Yagotcha! Industrial Ideas

The world is gradually becoming an internet shopper. With every passing year, the percentage of people that buy or at least research products on-line is growing. I’ll bet that you do it and your customers do too. Internet shoppers are like children in a super market checkout line.  With all that candy and goodies marketing to them right at eye level, where do their hands go? Vendors pay good money for that 3-4ft zone shelf space. The same applies when internet shoppers view their search engine results. We all know where eye level is for them and it’s certainly not on page-2.

THE FACTS ARE IN THE TRACKS

Have your web master pull the files on your web traffic. In the listing of visitors, you’ll find footprints from the folks at Yahoo and a lot of others that you never heard of. Then you’ll find Google tracks. You can’t miss them. Google sits there like a signpost. Without maximizing those little Google visits, you could miss out on over half of your internet search hits. What if you lost half of you leads? Half of your phone calls? Half of your trade shows visitors?

Google has grown to a point where it dominates the search engine market. Good or evil, it is what it is. Your customers use it, so let it be the focus of getting more search result hits. So how do you get Google to recognize that YOU should be at the top of the search results and not your competitor?

CATCH THAT BUG

About ¼ of what you can do to get a better search result from a Google inquiry can be accomplished within your site code. There are many items from meta tags to proper titling and headings.

However, a whopping ¾ of what it takes to keep your page ranked well lies out in the world, off of your site. Sure, it takes having a good site and clean HTML code; but more importantly, it takes having the internet world trust you enough to link to it. There are many places to spread links and majority are free! Some of which I’ll comment on in up coming posts. A “www.yourcompanyname.com” link is great, but a “Your Name” or “Market Keyword or Phrase” that is a hyperlink to your site is even better. Search engines use their spider programs to constantly crawl the internet looking for meaningful content and reporting it back to their owners. Inbound links to your site create a network of threads for the Google spiders to crawl back to you. Even Miss Muffet wouldn’t run from these bugs.

ENTER THE WORLD OF SEO

Getting links is a great start, but using the internet to promote your presence into measurable lead generation and sales revenues is called Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the science of getting you noticed by the internet and its users. A dedicated SEO person will see where you are, know where your customers travel and weave a web between the two. If you’re sitting on page-3 or even the bottom of page-1, then chances are you’re not going to get the hit. That means your competitor will.

When the top 3 positions on a Google search yields more hits than the positions 4 to 200 combined, you can’t afford NOT to do a good job. So get our there and spread those links or find an SEO person that understands your industry. To paraphrase legendary NASCAR racer Ricky Bobby, “If you’re not in first place, you’re LAST.”

Internet Marketing crawler, Google, headings, inbound links, internet, lead generation internet sales, meta tags, miss muffet, search engine optimization, Search Results, SEO, spiders, titles, web site, web traffic, Yahoo

Thomas Edison was a great inventor and the father of the electric light bulb. In fact, the incandescent lamp used today is virtually unchanged from his original design.  His genius gave us a light source that opened up the 20^th century for our well-lit, modern caves. It’s been fun, but now it’s done.

In December of 2008, former president George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2008, (HR-6). In section 321, this definitive energy regulation declares that other than a few exceptions, the general purpose incandescent lamp is being extinguished. The phase-out begins in the next 3 years, with only tougher regulations foreseen in the future. The European Union begins in September of this year.  Oh, there are certainly light sources that will take its place. We have LEDs, O-LEDs, fluorescents, HIDs, cathodes, and induction lamps to name a few. Each of the replacement light sources has its own strong points. Some have a long life, some boast reduce heat or give more light per what. But can they duplicate what Mr. Edison and his tungsten wrapped threads accomplished in the late 1800s? The answer is NO. Here’s why.

Through the past, oh say 200 million years, life on planet earth has had the luxury of seeing with the complements of our sun. The sun produces generates a good mixture of colors that is delivered to us in what we know as ‘white light’. It establishes for all of us a common platform to see and agree on what is Red or what is Blue  and so forth (never mind the philosophical questions of the existence of either). This is because you don’t actually see an object, but only the light that is reflected from it. It absorbes some of it and reflects back the ‘color’.  Since we (as a species) grew up under the sun, all that we see under it is true color–or at least a consistant electromagnetic wavelength reflected from objects into our eyes.Yet when you bring the same object indoors under a non-incandescent light source, these items do not receive the 100% of colors that they receive outdoors. They only receive what we can technologically give them with our science. This property of a lamp is called the color rendering index or CRI. The sun has a CRI value of 100, of course.

