Social media is changing how we use the Web. It’s changing  the way we consume, search and share information, so much, that consumers are now turning to social media before company sites when researching information on a product. If you’re like many small businesses who have read all the hype around social media and registered for accounts, but now wondering, “what’s next?”…this post is for you.

Often times, small businesses turn to expensive software services and applications to help maintain their social networks. This can be very beneficial if social media is an integral part of your marketing mix; however, we’ve learned that most small businesses don’t need all the features many of these services offer. You’ll end up spending more time trying to set up the accounts, remembering passwords, and figuring out how to use it, versus the end goal, which is to connect with your audiences and share key messages.

To help simplify social media, here are few tools that we recommend you use to manage social media and balance it with the rest of your daily responsibilities.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management tool with an easy-to-scan dashboard of all your social media accounts. Instead of logging into each account separately, Hootsuite allows you to see them at once. At TREW, we use this service to schedule tweets and Facebook updates, and easily interact with our and our clients’ followers.

TREW uses this tool because: it allows you to schedule updates at your convenience. You can schedule tweets over the weekend, or while the key personnel are on vacation. In addition, it allows you to see new @mentions and direct messages in one interface, as well as, it has it’s own link shortening service, so the analytic reports are housed here too.

Case in point: At NIWeek 2011, TREW used Hootsuite to schedule social media updates for client, Wineman Technology. At the conference, Wineman and  Tecnalia Research launched Dynacar, a fully validated, real-time vehicle model simulator for developing and testing passenger and light commercial vehicles. Intermixed with PR efforts, trade show planning, and web preparation, social media tweets and Facebook updates were released throughout the day to NIWeek attendees and show followers online. While tweets were released, TREW was helping clients on the show floor, and Wineman was occupied giving demos, meeting with press, and attending client appointments.

The result: Wineman had a strong show floor as well as off show-floor presence with over 200% web visitor growth. The graphic below shows how strategic social media can help amplify your message, which in this case was a result of the Dynacar launch at NIWeek, with the help of HootSuite for organizing and planning our social media updates. 

Klout: Klout measures the influence based on a person’s/company’s ability to drive online action. With engineered algorithms, Klout analyzes your tweets, posts, Google+ updates and other activity to determine your “Klout score” from 1-100, based on the number of people you influence. The score fluctuates in real-time, so if you’re active one week and silent the next, your score will reflect that.

TREW uses this tool because: It helps to understand our return on investment with social media. At TREW, we don’t fixate on the numerical score, but rather the other analytics that surround it. It’s a useful tool for improving the focus of your social media strategy, by gaining valuable insights on whom to target, and how to spark conversation among influential people. Then we look at the results from Klout, which measures “influence,” meaning how many users engaged with your message. It can take many forms, such as a re-tweet, @mention, or a click – ie, actions of influence to measure. By monitoring your Klout score, you can better understand the percentage of effort each channel deserves based on your results and audience influence.

TwitterSearch: A hidden gem, TwitterSearch is much more powerful than most people know. Finding things in the Twitterverse can be overwhelming, which is why this search tool is invaluable, allowing you to cut through the clutter and focus on topics you’re interested in.

For instance you can find out what people are saying about your competitors by typing in “to:handlename” or “from:handlename”. It will give results of tweets that people are posting about the competitor or if you used the “from:”, it will provide tweets from the competitor.

If you want to see conversations about your business that may not be sent directly to you with an @mention, there’s a search query for that. For example, if TREW wants to run this search query, we could type in “Trewmarketing -to:Trewmarketing -from:Trewmarketing -@Trewmarketing.” This tells the search engine to only give results of tweets that talk about Trewmarketing, and not any tweets from TREW or directly to TREW. Many times, you’ll discover a few tweets that would otherwise not be found by your analytics.

