New Website for Power Electronics Industry Launched
everything PE is a new website that has been launched to address the power electronics industry. Developed by the creators of everything RF, the new everything PE website sits within the network of publications such as the PCB Directory, the EMC Directory and GoPhotonics.
Developed to meet the growing demands of the power electronics industry, everything PE will aim to help solve the problems that engineers are facing, and will provide updates via the latest news, products, whitepapers and upcoming events in the industry. All content will be tagged with relevant keywords to make it easier and simpler to search on the website.
everything PE also features a parametric search tool, enabling engineers to find products from leading manufacturers in each category based on their requirements. Currently, the search tool features 15 categories, which allows users to see detailed product specifications, download datasheets, compare products and get pricing or request a quotation. The products are sorted by relevance and launch date allowing users to view the latest and the most up-to-date products that meet the requirements, and any inquiries generated via everything PE are directly routed to the sales contact at the relevant company and their distributors.
At Napier, we are always pleased when a new website is launched to address growth within the industry, and we look forward to seeing the content the new site will provide.
To find out more about the new everything PE site, please click here.
Global Industry Focus Magazine Announces First Issue
In May 2021, we reported on the launch of a new digital magazine, Global Industry Focus, launched by the same team behind What's New in Electronics (WNIE) online. So we were delighted to hear the news that the first issue of the new publication will be live at the end of September 2021.
As a bi-monthly publication, the magazine will explore new ways of connecting with its audience and readers, by evolving static editorial content and presenting it in a more engaging way. The publication will be a fully optimised digital magazine offering readers an in-depth look at companies, their people, and their unique journeys across the whole electronics sector. The magazine will be printed only for major trade shows to save on paper and postage.
Featuring guest editors from across the electronics world, Global Industry Focus will provide regular updates from industry associations and trade bodies, via news, technical articles and opinion pieces.
Kirsty Hazlewood, WNIE content creator and Global Industry Focus editor commented: "Global Industry Focus is a new digital magazine that will offer a functional and immersive editorial experience for our audience. We’re looking forward to bringing our readers extensive coverage of the whole electronics and off-board industries using a new immersive and enhanced approach.”
We look forward to seeing the first issue of Global Industry Focus, and the direction the editorial team has taken.
Webinar Best Practices: 5 Things We Learnt From ON24's Webinar Series
It's no secret that the use of webinars has accelerated in the past year, as many businesses had to adapt to a new virtual approach, in order to communicate with potential customers.
With nearly 70% of B2B buyers preferring to research online on their own, and an expected 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers to occur through digital channels by 2025, it's never been more important to ensure your digital tactics and communications such as webinars, are optimised for success.
We recently attended a webinar by ON24, the digital experience platform, which delved into the results of a recent study they had undertaken to understand the best practices and current benchmarks for hosting webinars. Analysing 100,482 webinars held by companies between January-December 2020 across Europe and the US, the study aimed to discover webinar best practices and benchmarks for success.
In this blog, I'll explore the top five things we learnt from the webinar and best practices to consider in the future.
A Webinar is an Experience
With the capabilities of digital platforms continually expanding, companies now have the option to provide more than just a traditional PowerPoint webinar. Webinars can be anything we make of them, and although the primary focus is to generate leads, it can offer many more additional opportunities.
Over the last year, webinars have become more approachable, with content that is interactive and provides a multi-touch experience. Webinars are no longer a tactic that can just be used for top of the funnel activities. Instead, they now have the capabilities to provide your potential customers with a positive experience throughout each stage of the sales funnel. They can be used as a top of the funnel tactic, but also as a bottom of the funnel tactic, by providing content such as product demos.
Long Term Promotion isn't as Important as it Seems
ON24's study revealed that there is a change in the notice needed to attend a webinar. Instead of long term promotion, it seems there is the immediacy of 'now', with 45% of companies finding that when promotion takes place 1-7 days before the event, they achieved more registrations, compared to the 20% of companies that promoted more than 15 days before the webinar, resulting in fewer registration sign-ups.
As a 12% increase from 2019, this was an interesting finding, offering companies the option to be more flexible with the promotion plans they put in place, and in fact, suggesting the tactic to do a 'big push' of promotion closer to the date of the webinar.
Tuesday and Wednesdays were revealed to be the best days to send promotional emails, sitting at 22% and 21% respectively, followed closely by Thursday at 20% and surprisingly Monday, with 18% of companies voting for this as the best day.
