Smart Marketing Blog

Your Covid-19 B2B Marketing Pivot Plan

In the last month, we've seen marketing plans and budgets shift significantly due to the spread of Covid-19. Most notably affected are face-to-face trade shows, events, and sales meetings. Instead of packing your bag and getting on a plane or hitting the road to meet with prospects, customers, and colleagues, you're most likely holed up in your basement or guest room working from home and working across your team to figure out how to reprioritize you marketing activities and budget.

Get Me the $*&% Outta Here! 8 Tips for Working from Home Without Going Crazy

Hello my fellow remote workers! Whether on purpose or under duress, many of us find ourselves working from our homes during these unprecedented times. I’ve actually been at this for twelve years now, fifteen for my husband (and can you believe we’ve managed to share home office space together all this time and are still happily married???).

What is a Lead Conversion Funnel?

  To understand what a lead conversion funnel is, you should know what a regular ol’ funnel is. According to “The Google”… So for our purposes, a Lead Conversion Funnel at the most basic level is a visualization of how prospects or leads interact with your company from an unknown website visitor to a new, first-time customer. The only difference with a Lead Conversion Funnel and your run of the mill kitchen funnel is that 100% of the contents poured in do not come out as customers.  This is where the conversion portion comes into play. There are imaginary holes in your funnel where leads leak out for various reasons, including disqualification, lack of interest, unsubscribes etc. In order to predict this loss with a reasonable amount of certainty, you use conversion rates to calculate the various lead stages. Each company’s conversion rates will vary but typically are fairly consistent from industry to industry.

Leading During Uncertainty

Uncertainty. There is a lot of that going around these days, as the world reacts to the spread of COVID-19, or Coronavirus. As with other crises both local and global in scope, business leaders need to keep calm, stay informed, and react quickly when policies and plans are needed to protect their employees, customers, and business.  Uncertainty can also present golden opportunities to innovate and grow.

Social Media Template Design: The Importance of Visual Imagery

In the first post of our social media blog series, we discussed common questions we get about social media. Today, we'll discuss how important visual imagery is to a successful social media program. It's pretty common knowledge that social media posts with images or video generate more impressions and clicks than posts without imagery do. To maximize your social media efforts, it’s imperative that you find or create images for every post you share.

New Podcast Series Launched by TREW CEO

I’m excited to announce the launch of my podcast series Content Marketing, Engineered. In each episode I’ll bring in colleagues, industry friends, and TREW clients to share their experiences and wisdom marketing to technical audiences. My goal is to help you work smarter and produce better results with content marketing. 

10 Keys to Success as a Technical Marketing Manager

To be a successful technical marketing manager, you must understand how to apply marketing best practices in the context of a nuanced technical audience.  If you’ve hired a technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help your new staff member understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations! Here's a jumpstart to your job: research from hundreds of engineers that shows how they search for information and how they want to interact with marketing and sales. These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning, website plans, content marketing strategy, and awareness and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful marketing manager in a technical, B2B company:

3 Reasons Why A SMB Doesn't Need a Custom Website

As the inbound marketing account manager at TREW Marketing, I work with a lot of engineering companies to strategize, build and grow their new websites. Any time a company comes to TREW for a website redesign, we start with strategy to thoroughly outline who the site is targeted to, the content that will best suit those audiences, and the general hierarchy and design of a site. We also talk through the web platform a site will be built on and whether the site will be templated or custom. Clients don’t always have a content management system preference, but the custom vs. templated question usually elicits a couple common responses. Below, I’ll cover the top reasons why clients think they need custom sites- and why they probably don’t.

5 Tips for a Successful Product Launch

Did you know that only 25% of product launches are successful after launch? Generating brand awareness, justifying the budget, and establishing credibility are only a fraction of the challenges you will face during product launch. Understanding these challenges helps increase your chances for success.

Top 5 Questions We Hear About Social Media

Many B2B technical companies are lost when it comes to social media. While engineers understand how to use their personal social media accounts, they often don't know how to use social media to boost web visits and leads.