Here in Minnesota, there are many wonders.  Being a California transplant, one of the wonders for me is seeing people jogging in 20 below weather on icy, slick sidewalks.  I can’t help but shudder and think, “How do they not slip and break a leg?” I got my answer this morning, when I heard a piece on the radio about a specialized niche of walking and running shoes that are specially designed to allow you to traverse icy surfaces. 

Made with carbon rubber, Gore-Tex, and other materials used for winter clothing, these shoes feature special soles that allow you to run safely across rough terrain or ice.  The man on the radio said “You could run across a hockey rink in these shoes!”  Amazing!  (Now I know how those runners do it, but you still won’t see me out there scampering across the tundra!)

The point is, these runners are prepared for all seasons and are able to exercise and be at their physical best year round, even in the harshest winter.  All it takes is a highly specialized product to make it possible.   Your industrial website is the specialized online presence for your niche product or service, whether it’s laser marking or waterproof fluorescent lighting.  It’s easy to ensure that your website is ready to perform at its best for you year round.  Here are a few strategies to help your website run on ice and outperform other websites that just don’t have the right shoes.

Contact, Contact, Contact!

Each step you take is one step forward.  The same applies to visitors making contact with you.  Every contact has potential.  Make sure that you provide easy and accessible ways for a potential customer to contact you.

• Strong calls to action-Every page of your website is a potential landing page, and web users searching for your services using search engines will rarely reach your site via the homepage.  A strong call to action offers visitors the chance to make contact, no matter where they are in the site. It’s important to make it easy for a visitor to find a link to your contact form, your RFQ page, and your phone number on every page.
• Multiple lead generation options- Every industrial site should have a contact us form, a request for quote form (if you offer quotes), an easy way to make a purchase in as few steps as possible if you offer online purchases, and a toll free number.  Also, offering a regular newsletter with specials encourages users to maintain contact with your company.  Make sure the sign up form for the newsletter is prominent and short.
• Keep your forms simple-No one wants to spend half of their morning filling out a form with too many fields.  Web users want things to happen fast.  The only information you should require on your contact us form is the name, email address, and possibly a phone number.  The RFQ form should only ask for information that is absolutely critical to being able to make contact with the person who filled out the form.  You can gather the details of the RFQ directly from them when you call or email them.

Diverse Content and Professional Copywriting

You might be the best technician in your field but you may not have the writing skills to talk about your products and services in a way that is appropriate for the web and that will drive visitors to make contact with you.  That’s okay!  There are professional industrial copywriters who can help you.  Their job is to create web copy that is appropriate for your visitors’ interest and reading levels and that encourages search engines to find and rank your pages well.  A professional industrial copywriter understands your niche and can help your website put its best foot forward.

There are also types of content that should appear on an industrial website that are geared specifically for industrial and commercial clientele that you can help generate, if you do have the ability to write well. 

• Definitions or glossary page-Help your visitors understand your products and services better while incorporating important keywords.
• Resources-You can include spec sheets, white papers, case studies and more.  These show the range of your company’s abilities while offering great content for the search engines.
• News page-You can talk about the latest piece of machinery or process, changes in the company or any other important information.  Tie this into submitting press releases online with a link back to your site and you’ll be generating interest in your brand and services both onsite and offsite!  By archiving news releases on your website, you are ensuring that you have plenty of relevant content available for the search engines to offer potential customers.

Video Optimization for Industrial Websites

Take advantage of this multimedia opportunity to tell a story about your products or services and to engage and educate your customers.  Video optimization for industrial websites is a powerful method of increasing your brand recognition and reaching an audience you might not have with a website alone.  Read more about how industrial companies can benefit from video optimization!
 
Year-round runners stay focused and fit, and make sure to do what’s necessary to stay one step one ahead, even in the depths of winter. Their specialized footwear let’s them go where people like me and my summer sneakers can’t follow.  Make sure to take advantage of specialized optimization techniques when developing your industrial website and stay ahead of the pack!

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There have been some interesting discussions about how the readability level of your website can impact it’s effectiveness for both visitors and search engines.

On the usability side, it’s easy to see the impact. Having a readability level that is too high for your target audience limits their understanding of your products and services. They get frustrated and leave your site to find one that isn’t so confusing.

