WJI May 2019 Feature Sample

WIRE JOURNAL MAY 2019

®

INTERNATIONAL www.wirenet.org

OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE WIRE ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL

FEATURE

MARKETING: branding, social media & more Marketing has always been part of the DNA of business...for suppliers, but not necessarily for manufacturers, especially those that compete in niches with tight margins. This features looks at what some manufacturers—large and small—have done, and offers up some advice.

Marketing Perspective: Loos & Co. A medium-sized business with some 300 employees, Loos and Company manufactures a wide variety of wire, aircraft cable, and wire rope. Below, Robert Davis, vice president of sales and marketing, discusses his company’s marketing. marketing team member had the benefit of adding a digital WJI: When did your company begin a full-fledged effort marketer or media content producer. We used Google and to market on-line? Did you know what you wanted to do, Hubspot—and still do—to track activity and plan our SEO/ and you followed that script, or did your campaign change Content operation. It was important then, as it is now, to as you went along? set conversion goals and contact capture campaigns so that Davis: Loos & Company had a web presence from the you can add value to the sales activities. You can use email early days of the dot com revolution. The internet marketcampaigns, forms, on-line content and tracking software ing strategy was not fully developed until the mid 2000s, at to understand customers which time we decided better. Success comes to expand the reach and from leads and converrole of our web activsions, based on who ities beyond the interyou’re targeting and net catalog of the time how the web fits into period. By 2008/2009 your overall sales and when we launched a marketing strategy. complete redesign of our site, we had created a WJI: Is social media vision and a mission for part of your overour site, complete with all marketing efforts, social media and content and if so, how has that plans, analytics, SEO evolved? Does it eat up goals, etc. We certainly a lot of time? made many changes to Davis: Yes, absothat original script as lutely!

And like all we learned more about Loos & Co. Sales and Marketing Director Robert Davis. activities, it takes less what worked and what time than you think if didn’t in B2B wire rope you can plan and execute. Coordinating social media with marketing on-line. I would say the norm then and the norm your other marketing activities is quite important, so you now is much more change that you would think, making can’t just wing it. If you can lay out your required activities the need to track, test, and change to stay ahead of competiand plan the content, it’s not overwhelming, and content tion one of our top focuses. experts and processes exist that can help a lot as well. The evolution you spoke of has been mainly in the understandWJI: When you started out, how was this being done? ing of how the tool works and what you can use it for. Each Did you add people as the scope expanded? More imporplatform has its pluses and minuses, and aligning with tantly, how did you assess how successful these efforts those in the B2B Industrial space can be a challenge. At were? one time, most executives would ask you why you were Davis: We patched together a team of outside contrac“playing” around on Facebook or twitter. But today, most tors and inside talent that allowed us to keep content fresh companies understand that you need to communicate with and use the latest in digital marketing technology. We potential customers on many levels, and provide many didn’t necessarily add people just for web activities, but the touches before a sale can happen. Social is just one of those talent pool was rapidly changing in that candidates came that fits in with the overall digital and marketing strategy. with coding and social media experience. So adding a new 34 | WIRE JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL

A Loos & Co. social media posting at its website.

WJI: Wire and cable is seldom the leader in rushing into areas that have unknown paybacks? Is that still the case, to some degree, or are you comfortable in saying that it has proven to be worthwhile?

Davis: Sure, I can say that. As we’ve evolved in our use and understanding of social media and digital marketing, we’ve gotten better at tracking ROI and customer

WJI: Are you where you want to be now for marketing/ branding/social media? Do you have future directions laid out?

Davis: As a rule in marketing, you’re never there! We don’t have the luxury of being satisfied with our progress: there’s always more satisfaction to be reached for. There will always be a new technology or another market. While we have a great understanding of how to use it in our business, we’re always looking for new ways to engage with prospects and customers alike.

We have a plan for the future that is heavily based on digital marketing. I see this as being a larger and larger component of overall marketing spending going forward, and I feel most people agree. The trick is going to be finding the mix of platforms and engagement techniques that pays the biggest dividend, in an environment where technology has a tendency to disrupt everything you planned for very quickly.

WJI: What advice do you have for companies that have not made this a priority?

Davis: Sell now while you still have customers. 

Why LinkedIn remains B2B manufacturing’s ‘go to’ site for marketing Many options exist for marketing, but LinkedIn likes to point out that it remains the business card of choice for industry. Visit LinkedIn, and it will remind you that “People spend time on other networks, but they invest time on Linked In.” Per their most recent on-line stats, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn. Further, 43% of marketers say that they have sourced a customer from LinkedIn, and 92% of B2B marketers leverage Linkedin over all other social platforms.

LinkedIn is seen as an effective source for generating B2B leads by 79% of marketers, while 46% of social media traffic comes to your company site from LinkedIn. LinkedIn continues to be the largest professional network and provides B2B companies with an ideal marketing channel. It now has 590 million users with 260 million of them being active on a monthly basis. It performs 277% better than Facebook and Twitter when it comes to generating visitor-to-lead conversions; and 35.80% of social media B2B leads come from LinkedIn.

When it comes to direct traffic to your website, LinkedIn is easily the number one social network. In fact, LinkedIn users are four times more likely to visit your website than Facebook users. These numbers weren’t based on some small sample size, either: Ecosultancy reported this gap based on a two-year-long study where they analyzed 2 million monthly visits to 60 different corporate websites. LinkedIn accounted for nearly two thirds of all social network referrals to corporate homepages in this span, far more than any other social network: HubSpot looked at conversions across LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook for 5,000 businesses. They found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitorto-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, which was 277% higher than Twitter (0.69%) and Facebook (0.77%). That’s higher than social media’s average conversion rate of 0.98%.

In other words, many roads may leads to Rome, but all business roads (nearly) lead to LinkedIn.

MAY 2019 | 35

FEATURE

engagement that in the beginning eluded us. Now we can tie specific sales to web activity, so the payback is better known. As a touch point for our customers, it offers us a few more chances to get our message across to the targets we’re pursuing as well; as some that we don’t know about yet! If you put all these things together, the fuzzy math associated with digital marketing does pay off in the end.