There's Flexibility to the 'Right' Day to Hold a Webinar
The study revealed some interesting results for when best to hold a webinar. Although Wednesday and Thursday were revealed to be the clear winners of when to host webinars, there was also a surprising increase in people wanting to watch webinars on Monday and Friday. This can almost directly be related to the shift of working from home we've all undergone the last year, especially Friday, which previously never would have been a feasible option.
Reassuringly attention spans for webinars have also increased since last year, with 57 minutes being the average viewing time in 2020.
Steady Increase of Engagement Tools and Videos
With the expectation for a webinar to be engaging and interactive, it was not surprising to see that there has been a steady increase in the use of engagement tools and videos. 86% of companies used Q&A throughout their webinar, (remember to encourage engagement you can do Q&A in the middle and end) with 70% uploading resources within the platform for listeners to download while watching the webinar.
There are several opportunities for customers to use engagement tools to their advantage. 43% of companies used surveys to generate content for their presentation, whilst only 22% used polling as a tactic to integrate their audience and start conversations throughout the webinar.
Several companies also missed the trick to include links to their socials within the webinars, with only 22% ensuring they did this. Unsurprisingly, video has become a key tactic, with 66% of all webinars in 2020 featuring some type of video.
On-Demand is the Future
Although encouraging registrations for a 'live' webinar is extremely important, it's also vital that an on-demand version is made available.
The study revealed that an average of 53% of registrations watched the webinars live, with 43% of registrations watching the same webinars on-demand. The stats show that the gap between live and on-demand is close, proving that your content can still be significantly valuable once the live webinar is over.
On-demand webinars can be used to link to similar content by personas type or industry, or to create snackable content that can be used on social media channels. Surprisingly a low 29% of respondents shared that they integrate their webinars into personalized landing pages, while only 43% are currently using on-demand webinar hubs to promote webinars after the live event is over.
Conclusion
With 89% of respondents believing that webinars outperform other channels in creating qualified leads, and 66% of respondents sayings their sales teams prioritise leads that come from webinars, it's clear to see the impact webinars can have on the sales funnel. In fact, 72% of respondents said that webinars directly impacted their revenue and pipeline!
At Napier, we run our own webinar series, and we've taken note of where we can improve to ensure we are optimizing our webinars for success. If you have any questions regarding tactics you can implement to make your own webinars successful, why not get in touch with us? We have extensive experience in helping our clients generate high-quality leads via webinars.
A Napier Webinar: The Secrets to a Successful PPC Campaign
As customers have worked from home, B2B marketers and PR specialists have increasingly incorporated digital activities into their traditional strategies. A key tactic used by many is pay-per-click advertising or PPC. This approach is used on search, paid social and even display advertising, ensuring you only pay for traffic to your website.
But there is no point in generating clicks if the visitors aren’t actually interested in your website. So how do you ensure that you are implementing a strategically crafted PPC campaign that can provide traffic, leads and ultimately customers?
Napier recently held a webinar 'The Secrets to a Successful PPC Campaign', which explores what B2B marketers need to consider when implementing a PPC campaign and covers:
- What is PPC?
- Benefits of running a PPC campaign vs a display campaign
- The different PPC platforms you can use
- How to use PPC with ABM
- Top tips for programmatic advertising
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘The Secrets to a Successful PPC Campaign’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Napier’s latest webinar, the secrets to a successful Pay Per Click campaign. As a quick introduction, my name is Hannah, and I'm the business development manager at Napier. And I'll be interviewing Mike, the managing director today, we are taking it in a slightly different format with regard to an interview rather than a presentation, with the aim to really help people who aren't digital experts get up to speed on pay per click advertising campaigns. So with that in mind, I think the best place to start is to ask Mike, what is pay per click advertising? And how can we use it.
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Thanks so much for running the webinar today. So it's a great introductory question, what is pay per click advertising? Well, at the most basic level, pay per click is advertising where you pay only when someone clicks on an ad. And not when someone sees an ad. So traditionally, in most publications, when you buy space, you buy on a per impression basis. So you pay when people see the ad. With pay per click, you pay when somebody actually clicks, then reality it's not quite as simple as that. Because there's various other models you can use that are all included within that pay per click. So you can actually measure conversions and pay for conversions, for example, but that's very simply what Pay Per Click is. And typically, you see pay per click in areas such as Google search, or Bing search. So search advertising. You see it on social media platforms. And you also see a lot of pay per click on retargeting and a bit of it on display where you're not targeting a particular publication. But rather you're perhaps targeting an audience across a range of publications.