Granted, our science will always get better and I have no doubt that there are future Edison’s that will make it so. Yet, right now we just don’t have the know-how. What Thomas Edison happened upon was a lamp that could be economically produced with low cost supplies that has a CRI of 100-or equal to the sun in the sky. All other lamps not based in that technology have CRI ratings below this. Some have a high 92, while others can be found in the low 70s. 

Still, the sad time has come for quantity to win out over the quality. Since we are all on this planet together, it’s time we took responsibility for our gluttonous energy ways. The problem with our lighting is that in most cases we just don’t get enough quality for what we have to pay for in energy. When gauging a lamp’s energy appeal, we use the term efficacy. Efficacy is the ratio between the total visible light and the total amount of input power it consumes. Here’s a chart that demonstrates where Edison’s lamp falls into the most common manufactured light sources:

You can see that short of an open flame, the incandescent lamp has the poorest efficacy in our lighting family. But there are other factors that make a lamp source acceptable for incandescent replacement. Here are a few: 

Color Temperature: This is the feeling of warm and cool that we get from a lamp source. It’s reflected in Kelvin degrees and opposite to what you’d think. A warm lamp actually carries a lower Kelvin temperature than a cooler lamp, which burn higher. Make sense? No? Try this then: a standard incandescent lamp burns at around 2800-3300 degrees Kelvin. While a cooler fluorescent tube burns at 4100-5500k. Daylight is at 6500k.

Disposal: Some lamps, such as HID or fluorescents have small amounts of mercury. We all know that mercury has a nasty little habit of finding its way into our food supply. Therefore, mercury=bad. No mercury=good. There are mandatory recycling initiatives for standard fluorescent tubes that keep the mercury out of our kids’ DNA. Yet, in recent times the lamp manufacturers and government authorities hatched an ingenious plan to lower the mercury content so that we could throw them away. This still means mercury is getting into our environment. Wouldn’t it make sense to quadruple the mercury content and make sure that everyone recycles? Show them: recycle anyway.

Price: Alternatives for the Edison lamp aren’t cheap. However, by choosing the right lamp, such as a good fluorescent or LED source, you can actually plot a Return of Investment (ROI) or even make money once it is paid off. This is easy to accomplish due to the very appetizing lamp lives that they have.

It’s no doubt that once we start to push the incandescent bulb out of distribution, the consumer will need a little more savvy in their lamp purchases. With proper understanding of the replacement technologies at our disposal, we can mimic the properties of the Edison lamp.  But as far as duplication, we’ll need to settle for around 80-90% for a while at least.

Thanks for reading.

John Maclay

Political Musings ASHRAE, Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, EPAct, fluorescent, green energy, green lighting, IES, illuminating engineering socioty, LED, light bulb, lighting

So what does a $700 billion bailout buy for you now days? Well…the 2008 bailout paid for some executive bonuses. It also ensured solvency for our nation’s top financial institutions, of which we’re still waiting on a return of the favor. But in typical Washington bureaucratic practice, it also included extras (or riders) on the bill where pork spending is distributed in a good-old-boy, come to the trough and get some mentality. Among some of the bacon that congress leveraged out of its citizens were tax breaks for manufacturers of “certain wooden arrows used by children”, cost recovery for race track owners and credits for rum imported from Puerto Rico. Yet, this time they seemed to have gotten something right.  Specific notation in the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008“, Public Law 110-343 of October, 2008 grants the spirit of EPAct life for yet another year.

In 2005, President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005 or EPAct. This simple gesture finally put our nation’s money where its mouth was when it came to green energy investment. It was a pioneering move by our federal government that encouraged citizens to take up the ‘green’ cause while keeping a little coin in their pockets. Some tax incentives were in the form of credits for qualifying commercial, government and private business. Scheduled for termination at the end of 2008, this 11^th hour rescue saved a bit of seldom seen, good legislation.

Renewed for another year, these popular tax incentives reward those of us that make the effort to invest in manufacturing and exploration of alternative energy sources and construction of energy efficient homes and business. The legislation continues a tax deduction of up to $1.80 per square foot for new or existing buildings constructed or renovated to save at least 50 percent on the energy costs on HVAC, water heating, or interior-lighting systems in buildings that meet the efficiency guidelines in ASHRAE 90.1-2001. Though voluntary, most states have adopted the standard as their mandatory building energy code. There are also partial deductions of $0.60 per square foot (psf) are available for improvements to one of the three systems — including lighting — that reduces HVAC, water heating or lighting energy use by 16.6 percent.

