Smart Marketing Blog

Highlights from Content Marketing Workshop for System Integrators

Last week TREW Marketing held a half-day Content Marketing for Engineers workshop as part of the CSIA Executive Conference in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. Presenters Wendy Covey, TREW CEO, and Jennifer Dawkins, TREW Account Director, took a hands-on approach to educate on content marketing industry trends backed by new research, discuss best practices for writing and promoting technical content, and guide attendees in creating their own content marketing plan.

6 Crucial Steps in Preparing for a Web Redesign

Google’s algorithms, people’s search behavior, technology and web trends change rapidly- is your website keeping up? Without making routine, data-driven-design changes, and fully redesigning your site every few years, it’s easy to get left behind. Since your website is a crucial, 24/7 representation of your business, you want to be sure it accurately portrays and efficiently serves your business day in and out. To do this, you need to start any web redesign process by firming up your marketing foundation. Doing so will give you a clear strategy moving into the redesign, guiding content, structural and design decisions.

New Ebook: Smart Messaging for Engineers

Differentiate Your B2B Company and Stand Out to Technical Buyers While marketing practices continually change and provide new ways to drive awareness and efficiency – from email marketing in the 90s to social media marketing today – people are still people. And if they don’t trust you, your company, or your spokespeople, or if they believe you say one thing but do another, no marketing program will change that. But, if you have great products or services, accurate, compelling messaging can help solidify and communicate your brand to your audience.

Growth-Driven Design vs. Traditional Web Design

A well-designed website is essential to online success. According to a recent HubSpot survey, 94% of respondents cited poor design as a reason they do not trust a website. On the flip side, an intuitive, well-designed website positively impacts how visitors view your company, it also improves lead conversion through easy-to-see calls to action driving conversions to your technical content. Before you decide how to redesign your website, let’s look at the current model of traditional website design and compare it to the new Growth-Driven Design approach. 

I Launched My Website, Now What?

Data-Driven Web Design and 7 Key Metrics You Should Track You’ve spent months redesigning your website and it’s finally live. While it may be tempting to just launch it and leave it on autopilot and return to your regular marketing routine, the real ROI comes from your ability to make your website work for you over the long term. If your website is the valuable, 24-hour-a-day employee in your marketing organization, you can’t just let it perform on autopilot.

3 Inbound Marketing Proof Points

You may be tired of hearing us preach the importance of inbound marketing when it comes to reaching B2B technical audiences. Or maybe you think developing content and maintaining a website is too much work. Whether you doubt the inbound marketing methodology or believe it's too time-consuming to implement, here are some data points that may serve as a catalyst to spark your interest in implementing an inbound marketing approach for your business. 

How-to Keep Your Gated Content Out of Search Engines

A few weeks ago, we covered whether or not to gate your high-value content, including what types of content you should be gating with a form. Gating a content resource involves setting up a landing page with a form that a contact must complete in order to access the resource. We’ve discussed the optimal number of form fields in the past (between 3 and 5 fields), along with the form fields engineers are most likely to complete according to research. Today, we’re going to talk about an oft-overlooked but critical step in publishing gated content: blocking robots from crawling and indexing that gated content piece.   

4 Tips for Achieving a Strong Market Positioning Statement

What is Market Positioning?

The Leadership Chemicals: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Some Don't

What makes some teams pull together, while others totally fall apart? According to Simon Sinek it all comes down to instinctive human behavior. As leaders, we can all learn from this to create environments that draw out the best in our teams.

Want to Market Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

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