Hannah: That's a great explanation. Thanks, Mike. So you know, you talk a bit about doing LinkedIn retargeting search, but what I'm really interested in knowing is what are the benefits of running a pay per click campaign? First is a display campaign, for example?
Mike: Well, it's a great question that gets right to the root of why we're talking about this. So obviously, the benefit of a pay per click campaign is you're only paying when somebody takes an action when somebody clicks on your ad. And in theory, what that should mean is that you're actually paying for valuable traffic to your website, rather than just paying to show the ad to people who may or may not be relevant. Now, of course, it's not quite that simple. Because once you start running Pay Per Click campaigns, you'll very quickly find that a lot of people click on ads that they have no interest in, there's a lot of spam clicks that are happening. And also, you'll find that there is value in actually showing the ad and changing people's perception. So it's not quite as simple as just saying, you know, you pay for results, rather than paying for actually showing the ad. But at a basic level, there's a lot of truth in that kind of concept.
Hannah: Brilliant. So would you say there's more? What are the pros and cons for each, you know, they're more advanced is to pay per click or, you know, more advices to display? Or actually does it depend on the approach and what you're looking to achieve? I think it does depend on the approach. So if you look at buying display for certain publication, all you're doing is buying their traffic. So you're actually saying I want to show ads to people who read this sort of content. And that can be really, really effective. We know that advertising in industrial publications works well. So absolutely, there can be benefits there. However, you might be also advertising to quite a broad audience when what you want to do is target a very focused audience. And so that can be the downside. So if you look at you know, very general title, I mean, I N is a classic industrial title appeals to a very broad range of people.
Typically, if you're running ads on that publication, you might be reaching a lot of people who are never going to be customers, and you're paying by impressions, you're paying for those people who see your ad even though they won't be a customer. Now, if you look at pay per click, that's very different, because pay per click, then really what you feel you're doing is you're paying for the people interact. So the high quality. Now, there are some really important things to remember about pay per click. The first is that almost all pay per click is done on a bidding basis on a real time auction. And literally every time the ad is shown, there's an auction to decide which ad is shown.
And so what happens is, is that companies like Google are fundamentally looking to optimise the revenue they get. So what they'll do is they'll look at your bid how much you're prepared to spend on the ad. But they'll also look at your click through rate and the ad performance. So the features around the ad performance and crudely speaking what they're looking to do is maximise the revenue. And roughly, and this is certainly not a precise number, but very roughly, the value of your ad to Google is your click through rate times your bid per click, because that gives you an idea of how much money they're gonna make.
So, you may think this is fantastic, I'm advertised to a wide audience, and I'm only going to pay for the clicks, the dangerous, you'll pay more for the clicks. So I think there's there's really lots of subtle differences in terms of, you know, is it better to pay for clicks, is it better to pay for impression, frankly, actually, it's better to have a really good campaign that targets the audience, you want to reach really well. And I guess that's where the last thing I'd say about Pay Per Click comes in, is that if you look at the platforms that run pay per click, then perhaps that's the biggest reason for choosing pay per click. So that might be Google. Now, Google talks a lot about intent. So if somebody searches for a product, so if somebody searches for a motor drive, then the chances are, they're actually looking to buy that product. So you're actually reaching someone with an ad at the point when they're considering that particular product. So the intent has huge value, more value than the fact you're doing pay per click, rather than pay per impression. It's all about the intent. And equally, if you look at some of the social platforms, LinkedIn is a great example. You can be very precise in who you target. So with LinkedIn, you can target down to specific companies, specific job titles, specific countries, you can be really, you know, really accurate on who you're trying to reach. And again, that that really detailed demographics for your targeting can actually be worth more than the factor of doing Pay Per Click rather than pay per impression.
Hannah: That's a really good point, because you know, you're talking about lots of different tactics, lots of different areas. But what it comes down to is that you do what makes a good campaign and what's going to generate results for you.
Mike: Exactly, yeah, it's all about, you know, starting from what you want to achieve, and working out what the best campaign is, rather than saying, I'm going to do pay per click, because it's the best advertising approach there is. It's not necessarily the best advertising approach. It depends on what you're trying to achieve.
