B2B Marketing and The Curse of Knowledge

While the title of this blog may sound like a bad B-movie, it’s really a call for B2B marketers to stop over-complicating their marketing.  The “Curse of Knowledge” comes from Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The book is a fascinating and practical look at effective communication strategies, namely how simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories can make your ideas “stick.”

The Curse of Knowledge theory states that once you know something, it’s extremely difficult to imagine not knowing it.  As a result, we become lousy communicators because we assume our audience also knows what we know.  Think about the conversations that happen every day around your office. I’m sure there are plenty of acronyms and other ‘inside baseball’ phrases that would be unintelligible to someone outside of your organization.

Overcoming The Curse of Knowledge gets more difficult, the more we know about the subject. Just talk to a lawyer to experience a prime example of a victim of The Curse.  There’s almost never a simple answer, and any answer you do receive is likely full of jargon.  Lawyers simply know too much to explain it in easy-to-understand terms.

A few months ago I ran into a friend and he asked what my company does. I told him “Informous leverages corporate collateral to generate online leads.”  It was a short, sweet description that I thought made me sound smart.  He looked at me like I had two heads. Read the rest of this entry »

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Digital Marketing: Packaging Your Company Online

Products with cool packaging get lots of buzz.  The same is true of companies.  Think about how Apple packages itself versus Dell.  Both sell computers and other accessories, but Apple does so in a way that makes you feel happy and proud to buy its products.   Having opened many Apple packages, my reaction is always ‘wow, these guys really thought through the entire user experience.’  It’s not just what Apple sells, it’s how they sell it.  Through innovative digital marketing, any organization, whether it sells injection molding machines or graphic design services, can make its customers feel the same way.

Our tips on what product packaging can teach you about marketing your business:

1. Don’t forget function.

The box: It doesn’t matter how much your packaging stands out on the shelf if your consumers can’t open it.

The business: Having a pretty website is useless if your visitors can’t navigate it. Think deeply about what you want your visitors to get out of your website, and then make it easy for them to do it.  This might mean providing your contact information on the home page, or more prominently displaying your products.  Either way, solid thinking on improving your user’s experience will help your visitors avoid the frustrating “I can’t get this toy open” feeling.  For more on this topic, check out our list of 5 ways your website could be bad for business.

2. Get found.

The box: Products often utilize larger boxes than necessary to help them stand out to shoppers on the shelf—for example, a deluxe pen in a big wood box. Packaging like this unfortunately results in waste, but does help the product stand out on the shelf

The business: Making your website a big player on the “search engine shelf” takes work, but it’s where your buyers are starting their research. Large, content rich websites do exceptionally well on search engines, but someone has to create that content. To make sure that your company is easily found online, check out our article on search engine optimization.

3. Have fun.

The box: The best packaging is functional, easy to use and fun to look at.  We like these bags in Fast Company’s roundup of cool packaging designs.

The business: Your company should have fun online. In the age of social media, your customers expect to be able to reach real people at your company.  Provide your online visitors and customers a way to experience your company culture and get to know some of your employees.  A simple way to accomplish this is to set up a page on your site with pictures of everybody.  Nothing goes further in beginning a relationship than placing a face with a name.  Whether it’s on your website or on social media, your brand should have fun.  Start today by tweeting us a funny joke—we’re @informous.

Is your company still ‘on the shelf’ when it comes to packaging itself online? Comment and let us know.

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Four Simple Ways to Rethink SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for any company with an online presence (which should be all of them!). Unfortunately, many B2B marketers are thinking too narrowly about SEO, focusing in on just a few keywords, often with little regard for how people actually search for their product or service. Businesses can reap larger rewards from search engine optimization with just a few critical strategy adjustments.

Below are the four SEO strategies we find companies miss the most:

1. Traffic is nice, but leads are better. Focus on keywords that will bring new business. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling extrusion systems or accounting services, traffic doesn’t matter as much as converting those visitors into customers. While ranking well on a highly trafficked keyword such as “packaging,” may bring you a lot of traffic, if you’re selling sealing machines, you’ll likely see a more specific query bringing you more qualified visitors.

2. Think long tail. Think about all the different search terms people might enter to find your product or service. Go beyond one or two phrase keywords. Go deeper. Your customers may search for a specific feature, they might use slightly different terminology, and they will most definitely misspell words. Make sure that the content on your website is both extensive and high quality, so that you seize every opportunity to capture and convert qualified search engine traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Is It Time for an Informous Health Check?

Many of you have asked us how you can get more out of your Informous Library.  We’ve heard you and are excited to announce the Informous Health Check.

During this interactive 15 minute phone call, we will:

1. Review your Informous Library to ensure we have your most up to date sales and marketing collateral.

2. Compare your results to other companies in your category.

3. Analyze your reports and data to gain new insights.

4. Review the leads you received and discuss the ones that got away.

5. Identify ways to increase your visibility and leads.

Recent Health Check participants discovered new techniques enabling them to become more effective online marketers and drive more sales leads.

