Industry News & Trends

A new Internet study about industrial businesses has some valuable implications for marketing executives in all corporate sectors.

"Marketing Trends Survey," a study from GlobalSpec, indicates that 56% of industrial and manufacturing marketing and corporate managers plan to spend more on online marketing in 2006 than 2005. In fact, 35% intend to target upwards of 50% of their overall marketing budgets to online programs.

"Five years ago, suppliers and manufacturers still relied primarily on traditional marketing channels and were cutting back budgets to weather the recession," according to the report. "Today there is increased economic optimism and a greater focus on online marketing now that the technical audience has fully migrated to the Internet."

As the old adage says, you've got to spend money to make money. It's always a question of how much and where.

Manufacturers and other businesses should be very careful about how they spend the online marketing dollars. Here are 7 key points to consider followed by complimentary resources we've compiled in the past year:

• Think ROI
  It's not the end of the world if you can't conceive, track and measure ROI. If you're getting more website traffic through online marketing, you may be getting more leads and sales without being able to pinpoint what helped. But it's good to know so you can make effective decisions about keywords, landing pages, conversion strategies, etc. We've seen countless websites lack common business sense when it comes to the offer and tracking the origin of a lead.
• Keywords are everything
  If you go too broad, you may miss your visitor. If you're too specific, you may miss out on the traffic volume you need for success. Go for a variety that your website can support (i.e. number of pages, quality of content). Avoid the one-word terms as much as possible. You need to have a lot of elements in play to land those and to connect with a small percentage of visitors who really want your product or service.
• Check your source code
  Everything can make a difference. Sloppy source code (lack of consistency) can throw off the search engine spiders when they crawl your web site.
• Domain names
  Longevity in a domain name and website can help a lot, especially if you managed to get a keyword in the domain name.
• Check the competition
  What does the competition have over your website? They may have more pages indexed than your website, keywords in some page names (always a bonus if you don't go overboard), cleaner source code (simple is good), more keywords in higher places on the page, more keyword cross-linking between pages, etc.
• Stay on top of links
  It's quality and quantity, not just quantity that matters. Get good links from other websites related to what you sell. Links from industry news sites, specialty directories, blogs, online newsletters, e-zines and many other places can help.
• Page titles and META data
  Test out keywords in your page titles and META descriptions. Most websites either ignore these or stuff them with too many keywords.

Questions? Call us at 866-RANK-YOU (726-5968), or email us at info@fathomseo.com.