Hannah: Definitely. So if we take a look at actually designing a pay per click advertising campaign, you know, we've got some clients, non-clients listening today, at Napier, we use a unique four step process. Did you just want to walk us a little bit through that and how you would look at designing a campaign?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I love our four step process when we get into things like pay per click, because it works so well. So for people who don't know, our four step process starts with the determine phase, this is where we're looking at what the situation is analysing the situation. And we're also trying to work out how we're going to outsmart the competition.
The next phase is focus. And that's about the audience the message and the channels. And clearly, with pay per click, this is where we would decide to run a pay per click campaign, and which channels we choose to use. We then have the deliver stage, which is about getting results. And lastly, we have the enhanced stage. Now the enhanced stage is super important in pay per click, because Pay Per Click is so suited to experimentation, particularly as, generally speaking, you're running them on a self service platform. So you're able to deliver the ads that you want to deliver, you're able to change it so you can test and experiment. So if you're working through a campaign, that's going to be pay per click, you start with a determined phase. And here you look at what you're trying to achieve. Now let's say for example, you're trying to achieve, say newsletter signups or datasheet, downloads, you'd recognise that this is what you're trying to do. And you're trying to identify what you're trying to impact. So whether it's trying to find people who are looking to design or just trying to find people are looking for background information. As you go through the focus stage, you then look at the audience itself. So are you looking for engineers? Are you looking for senior engineers? Are you looking for VPS of engineering? What's your audience and also you look at the message. And here's where you start building the ad campaign.
And let's say for example, we've decided that we're targeting people who are looking to buy motor drives, again, as I picked earlier, where people are searching for drives, we want to show our ad. And here, you start building an understanding of the audience you want to reach. So we would absolutely always build personas, and customer journeys and work out where the search comes in the customer journey, and why that individual might be searching. At that point. Once we know what the intent is why they're doing the search what they want, then we can serve an ad that's relevant to their needs. And at that point, we can also decide the channels if it's search. Clearly, it probably be running on Google with the biggest searcher, but actually, there are a lot of campaigns that run successfully on Bing. So there are ways to also look beyond Google if you feel your persona is less likely to use Google and obviously, the enhanced stage we would set objectives. So as I said earlier, we might be looking for newsletter signups. Initially, we probably have an idea of how much we value a sign up. So let's say we're prepared to pay, for example, $40. For a sign up, we can then measure the performance of our campaign against our target, which is cost per sign up. And that will allow us to optimise and we can run testing as well as we enhanced the campaign to make it run more and more effectively.
Hannah: That's a great overview. Thanks, Mike. So if we apply this to a more specific scenario, so say we were looking to target the top 20 companies in the semiconductor market? How would you use the approach and the steps you've just talked through to really narrow down and get results from this sort of campaign?
Mike: That feels like you're asking me how to do your job as business development manager for Napier. But it's a great example. So if we look at what we're trying to achieve, with our campaign, we'd probably looking to get some engagement with a certain proportion of those top 20 semiconductor manufacturers. So our goal for the campaign or objective might be to get one or two phone calls, that might be the objective. Now, that's important, because that's not something that's directly measurable. When you're running a pay per click campaign, it's something you need to add in at the end as to whether you've got those calls. And I think that's really important, always considering your business goal, as well as the numbers you get from whatever platform you're using to run the ads.
But looking at that, we then say, well, what do we want to do? You know, we want to target these people. Who do we want to target? Well, the people we want to target are probably marketing managers, PR managers, VPS of marketing, CMOS at those companies. So we know their demographics, their job title, we know the company names.
And then we'd look up, well, what are we trying to tell them, we're probably not trying to target these people, when they they're looking when they're searching for a PR agency, because that's not going to happen very often, it's pretty infrequent. And frankly, if you're in marketing, or PR or Communications at top 20 semiconductor company, you probably get a lot of approaches anyway, from PR agencies. So you probably are being approached all the time, you don't need to search. So clearly, we know the demographics, we know the job titles, you know, the companies, this is pointing us towards using LinkedIn as our channels, our platform. And through the messaging we'd want to do would be focused around how Napier can provide a differentiated service to some of the other agencies that might be used by these companies. So that's really the process of developing it. But once you've got that core campaign, you might decide to add other things. So as example, you might decide to add retargeting, or you might say, Well, actually, I know that this particular agencies got a very high proportion of those top 20 semiconductor companies, I'm actually going to advertise against searches for that agency's name. Because a lot of people still type in, you know, whatever they're looking for, rather than the website, it's just quicker, and then click on the googling. So there may be a way to actually then interject in terms of the search, to interrupt people and get them to think Well, hey, actually, maybe there's other agencies. But that would be the real process, we'd obviously have our metric of calls. And with the enhanced cam, part of the campaign, we'd be looking at whether we can walk people through steps towards those calls. And obviously, those steps might include, you know, for example, registration or a contact form inquiry, it might include engagement with emails, and then it might be the actual call itself. So there might be several steps after the pay per click measurement that we can look at, and measure and then use that to improve and enhance the performance.
