“TREW’s marketing expertise and knowledge of the embedded space make them a trusted advisor to help us drive awareness and demand, as we continue to grow our business and market share,” said Jason Clarke, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Crank Software. “They have a proven track record developing and executing strategic marketing plans that focus on results, and we’re extremely pleased with the results they helped us achieve on our launch of Storyboard Suite 3.0.”

Crank Software specializes in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that enable R&D teams to more quickly develop UIs for resource-constrained embedded devices like in-car graphical displays and animated GPS systems.

When Crank needed to launch the latest version of their flagship software, Storyboard™ Suite, they chose TREW Marketing for our experience in developing product launch plans that target embedded design engineers. Crank sought to increase awareness of Storyboard Suite 3.0, drive web visits and capture leads through software evaluation downloads.

Deliverables:

Marketing communication strategy for the Storyboard Suite 3.0 launch including:

• Media relations strategy and execution
• Search engine optimization and advertising
• Launch email and automated direct marketing
• Social media strategy and execution
• Partner co-marketing with QNX in the Consumer Electronics Show concept car

Results:

• 85% increase in evaluation downloads
• 56% increase in online leads following the launch
• 38% increase in total web traffic following the launch
• 237 news release postings to online sources
• 2 contributed articles in RTC and Embedded Computing Design
• +3-minutes time-on-site to launch landing page
• 2-hours time-on-site generated from Twitter links

Beyond the Storyboard Suite launch, TREW Marketing continues to serve as Crank Software’s marketing partner, providing ongoing strategy consulting, brand and product-level messaging and positioning, media relations, content marketing, partner co-marketing, search engine optimization, search advertising, social media and email marketing services.

Want to learn more about product launches?

So you’ve developed a new product for your technical industry – spent hundreds of hours and undergone multiple rounds of revisions and beta tests, figured out your pricing and distribution model – and now it’s time to bring it to market.

The initial step towards launching your product is to name it.  You’ve invested significant time creating it and it’s your baby — not just any name will do. It needs to be memorable, searchable (particularly on search engines), unique in your industry, and relevant to your target audience.

So where do you begin? First you need to collect ideas. Gather a cross-functional team from across your organization of at least 3, but no more than 10, to brainstorm name ideas. After the initial brainstorm, have a few decision makers come together and decide on the top 5-8 names. Then take those 5-8 names and create an online survey that you can distribute to your internal key decision makers.  From there, you can reduce the options down to the top 3, and vet each one out and make final recommendations.

The following 7 tips will help guide you through items to discuss when narrowing down the choices to a final product name.

1. Determine a naming strategy that you will follow for this and future product names. Two primary strategies exist in the realm of product naming: highly descriptive and suggestive. The former will roll under your company brand and will not be trademarked, the latter may be stand-alone brands or can be linked with your corporate brand and can be trademarked. An example of a descriptive naming strategy is Apple, with its iPod, iPhone, and iPad products. OXO is an example of a suggestive naming strategy with names like GoodGrips, Touchables, and SteeL. While less descriptive than Apple’s product names, the OXO product names still strongly suggest what distinguishes the different line.
2. Use short, descriptive names that are generally three or fewer syllables.
3. Make it easy to spell, pronounce, and remember. Italics and capitalization of different letters make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the product name to remember how to spell it correctly.
4. If the product will be launched and used globally, consider the implications of the product’s name in other countries.
5. Avoid naming a product by an acronym that has to be spelled out in order for the public to understand the mark.
6. Research potential product names by performing online searches for third-party use of an identical or similar name, mark, or description used in connection with similar products
7. If you plan to apply for a trademark, visit www.upto.gov to search the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for third-party applications or registrations of a similar designation for a similar product. If the application or registration has been abandoned or listed as dead, know that the third party still may have rights, where you would want someone in the legal field to review.

Evaluate the potential names with specificity and objectivity. It’s not enough to say, “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Use the following eight categories to understand why a name will or won’t work.

1. Appearance – Is it easy to spell? And how will the name look in a logo, ad, billboard, etc.

2. Distinctive – How different is the name from the relevant product competition?

3. Depth – Names with depth have layers of meaning and association, and keep surprising you with new ideas with each layer.