The list doesn’t end there. It covers a wide assortment of actions that encourage and reward satellite businesses that promote green energy such as alternative fuel transportation and security. 

So for all of you builders, manufacturers and green market niche operators reading this post, enjoy the lime light–as well as the cash. Your government loves you, at least for another year.

Here are a few links that will help answer any questions:

http://www.energy.gov/media/HR_1424.pdf

http://www.energy.gov/taxbreaks.htm

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_tax_credits

Public Law 110-343 - Oct. 3rd, 2008

Thanks for reading!

John Maclay

Political Musings 700 billion bailout, ASHRAE, Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, Energy Policy Act of 2005, EPAct, green energy, tax incentives

It’s a mad world out there. I’m sure that you would agree that through this recession, your sales department should be exhausting the obvious paths of least resistance to get customers into the buying process. But if it’s so obvious, why are the majority of businesses scratching their heads when it comes to the most obvious cache of most-likely buyers?

In their recent study “Routes to Revenue” the Palo Alto, CA.-based CMO Council cited that: “Despite a depressed global economy, a surprising 76 % of senior marketers believe they are not realizing the full revenue potential of their current customers. In addition, less than half said they have good insights into existing customer retention, profitability and lifetime value.”

Sponsored by Ricoh/IBM InfoPrint Solutions Company, the comprehensive report survived 650 international senior marketers during 2008. It revealed that initiating more relevant and personal forms of communications, as well as more targeted and timely action was among the top strategies for higher revenue and profitability for existing customers. Other strategies included pursuing under-penetrated market segments and finding ways to up-sell and cross-sell existing accounts.

The CMO Council study highlighted three key obstacles for not optimizing the full potential and long term value of existing customers:

• Lack of real-time data and analytics that captures insights from across all customer touch points.
• Information not only being selectively gathered, but often inaccurate or incomplete.
• Data being siloed and restricted in its availability and use across the organization.

“It is inexplicable that the vast majority of marketers are still struggling to source and extract meaningful insights from customer data at a behavioral, transactional and account value level,” said CMO Council Executive Director Donovan Neale-May. “Marketing must assert its role as the owner of both customer experience and information, and apply this to devising growth strategies that leverage better knowledge of customer opportunity and potential.”

When it comes to acquiring new business, the study showed that global marketers have a much broader and more comprehensive set of strategies. The top five include:

• Testing and launching new products aimed at specific market segments
• Establishing new partnerships and revenue-sharing agreements
• Stepping up demand generation and customer acquisition programs
• Expanding geographical presence and intensifying international focus
• Ramping up eCommerce and customer-direct communications

40 % of the surveyed companies stated that they were reducing head count, overhead and/or budgets to improve top-line and bottom line performance. 38% planned to automate complex and costly processes. 31% planned to outsource more services and 28% planned to reformulate products or minimizing packaging to contain cost.

Today’s marketers are seeking more efficiency and effectiveness. Almost 64% of CMO Council survey respondents said they were evaluating all areas of marketing spending to increase yield and accountability. Primary areas of focus included:

• Bringing more discipline and rigor to marketing budgeting and spend
• Leveraging existing resources within the organization to enhance customer communications
• Exploring new customized communications technologies
• Moving more marketing investments to Internet and mobile channels
• Improving behavioral targeting of advertising and online marketing campaigns
• Driving adoption and use of CRM and sales automation applications

“There’s a big shift to more individualized delivery of marketing messages,” noted Sandra Zoratti, VP of Strategic Business Development and Transformation for Ricoh/IBM InfoPrint, “The Routes to Revenue” findings clearly underscore the value of more personalized offers and interactions across all customer touch points, particularly regular monthly communications, such as statements and invoices.”

According to nearly 60 % of “Routes to Revenue” respondents, introducing better segmentation, profiling and targeting strategies topped the list of ways companies are trying to better engage core audiences. Other initiatives included:

• Adding or improving database marketing systems
• Acquiring new customer and market analytics capabilities
• Personalizing multi-channel communications and customer touch points
• Individualizing print, email, text messaging, call center or web interactions
• Building online customer communities and interactive channels
• Capturing more customer information via the web and at point-of-sale

More information on the Routes to Revenue study can be sourced from the CMO Council web site at http://www.cmocouncil.org/index.asp.

