From the Marketing Team Archives - Page 2 of 2

October 7, 2011 by Kendal White

Benefits of Using Online Video for Manufacturing

I joined the digital video revolution during its earlier days. When I started editing as a pastime during college I was fascinated with all things digital video and the breakthroughs that were being made. What your average teen can produce on his Macbook these days was industry-shattering at the time. It allowed your average Joe to pick up an affordable camera and connect that camera to a computer to capture, edit and produce video. It was a revolution in the way videos were produced and delivered. Everyone became a potential filmmaker.

Then in February of 2005 a new platform called Youtube came along that provided a way for the guy with the handycam and computer to distribute his content for free to anyone with an internet connection.

Today there are more options for producing video than would fit in a series of blog posts so I won’t delve into the production side of things, at least not yet. However I would like to briefly tell you why online video is a good thing for manufacturers and how manufacturing video can help drive the bottom line. [Read more…]

September 12, 2011 by Kendal White

Killer Sales Presentations – Not Death by PowerPoint

We’ve all been there…sitting through a horrendous sales presentation that’s bursting at the seams with bullet points, clip art, and horribly constructed graphs and charts that in no way conveys any understandable data. Then there is the presenter of said presentation who is pounding through slides, reading every bit of text on the screen aloud to you. Crash. Burn. Done – no way are you buying anything from this character. So why does 99% of Corporate America rely on these decks of doom to be the final step in the sales cycle?

Nancy Duarte, Principal and CEO Duarte Design, says it best in her book Slide:ology where she asks us to

“consider the disparity between the content, design, and production values of [your company’s] $100 million campaign, and the slide show residing on your lap top. Consider also that this slide show may be the last engagement you have with your customers before they make a purchase decision. From an experiential standpoint, few things could be more anticlimatic than a massive campaign followed by an unorganized, unmoving presentation that might not be relevant to what the audience needs from you or the company.”

We’ve placed a strict ban on terrible sales presentations here at UniTherm and in this post we will share a bit of advice to our fellow marketers (and sales professionals) in manufacturing.

Building the Deck

There are so many steps that go before this, but we don’t have time for that in one simple blog post, so I’ll assume you’ve already done the necessary footwork to start building your slides. Now, let me just say this. I am not a fan of PowerPoint, but that is only because I really love working with Keynote. That does not mean however that PowerPoint is in any way bad – it’s the people behind the software that create atrocities, not the software itself. In this post we’re not going to focus on software, we’re going to talk about content and presentation.

Take the Time. Do It Right.

Its so important to allow for an appropriate amount of time to plan, outline, and create your sales presentation. A great deck of 30 slides, well presented is going to take at least 40 hours of work to put together and rehearse. Get folks from marketing and sales together to tackle the task and always, always keep the audience (your potential customer) in the focus of what you’re doing.

Speaking of the Audience…

…they are the only reason you’re even working on the presentation in the first place. Their needs and objectives simply must be the number one driver behind every design and content decision you make. You need to know who your audience is, what their concerns and problems are, what actions you want them to take, and how they will best receive information from you.

Plan. Implement. Refine. Edit.

Here we are, finally ready to get down to business and start creating our sales deck. Every person has their own unique approach to creating, whether it starts with sketches, outlines, or both a key step in the process is planning. Don’t even open your presentation software until you have a very clear idea of what it is you need to convey to the audience and just how you’ll do that. (I’m an absolutely terrible sketch artist, but still rely heavily on “off-screen” planning to really delve into and properly layout the meat of a presentation).

When the time comes to construct your slides, resist the urge to fill them to the brim. Remember that a person has the job of presenting the material and the sales presentation slides only serve as a visual reinforcement of what the presenter is saying. Learn from the likes of Steve Jobs, Nancy Duarte, Marc Benioff, and Garr Reynolds and put only the visual cues aids your audience truly needs on the slides – leave the rest in the capable hands (or words rather) of the presenter.

check out an actual before and after on some of our slides from the 'archives' vs what we use today.

Do your data right and present it in a clean, simple, easy to absorb format. In the realm of presentations less is definitely more. Bar graphs don’t need gradients and drop shadows, pie charts don’t need to sit at an angle, and only one set of data should be displayed per chart or graphic element. You also don’t have to use charts and graphs at all, many times relevant graphics and icons do a better job of portraying your message than traditional methods.

Once you’ve completed your sales deck, go back and refine and edit the content to every extent possible. Carefully consider each slide, each statement, each word and if its value is worth the space it occupies on the page. The editing step (read: deleting unnecessary junk) is second only to identifying and defining your audience.

