Looking for additional insight? Check out our TREW Talks- SEO Slideshow

Unlocking the secret to keyword ranking success

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

Last month, we gave insight on how to hire a technical marketing manager who can propel your marketing efforts forward and add value to your organization. In Part 1, we focused on prioritizing candidates’ talent, culture fit, and experience, and in Part 2, we gave the practicals for actually hiring your technical marketing manager, based on proven experience.

If you’ve now hired your technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help them understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations! These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning and website plans, content marketing strategy, and awareness and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful technical marketing manager:

Technical Positioning, Brand, and Website Development

1. Create a Successful Marketing Plan

Having an effective marketing plan and following it will be critical to your success as a technical marketing manager. Without a plan, how do you know what you need to do, in priority order, to get there? In busy times, the tendency is to rush and complete any marketing tactic that looks promising at the moment, without taking into consideration your marketing strategy and goals. So, take the time to truly define your marketing goals and measureable objectives.

• Related Post: How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan that Drives Results
• For more about how to create your plan, read about 5 Critical Steps to Developing a Marketing Plan.

A well-defined marketing plan will set the course for your company’s marketing efforts.

2. Position and Brand Your Company Creatively and Carefully

Your brand is of utmost importance to your company, as it conveys who your company is and your unique value proposition. Positioning your brand well will be critical to the long-term success of the business. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding style guide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.

• Related Post: Understand the Components of Brand Messaging
• For more about positioning competitively, read about What Goes into the Decision to Market Against Your Competitors

3. Holistically Evaluate Your Website to Maximize Your Future Time and Spend

Your website will be at the core of your marketing efforts, so before you make any major changes to it, audit your web site so that you can prioritize how to go about making changes and additions to it in the future.

Evaluating your site holistically will help you create a better web experience for all visitors to your website no matter where they are in the buying cycle – those researching your business, learning more about your products and services, preparing to buy, or returning for another purchase.

• Related Post: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website
• For more detail on web systems, read about What to Ask Yourself Before You Buy a Web Content Management System

Content Marketing Strategy

4. Show Your Products or Services in Practice with Compelling Case Studies

Customer case studies are a great marketing and sales tool. By reading about how customers have benefitted from using your products and services, prospective clients know they are not the first to choose your company, and can hear from real customers to supplement what they’ve learned from reading your marketing brochure or website. To succeed as a technical marketer, you’ll need to know how to prioritize the most important applications for case studies, tell your customer’s story clearly, ask for permissions from the customer’s company and streamline and leverage your work.

• Related Post: 5 Tips for Developing Customer Case Studies
• For more, read about 8 Quick Tips to Create Great Case Studies

Learn all of the elements that make up a compelling case study.

5. Offer the Technical Data Your Customers Are Searching For

Because your company is trying to generate leads, create opportunities that engage customers, and ultimately close sales, it’s imperative that you offer the data, insight, and information that your prospects need and want. Offering quality content will cause your customers to see your company as an expert in the industry or technology area in which you work, and direct them to your products and services as solutions to their challenges. In addition to case studies, targeted presentations and white papers that cover relevant topics will build credibility, show your company’s experience, and convey a memorable message.

• Related Post: 4 Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations
• For more on white papers, read about 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

6. Engage with Your Prospects by Making an Investment in Video

Here’s a statistic that will make your head spin: according to Pingdom, a website monitoring firm, more than 800 million web visitors watch online videos per month. And, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine on the planet, just behind Google. Web visitors are drawn to video, so you should be creating videos as a technical marketing manager to add a dimension to the web that text and imagery alone cannot achieve.

• Related Post: Why You Need Video in Your B2B Marketing Mix
• For more about creating videos yourself, see DIY Marketing Videos on a Budget

7. Optimize your Content Marketing with Content Re-Use and SEO

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, amplify it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper with tags and meta data that search engines will see. Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts. And, search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content that others want to reference. Driving inbound marketing will help you widen the funnel of awareness, gain more leads, and convert leads to sales.

• Related Post: Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results
• For more about SEO, read about how Killer Keywords are the Secret to Search Engine Success

Loyalty and Awareness Campaigns

8. Increase Customer Engagement Regularly with E-Newsletters

Staying top-of-mind with prospects and customers is a challenge you’ll probably always face. E-newsletters are a great way to maintain a conversation with your target audience, promote valuable content, and help nurture your lead base to increase customer loyalty and move prospects closer to the sale. A corporate e-newsletter, done right, can be one of the most effective and strategic marketing activities a company undertakes. You need to understand all aspects of e-newsletters, from design to content to mailing lists, in order to create ones that build your brand and bring new leads to your company.