Hannah Yeah, I love that. And I love like how many options there are, you know, bidding against competitors, that sort of thing. Just going back to you know, you mentioned LinkedIn that we could, you know, if they were focusing LinkedIn is going to be our primary tactic. Are we then talking about account based marketing here? Would we perhaps use other platforms such as a direct account based marketing platform such as Nrich? What sort of tactics should we expand outside of the pay per click?
Mike: Well, you're absolutely right, quite often pay per click is based around account based marketing. And almost always when you're doing LinkedIn, it's some form of account based marketing, because you're typically focusing either on a target customer list, or you're focusing on particular markets. So there is a huge overlap between pay per click and account based marketing because of the capabilities of a lot of the platforms. So absolutely. When you're doing this, I think it's important not to think about Pay Per Click as the goal. It's not that you're trying to run a pay per click campaign. You're trying to achieve a business goals.
So maybe you're trying to win one of the top 20 semiconductor suppliers as a client for Napier. That means you don't just run pay per click that might form a big part of your campaign. But I would absolutely be looking at what other tactics might support, that sort of account based marketing approach. And that could be anything from, you know, direct postal mail at one end through to a platform, right, as you say, enrich, which lets you target by IP address to actually reach specific companies. So it's all about understanding your personas, the people you're trying to reach? And what would be most impactful for them? What would make the biggest difference?
Hannah: Yeah, love that its about making the biggest difference. That's definitely the key takeaway, what is it, it's going to be most effective for your campaign? So if we had a look, if we focus a bit more into the enhanced data, the process, how would you look at measuring a campaign like this?
Mike: Well, the first thing most people do is they'll go to the platform they're using, whether it's Google or LinkedIn, and they'll probably look at a screen full of numbers, or download a spreadsheet. And I think it's really important not to be a slave to all these numbers, because they can be very enticing, you know, you get these percentages with two decimal points after it. So you know, four significant figures of information potentially, they're actually not that accurate, you've got to understand randomness. And one of the things we've done in Napier is we've actually built an A B test calculator, which lets you understand whether differences between ads are due to randomness, or actually likely to be due to a real difference in performance. So very often, we see people actually looking at the numbers, making assumptions and making decisions that really feel good, because they've got all these very precise feeling numbers, but actually are not statistically significant. So in reality, you shouldn't be making those decisions. So I would say the most important thing is, whilst you to use the numbers as a tool, the numbers you get from the platform and not your goal, what your goal is, is the objective you set, when you conducted that determined phases, start what you want to achieve. And it's all about looking as to how you're moving prospects oriented, you know, sometimes the pay per click, it might be customers, how you're moving them towards that end business goal. And so it's about understanding that, rather than just trying to get the numbers that look good.
Hannah: Definitely, yeah, I agree with that. So if I took give you a slightly different scenario, I know you always like a challenge. We've spoken about account based marketing, using pay per click like that. But if we actually were looking to launch a search campaign, targeting people who are planning to use thermal imaging cameras how would we apply our process in this scenario?
Mike: So thermal imaging is a very interesting application, I think this is where, you know, really can start to become quite creative in pay per click. So you might decide, for example, to target people who search for thermal cameras.
