Inbound marketing, at 61% of the cost of traditional outbound marketing has revolutionised the PR industry. The consumer electronics sector relies heavily on social media and content marketing to attract potential purchasers and drive up sales and technology PR firms have responded with the creation of more online content, managed digital campaigns and social media maintenance and monitoring. But what about B2B? Do you really need to produce endless tweets, graphics, videos and blog posts when you are marketing to engineering and electronics companies?
When your customers are ready to buy they will find you, according to DemandGen’s 2012 report, 81% start with a web search. Many industrial electronics, technology and engineering firms have responded to this trend for organic traffic via search engines by optimising their websites with the relevant keywords and search terms. Expert online copywriters can adjust the text on your website to increase ranking but as search engine algorithms change frequently, this text needs to be regularly revisited to ensure the best results. Technology PR firms can help with carefully crafted and search engine friendly online press releases, blog posts and news for the company website. But effective content for inbound marketing is much more than optimised blog posts.
B2B is a misleading term. Businesses are made up of people and people do business with people. To generate leads for an electronics firm or engineering business you need to attract engineering and electronics people. EE Times recently published a report with the headline that engineers do not use social media for work but when you read the report it becomes apparent that it is taken for granted that they do use blogs and forums and they do use other forms of social media, like twitter and Youtube outside of work You need to make yourself available, accessible, enticing. You do this with interesting, useful, relevant content that is shareable. The whitepaper is still the most important document when moving towards a close of sale but you need to attract enough attention to get your whitepaper in front of them first. Draw them in with a game or interesting image, a helpful video, a webinar, some generous tips and advice and you will earn their attention rather than have to pay for it and benefit from the extra visibility their interaction and engagement with you generates across the relevant social networks.
Inbound marketing shifts the cost from media buying to media creation and technology PR firms are seeing demand rise while traditional print and broadcasting advertising and media sales suffer. A good technology PR firm will offer a full service that includes digital marketing, social media and content creation.