On the search engine side, the wrong readability level can cause trouble too. Visitors hitting your page and leaving quickly increases your bounce rates. When bounce rates are high, the search engines might decide that your web page isn’t very relevant for that keyword phrase and drop your ranking.

Additionally, comments in an article by The Search Agents suggest another impact. Readability levels are pretty easy to measure. Search engines could easily use that as one of the factors they consider when ranking pages.

Getting the right readability level can be tricky for industrial companies, especially those with complex products or a lot of technical language. This is why it’s so critical to really know your target audience – even down to knowing their reading level. Then you can tailor your site to visitor needs, keep them on your site longer, generate more leads, make more sales, and maybe even improve your search rankings.

Also, beware of using too much company jargon on your website. Jargon, although it makes perfect sense inside your company walls, confuses potential customers, and negatively impacts the readability of your site. Consider using professional copywriting when you want to clean up jargon.

If you want to find out how readable your website is, Ann Smarty has a great list of free tools to test readability levels. Test it out on your site and some sites that compete for the same keywords to see if you can see any correlation between readability and ranking.

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It’s becoming all about brand recognition. Customers want to know not only what they are buying, but who it’s coming from. Best Buy is known for their strong standing in the electronic and technological world. Reebok is widely affiliated with their NFL pro-shop line and running shoes. Prozac is generally believed to have elevated depression into an accepted medical diagnosis rather than being seen as an exaggerated or imagined illness. In many cases, the brand is key to customer conversion while service and quality are essential to customer loyalty.

Website development ensures your name is brought across the world. SEO brings your site recognition in the search engines. Now, you may wonder, where can you go from here? With paper endorsement programs getting too expensive in a tight economy, many businesses are looking for a new way to promote their company or product names. The best way to do this is through social media.

Setting up social media networks through Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or YouTube channels brings you to a more personal level with your customers. With everything being so technologically advanced, clients and customers are looking for that personal connection no matter how electronic it is. By creating forums, blogs, or article based media, your customers get to know the more personal side of your business.

Everyone knows what it’s like to call an 800 number and get an automated voice on the other end. It can be frustrating when your question does not match options 1, 2, or 3. By randomly pressing a series of numbers or repeatedly hitting the 0 button over and over, the automated voice will generally put you through to a live service representative. (Try it, it works!) This represents the frustration that many people have with professional companies who do nothing to reach out to their customers. Rather than providing your customers only with your automated, professional persona, it’s important to also provide them with the “live” version of you.

On a Twitter account, you can tweet fun and random facts regarding your services or provide helpful tips directed towards your industrial niche. On your Facebook page, you can provide status updates, pictures, and business information with a far more casual persona than you utilize on your website. This helps to tie in a variety of customers. With a YouTube channel, you can upload videos that highlight the machinery you use, products you manufacture or distribute, or services you provide in a fun or different way than you would otherwise. For example, Reebok created videos for their EasyTone shoe line with some pretty racy footage. However, it gets the point across in exactly the way they would want to. They target and appeal to women in a very obvious way.

Brand recognition is an important aspect of any company. By bringing yourself into the world and connecting with your clients/customers, you are ensuring your name is out there. This will help drive direct traffic to your site alongside your search engine traffic results. For more information on social media and how it can help your company, contact us!

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Since we discuss and dissect social media and its influence on the industrial marketplace, its fitting that we have our own Facebook page. Ecreativeworks and the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog can be found on Facebook.

Become a fan and you’ll receive daily updates about industrial marketing, invites to free webinars and great resources for making your website stand out.

We look forward to sharing our enthusiasm for the industrial marketplace, so check us out!!

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Dell is a brand that actively uses Twitter, and their numbers are showing a payoff. They have generated $6.5 million in revenue from Twitter. Dell has 1.5 million followers to their Twitter account @delloutlet

For perspective, Dell generated $60 billion in revenue last year, so $6.5 million is fraction of their total paycheck, but Twitter is driving revenue nonetheless. I think the money earned is promising, as well as the other number in this news. 1.5 million followers is 1.5 million chances to generate traffic and brand awareness.

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As industrial ecommerce sites see more customers coming their way from the search engines, the need to have high quality, interactive images will increase. B2C sites are already using product zooms, multiple product views, interactive personalization, and other image techniques to increase time spent on site and online conversions.