That's an easy thing to do. Probably people searching for that want to buy them. But there's a wide range of thermal cameras. So perhaps you want to target for example, brand names. So you know, the market leader is FLIR in this market. So perhaps you want to target FLIR or some of their brand names. Or maybe you want to target fluke is number two, and again, target those those brands. So you can start looking at specific products, but that might not be the right way to go about it. Because actually, people typically are not buying a thermal camera, because they've been told a thermal camera, you know, is the thing to have, they're buying a thermal camera to solve a problem. And so quite often we see people, rather than trying to target brands, which quite often can be a little bit late in the process, you know, trying to target a competitor's brand when someone's searching for it, they've probably made the decision, but you can look at some of the applications. So one example might be people use thermal cameras to detect problems, electrical panels, so high power panels, you can see problems because they show up as hotspots. So you might want to, you know, look for terms around thermal inspection of panels or thermal inspection of electrical panels. And that would be a great way to, you know, put your brand top of mind when somebody starts thinking about buying a thermal camera to solve a particular problem. But you could even go further back and you can say, Well, actually, there might be people who don't understand the benefits of thermal cameras, when you're trying to check panels or make sure that they're working correctly. And so we can advertise around you know, for example, you know, just looking at panels and finding on panels, rather than somebody specifically looking for thermal cameras. And then what you're doing is really talking about top of the funnel. So they know they've got a problem. They don't actually know the solution. They're just googling around the problem. You can present content that actually provides a solution and obviously presents your solution in the best possible light.
Hannah: And so you've mentioned in the previous campaigns retargeting is retargeting something that would be effective with this as well.
Mike: Absolutely, it's, it's always very interesting. And I think maybe less. So for LinkedIn, people can understand the value of retargeting. But in search, you know, the whole point about searches that it's all about intent, people are trying to find something at a particular time. But incredibly, you get a lot of people who don't convert, if you retarget, those people, they will come back, and they will convert on seeing your subsequent ads. So they're actually converting at a time when, theoretically, we don't know they have intent. We know they had intent in the past, but we don't know they need the product. Now. It is interesting. And I think this is really down to the fact that most decisions in b2b tech, they actually take quite a long time to make, you know, I mean, we're not the sort of people who, you know, going out and buying, you know, I use the drives example, but buying drives on Amazon, without even, you know, paying any attention to it or doing analysis. So, quite often, the intent phase is where people are actually analysing what products to buy, they're doing selection. And so what the retargeting does is keeps you top of mind and keeps you in front of that customer, all the way through from from that initial start of selection all the way through to the actual purchase. And so retargeting absolutely can have a big effect, and a very surprisingly positive impact on search ads, as well as things like LinkedIn, and other social media platform ads.
Hannah: I'd have to agree because it is, you know, b2b tech, we do have long sales cycles, and retargeting I almost feel as underestimated at times of impact it can have on the results and getting people from awareness to opportunity.
Mike: Totally agree. Totally agree. You're absolutely right. And you know, retargeting, of course typically is another form of pay per click, depends on how you're running it. But almost all retargeting is run as pay per click. So it's absolutely something that quite often is undervalued.
Hannah: So what is the biggest mistakes you’ve seen? This is a question I've been looking forward to asking what are the biggest mistakes you see when it comes to developing and deploying campaigns such as Pay Per Click?
Mike: This is this is a great question because the mistakes cover such a huge range of different areas. So one end, we see people making some, you know, what feel like fairly basic mistakes, but are made incredibly frequently. So for example, we'll see companies that are targeting ads globally. And they might only sell in a couple of countries, I've seen companies where the top 10 countries for clicks. So the top 10 countries where they're spending money are actually 10 countries where they've never sold a product. So, you know, understanding the platform and configuring it correctly, not making mistakes is really important.
And then I think it comes down to you know, not really being driven by just the platform, but actually putting some thought into it yourself. So really trying to think and understand. And that's particularly important when it comes to things like numbers I said earlier, you know, don't don't be a slave to the numbers from the platform, think beyond the platform and the click through rates, because they're not always the full story, try and get a much broader, a much wider picture. So you know that those are two areas, I guess, you know, firstly, it's absolutely started, you know, with the right configuration. And then once things are running, make sure you're looking at, you know, the right numbers, the right figures, so optimise your campaign. I mean, there's lots of other, you know, individual mistakes that can be made. One of the ones that is surprisingly common actually is breaking the rules. So all of these platforms will have rules about what you can and can't do. And quite often, companies will run ads that will break the rules. So for example, we talked about targeting competitors, you can absolutely target competitors and search for example, even if that search is a trademark, you can target the search, but you can't use the trademark in your ad. According to Google's rules. We also see issues with some, I would say inconsistent interpretation of the rules as well. So you know, there are always situations where people are running ads that you know, should be allowed to Google disallows them or vice versa and that margin, there are quite often problems. So lots and lots of things you could do I mean, really, I guess the ultimate thing, if you don't mind me pitching a bit is people should come to agencies that know and understand pay per click, because they can help you avoid all the problems that do occur.