Death by PowerPoint

View more presentations from Alexei Kapterev

Alxei Kapterev is not associated with UniTherm Insulation Systems – we just happen to share the same ideas about presentations.

Do you find yourself preparing or giving sales presentations? What insights would you share with your peers in manufacturing?

Up next: Presentation mediums – choosing the best format for your particular audience. It’s not always deck and spiel.

September 2, 2011 by Kendal White

Do We [Manufacturers] Belong In Social Media?

I recently came across this article (are social media right for all manufacturers? maybe not) on AJ Sweatt’s blog. First of all – his blog is a fantastic resource for anyone (especially marketers) in manufacturing. I’ve just started to dive into the content there and have found several fantastic articles.

This article in particular takes a look at social media and the payoff for manufacturers. (It also refers to and briefly touches on another insightful article by Mike Collins – Industrial Marketing is Not Consumer Marketing, but that’s a discussion for another time). AJ breaks down 3 weaknesses of the use of social media to serve industrial and manufacturing buying cycles;

Serving Discovery
Serving Research Behaviors
Building/Sustaining Your Brand

AJ makes some valid points about adoption rates among our peers and the negative effect that has on social media results. (Most of us just won’t have hundreds or thousands of customers following us on Twitter and friending us on facebook). While everything he says is for the most part true right now industrial marketers shouldn’t be abandoning their social media efforts – but instead carefully considering their strategy and setting realistic goals and expectations.

Reading AJ’s words did make me stop and think about what we’re getting out of social media, particularly our time spent on twitter. We may not be hitting on everything AJ laid out, but here are some things we are getting out of it:

Building relationships with our peers– the number one, most important, key objective of spending our time on Twitter is to build relationships with our peers. They may or may not be our potential customers, right now that doesn’t really matter – because they serve a greater purpose. They are companies and individuals we learn from. They feed us important industry news, they advise us in decisions we make, they answer the questions we couldn’t even ask before. Our social network actually helps fill a knowledge gap that Mike Collins addresses, giving us the industry training and knowledge we probably didn’t receive in school or previous consumer-facing jobs.
Endorsements, referrals, evangelism – while it may be near impossible for any manufacturing or industrial organization to connect with thousands of their customers through social media right now it is becoming easier and easier. More and more members of the supply chain are getting in on twitter. Manufacturers, eps, distributors, OEMs and of coarse consumers are all out there, and every day they become more and more engaged, active, and aware of the relationships they can build through social media. The daunting task is finding and connecting with these key contacts.Those relationships we mentioned previously actually do most of the driving for us on this goal.
There is an overwhelmingly positive cycle of promoting (not self-promotion, but promoting others) in social media. Take for instance #FollowFridays (or #FF) a Twitter-wide Friday tradition of suggesting your favorite Twitter accounts to follow. And even #FBLT Facebook Like Tuesdays – a manufacturing-centric tradition of promoting each others’ Facebook pages every Tuesday.Every week we find ourselves forging relationships with relevant – potentially synergistic companies and individuals, generally thanks to the endorsement, evangelism, and promotion our network provides.
An opportunity to share our content – I know, I just said social media is not about self-promotion, that’s not what I’m talking about here. As any marketer involved in online, social, web2.0 etc marketing knows – when it comes to driving traffic to your website, creating inbound interest and generating organic leads – content is king. AJ mentions that a manufacturer’s website is the place where all the information industrial buyers need should live. The dilemma? Driving traffic to your site where all that hard-earned content lives.Social media is an appropriate place to share and even promote your own content – when done in the right way. We post several links back to our blog several times a week, we link to our own website on regular occasion, and don’t feel there’s a problem with that because we keep the content relevant to our audience and we don’t overwhelm followers with the density of shares. If we were to look at all of our tweets, only a small fraction (perhaps 1 in every 30 or so) tweets promotes our own content. Everything else is about our followers and the folks we follow.
There are also no secrets about the importance of social media in SEO. More and more search engines are indexing social content and weighting their algorithms towards social shares, visits from social networking sites, and authority of social profiles. Want to show up higher in Google? Social networking will help you work toward that goal.

So, do we [manufacturers] belong in social media? Our answer is an overwhelming yes. While the goal of any industrial or manufacturing organization is to drive sales, the way to get there is often a long and winding path – one that includes several strategies, methods, and sometimes the occasional hope and prayer. Involvement in social media will not drive an immediate increase in website visitors, brand recognition, and certainly not sales. It will however, if cared for properly, make a difference in all of these things over the long haul. We promise you’ll learn a thing or two along the way, forge some fantastic relationships, and feel more connected to your peers in manufacturing than ever before.