TREW uses this tool because: it’s quick, efficient, and it provides results in real-time. With TwitterSearch, there’s no need to sign up for a new account on a third-party site, it’s already accessible on the Twitter account. It gives accurate feedback about most everything you can think of, and it’s a quick way to check if you’re social media analytics are accurate for Twitter. For niche industries, this search tool can be very useful to find subjects being discussed, influencers engaged in the discussion, and opinions surrounding these conversations.

All in all, there’s many tools and services available to help you manage social media. These are three that have worked for TREW and our clients, by helping us manage accounts on a daily basis, and analyze data in an efficient and effective way.

You can read more about the benefits of social media, and how to use it with these related blog posts:

Social Media: Real-World Examples that Dispel the Myths

Social Media: Define, Act, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Repeat

Social Ad Showdown: 5 Ways LinkedIn Takes Care of Business

“TREW’s smart, engineering-minded approach to redesigning our website and developing a comprehensive marketing plan has delivered outstanding results. Website traffic has increased three-fold in the first several months and the number of leads we are passing to sales has continued to increase.” – Dr. Fred Bloennigen, President, Bustec, Inc.

Founded in 1997, Bustec is a leading supplier of high-performance data acquisition and test products in power generation, aerospace and defense, and medical device industries. Test and design engineers at companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Siemens, and NASA rely on Bustec’s products and solutions for their proven accuracy, throughput, and density.

One of the first projects Bustec selected TREW Marketing to lead was a comprehensive redesign of their website. The goals were to create a clean, professional, modern design with improved navigation; update company and product content; create an easy-to-use CMS (content management system), making it easier to regularly update the site; and deliver a positive, effective brand experience.

Deliverables

• Web goals and strategy, including content navigation, product categorization, user experience, and a home page promotion management system
• Detailed web redesign plan including design, navigation, content management, and analytics
• Development of a flash-based tutorial that quickly and visually communicates the unique nature of Bustec’s product interchangeability between platforms

Results

• 300% increase in website traffic in first 6 months of launch
• Streamlined product pages with easy-to-use tab navigation for product overview, documentation, accessories, specifications, and related products
• Efficiency gains with custom Product Quickfind feature, allowing web visitors to quickly locate products by measurement type
• Flash-based video describing product interchangeability, giving the visitor a short (~1min), immediate understanding of product benefits
• Cleanly designed, compelling home page with industry-focused case study promotions, Product Quickfind, custom product promotions, and clear navigational paths
• Search functionality and optimization for external search rankings

Website before and after images

The five-word phrase has come up in marketing discussions in every company across America: “We should start a blog.”

Marketers smile. A new vehicle to reach our audience. Sounds great.

PR professionals cheer. A low-cost way to specifically explain our business! Let’s do it!

Executives and engineers cringe. Waste precious time on blog posts, only to get lost in the information overload that is the Internet? No, thank you.

The last thing that TREW Marketing will advocate for is wasted time, but, one of the first things that TREW Marketing will advocate for is a clearly communicated message to your target audience.

Creating Quality Content

Blogging allows for a streamlined platform where companies can talk to a targeted audience about industry challenges and trends in order to advocate for their company and products.

For example, we can use content that we have put together over time on the TREW Spotlight blog to show you best practices in print advertising, email marketing, style guides, pay-per-click advertising, and public relations. This content doesn’t talk directly about TREW products and services; instead, our blog provides best practices and talks about industry challenges, solutions and trends. A blog shouldn’t be a sales pitch, it should be a way to show your customers and prospective customers that you know what you’re talking about, that you understand the challenges and solutions of the industry, and that you provide measureable results.

Reaching Your Target Audience

Your blog should be hosted on your site as a culmination of your company’s content. The blog is a hub where other online outreach vehicles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) point, so that when someone engages with your tweet or Facebook update, they are directed to your blog, where they can find more information than what can be expressed in 140 characters, and can interact with the rest of your site, including your products, case studies, whitepapers, etc.

The TREW Spotlight blog.