Marketing Topics budget cuts, CMO Council, recession marketing, Routes to Revenue

Soilent Green Marketing.

Want a new credit card? They’ll transfer your old debit.

How about a trip to Bermuda? 4 days and 3 nights paid for you just show up at the port.

Maybe a free estimate on life insurance? You’re getting old, you know. Gotta take care of your loved ones.

Don’t want any today? That’s ok, they’ll ask you again next month.

Per a recent article in Time Magazine, Americans are pushing direct mail campaigns into our landfills at an unprecedented rate. Here are the facts:

• 40 pounds: weight of junk mail an average American gets per year.
• 8 months: time wasted over an American’s lifetime sorting junk mail.
• 18 to 1: ratio of junk mail to personal letters we receive.
• 100 million: number of trees sacrificed to junk mail each year.
• 44%: Percentage of junk mail entering into landfills–unopened.
• 89%: Percentage of respondents of a national poll for a ‘DO-NOT-MAIL’ LIST (similar to the Do-Not-Call list that currently exists for telephone marketing).

This translates to nearly a  thousand pieces of post cards, letters, flats and catalogs per person. The super majority of which are unsolicited. If you’re a B2B business person responsible for vendor decisions, this amount may see small to you. Yet ask yourself, how many of these unsolicited interruptions of your mail sorting do you actually respond too?

20^th Century marketing was the hay day for unsolicited, “interruption” marketing tactics. Today, potential clients are savvier in discriminating the good content from the chaff. From being deluged with constant marketing from TV and radio ads, newspaper ads and mailers we can now detect marketing attempts in the smallest of places. My own family enjoys a game of pointing out marketing attempts in movies such as a well placed fast food chain sign, small Coke bottle on a table or a Verizon phone in an actor’s hand. My 8 year old daughter has acquired quite an eye for this. The fact is: we are a smarter species now and should be proud of it. Marketers must learn to respect this.

Yelling in the Roaring Crowd.

Today’s savvy B2B customers already know their market and the vendor players that populate it. Take for instance a small parts manufacturer. He knows where he’s going to get his product painted. Chances are, he’s already got a relationship with one now. When you approach him with a post card or an email, you are asking him to stop what he’s doing to listen to your song and dance. Your routine is well choreographed and you see no obstacles for bringing the viewer on board when they see and hear it. But in reality, you’re just a voice in the crowd looking to get your prospect’s attention. Even if you are the cat’s meow, solely relying on direct marketing may limit your chances to be heard in your market. This being said, how do you get attention then?

Responsibility in Marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still a fan of focused direct marketing campaigns. They are useful in allowing potential B2B clients to learn about your product or service. A focused direct mail piece can effectively augment other media such as email, web, etc. However, we as 21^st century marketers must use it responsibly. We are no longer mailers in a vacuum and must stop the attempt to fill the void with our words. When factoring diminishing global resources with the fact that recipients just don’t what the crap, a modern marketer must use responsibility, subtly and common sense.  

Become Social-able with Social Media

Modern customers expect more. Knowing this, how do you get the jump on your competition. Listen closely, as I am about to give you the secret to line-jumping in the modern marketing playground. Help them before they buy from you. It’s that simple.

Social Media has given B2B marketers the keys to the marketing kingdom. Being useful to your clients before the buying process paves the path for them to your doorstep. By using content based marketing on third party social media sites along with your own web, you will stand out from the crowed of self centered marketing campaigns that only want to talk about themselves. Here are some ideas: 

1. Use a blog on your website devoted to your archetypal customer and their problems.
2. Get a Facebook business page and springboard your message into that arena of users.
3. Use Twitter and Twitter groups to broadcast your message into today’s fastest growing social media.
4. LinkedIn is another business oriented networking group filled with business contacts.
5. Film a small but captivating video short about your company and push it viral on Youtube.
6. Upload company media to sites like Flickr and Slideshare for search engine indexing and customer crawls.
7. Start a list of email subscribers that can see your posts via blog and social media sites.
8. Ask questions and encourage your customers that already use your product to author content.
9. Send out regular press releases to show the world what you’re doing for them.
10.  Find a non-business related cause that you approve of and promote it. Hug a tree, save a child, eat Vegan or recycle and post it on your site.

But I’m Too Old For this Stuff!