So spend 15 minutes with us to see how your company stacks up and what you can do to leverage your collateral for greater marketing performance. Call Mike Cieslak at 410-402-1071 or email him at mike@informous.com to schedule your Informous Health Check.

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Plastics and Packaging Marketing – Focus on WIIFM: What’s In It For Me?

Companies selling $2 tubes of toothpaste or $20,000 packaging machines must focus marketing efforts on benefits, not features. Plastics News recently posted an article about this in March that’s had us cheering ever since. Marketing experts Mary Scheibel and Eric Schwartzman nailed a rampant problem for many B2B organizations.

Scheibel stated that companies “spend a lot of time telling me what you do, but you don’t spend very much time telling me what you can do for me. And in the end, what you can do for me, that’s really all I care about.”

Informous hosts and manages tens of thousands of pieces of marketing collateral from hundreds of packaging and plastics companies.  Based on what we’ve seen, below are three questions that your marketing team needs to answer before creating collateral:

1. Do you talk about what you do or do you talk about what value you provide? Listing features is great for SEO purposes, but will likely not resonate with prospects  unless they understand WIIFM – What’s In It For Me.  Show how features provide benefits.  If your products save time or money, stress that first, then back it up with features.

2. Do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? Your marketing collateral should clearly reflect what sets apart your company. Maybe it’s your excellent 24 hour service, maybe it’s your experienced engineers.  Whatever it is, highlight the VALUE of your differences and make sure that information is prominent in your marketing collateral.

3. Do you provide the right information at the right time? Not all prospects are immediately ready to buy.  Identify where they are in the purchase funnel and then provide the information necessary to move them further through the sales process.  For example, if pricing is unique to each solution you provide, don’t post it on your website or talk about it on the first cold call. Alternatively, if your pricing is a differentiator and a compelling aspect of your value proposition, by all means, promote it.  Measure when people turn away and when they tune in for more.  Then hone your marketing and sales processes to match.

How does your company ensure that you’re marketing based on benefits, not features? Share your story in the comments.

For Informous listed companies: Informous Sales Director Mike Cieslak is helping our listed companies maximize their marketing on Informous with free Informous Health Checks. Call Mike at 410-402-1071 or email him at mike@informous.com to schedule an Informous Health Check for your company. Not listed? Get listed.

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The Power of Active Communication

Most people write the way that they speak and that is almost never a good thing.  There is no reason to ever write “at the end of the day” or “the bottom line is.”  Those are meaningless phrases that only get in the way of the point.

B2B marketers have minimal time to grab a prospect’s attention.  Don’t waste it on throw-away phrases: get to the point. I’m going to do that right now by laying down my top three biggest writing pet peeves.

1: Do not use introductory prepositional phrases. These object modifiers only keep your reader from getting to your ideas.

Incorrect: At Informous, our goal is to provide B2B marketers the most effective digital solutions.

Correct: Informous provides the most effective digital solutions for B2B marketers.

Why would a writer start a sentence with ‘At Informous’?  The visitor is already on the Informous site.

2: Brevity. Use as few words as possible.  Shakespeare knew this and who questions The Bard?  In Hamlet, Polonius says ‘brevity is the soul of wit.’  Those words still ring true.

Verbose: I would like to tell you about my idea for Informous and how it will change B2B marketing.

Succinct: My idea for Informous will change B2B marketing.

3: Use active language. Passive language weakens your writing and makes your sentences longer (See point #2).  Focus your reader’s attention and increase your copy’s impact with active writing.

Passive: Informous offers unlimited content storage for all of its listing companies.

Active: Listing companies get unlimited storage on Informous.

Capturing your readers’ attention and delivering an active, succinct message should be the goal of all B2B marketers.  So many companies are trying to grab our attention that the few that get it will achieve much greater mindshare and ultimately, success.

Now that you know my writing pet peeves, what are yours?  Comment and let me know.

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Business to Business Marketing – Is It Time To Kill Direct Mail?

Hey B2B marketers, how do you feel when you get a piece of direct mail? Are you engaged in the message? Excited to receive it?  Do you think “where has this company been all my life,” or do you barely glance at it before it ends up in the recycle bin? Seriously, when was the last time direct mail compelled you to reach out to the company?  Before you spend one more dime on direct mail, you should put yourself in your recipient’s shoes.

Correctly managing a direct mail campaign is difficult, not to mention expensive.  You have to come up with a concept, work with an artist, produce the piece, and then mail it.  Then, 30 days later, you need to somehow be able to justify the expense to the boss through some kind of ROI analysis, and trash bins don’t provide analytics.

There are definitely some advantages to direct mail, namely:

1. Receipt assurance. There is a high level of confidence that the piece will actually be received by the intended target (though it may not be read!)
2. Personalization. PURL technology can personalize your message and also do a pretty good job of identifying whether that specific person responded to the piece.  Ironically, PURLs require a recipient to go to a website to get the information.
3. Highly Targeted. You can build/buy a mailing list of highly targeted prospects so that you know that your message isn’t being ‘wasted’ on non-prospects – the rifle vs. shotgun approach.