A lesser-known fact about blogs is that you can use your blog to get your content directly to your audience through their email, like a basic e-Newsletter with a simple format, using a service like Feedburner. Feedburner is a free service that provides email subscriptions to your readers. Simply create a Feedburner account, and then follow the instructions to setup a “subscribe to posts via email” widget for your blog.

The Feedburner widget.

Readers who subscribe will now receive each new blog post that you publish via email, allowing them to engage with your company via their inbox, and giving them the opportunity with each new post/email to click through to your site. If you’re interested in Feedburner, you can read more about how to use the service.

“Our partnership with TREW Marketing resulted in clear, consistent company, product-level positioning and messaging with a well-organized strategic marketing plan. Their smart, collaborative approach, flexibility with our evolving team and strategy, and a commitment to truly understand our business model enabled them to define and deliver our unique value proposition in a highly competitive market.” – Jon Pafk, Sr. Director of Marketing

Founded in 2006, Starmount delivers software solutions that transform the retail environment to a more connected and engaging store experience. Their mobile selling, interactive kiosk, and digital signage software brings the richness of the web and the power of mobile into the store, where retailers can create more personalized, relevant, and dynamic interactions while shoppers can learn, discover, and buy anywhere in the store. Starmount’s customers include leading retailers such as Pep Boys, Urban Outfitters, and Home Depot.

Starmount selected TREW Marketing to develop the company and product-level positioning and messaging “brain”, followed by a 12-month integrated campaign-based marketing plan to establish awareness and preference of Starmount and its products and services.

Deliverables:

• Developed core elements of the “brain”, including:
  • A clearly defined mission and vision statement
  • Company positioning and quick pitch
  • Distinctive and intriguing tagline concepts
  • Product- and services-level positioning and messaging
• Custom, integrated, campaign-based 12-month marketing strategy and activity plan, including:
  • Prioritized trade shows, recommendations to extend “event shelf life” with pre/post-show promotion
  • Content development plan to generate qualified leads through compelling, targeted content
  • Direct marketing centered on launch of a quarterly e-newsletter
  • A multi-tiered PR approach to maximize resources and target top-tier relationships
  • Search engine marketing analysis and recommendations across multiple campaigns, including natural search and pay-per-click reporting metrics
  • Recommendations for co-marketing with Oracle Retail to increase leads and become an aligned partner on events and news opportunities

Results:

• Communications Brain used as messaging guide for primary company and product communication
• Consistency and efficiency gains by using Brain vs. reinventing messaging with each new activity
• Scalable and integrated mix of low- and high-cost media investments to generate demand
• Creation of the company mission and vision statements:

• • Mission: ”Starmount solutions bring the richness of the web and the power of mobile to create relevant, engaging store experiences.”
  • Vision: “To transform the in-store shopping experience to make stores relevant and more connected than ever before.”
  • Taglines: “We make shopping sense.” “Don’t just serve your customers. Engage them.”; “Create relevant shopping experiences. Anytime. Anywhere.”; “Software that makes shopping local, mobile, and shared.”

Here are examples of the Starmount “brain” brought to life:

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.

Dynamometers and servo-hydraulic test systems are no mystery to Wineman Technology, whose engineers are experts in test system design and development. When it came time to build a website, however, they knew that outside help was required and called upon TREW Marketing. more…

It looked easy.  I chose a few keywords, gave Google my credit card number, and BAM!  My website should be crawling with qualified prospects, right?  But instead my website bounce rate skyrocketed and I quickly spent my monthly marketing budget with nothing to show for it.

Sound familiar?  If so, it is time to better understand the 5 steps of building an outrageously successful paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.  But first, why should you invest in PPC instead of improving your natural search results?

Search engine optimization is a journey, and the destination can sometimes be far in the distance, especially for small start-ups.  While working to improve natural relevancy, PPC can be a good bridge marketing activity.

