Last weekend, The Austin American-Statesman featured TREW Marketing in the “Statesman Startup Spotlight.” In a Q&A-style, the article highlights TREW’s startup roots, planted by co-founders and long time friends and colleagues, Wendy Covey and Rebecca Geier. The two shared many discussions over lunchtime workouts and combined their individual passions to form the agency uniquely focused in B2B science, engineering, and IT industries.

The Statesman Startup Spotlight shows that in a crowded marketplace of marketing and advertising agencies, TREW distinguishes itself from competitors by staying true to our niche and using smart, collaborative business tactics. For instance, TREW organizes into small teams to meet clients’ marketing needs, where one team may be executing an entire Web redesign for a customer in Germany, another is leading a product press tour in New England, and a third in Silicon Valley for a trade show – leading event PR, social media, and developing new business for the company. In these ways, TREW has been able to grow in our industry and maintain close relationships with our customers, many of whom have been with TREW since our founding.

TREW has also been named a BtoB Top Agency in 2012 in the small agency category. 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. We were included in the Top Agency Special Report for achievements in the following marketing programs:

• Product launch success with 125% more media coverage than any launch in the client’s history
• Search advertising program with an 82% increase in AdWord click-through-rates and a 60% decrease in pay-per-click spending
• Product launch with media coverage in top trade magazines Test & Measurement World, Design News, ECN Magazine, Design World, and Engineering TV of Dynacar, the world’s first fully validated vehicle model simulator by Wineman Technology and Tecnalia Research
• Web Redesign for DISTek Integration which received a 37% YOY Web traffic increase, 68% increase of time spent on site by visitors, and 92% increase of organic search traffic
• Consistent visual and textual branding for communications and 12-month marketing plan for DISTek Integration

• 34% YOY revenue growth from 2010 to 2011
• 179% increase in site web traffic to trewmarketing.com
• Launched an award-winning e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers, that resulted in a 600% increase in web traffic for TREW
• Online and print coverage in the Wall Street Journal for being a finalist in the publication’s “Small Business, Big Innovation” national competition

Completing Q1 of 2012, TREW is off to an impressive start to the year. In addition to these features, TREW has increased first quarter revenue earnings by 145% from 2011, and also was recently covered by The Austin Business Journal for a marketing partnership with Kline Technical Consulting.

To read the full article on TREW’s Startup Spotlight from Austin American-Statesman, click here.

Q4 Technical Trade Shows & Conferences:

• Aero Engineering 2011, Nov. 9-10
• Automotive Testing Expo 2011, Oct. 25-27
• IP Expo 2011, Oct. 19-20
• International Time & Synchronisation in Telecoms (ITSF) 2011, Nov. 1-3
• Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) Minneapolis 2011, Nov. 1-3
• NI Technical Symposium (NITS) 2011, Oct. 18-Dec. 8
• Productronica 2011, Nov. 15-18

Face-to-face marketing such as trade shows and seminars are a powerful way to personify your brand, capture leads, and grow customer excitement and loyalty. With that said, they can be expensive, so it is critical to have a clear strategy and well-defined objectives to measure your return on investment.

Before anything else, set your trade show objectives prior to creating marketing activities. Example objectives to discuss with your team are:

• Number, profile of leads
• Speaking engagements
• Press meetings
• Key prospect/customer meetings
• Competitive analysis
• Partner co-marketing

In April, Wineman Technology celebrated its 20^th anniversary. Anniversaries are a great time to showcase what your company has been through and what you’ve accomplished over time. Often, employees have their hands in the day-to-day work of a company, but marketers have the time to interview and dig deep into the history of the company. After conversations with the engineers at Wineman, we uncovered extremely newsworthy details about the company’s history. For example:

• Over the course of 20 years, Wineman boasts a 31% average yearly increase in revenue
• Wineman is home to 11 engineers with LabVIEW development certifications
• The company furthers hands-on learning by donating to institutions like Michigan Technological University, where students are building a mobile laboratory

To promote Wineman through their 20^th anniversary, we created and wired a news release, sent customized news pitches to targeted journalists, and published specific web content that drove traffic to Wineman’s web site.

Creating a News Release

News releases get a company’s information to its audiences clearly and provide credibility. Well-written news releases are often covered by multiple outlets and online news sites, ultimately increasing a company’s web presence. As a result of our Wineman’s news release, their 20^th anniversary was covered across the globe in outlets like CNBC, Yahoo! News, and Reuters.

Sending Customized Pitches to Targeted Journalists

TREW uses email news pitches to reach targeted journalists. We spend the time and effort to create customized press lists for each of our clients to ensure that we’re starting conversations with the most relevant journalists for their products and services.

For Wineman, we sought local coverage to celebrate the company’s accomplishments. We reached out to journalists in the mid-Michigan area, as well as large, industry-wide publications, and received coverage in a wide range of outlets (including the Facebook page of a local, influential business alliance, below). Because the local publications are more interested in a human interest story and how the company has impacted the local economy, and the industry publications are interested in how the company’s technology has developed and what solutions they have created over time, we created two different news releases – one for each audience. It is important to customize news for your audience and send journalists something that is valuable and interesting to their unique audience.