But there are also a number of downsides:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Growth is Good! Informous Raises Venture Capital

This past Friday we announced that we closed a round of venture financing.  We’re thrilled that our investors believe in the Informous vision and have provided us with necessary capital to continue our rapid growth.

What this means for Informous’ listed companies and site visitors is more features and enhancements to create better connections between buyers and sellers.  Visitors can more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for while solution providers have a dynamic way to present their offerings.  Combined, Informous offers the most powerful connection platform available for the packaging and plastics industries.

If your company offers products or services in the packaging or plastics industries, give us a call. We’d love to get you on the site and connect you with qualified buyers.

For more information, see our official press release or contact us at contact@informous.com.

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Interpack Planning: Integrate Online and Offline Marketing

Packaging companies from around the world will head to Germany in May for Interpack. While Informous focuses on online marketing, we recognize that traditional forms of marketing continue to be crucial. In fact, many of the individuals on our team have years of experience in the tradeshow industry.

It’s clear that marketing works best when online and offline are incorporated into a comprehensive strategy. Below are some tips on how to integrate your online and offline marketing, both before Interpack and year-round:

1. Put your collateral online. House your brochures, videos, and other marketing content online so that there’s no need to hand booth visitors bulky content that’s likely to end up in the hotel trash before their plane ride home.  Provide attendees access to online content through your corporate website, an Informous library, or a company Facebook page (or all three to super-charge your SEO efforts).  Doing so enables you to track your content through reports and analytics, keep it out of the trash, and save printing and shipping costs. Not to mention, you’ll save trees.

2. Optimize your collateral. Your online presence should be reflected on your offline materials. Include your LinkedIn profile, company Facebook page, and company Twitter handle on your business cards and white papers. You can even include a QR code that links to a custom site where people you talk to can easily access your entire online presence. This way, they have a quick way to connect with you after the show.

3. Follow the event on Twitter. According to our initial Twitter research, #interpack seems like the frontrunner for the hashtag on Twitter. In a prior post, we talked about how one ProMat 2011 attendee sought information about a booth through tweeting on the #promatshow hashtag. Monitoring the hashtag for the show will help you find out if people are seeking information about your company, and connect with other exhibitors and attendees through a virtual handshake.

4. Collect (and use) emails. If at all possible, collect emails from your booth visitors and other people that you meet.  Reach out after the show with an email campaign or just a simple and personalized “nice to meet you at Interpack” note. Of course when you do this, your email signature should include links to your Informous library, corporate website, and company social media properties.

5. Take the initiative to connect. If you had a good conversation with someone at Interpack, take the initiative to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter. It doesn’t matter whether or not this person is a prospect for your company right now—you may be able to help each other out down the road. Making an online connection keeps the conversation going even if you live far from each other.

How does your company plan to market itself surrounding Interpack, or other trade shows? Have any tips that we missed? Comment below, and join the conversation.

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Informous is Growing: Inside Sales Representatives Needed ASAP

Informous is growing fast, and once again, we’re hiring inside sales representatives. If you want to work in an awesome environment with a fun team, read on:

If this is the first time you’re hearing about Informous, some background:

Informous is a funded startup that enables industry buyers to research, compare and request information from multiple vendors in one place. It helps buyers find the solutions they need, and suppliers market the solutions they provide.

Informous aggregates white papers, brochures, videos, articles, webinars, and many other types of content from across the packaging and plastics industries. This content is optimized, categorized, and distributed on Informous, search engines, and social media sites so that it’s easily found by buyers during their research process.

Position Summary & Responsibilities:

The primary goal of the Inside Sales Rep is to request and receive permission to include a company’s content – videos, brochures, white papers, etc. – on the Informous website. While this is officially a ‘sales position,’ you are not traditionally selling. Your success rate in converting prospects to customers will be very high, for the following reasons:

• You will be given a very targeted list of thousands of companies, and specific contacts at those companies, who can provide a yes or no answer without going through a lengthy sales process.
• You will be asking these contacts for permission to include their content on the Informous site, and NOT for anything in exchange – i.e. No $ to use our service.
• You will be providing a ‘no brainer’ opportunity to marketers who are seeking more exposure for their products and services.
• Acquiring content is one of the most significant drivers of our company’s success, so you will receive access to and support from the entire organization, including the VP of Sales and CEO.

If you’re interested in achieving success every single day in a fast-paced, venture-backed startup environment, this is the position for you.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• 1-3 years sales experience required.
• Ability (experience preferred) to present a company’s services via phone.
• Knowledge of (or experience in) SEO is a big plus.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

How to Apply:

Please send a short note expressing your interest in the position, along with a resume to jen.spiegel@arcpointpartners.com.

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