4. Energy – Does the name have life to it? Can it carry an ad campaign on its shoulders?

5. Positioning – How relevant is the name to the positioning of the product?

6. Sound – This is two-fold – how does the name sound and how easily is it spoken to the customer? Word of mouth is a big part of marketing, but if people aren’t comfortable saying the name, the word won’t get out.

7. Trademark – This is easy, is it available? It’s either likely available, may be available, or not available.

8. Web Domain Name – Again, this is easy, is the URL available? If so acquire it before someone else does. If not, determine if the URL is available for your option 2 or option 3 name; or find out who owns the URL and see if you can acquire it from them.

After you have chosen a name for your product. It’s time to launch it. Smart Product Launches for Engineers provides a framework for how to plan, position, and implement a marketing activity plan that generates buzz and drives leads for your new product.

Related Blog Posts:

How to Use a Well-Time PR Launch to Spread Your Message

Practical Steps for Creating a Product Positioning Statement

Want to Marketing Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

Today, TREW Marketing released a new e-book, written specifically for the business owner, product manager, and marketing leader preparing to launch a product targeted to technical audiences in the B2B space. Available for download on our site, Smart Product Launches for Engineers provides a framework for developing your product launch plan, discusses how to position your product in the marketplace, and includes practical tips for choosing, implementing, and measuring smart marketing activities and tools. It also includes case studies of three diverse, successful product launches.

In this guide:

1. Plan the Launch
   You spent a great deal of time and resources developing your product, now you need to launch it to market, but how? You need a plan. Walk through the process of creating a successful product launch plan that can have significant long-term success. Identify your target audience and determine your marketing goals and measurable objectives.

1. Brand Your Product
   With a plan in place, follow our three step process and learn how to define your product brand and position it in the marketplace. Also included are examples that help illustrate the process.

1. Determine the Marketing Mix
   Execute your product launch and achieve your objectives with a smart mix of integrated marketing activities. Review important considerations and explore various activities to determine which marketing channels will make the greatest impact at driving awareness and generating demand.

TREW Marketing has been selected as a finalist in BtoB Magazine’s Annual list of Top Agencies in the small agency category for the second year in a row. We were included in the Top Agency Special Report for achievements in the following marketing programs:

• Strategic media outreach leading to publicity in top national outlets, including seven features in top-tier outlets and six contributed feature articles
• Co-marketing campaign driving 320% lead growth for an embedded wireless product manufacturer
• Lead-nurturing email campaign resulting in 45.9% open rate and 17.3% click-through rate
• Full-Service integrated marketing program, results including:
  • 32% YoY growth for total web visits
  • 46% YoY growth for organic search web visits
  • 41% YoY growth for search advertising click-throughs with a flat YoY budget
  • More than 2X the industry average open rate for email marketing, at 33%
  • More than 2X the industry average click through rate for email marketing, at 23%
  • 43% increase of monthly average web leads after the website redesign, totaling a 14% YoY lead growth
  • 2,018 news release postings on media sites

In addition to the successful marketing programs for our clients, TREW Marketing’s business growth is highlighted in the following 2012 achievements:

• 50% YOY revenue growth from 2011 to 2012
• 44% YoY increase in project accounts
• 30% increase in specialized technical marketing team
• 56% increase in site web traffic to trewmarketing.com
• 82% increase in social media reach
• Two published webcasts, one white paper, and 40 blog posts published on trewmarketing.com
• Inaugural launch of TREW News, our quarterly E-newsletter, which increased leads by 169% within the first week
• Certification in the HubSpot all-in-one inbound marketing software platform

To compile the list of Top Agencies, BtoB Magazine surveyed agencies in its database through an online form in four categories (small, midsize, large, and interactive). The finalists in each category were selected based on percentage of total business that is B2B, revenue growth, client wins, and innovative work.

TREW is honored to be included in the BtoB Top Agency report, and is already off to an impressive start to 2013. In addition to the BtoB feature, TREW was recently covered by The Austin Business Journal for our marketing partnership with Silex Technology America.

You can read about the rest of TREW’s award-winning marketing programs on our awards page, or read our most recent news releases on why clients choose to work with us.

Silex Technology Selects TREW Marketing for Branding and Marketing Strategy

Crank Software Selects TREW Marketing for Embedded Industry Outreach

TREW Co-Founder Wendy Covey recently sat down with Michael Aivaliotis from VI Shots for an interview titled “Why Engineers Should Love Marketing.”  Michael Aivaliotis, founder of VI Shots, records audio podcasts targeted to scientists and engineers who use LabVIEW. The podcasts include interviews, discussions, and ideas centered around LabVIEW development and growing a successful technical business.