• Related Post: Nurture your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part I
• For more about e-newsletters, read about Nurture Your Leads: Harness the Power of E-Newsletters, Part 2

Use E-newsletter campaigns to stay top-of-mind with customers.

9. Get more Blog Traffic and Grow Your Potential Customer Base

Blogging is a great way to bring more visitors to your website, so you’ll want to constantly be seeking to get more blog traffic (and in turn, get more prospective customers to your site). It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience, but the payoff can be worth it in the long run. Maximize that investment by understanding the potential of your blog, getting discovered, converting readers into subscribers, and finding advocates for your blog.

• Related Post: 4 Ways to Get More Blog Traffic
• For more, read about how you can Improve the ROI of Your Blog

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

10. Grow Awareness and Traffic With Media Coverage

News coverage generates awareness about your company and its products and services, boosts organic search for your company, and drives traffic to your company web site. Quality news coverage starts with strong, longstanding relationships with journalists, so you’ll want to begin building those contacts. Overall, your interactions with the press should be productive if you’re willing to consistently contribute strong and relevant information that they can use to better inform their readers. They’ll come to appreciate your insight and value your relationship as an industry expert as much as you value their ability to widely publicize your company or product name.

• Related Post: 4 Steps to Building Meaningful Relationships with Journalists
• For about interacting with the media, read about Trade Show Media Relations Do’s and Don’ts

Want deeper insight?

Based on our decades of experience building hundreds of customized marketing programs targeted to engineers and scientists, we have written this guide to help you get started in your technical marketing career.

Download Smart Marketing for Engineers – an e-book that helps technical business leaders build and execute an efficient and effective marketing program where every dollar and every hour spent drives results.

If your target audience is in engineering or technology, they will often be very specific when conducting searches in Google. Unless your site content includes specific keyword phrases that your audience uses, you may be “invisible” to them.

You don’t have to guess when selecting keywords. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool will show you how people search for your products and services, and how much monthly search there is for each keyword. Here are some basic steps to follow when using the tool:

• Deselect “Broad” and select “Phrase” at the left of the page
• Tick the “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” box.
• Include 10-20 keywords in the “Word or phrase” box and press “Search”
• The Global Monthly Searches column shows the approximate number of Google searches on that exact phrase, either by itself or within a longer keyword

Let’s say your company offers storage tank testing services for the petroleum industry. Here are some of the different ways that searchers can look for these products and services:

What You Are

How do your target customers describe what your products are, or the nature of your services? “Tank Testing” has plenty of search, but it is too broad because it includes fish tanks, air tanks, scuba tanks, etc. It is much more effective to optimize your site on specific terms such as “Oil Tank Testing,” “Gas Tank Testing” and “Underground Storage Tank Testing.” Note that searchers also use common acronyms like “UST Testing.”

What You Do

How do your target customers describe what your products do, or what services you provide? Your company may provide leak detection services, but you need to be specific and optimize for terms like “UST Leak Detection” since you don’t need to attract search for roof or swimming pool leaks.

Who You Serve

How do your target customers describe themselves and their needs? Many searchers want to know that your company has experience serving their industry, and it is important to know how they self-identify. “Gas Station Inspection” is likely a relevant term, encompassing services like tank testing and leak detection.

Pain Points

How do your target customers describe the problems they are trying to solve? If searchers are dealing with tanks experiencing “Pressure Decay,” it is important that the site includes content describing solutions for this problem.

Purchase Intent

How do your target customers give clues that they intend to purchase? Searchers looking for “Underground Tank Testing” could be looking for a Wikipedia entry, but those searching for “UST Testing Companies” are much more likely to be future paying customers. For the services you provide, look for terms ending with service(s), solution(s), consultant(s), and consulting. If you are selling a product like software, look for terms ending in software, management, reporting, analysis, analytics, and metrics.

The Importance of an SEO Strategy

If you have a short list of keywords that you think are appropriate for your business, and the AdWords Keyword Tool shows that there is search volume for these terms, conduct some Google searches to see if your website shows up on the first page of Google. If not, waiting and hoping for the best won’t produce the results you desire. You need an SEO strategy to attract these terms, and TREW Marketing is here to help.