Industrial customers are already using these features on B2C sites in their personal lives, and are starting to expect the same richness of experience when they are making purchasing decisions for their companies too. Even if you sell through a distributor base, more and more customers are starting their research online, and then contacting distributors once they have done some initial research.

Here are a few ways B2C sites are merchandising their products with images. What would your industrial customers find valuable for your products?

Alternate Product Views:
Shoes.com has multiple product views so shoppers can see the top, back, side, and front views. They even show the tread on the bottom of the shoe.

Image Zoom:
Nordstrom has an interactive zoom feature on their products, allowing customers to zoom in on the details they want to see.

Color Options:
Instead of merely showing a little color swatch and making customers guess what their pants looks like in another color, JC Penney shows full images of products in each color choice offered.

Personalization Views:
Custom Ink gives their customers the ability to create their own custom t-shirts and shows them what the shirts would look like.

Don’t forget to name images and use keyword rich alt attributes so the search engines know what your images are about. And, having great images does not replace having great copy on your site. You still need to explain product features and answer questions to convert those buyers.

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As industrial marketers, it is important to understand that many leads generated from your website will not “show up” in your analytics. The nature of large industrial purchases mean that calling a company directly rather than submitting a form is more comfortable. Few B2B websites and industrial websites generate actual sales online, instead, purchases are made over the phone and even after face-to-face meetings with the company.

The challenge that the purchase behavior in the industrial marketplace presents is the tracking of those web to phone leads. Web to phone leads are ones in which a website visitor views an industrial company’s website, develops an interest, and makes a call. For companies that put money and effort into online marketing, determining which phone calls were precipitated online is key. A simple way to find out the origin of the lead, is to ask. The rep that receives the phone call should simply ask, how the customer found your website. I would suggest being as natural as possible when asking how the caller found your phone number though, to avoid sounding like a survey. Bring the question up within a relevant conversation. Maybe even ask if they found the website helpful or what their impressions were.

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I’ll admit it, I’m an organization junkie. I have color coded spreadsheets for tracking client projects and a pile of folders in Outlook to neatly organize all my emails. And that’s why I’m so excited about the new Lists feature in Twitter.

Twitter Lists let you organize the people you follow into tidy little groups and reduce some of the noise that can make Twitter seem a bit overwhelming. Twitter Lists can be public or private depending on the settings you choose for your list. If you want to learn how to use Twitter Lists, Mashable has a great how-to article.

But how can an industrial or B2B company take advantage of Twitter Lists? Here are a few ideas:

Company or Organization Directories – You can create a List of the people in your company or a list of the different divisions for really large companies.

Industry Experts – Create a List of the most influential leaders in your industry and follow them to keep up with emerging technologies or processes.

News – You can make a List of the top news sources for your industry to keep up with industry trends and changes.

Brands – If you are a distributer of many brands, try making a List of all the different brands you carry to keep up with new products.

News Distribution – If you make it onto other people’s lists, it’s a great way for you to distribute your company news, whitepapers and articles too.

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Good morning! If you’re working on any email promotions or newsletters for your industrial website, here’s a quick list of Dont’s – so that your emails will be engaging, and never seem like spam.

Don’t:

• Use exclamation points excessively, they seem unnecessarily aggressive.
• Use long subjects. Keep your subjects short, which will help the user decide if the email is worth checking out. If it’s a long subject, users lose interest fast.
• Don’t overdose on words like “free” “special” or “limited offer”. These words are too commonly used, and will just be glossed over. Try shake things up, be original.

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With the onslaught of Bing ads on TV, radio and online, people seem to be drawn in by the novelty and shiny new features of Bing. But still Google holds on to its spot as number one search engine. But that does not mean Google is not taking note from what Bing brings to the table. A little dose of healthy competition has Google adding some features of its own. Today, Search Engine Land pointed out that Google has added a “page preview” option to its results. When you search in Bing, a small screen shot appears next to each entry in the results. It’s a nice little feature, reducing some of the click-through mystery when weeding through search results. Google’s page preview option is not automatic like Bing’s. Instead a user must click on the “show options” link under the search bar in order to pull up the search options available. Near the bottom of the list you will see “page preview”

Here’s a screen shot of what searching with this feature looks like in Google.

So whether you’re a Bing enthusiast or not, the introduction of Bing will be helpful for all search engine users because it will keep Google and the rest on their toes, adding new features and trying to outshine each other with the best search experience.

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