In this interview, Wendy discusses how to approach B2B marketing to technical audiences and provides practical advice encompassing a range marketing topics, from planning and positioning to conferences and social media.

Highlights from the podcast include:

• Planning– what are your business goals?
• Messaging – how are you truly unique?
• Branding – it’s more than pretty colors and a creative logo
• Website and Content – your virtual storefront and the #1 marketing investment you should make
• Conferences – personify your brand, capture leads
• Thought leadership – it’s a marathon, not a sprint
• Social Media – start with a blog, listen first
• Email – stay top of mind

Listen to the podcast at VIShots.com.

Related blog posts:

New eBook: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

Infographic: B2B Marketing in 2013

How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan that Drives Results

This past week, the TREW Marketing Crew gathered in Austin Texas for a 2-day team retreat. The goals of the retreat were to get together as a team and strengthen relationships while discussing how we can deliver excellence to our clients. Here are a few highlights for our time together.

We started off with an ice breaker – the Great Egg Drop.

Using straws, tape and popsicle sticks, we had to build a structure to protect our eggs when dropped from a high elevation.

Unfortunately, none of the eggs survived the big drop – clearly we need our engineering customers’ help!

After the ice beaker, we got down to business. Wendy and Rebecca kicked off the retreat with our 2012 successes.

The team was excited to hear we had a year end revenue growth of 50 percent.

Day one finished up with happy hour and white elephant gift exchange.

Here’s a a glimpse at some of the great gifts.

Day two’s topics included marketing successes and goals, as well as HubSpot demos from each team member.

In between presentations we kept up the hard work, taking advantage of our time together.

We found the retreat to be a great success and can’t wait to gather again in 2013!

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

There is a great saying many marketers use, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Without a plan, how do you know what you need to do, in priority order, to get there? In these busy times, it is difficult for many to take a pause from everyday work to stop, breathe, focus, and plan. Instead, they rush down any road that looks promising at the moment. Unfortunately, these unplanned roads lead to mediocre results and higher costs – in time, money, stress, and frustration.

What if you took some time to truly define your business goals and an investment strategy to get there? Outlined below are the key steps TREW Marketing takes in the marketing planning process.

1. It all starts with business goals.

We kick off the marketing planning process by first asking about your 1-3 year business goals. We then dive in to understand your products/services, key differentiators, target audience groups, and competitive landscape. This closely informs campaigns and defines how we’ll measure results. We also conduct a preliminary analysis of your website and keywords, which greatly informs later steps in the marketing planning process.

2. Develop a marketing strategy.

During this stage, we define marketing goals, such as growing inbound web visits, capturing leads, or growth in thought leadership. You may also have major foundational goals such as creating a new website or adopting marketing automation software, such as HubSpot.

At this point, we create marketing campaign plans. A marketing campaign is an integrated set of activities coordinated closely to achieve a common goal. Campaigns are often centered on an industry, audience type, partnership, or major product/service initiative. We also discuss differentiators at the campaign level, which may lead to the development of core messages through TREW’s Branding Brain service.

3. Prioritize inbound and outbound marketing activities.

Content is central to marketing campaigns. We identify key content needs, such as web landing pages, white papers, case studies, demos, webcasts, and video to support the campaign objectives. We then identify and prioritize marketing activities, such as search marketing, PR, database marketing, and events (to name a few), which can attract qualified visitors to the website, capture leads, and deliver on marketing and business goals.

Activities chosen should tie directly back to marketing goals along the funnel, from generating awareness at the top to supporting targeting sales efforts and strengthening loyalty at the bottom.

4. Turn Strategy into Action – the 12-Month Activity Plan.

At this stage, campaign plans are mapped out in a budget-based, 12-Month Activity Plan. This plan outlines specific activities by quarter, and is intended to be a living document. Often activity plans are modified on a quarterly basis based on new opportunities, changing business needs, and the outcome of activities. This is also the time to identify internal staff and external resources needed to execute the activity plan and measure results, and the responsibilities of each.

Let’s get started — together.

This collaborative, 4-step process leads to the smartest, fastest, and most cost-effective ways to achieve marketing and business goals, and reduces costly inefficiencies down the road. Ready to get started?