Read more about our SEO services.

Contact us to get started.

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.

Last week, the TREW Crew headed to Boston for a full-court press of training on HubSpot software and inbound marketing best practices. This follows over 50 hours of training by the team this past summer, culminating in TREW being named a HubSpot Certified Partner just two weeks ago. Here are our top takeaways from the week – look for lengthier posts to come diving into these and other topics from the conference.

1) 1+1=3

During Inbound 2012, HubSpot announced their latest 3.0 software release themed around cool new features combined together for a greater impact (or the more catchy articulation of 1+1=3).

Dharmesh Shah on stage at Inbound 2012 showing off the features of the 3.0 release

Of these new features, there are a few stand-outs that the Hubspot-Certified TREW Crew is excited to implement right away. (For illustrative purposes, we will discuss these features using a fictitious TREW prospect named Larry).

• Smart Calls-to-Action (CTAs) – Larry has already visited TREW Marketing and downloaded the Smart Marketing Guide for Engineers, so the next time Larry visits the site, he would see an offer for our white paper, Inbound Marketing: 5 Keys to Generating Leads on Your Website.
• Smart Forms – When Larry returns to the TREW site for more fantastic TREW downloads, we will remember his information and not ask for the same personal information again.
• Contacts timeline view – Not only can we learn about Larry from what he has shared with TREW, as well as by viewing his social media activity, the new HubSpot timeline view provides us with a visual story of the actions Larry has taken on the TREW site and lifecycle status.
• Social media management – HubSpot 3 makes social sharing easier, providing us with the ability to post to multiple accounts and platforms. It has built-in scheduling (and timing suggestions) so that we reach Larry when his is more likely to be plugged into his social accounts.

These are just a few of the many new cool features in Hubspot 3. For more about this new release, visit the Hubspot website.

2) Marketing Math – Calculating Visits to Leads to Sales

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 the revenue our business needs. Up to now, that has been difficult, but with HubSpot’s automated and highly analytical inbound marketing tools, it gets a lot easier.

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of HubSpot, shared his process for doing just this, using an example revenue goal, sales data, and analytics from his HubSpot marketing tools. By knowing his average revenue per customer, and historical data on his lead-to-customer and visitor-to-lead conversion rates from HubSpot, he gladly signed his marketing team up to do their part to support sales.

Look for another post to come that goes into much greater detail about this example, including formulas and real numbers. In the end, his marketing team needed tens of thousands of leads to generate less than one hundred more customers for sales – and the key to marketing doing this job is a continuous flow of new content, distributed across marketing channels. To read more about this and whet your appetite, check out our new Inbound Marketing white paper.

3) Content is Still King.

We’ve said it in blog posts, we’ve said it books, and we’ve said it in probably every client meeting over the last five years:

Content. Is. King.

According to everything we learned at Inbound 2012, content is still king. But, marketing best practices have to adapt, because as Gary Vaynerchuk said (with much more *colorful words), “As marketers, we take every good idea, every great new technology, practice, and tactic, and we ruin it. We use it and we squeeze the life out of it until no one likes it anymore.”

Drastic statement? Think about traditional mail. Surely our grandparents were excited to get mail. Are you excited? Probably not, because it’s full of junk and ads. Marketers ruined it. We use a spam blocker to filter our marketing emails and a DVR to skip commercials. Mass-produced, generic content has been squeezed pretty hard, but content is still important.

So how is content evolving? With context. Content is still king, but it needs to be in the right context for the audience. Marketers have to understand what their customers and potential customers want, what their interests are, and provide content that will appeal to those customers best in order to succeed.

4) Try again.

The slide above is from Rand Fishkin’s, CEO of SEO software company SEOmoz, keynote speech on SEO tactics. In this new age of inbound marketing, we feel a sense of duty to constantly pump out content and make it go “viral” – to reach new audiences by blogging and sharing via social media.

Rand’s example of his guide, “SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz” was a great case study of how he launched and re-launched this guide. On the first try, it did not generate much traffic nor did it capture the top spot on Google’s results page. He then revised and re-launched it two, three, and even four times to finally earn the top ranking spot on Google, which now effectively drives traffic back to his website.

The lesson here is that you can launch a revised white paper year over year at the same URL. With each new version, Google will see the new signals accruing at this URL and will increase its ranking in the search engine results. Also, don’t be afraid to blog about the updated version, and post it on social media multiple times. If your first attempt failed, no one will care if you revise and repost it…because no one saw it to begin with.

