Internet users click on their ads, maximizing efficiency and online return on investment.

PPC is one of the most targeted and measurable forms of marketing.

The most successful PPC programs require dedicated time and effort to establish goals, monitor performance and maximize results.   One of the most critical components, and least understood, is ongoing budget allocation. Determining budgets is easy; properly managing them requires individualized attention and dedicated expertise.

The process begins by allocating budgets by campaigns, or keyword groupings. A best practice is to spread keywords across a multitude of campaigns, as a greater number of campaigns allows for more granular optimization and budget allocation. Proper allocation goes a long way toward preventing high-volume, highly-competitive (and thus expensive) keywords from rapidly depleting PPC budgets and keeping other important search terms from triggering important ad messages.

With budgets and campaign structures set, the keyword bidding process begins. Although “automatic” bidding is an option, we recommend manually bidding on every keyword purchased. The manual process yields greater strategic control and allows hands-on discovery of keyword trends in real-time. Proper bidding is a complex, labor-intensive process that requires constant monitoring and tweaking for optimal results. Our specialists regularly dedicate the hours necessary to ensure proper management throughout the bidding lifecycle.

This customer saw high time on site with a highly engaged audience and a high percentage of new visits compared to the overall site.

Merely spotting trends isn’t enough – PPC program managers must continuously absorb and leverage learned, program-specific intelligence. Because no two advertisers or programs are alike, this requires a great deal of real-time dexterity. We monitor geographic trends, search engine versus display network trends, device/access trends, and even evaluate trends by time-of-day or day-of-week. The result is a better, more efficient PPC program built, measured and continuously-adjusted to meet our clients’ specific marketing objectives. By proactively addressing trends, we maximize PPC results.

Many advertisers and small businesses choose to self-manage and end up abandoning PPC programs before they’ve been given a fair chance to succeed. Others simply never realize their PPC programs’ full potential. Putting PPC in the hands of professionals replaces the guesswork with expertise and infuses PPC programs with new life and strategic focus.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the many benefits and nuances of Pay-per-Click in this article. For more information, visit our previous blog post, 5 Steps to Building an Outrageously Successful Paid Search Campaign.

Ready to begin a Search Marketing Program, or improve your PPC performance?  Contact TREW Marketing today.

If you’ve visited the Google search page today, you probably noticed some big changes. Google has updated their look with a new left-hand side panel which offers search tools to help customize and refine results. more…

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.

With one of the most popular trade show and conferences in the science and engineering space, NIWeek, coming up next week here in Austin, we at TREW Marketing put together a list of five proven methods for marketing to a technical audience. With all those leads you’re going to get from the show, you now have to make sure you are set up to work them.

This is by no means an end-all, be-all list, but in our view, the “must-haves” in any technical marketing program.

1. Engineers + Google = Love

2. Webcasts – a win-win for all

3. Timely, accurate technical content

4. Engineers like pictures too

5. Your customers say it all

After you read the post, be sure to VOTE on the type of marketing you’ve found most effective to reaching engineers and scientists.

1. Engineers + Google = Love. Numerous studies from trade journals and engineering-centric companies how shown time and again that they primary way engineers find information and seek answers to problems is through search engines. Engineers rely heavily upon search engines because they are the fastest and most convenient ways to seek specific information. From learning about a new standard affecting their design to seeking possible system-level component solutions, engineers are using search engines throughout the development process to find the information and products they need. So, what can you do to ensure your products and services are easily and precisely found on search engines?

• Create a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan.  Set goals for your presence on search engines and identify keywords you want to own.
• Optimize your website for search.  This includes organizing your site around the desired search terms, programmatic changes such as page titles and metatagging, and “look at me” submissions to major search engines.
• Purchase targeted, uncrowded search terms (e.g., Google Adwords). Start with Google, which owns a commanding 65% of search market share, and Yahoo, which is strong in areas such as local search, but pay attention to the active search engine industry battles, such as Microsoft’s new Bing engine that is taking Google head-on.
• Monitor your results frequently — your competition might be quick to respond and before you know it, your rank or ad placement may have weakened.