• Contact TREW Marketing to request a consultation and quote
• Learn more about our marketing planning services

Looking for additional insight? Check out:

Inbound marketing strategies are fueling growth in conversions and leads for the savvy companies who adopt and implement them as part of their integrated marketing plan. However, there are holdouts in B2B marketing who still aren’t convinced that inbound marketing tactics are worth the effort. So let’s look at how two key inbound marketing activities, content and SEO, make a big impact in driving marketing results.

First let’s define inbound marketing. Wikipedia defines it as the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easily found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.

1. Content — it’s probably our favorite word at TREW marketing and with good reason. Having quality content on your website is a staple for inbound marketing. And it’s not always for selling or marketing, it’s also for educating and/or establishing thought leadership.

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, use it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper.  Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts.

2. Search — Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content. As our culture becomes increasingly digital, search is now one of the largest channels for demand generation. Ranking in top positions on generic search terms has a large impact on your brand and gains in customer mind-share vs. your competitors. How do content and search impact each other and how can you leverage them to drive your results?

Let’s consider blogging. One of the main benefits of business blogging is the rewards it delivers to SEO.  Having your SEO and blogging strategy aligned is key to ensuring that you are optimizing blog content with keywords for which your business is seeking to rank high in natural search. If you are pushing to rank for a specific keyword, your blogging strategy should support that. For example, let’s say you are a software developer; by creating content about best practices for software development, the best tools to use when developing software, etc. and working in using specific keywords about your software, you will optimize that blog post and earn higher SEO results.

3. Measurement. Now that you’ve created content, and are optimizing SEO to your advantage, how do you measure results? The most effective way to make sure you’re getting the most from your inbound marketing efforts is to regularly analyze data across all of your marketing channels so you can see how your integrated campaigns perform, and make adjustments to your marketing programs on an ongoing basis. Key inbound marketing metrics include web visits, time on site, leads, and sales conversions.

Need help building your inbound marketing strategy, or managing your integrated marketing efforts? Contact TREW Marketing or explore our services, including:

• Marketing audit
• Virtual marketing manager
• Search engine marketing
• Content development

Don’t be a hold-out — join the inbound marketing revolution. You’ll not only see an increase in awareness and conversions, but you’ll build a cohesive customer experience that will lead to long-term loyalty, and bottom-line results.

We all would like to formulaically know how many visitors to our website it will take to convert the right number of leads to generate that incremental increase in revenue. Up to now, that has been difficult, but with HubSpot’s automated and highly analytical marketing tools, it gets a lot easier.

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of HubSpot, shared his process for calculating just this, using an example revenue goal of $500,000. He worked with his sales team to set up a Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA) – agreeing that marketing would do their part in the form of visitors and leads to support this sales goal.

Now the calculating begins. First, he determines the average revenue per customer (ASP). In Mike’s example, it was $10,000/customer. From here, he then calculated his average lead-to-customer conversion rate – 2% in this example. Using this rate, he then divided his $500K revenue goal by the $10,000 ASP, and got the answer of 50 customers. Just 50 customers – that’s all he needs. That should be SO doable. But wait…how do we get those customers? That’s where marketing comes in.

So how many leads does Mike and his team need to get 50 customers? To arrive at this, he divided 50 customers by .02 (lead-to-customer conversion rate), to get the result of 2500 leads. So Mike needs 2500 leads in order to generate $500,000 in incremental new revenue.

But wait – where do we get those leads? More calculating…Mike then looked at his visitor to lead conversion rate, which in his example was 3%. So dividing 2500 leads by .03, he knows he needs over 83,000 visitors to the website. Not so easy, eh? Well, at least he knows what is expected of his team to achieve the SLA they made with sales.

This was the tip of the iceberg at this session – Mike went on to calculate conversion rates of different types of content (e.g., those who download white papers have a lower conversion rate than those who download a demo or request a consultation). Based on what actions a lead takes on the website, he then, in his HubSpot lead tools, can define which lead is a “marketing qualified lead” (MQL) versus a lead that needs more nurturing in the marketing funnel. Those leads designated MQL automatically get flagged in the CRM system so sales is alerted and can efficiently focus on those higher quality leads.

Related blog posts:

Need Leads? Tips for a Winning Landing Page

HubSpot Certifies TREW Marketing for Integrated Marketing Platform