TREW to Help Science, Engineering Customers Drive More Leads; New, Free White Paper Explains Inbound Marketing

AUSTIN, Texas – August 23, 2012 – TREW Marketing today announced it is now certified in the HubSpot all-in-one inbound marketing software platform. With the HubSpot platform, TREW can help science, engineering, and technology companies further automate marketing plans to generate a consistent flow of qualified leads that fuel new sales opportunities and drive growth. To help clients and potential clients stay on the leading edge of marketing best practices, TREW also today released a free, downloadable white paper that discusses inbound marketing and shares five essentials of effective, lead-generating websites.

TREW’s new certification follows more than 50 hours of training and adds to the agency’s track record of creating smart, collaborative, and measured integrated marketing plans that directly tie to business and marketing goals.

“Our goal at TREW is to help scientists and engineers define their company’s unique, differentiated position, and then create and execute a smart, integrated marketing plan that establishes leadership and generates leads to drive sales,” said Rebecca Geier, Principal and co-founder of TREW Marketing. “Using HubSpot, we now have more intelligence about prospects and leads, increased efficiency in engaging and nurturing those leads, and access to more data to inform decisions and effectively allocate resources.”

HubSpot tools bring a proven record of client success. Typical HubSpot users see a growth in monthly unique visitors to their websites by up to 60 percent, an average increase in leads of 25 percent and an increase in sales of 50 percent or more because of their inbound marketing efforts.

“TREW Marketing has demonstrated their ability to grow their own traffic, leads and sales using the HubSpot software and inbound marketing methodology. As an engineer myself, I’m eager to see them apply their creativity and skill to helping their science and engineering clients accomplish the same goal,” said Peter Caputa IV, Channel Sales & Marketing Director at HubSpot.

Inbound Marketing Explained: Free, Downloadable White Paper

TREW Marketing recently released a white paper to educate small to mid-size companies that serve scientists, engineers, and technical professionals on the importance of inbound marketing.

The paper provides current data on the ROI of various marketing investments and best practices for web lead generation and nurturing through activities including SEO, blogging, and social media.

For more information about TREW Marketing, readers can download the white paper, visit http://trewmarketing.com/, or contact TREW directly at info@trewmarketing.com.

Click to tweet: New from @TREWMarketing: HubSpot Certifies TREW Marketing for Integrated Marketing Platform. http://ow.ly/d63rR

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a full-service marketing firm uniquely serving leading companies and organizations in the engineering and science markets. TREW Marketing uses decades of specialized technical marketing experience to create strategies and plans, and execute services for clients such as brand identity and design; positioning and messaging; market research; product launch planning; PR and social media; website strategy and design; and search marketing.

About HubSpot

HubSpot all-in-one marketing software helps more than 7,500 companies in 46 countries attract more visitors to their websites, convert more of those visitors to leads and drive customer growth. Website management, blogging, search engine optimization, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, landing pages, and social media marketing are among the 25+ integrated tools that make up this end-to-end marketing software. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular marketing analysis tool, MarketingGrader.com, which grades the marketing efforts of over 250,000 companies a month. In the last year, HubSpot has been named the second fastest growing software company by the Inc. 500, one of the 20 most promising companies in America by Forbes, and the eighth fastest growing technology company in the world by the Deloitte Fast 500. HubSpot, Inc. was founded in 2006 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find them at http://www.HubSpot.com. Find out if HubSpot software is right for your business by applying for a free inbound marketing assessment.

Trek Global Chooses Agency for Technical Focus and Breadth of Marketing, PR, Web Expertise

AUSTIN, Texas – June 11, 2012 – Trek Global today announced its selection of Austin-based TREW Marketing, a specialized science, engineering, and technology marketing firm, as its brand and marketing communications agency. The partnership includes a business re-naming project, corporate positioning and messaging, and a website redesign, as well as ongoing technical content development, search engine marketing, and public relations.

Trek Global delivers ERP solutions for mid-size distribution companies that need to order, shelve, assemble, and ship their products efficiently. The company’s open source approach to ERP offers customers a cost-effective, low risk solution that harnesses the benefits of top-tier ERP systems, like Oracle and SAP, without the typical restrictions and expenses. Trek Global’s growth in North America drove a desire for integrated marketing communications to match its level of expertise and high standards for quality.

