The hidden opportunity in your PDF downloads

If your company is like most these days, you have numerous PDFs on your Web site available for download. With this cost effective and user friendly tactic, many companies are missing the opportunity to let the PDF help close the sale.

PDF Newsletter (Toyota Material Handling)

Too often, the downloadable PDF is not professionally designed because you’re not investing in offset printing. Such treatment can lead to missed opportunities. When uploading documents in PDF format to your Web site, ask yourself, “What does my audience do with those documents, and are my PDFs doing their job?”

From investor relations to sales collateral, your PDF downloads provide a convenient means for potential buyers and investors to collect the information they seek.  But do those documents rise to the level of your corporate identity? Do they enhance your brand? Do they build your image? Do they sell?

When researching a vendor, product or service, buyers commonly collect downloaded PDFs and spit them out of the office printer for later analysis. Product information, whitepapers, spec sheets, company fact sheets, annual reports – they’re all being downloaded and printed as we speak. While offset printing volumes are being reduced, the office printer is alive and well.

So treat the office printer like another media channel. When your company’s material comes out looking superior to the others in the prospect’s collection, you’ve just jumped to the top of the stack.

Is your marketing plan ready for the upturn?

The industrial blogosphere was teeming with very cautious optimism about an economic turnaround somewhere on the distant horizon. An unexpected uptick in durable goods orders in February prompted some such blog entries, like this one posted by Jorina Fontelera, managing editor of ThomasNet, on TN’s Industrial Market Trends blog. The writer rightly cites far more negative indications, noting it’s way too early to get excited.

Whether or not we’ve hit bottom yet, good marketers are asking themselves two questions:

1. Has the recession changed your market and/or your competitors?

2. Will your company or brand be in a good marketing position prior to the rebound? (Is your marketing plan poised?)

If you can’t answer the first question in a half-second, chances are the answer to the second one is “no.”

Great brands strengthen their overall brand position by marketing specifically to the special needs created by the recession.  If your company keeps that mantra, your brand–even your corporate identity–stays present among its audience and fosters good will.

When it comes time for your audience to make buying decisions in the next economy, they will remember the brand who stuck with them when the times were tough.

B-to-B marketers still taking advantage of pre-Web 2.0 tactics

Social media, or ‘Web 2.0′ is not quickly catching on in practice. B-to-B marketers see those tactics as less measurable than more conventional digital lead generation, BtoB magazine reports. With all the talk about social media, however, there are still many small and not-so-small companies out there who still need to embrace the digital lead generation tactics that pre-date the Social Media rage.

read original story from BtoB | digg story

Email marketing has grown up as the novelty has worn off

Email is an excellent medium for the agent or dealer audience. They are willing 'brand participants.'

The blogger’s opinion in the shared post below is consistent with our own observations concerning the role of email marketing in today’s media mix. It is true that email has increasingly become an effective retention tool, while it has declined as an acquisition tool.

There are ways, however, to leverage email as a medium in your customer acquisition efforts. In particular, sponsored ads within existing email newsletters can bring relevant content to an audience already loyal to the sender, thereby providing reach to new potential  subscribers. Publishers who sell ad space in their email newsletters are on to this, and that can be a good alternative.

clipped from www.e-consultancy.com The use of email marketing to drive customer acquisition is in significant, and terminal, decline. email is not a customer acquisition tool. In fact it never has been, but in the early years of the media, the novelty of receiving email meant that acquisition and lead generation emails were opened and clicked on. Any email marketer who thinks that consumers expect and deserve regular, mass email marketing will find their reputation and results flowing rapidly down the toilet. Email marketing is a retention tool, and used cleverly it is the ‘killer app’. Cold emailing as a core business proposition just doesn’t work because the need to flog as much data as possible is totally contrary to email marketing’s core requirements – targeting, relevance and quality.

Corporate branding should improve the bottom line, not dent it

(By Michael Ervin, published in Orange County Business Journal)

Throughout the past decade, the focus on corporate branding has led to a heightened awareness of the critical role a branding campaign plays in the communications mix. We know that effective promotion of a brand helps customers, employees and shareholders better understand a company and its offerings. It enhances the confidence that stakeholders have in that business and its activities. It differentiates the company from its competition. And, we now see that all of these attributes can have a positive effect on a company’s fiscal health.

Unfortunately, the last decade also found those who believed that companies could “out brand” their competition simply by outspending them. Often, corporate branding campaigns offered high hopes at a hefty price. There were those who thought that the more money spent to “invent” a company’s brand, the more powerful it would become. But now, more than ever, we know that smart—not necessarily costly—branding is effective and essential. And smart branding is based on a company’s current, definable practices, activities, philosophies and personality.

A truly effective marketing communications program will uncover the strongest brand identity for a company when it is based on reality. By showcasing a company’s greatest strengths—hopefully those that also differentiate it in the marketplace—a company can build valuable credibility that resonates with its customers, employees and shareholders. Since a corporate brand is a reflection of what is true about a company, no amount of money thrown at “inventing” a brand will be successful—the company must walk the talk of the brand image it promotes. A well-researched, efficiently crafted, reality-based branding communications effort, therefore, need not be a multi-million-dollar proposition.

Not only is branding based on facts essential for enhancing a company’s goodwill, it has also become a necessary business practice to fortify balance sheets. Recent studies show that a brand’s power accounts for a whopping five percent of those things that contribute to whether the stock price will go up or down. When you consider the fact that a company’s “financial strength” factored in at only six percent—a mere percentage point difference—you can see how much power a brand wields.

Of course, stock price or shareholder confidence is one thing. A strong brand can also impact a company’s bottom line by affecting its ability to retain employees, attract customers and, ultimately, reduce costs by building momentum on its marketing dollars.

Gone are the days when branding efforts were optional. In today’s competitive marketplace, building corporate brand identity is critical to gaining ground on competitors. And while it shouldn’t place a heavy financial burden on a company, branding is simply something we can’t afford not to do.