What’s your take on social media for manufacturers? Are you seeing the same benefits we do, or something different? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments. And check out AJ’s blog.

August 19, 2011 by Kendal White

5 Essential Tools We Can’t Live Without

This morning we’re sharing 5 tools the UniTherm marketing team just can’t live without. There’s more than what’s on this list, but we picked these because they are all free (or offer a really great free version). Try them all out and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Jing by TechSmith– a screen capture and screencast tool ideal for quick a quick grab and share of your desktop. We use Jing at least a hundred times a day. Need to explain to someone for the eighty billionth time how to do a mundane task on their computer? Just take a quick screencast with Jing and they’ll have a video tutorial to keep forever (they’ll probably still ask you again though). Jing sits on the edge of your screen for a quick grab when you are ready to use it. Select the portion of the screen you want to capture and if you want a video or image. Grab your capture and you’re ready to share, you can even do some call outs, arrows, and text boxes on images. Your sharing options are:
- Upload to screencast.com – my favorite, get a ton of free storage and Jing automatically places the link on your clipboard. Simply paste into an email, IM, Twitter, or anywhere else you want to share it.
- Upload to your FTP server – a great option for adding tutorials to your website or blog.
- Copy – places the image itself on your clipboard for a quick paste into email, a document, or anywhere else you like.
- Save to directory – pre-select a destination for all your Jing files on your desktop or local network (I like to send mine to Dropbox).
Dropbox– The absolute, hands down, best way to backup, store, share, your files and access them anywhere. I have Dropbox installed on all of my computers, on my phone, and I’ve pretty much converted the whole UniTherm clan over to it as well. Dropbox acts like any ‘ole folder on your computer, making it incredibly easy to use. It automatically syncs to a remote backup and to all of your other installations anytime you add, delete, or edit files. You can share folders with anyone in the world with a simple right-click.
Dropbox also has a very cool Gallery option – ideal for throwing together a quick portfolio or just sharing your photos in a simple, elegant way. You can check out a live gallery here
Toggl – You are probably just like us and you do a million things a day- probably for every single individual at your company (or at least every sales rep). With all the things we’re responsible for it became difficult to keep up with how long we’ve spent on each project and also how long to plan for upcoming projects to take. We decided tracking our time would be the easiest way to get this done. With Toggl it is so easy for us to track time spent on projects. The stop-watch style time tracker and simple interface make it a breeze to add this extra step to our day. Toggl is really designed for agencies and contractors who need to bill time, but we’ve adapted it for our use and actually our whole office uses it now. Its a great tool for management to keep a handle on where hours are being spent and also for individuals to see just how long it really takes to complete projects. Their reporting is pretty great too – we all use daily and weekly reports around here broken up by project and company.
JotForm – JotForm and I go way back. It is hands down the best web form builder out there. And you can do just about everything you need to with it for free. Unlike most “freemium” programs JotForm doesn’t clutter your form up with ads or their branding. In fact, unless you look at the source code, you’d never be able to spot one of their forms. We use Jot to create quick forms for anything from event registrations to quote requests. While we do use our CRM integrated web forms for most of those needs, uses for JotForm still pop up all the time. Check out the video below to see just how simple JotForm is to use.

Click for Demo Video

(and by the way, here’s the form we just created for the demo)
- Full Name*
  
  First Name
  Last Name
- Your E-mail*
- Leave a message
- Should be Empty:
What you don’t see in the video is that you can also set up automated emails for notifications, responses, select a thank you message or landing page, and you can even download the full source code of the form to do some custom tweaks and changes to it.
Synergy– I’m a Mac stuck in a PC world – and I think many of us are the same way. I’m lucky enough that everyone I work with understands that my Mac is a better tool for the job I do – unfortunately there are still certain things I just need a PC for. (For instance checking our website in Internet Explorer every time we make changes). I’ve found that running parrallels or VMWare just slows me down to the point that I want to rip my hair out. The best solution I’ve found for the problem is to run 2 machines. It seems archaic and wasteful to run 2 computers for one person, but it saves me my sanity. The problem with this approach? 2 keyboards. 2 mice. I stumbled across Synergy years ago at a former employer where I had the exact same issue of Mac and PC toggling – and I was thrilled! Synergy allows you to put your mouse and keyboard on your local network and then share them out to 2 or more computers. The machines can be running virtually any operating system and it works like a charm. So you can pack away your PC mouse and keyboard and run with just one set. The coolest thing Synergy has done since I started to use it is support clipboard functions across machines. You can’t even do that with Parrallels or VMWare – but Synergy allows you to cut and paste across 2 computers with ease.

Got your own favorite tools? Share them with us in the comments below.

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