“Trek Global was founded by leading developers of open-source ERP and they have a clear and differentiated position in the marketplace,” said Wendy Covey, Principal and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing. “From our early branding and messaging work to an integrated strategy that drives traffic, engagement, and conversion, we are excited to increase marketing ROI for Trek Global.”

The partnership entails marketing projects including:

• Corporate-level branding brain and messaging
• Marketing communications strategy and campaign-based activity plans
• Marketing content development – white papers, case studies
• Website redesign
• Public relations strategy and execution

“The TREW team is passionate about marketing to technical audiences. Their diverse marketing experiences and the synergy between their team and ours creates a high-performing and high-character partnership. We consider TREW to be an integral part of our success and team,” said Chuck Boecking, Director of Education and Marketing at Trek Global.

Click to tweet: New from @Trewmarketing: ERP Integrator Selects TREW Marketing for Brand and Marketing Communications http://ow.ly/bfwQo

About Trek Global

Trek Global delivers powerful ERP solutions for mid-size distribution companies that need to order, shelve, assemble, and ship their products efficiently. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and with staff in five countries, the Trek Global team of system integrators and developers has more than a century of combined experience in enterprise software architecture and implementation. Trek Global’s software, based on the open source ADempiere platform, offers the benefits of top-tier ERP systems like Oracle or SAP without the restrictions or cost. With a focus on product and system training through Guided Implementation, customer education is Trek Global’s passion.

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a full-service B2B marketing firm uniquely serving leading engineering and scientific companies that target technical markets. TREW uses decades of specialized experience to create custom marketing programs that help customers efficiently and effectively achieve their business and sales. TREW takes an integrated approach using a wide array of marketing services, including market research, brand identity, positioning and messaging, product launch planning, website strategy and design, search marketing and public relations.

Read additional coverage in Austin Business Journal here.

Landing pages, also called “lead capture pages,” are the gateway to your web conversion offers that create leads for your company. This is often the first page a web visitor sees when arriving to your site from a social media link, email promotion or paid search ad. At TREW, we are asked many questions around how to create a landing page that generates leads, thus the following post outlines some of our tips to guide you through the process of crafting an effective landing page.

When should I create a landing page?

Landing pages should be created to house high-value content for a targeted audience. Good examples of content that visitors are willing to give you their personal information for are:

• Technical white papers
• Webcasts/webinars
• Tutorials
• E-newsletters

The more valuable the content is perceived to be, the more personal information a web visitor is willing to give. For this reason, creating a compelling landing page is critical to generate leads.

What are the key ingredients to a great landing page?

With one piece of content to house, and one main call-to-action, “to download,” landing pages should be quick to develop. Avoid wasting time by creating a “kitchen sink” of call-to-actions on the landing page. Instead, follow this checklist of landing page content and wireframe example below:

• Lead capture form prominently placed above the page fold
• Page title and detailed sub-title highlighting  offers
• Brief 1-2 body paragraphs followed by bulleted reasons why the reader needs your content, and how they will benefit from it
• Company contact information
• Bonus points: embed a short video that further explains the content

Is less really more? What fields should be on the lead capture form?

Just like the page itself, lead capture forms need to be clear, simple, and concise. Studies have shown that companies with longer page descriptions and forms have a lower conversion rate than those with simple landing page descriptions and forms. By shortening the landing page text and form fields, one company saw their landing page conversion rate go from 32% to 53% (Hubspot, Webinar Redesign Strategy, 2010). If possible, develop the lead form with 4 fields:

• First and last name
• Email address
• Company name
• Open description box

My landing page is live, now what?

Consider your landing page as a living document. Allow it to run at least a month before making changes to it, while tracking visits and conversion rates. Based on its performance, you will need to decide how to make changes to improve the page.

Are lots of visitors landing and then not converting? This could mean that the page content needs tweaks to better explain your offering and compel the visitor to download, or it could mean your offer is not compelling enough for your target audience to leave their name. If the landing page seems to not be reaching its expected web traffic, try to increase reach with an email campaign, pay-per-click ads, or use as a next step after a trade show.

Overall, the purpose of landing pages is to help you convert a faceless web visitor into real sales opportunities for your business, and is an important component in your marketing strategy and website design.

For more advice on website design, see these related blog posts:

Microsites: Effective Marketing or Bad Idea?

Maximize your Online Impact with a Winning Web Design

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