Creating a CTA with Specific Web Content

A developed news release that is sent to targeted journalists also needs to have a next step for readers, a call-to-action (CTA). In Wineman’s case, we created an interactive timeline on Wineman’s site, where readers could go to see images and details about Wineman’s history. The URL for the timeline was included in the wired news release and in the outreach to journalists. Each date and on the timeline provided images and details about Wineman’s history, along with links to more information on other parts of their site.

Happy 20^th Anniversary, Wineman!

Since the founding of TREW Marketing, our focus has been on serving engineering and scientific organizations with smart, collaborative, and measured marketing services. While serving this uniquely defined niche, we offer a broad array of marketing services.

#1 – Exceeding expectations: To start, how about some data?

43% 3.9x 156%

Q: What do 43%, 3.9x and 156% all have in common?

A: They are all results that exceeded expectations for our clients in 2010:

• 43% = Open rate for trade show followup compared to industry standard of 15-18%

Alfamation's email marketing response rate was 2.6 times greater than industry average.

The Alfa team taking care of customers and visitors to the booth during NIWeek 2010.

And no matter the project, our customers want to see results up and to the right. In 2010, we did just that:

• Exceeding expectations on individual activities, which led to…
• Customers growing their business with TREW, which led to…
• TREW growing as a team and company

• 3.9x = How many dollars over goal quoted for back-to-school campaign targeting control engineering professors as result of specialized microsite and database marketing efforts

• 156% = Growth in web traffic to Wineman Technologies’ website following our work on the company’s website redesign and search-engine-marketing campaign. In addition to quantitative traffic growth, we heard about a recent success story that speaks to the quality of traffic from this web and search marketing investment:

“One of our recent web leads went from new prospect to booking a PO for $250k within 3 weeks! Thanks TREW Marketing for driving qualified visitors to our website through search marketing.” – Darryn La Zar, VP of Sales and Marketing, Wineman Technologies

#2 – Customers growing with TREW

It is a TREWly awesome achievement when customers invite you back, and while we are still young, we are proud that many have asked us to continue working with them on new projects. Here are a few examples:

• One of our first customers – TAMEST – hired TREW in 2008 to lead the marketing launch of The Next Frontier K-12 STEM Education Report. We have continued to partner with them on their growing marketing efforts, including development of the organization’s first annual report, leading a critical technology platform selection process for TAMEST’s central database platform, and recruiting the organization’s Communications Director. We are currently providing strategic PR and messaging counsel for the upcoming 2011 Annual Conference.

“TREW Marketing quickly became part of our team and energized the project with their ideas and enthusiasm. The PR results, direct marketing efforts and website surpassed our expectations!” — Beth Henderson, TAMEST Executive Director

• Following a website redesign and ongoing search engine marketing management and execution for Wineman Technologies, the TREW crew is now working with the leadership team on future marketing strategy, including investment prioritization and detailed activity planning across several key industries and utilizing multiple communications channels.

Other customers we’ve grown our collaboration with include Alfamation, Hogg Foundation, UT Cockrell School of Engineering, Cyth Systems, and PVI Systems.

#3 – TREW Growth

With strong results on individual projects leading to continued work from existing, as well as new customers, it is exciting to report TREW business grew 126% YOY in 2010. Along with this growth, and a newly redesigned website with double the content and case studies, we’ve seen 30% growth in traffic to trewmarketing.com just in the last quarter of 2010 over the previous quarter.

With growth in business and high expectations from our customers, we are excited to announce the hiring of our first employee, Denise Goluboff, and first intern, Arpita Somani in 2010. We also continue to strengthen and expand the selective, highly talented partner specialists we work with, including in the areas of search engine marketing with Charlie Brown, content development with Morgan Norris, and technical product marketing with Irene Bearly to name a few. And we could not end our annual blog post without a TREWLY HUGE thank you to Jackie Dobson, operations aficionado!

TREW Resolutions for 2011

We look forward to serving our customers with continued success by:

1. being smart and collaborative as well as goals-, timeline-, and budget-oriented

2. asking tough questions that lead to the the most efficient and effective approach, maximizing limited resources and offering the greatest ROI for each project we lead

3. staying on top of the newest marketing trends and applying best practices to all projects we take on

We will keep it coming in 2011, and keep looking up and to the right.

In their annual feature, Inc. Magazine once again named Wineman Technology among the top 50 fastest growing engineering companies in the United States.  As one of TREW Marketing’s longest-standing clients, Wineman Technology has grown significantly in revenue and industry awareness during the past three years.

TREW Marketing provides multi-faceted services for Wineman Technology, including web design and management, search engine marketing, content development, and strategic marketing planning.

We congratulate the Wineman team on their outstanding long-term growth, and look forward to contributing to their success in 2011.

More Information…

• Case Study:  TREW Marketing’s work for Wineman Technology
• About Wineman Technology
• About Inc. Magazine’s 2010 Fastest Growing company list

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…