If done thoughtfully and monitored regularly, natural search engine optimization and paid advertising can be a powerful, efficient lead generator for your business.

2. Webcasts – a win-win.  It is no wonder that webcasts have exploded in popularity among the engineering community over the past decade – companies, trade magazines, and event trade show organizers now offer them as another venue for engineers to gather information.  And it’s obvious why – they are win-win for the end-user and the organizations. For users, webcasts are convenient – engineers can “attend” right from their desk or as a team in a conference room.  They are accessible – engineers just log in and are immediately listening, and void of the burdensome in-person social encounter or phone call with sales departments that some engineers would rather avoid.  And they can be interactive – webcast hosts often offer Q&A opportunities during the event.

For you, the webcast host, the benefits are also many: online events are highly cost effective when compared to physical events, the reach is broader, and while the live webcast is interactive, the session can be archived on your website and used as a lead generator for months to come.  Software demonstrations and videos of hardware/systems (even remote control of systems) can be achieved on any of the major webcast tools available today, reducing the need for costly demo equipment and shipping. Webcasts work best when part of an integrated marketing campaign.  For example, they can be a strong follow up action for people who attended your booth at NIWeek or another trade show, or a dynamic way to “demo” a feature of your product to prospects who’ve shown interest from a previous activity.

3. Timely, accurate technical content. Earlier, we talked about engineers’ preference to seek out their own information, and that search engines are hands-down the primary means they use to find this content. But what are they seeking? Most of the time, engineers and scientists are researching specific product or service types, product features, specifications, how-to articles, etc. (they are also seeking examples from  others who have done their application before, which we talk about in #5 below).

Therefore, it is critical that you provide timely, accurate information about your products and services, including tested and reliable specifications, comparison charts, and visual graphs showing a variety of performance results. Technical content can also focus on trends in certain industries or applications, or can detail tips and techniques for solving certain technical challenges. Here are some nice examples to review and get ideas. By providing this kind of content, you can become a technical resource for your customers and prospects, increasing customer loyalty as well as your chances of converting prospects when they are ready to buy.

As a sidenote, because technical content is very high-quality and of high value to engineers, you can turn this type of content into a lead-generating area of your website as well and have on-hand at your show booth. So you not only provide quality information, but you also help your SEO and generate leads.

4. Engineers like pictures too. I know this comes as a surprise, but engineers and scientists are human too…they like to look at pictures just like the rest of the us. As Dan Roam explains in his book, “Back of the Napkin“, pictures are the best way to communicate and therefore the best for solving problems. As a result, you can greatly improve the readability and comprehension of your technical content by having interesting images accompany your technical content. This can come in the form of photos of application shots, product shots up close or in action, graphs or charts showing performance levels or time-based results, flow charts explaining a system or process (such as the one below showing the process that is followed to wake up in the morning), tables, or even a video.

As I have said before in this blog, and will continue to say, interesting, relevant and high quality images, such as those listed above, can turn everyday content into great content by adding dynamic imagery to help education and explain your topic.

5. Your customers say it all. As with any type of purchase, the opinions and experiences of our friends and colleagues weigh heavily on our own purchase decisions. Except for a small few who want to be first to try the newest thing (the left side of the bell curve image below), most people, and especially engineers and scientists working in critical application areas with very little room for error, prefer products and services that are tried and proven. As Geoffrey Moore outlined in his book, Crossing the Chasm, for the early majority who represent the beginning of the mainstream market, “good references are critical to their buying decisions.”

A good reference can be a simple quote from a well-known company or a detailed case study covering the technical challenges of the application, how it was solved, and the qualitative and quantitative benefits that the new system or service delivered.

By focusing on these five methods of marketing consistently and over the long-term, you will be on your way to building a robust marketing program that engineers and scientists will find valuable, and ultimately, will respond to.