Promoting industrial products has never been one of the more exciting activities in the marketing or advertising world. Characterized by technical journals, trade magazines, industry trade shows, and listings in directories like the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, industrial promotion is rarely an expertise of many advertising agencies. Since most industrial marketers also have very limited budgets and are typically more interested in generating leads than building brand name recognition, it necessarily follows that industrial promotion is different than many other forms of promotion.
For many of our clients, this meant that industry trade magazines and the Thomas Register were historically the major beneficiaries of their advertising budgets. In fact, for years, a number of our clients poured tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year into these magazines and directories.
Of course, search engines changed all of this. In what has to be one of the biggest fundamental changes in the history of industrial advertising, search engines started to phase out print directories as the most common resource for engineers, purchasing managers, and other industrial buyers looking to find suppliers. Recent studies by the Thomas Register and their newest leading competitor GlobalSpec confirm this.
So how does an industrial marketing professional take advantage of these dramatic changes within the market? For the most part, the principles of search engine marketing that apply to most websites also apply to industrial websites. Industrial marketers just have to be careful about how they interpret what they read in regards to online marketing as the vast majority of reports and studies in the search marketing industry are related to the B2C ecommerce segment of the market.
- Organic Optimization
Typically, optimizing your web site to rank in the organic (free) listings in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN will offer your company the greatest ROI on its advertising dollar. Of course, competition for "first page listings" is increasing every day and the time, knowledge and costs required to earn them has become more challenging.Essentially, optimizing your site requires good keyword rich content, a site structure that can be spidered by the search engines, and links from other respected sites, especially sites dealing with similar topics to yours. In many ways, a search engine friendly site is simply a well organized site with lots of good content that other sites want to link to.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
After organic optimization, another area that can have a great ROI for industrial marketers is PPC advertising. There is a reason that Google has been one of the best performing companies in the world over the past few years... their advertising model works. For nearly all of our industrial clients, PPC advertising returns a lower cost per lead than any other form of promotion employed aside from organic optimization.The key to utilizing PPC effectively is to generate a very detailed list of keywords to buy. For example, if you make plastic rods, make sure you also buy phrases like polyethylene rods, LDPE Rods, PVC Rods, polypropylene rods, and any other descriptive phrases that apply. Similarly, if you make packaging equipment, remember that people may also search for packaging machine(s), machinery, and specific equipment names like "form, fill, & seal machines."
Some advertisers have been hesitant to use PPC because of concerns over click fraud. However, there are simple ways to protect your campaign against this activity. Plus, the availability of powerful analytics programs that can quickly identify issues further help minimize click fraud and ensure that your ROI is maximized.
The three main PPC advertising programs are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search, and MSN adCenter. You may wish to experiment with other programs, but these three routinely drive the largest amount of qualified traffic to the sites we manage.
- Online Advertising and Public Relations
Advertising and PR on the web can serve some unique purposes for industrial marketers. First, while search engine marketing provides an excellent ROI, it is really designed to target people actively engaged in a search for your products or services. If you want to get your message out to a much broader audience, advertising on authority and media sites, sponsoring forums and blogs, and sending press releases out to relevant publications and websites can also be very effective.
Unfortunately, today the opportunities can be overwhelming. There are dozens of online industrial directories, industry specific web portals, online trade magazines, and countless forums and blogs. In fact, there are so many now that figuring out where to advertise can be very complex. This is especially true when one tries to measure the success of this activity while considering lead generation, brand development, and even how the ad or press release has affected its site's link popularity (a major factor in its ability to earn high organic rankings).
In the remainder of this article, I will review the major industrial search engines and directories to provide some of my personal experiences and opinions on how you can integrate them into your campaign. Admittedly, this review will not cover every directory as many new ones have evolved in the last two years and we simply don't have experience with them all.
Prior to advertising in any of these directories, I always recommend building or modifying your own website to make sure that it is optimized, search engine friendly and effectively converts visitors into leads or sales. As stated above, I would also recommend bidding on a targeted list of keyword phrases in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search, and MSN adCenter as these PPC programs typically generate more leads/sales at a much lower cost than advertising for our clients. Finally, make sure you put some web analytics in place to track all of your activity so you can see where you are getting your best ROI. Google Analytics is free and meets the needs of the vast majority of industrial marketers with whom we work.
Armed with a site that performs and plenty of data from your keyword research and PPC advertising programs, you can now turn your attention to advertising. Buying listings in these directories can generate qualified leads, provide contact names and numbers, increase brand recognition, and even benefit your organic optimization efforts.
Listed below are some of the major industrial search engines and directories that we have analyzed, tested, and/or currently use. It is important to note that our review comes from our perspective as SEO Consultants.
Industrial directories and search engines create a difficult situation for industrial marketers who want to run their own search engine marketing campaigns. On the one hand, we can buy listings in these directories to generate more exposure, more leads, and more incoming links to our client's site. On the other hand, some of the money we pay these publishers to be included in their directories and search engines goes to fund their own SEO and PPC efforts. Considering that for many search phrases, our clients' main competition in Google, Yahoo, and MSN for first page positioning is these directories, the problem is obvious. If a company is running its own SEO and PPC campaigns, then these directories exist as both competitors and potential partners.
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