PPC is a highly targeted marketing activity with excellent accountability.  For example, you can purchase  ”long tail” terms, very specific to exactly who you would like to target.  You can measure exactly how many prospects saw and clicked through on your ad.  Then measure their behavior on your website.

Let’s Get Started!

1.  Keyword selection

You’ll likely invest a good deal of time determining which keywords to purchase.  I recommend selecting fairly specific keywords.  They may not be quite as well-trafficked as more general terms, but those seeking these keywords will be a more qualified audience, and your return-on-investment will be higher.

Give some thought to how your target audience seeks information.  Will they search by typing in their challenge/problem, or will they seek a solution?  Test keywords both ways and see which is more fruitful.

As you pull your preliminary list together, give thought to your budget.  You can quickly run up the tab by selecting very popular words, or by trying to be in the #1 spot.  We do not recommend these tactics.  Choose less crowded search terms, and embrace the bargain #2 or #3 position, knowing that you will be every bit as successful at #1, but pay much less for your results.

2.  Driver (Ad Text)

Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, each will need a catchy title and ad text that drives the reader to visit your site.  Focus on what you offer, and be specific.  Try to capture qualified leads, and steer away everyone else.  Otherwise you’ll pay for undesirable visitors to click and bounce away — not a good use of your marketing dollars.

Take some time to study other companies’ adwords.  You will quickly obtain ideas of the good, bad and ugly.  Here is a recent ad run by TREW Marketing:

On one hand, this ad is specific.  If you were reading and not a test and measurement company, or not interested in marketing, you would probably not click.  The ad could be improved by utilizing a more compelling offer, such as a white paper.

3.  Landing Page

I’ve clicked on your ad…where do you send me?  To your home page?  Or is there a more specific area of your site that provides targeted information?  The most important thing is to deliver on whatever offer you’ve promised.  If you have a general ad, sending someone to your home page is fine.  If your ad offers a white paper on the latest changes in industry test standards, make sure the visitor can easily find the white paper after they click .

Often our TREW clients will run ads specific to an industry or application, and then drive traffic to that specific landing page on their site.  This is very effective to retain visitors and compel them to learn more.

4.  Call to action (offer)

Use your landing page to continue a relationship with this new visitor.  What action would you like the visitor to take?  Subscribe to your newsletter?  Call your sales team?  Craft one or several calls to action, placed prominently on the landing page.  Set goals for conversion to next activity, and measure how well you are doing.  If this is an area of weakness, consider creating new offers, such webcasts or white papers.

5.  Next steps

After all the work that you’ve done, be sure you follow through.  If you’ve promised a sales person will call, be sure that information is passed to the sales team.  If you’ve offered a newsletter, be sure they are added to the list and you actually send something out.  And so on.  This is your opportunity to close the sale.

PPC campaigns do not run on autopilot.  We recommend measuring often, experimenting and tweaking your keywords, ad titles, ad copy, landing pages, and offers.  Other areas to test include frequency, languages, and 3rd party Google ad feeds.  It is a busy job managing Google adwords, but the payoff can be quite outstanding.

TREW Marketing has deep expertise in PPC, and offers monthly retainers to manage paid search campaigns.  Interested in learning more?  Contact us today at info@trewmarketing.com.

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.

Can your prospects find your website?  How does your site stack up against the competition?  TREW Marketing wondered this (and more) for our website, so we signed up for a free trial with HubSpot.  HubSpot uses complex algorithms to evaluate the strength of your website on several dimensions, including search engine data, website structure, traffic, and third-party links.

The evaluation was crazy easy to set up.  We received our results within minutes.  The report was organized, detailed, and color-coded with actionable recommendations for improvement.  

Not only is the report great evaluation tool, it also provides a primer for how to optimize your site. If you in the formation phase of your website, consider looking at criteria used in this grader to help you take the proper steps NOW to build a strong site for your organization.  If you are redesigning your website, this tool can provide actionable feedback to integrate into your overall plan.