Are you? I submit to you that you’re never too old. There’s nothing magical about it and no skills that you need that you don’t already have, (as to the technical requirements, there’s always a geek or two like me that could help you bring it to life.) You’ve been to cocktail parties, conventions and trade shows. You don’t go up to someone that you’ve never met before and spout off about you  and your company. The same goes for social media. People want answers to questions. You’re the vendor and you’re the salesperson. Get a username, sign up a blog, post an article and answer them. Fire up your brain and allow your content based marketing to make you the expert that you always wanted to be!

Marketing Topics 21st century marketing, Direct Mail, Green Marketing, Social Media

So I’ve gone and done it. Yagotcha’s blog is now up and running. I’ve spoken at great length with many of you about the need for reliable marketing and social media. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is and what better topic to discuss? Why, the value of marketing of course.

What is Marketing?

It’s common to think that marketing is a pen left behind after a sales call, magazine ad or spending a bundle to research why your customers like blue instead of red. Ok, that’s all part of marketing to the extent of saying that an elephant’s toe nail is elephant or a boat’s rudder is ship. To fully understand what marketing is and what it does for your brand presence, we need to take several steps backward from it.

For the purposes of definition let’s say that:

Marketing: (def.) the sum total of the message, strategy and supporting tactics that initializes and maintains a satisfying and valuable relationships between customer and supplier.

This all seem nebulous…Strategies? Tactics? Is this the Gulf War or Afghanistan? It might as well be, because there are competition-combatants out there that will not hesitate to seize your market territory and cut your company off from its life’s blood: your customer.

Strategy vs. Tactics.

A Strategy is immutable. It is the big picture look at what you want to accomplish with your mission as a company, country, religion or person. Simply put, your marketing strategy should be simple to state. It focuses your marketing efforts on what will aid your business plan. For example, if you’re an internet retailer a strategy would be to gain 25% repeat business. If you were a niche lighting manufacturer, a strategy would be to gain 5 new corporate house accounts per year.

A Tactic is fluid and will mold to the circumstance. It is the small picture approach to handle specific scenarios. It’s the focus on a few trees instead of the entire forest. An example of tactics that support the lighting manufacturer’s strategy would be to start a web blog devoted to the problems of a facility manager or press releases announcing a new assembly line dedicated to custom products for unique lighting fixtures. The internet retailer may offer a discount to repeat buyers or free shipping.

The knowledge of your marketing Strategy and the Tactics that support it are important to detail to market your company effectively. Yet, they do little good unless they are communicated to your customer. That’s where your Marketing Message comes in.

The Marketing Message.

Your marketing message is critical to all of your marketing efforts. If you have a great marketing message, combined with effective promotions, your sales worries will greatly subside. Once developed, your marketing message should be used in all areas of your company, (notice that I didn’t say ‘marketing’ here.) Any form of external communication should broadcast it. This includes faxes, telephone answering greetings-even the way you answer the phone. How your sales people are dressed, what they say, samples they leave behind, your literature, web site, tag line–all should reflect this message. Your prospect’s attention should be grabbed by your marketing message. It assures them that they’re problem is in good hands and they can trust you over your completion. After this, all that’s left is to plan out how to get it in front of them.

What’s In Your Marketing Plan?

A good company will have a business plan that focuses its mission in a trajectory that will attain success. It will detail how you will build products or provide services to your targeted customers.  The Marketing Plan, however, is the roadmap that allows you to formulate your brand and ensure that all aspects of your company reflect the business plan mission. It’s more than an ad in a trade journal or a fancy post card pumped out en mass. It is based on a clear identification of your marketing message and strategy. It details the tactics in a reasonable timetable on how you will succeed in your mission.

Without a plan there is not start, no finish and no checkpoints along the way that point you toward your destination. You wouldn’t just drive toward the setting sun to get to a convention in San Francisco or throw loose change in a bucket to pay for your child’s college education. I had a mentor once that spoke to me on a number of occasions about the necessity to this plan. It took me a while, but I eventually saw the light.

What’s Next?

I could write endlessly on all of these topics and more. But we both need to get back to work. In future blog posts, I will detail other aspects of marketing and ways that you can implement them into your daily business life. I truly look forward to this blog experience and encourage you to reply and comment with your experiences and opinions.

Good luck!

John Maclay

Marketing Topics industrial marketing, marketing plan, marketing strategy, marketing tactics, what is marketing