Hannah: I think it's such a great point. You know, I love that concept of Don't be a slave to the numbers. And as you've just explained, there's so many more factors to consider than just the numbers you see on the screen.
Mike: Absolutely, yeah.
Hannah: So I'd say my last question to end, you know, end on a bit of a positive note. But it'd be great if you could share a couple of tips of how to deliver a successful pay per click advertising campaign.
Mike: Absolutely. And here, I'm going to talk specifically about b2b because I think it's important to understand that we have some specific needs. So you know, the first thing you've got to do is understand the audience pick the right channel for the campaign. So, you know, if you're offering deeply complex, white papers, then maybe tik tok is not the right platform to offer offer it on, perhaps you want to offer it on something more professional like LinkedIn. But if you're offering retargeting and just trying to keep Top of Mind, then maybe you know, go ahead, try Tick tock, try Facebook, and see if that works. So understand the audience choose the right channel.
And then the next thing is don't rely on the channels to optimise for you. Now. Now, there are lots of optimizations that can be incredibly helpful. But if you just switch everything to Super auto, I think the thing you'll find is that you will end up with a very broad audience and when be very focused, and Google is particularly good at this, you know, trying to get you to spend 234 times what you're spending before. By widening the audience, sometimes you know exactly who you want to target. And you want to target those people, you don't want to target anybody else, or you want to target very specific searches, you don't want broad match and broad match can be extremely dangerous in b2b, because you can go from a term that has, you know, only a few searches, but absolutely identifies the audience, you want to reach to a term that has many, many searches from people who are never going to be customers. So use the tools. But don't let them create the campaign or driver campaign. We've talked about tests and optimise. That's really important. Keep testing, keep optimising I mean, Napier, we often run a B tests, we'll have, you know, little informal bets about which ad is going to win. And quite often we're wrong. You know, quite often we'll see an ad winning for reasons that we never expected. So I think, you know, trust the numbers, when it comes to testing, and make sure you you think about it from the audience's side, not from your personal opinion.
And I always say use negatives. So I mean, excluding companies and LinkedIn campaigns is really important. For example, if you're looking for customer acquisition, you want to exclude all the companies that are already customers, because you probably want different messages for companies already customers, but particularly on search as well, negative keywords are incredibly powerful. So use those negatives to rule out the people who aren't relevant. And I guess Lastly, you know, and this comes back to, to what I think I've said several times during this this discussion, track what matters. So make sure that you're tracking, you know, conversions, if you can track things electronically with conversions, or if not track it manually with business goals, whether that's customer acquisition, whether it's meetings, whether it's, you know, opportunities to quote, all of that track what matters and try and link that back to what you're actually doing in the campaign. Because the closer you get to the business result, the more impact you're going to get from your campaign.
Hannah: This is some really insightful tips. Thanks, Mike. I have to say I've fallen victim to you know, the automate automations within the platforms before so it's definitely something to learn as you go through.
Mike: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, I think most people have in recently, over the last quarter or So Google has actually turned on some automations automatically, that have broadened out campaigns. And it's very easy to miss Google making those changes. So totally agree it's really important to do that.
Hannah: Definitely. So I'm just gonna see if we got any questions from the audience. We haven't got any at the moment. So I would ask what's the best way for anyone to get in touch with you, Mike, if they've got any follow up questions from this webinar?
Mike: Well, hopefully clients know how to get in touch with me, anyone who's not a client, they can obviously contact me through LinkedIn. They can go to the Napier website Napierb2b.com and pick the phone up or get our contact details, or just send an email. My email address is Mike@Napierb2b.com. But you'd have probably guessed that anyway.
Hannah: Brilliant. Well, thank you all so much for your time, and we'll end up ended here, shall we, Mike? Absolutely.
Mike: Thanks so much. It's been a great discussion.
Hannah: Thanks, Mike.
A Napier Webinar: Five ABM Campaigns to Increase Sales
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of the fastest-growing activities within the B2B space, and when executed right, it can generate a significant amount of success for a company.
Napier recently held a webinar 'Five ABM Campaigns to Increase Sales', which explores ABM campaigns that can help B2B marketers achieve sales. We address:
- What we mean by ABM
- Why ABM is effective
- How many companies should be in your ABM campaign
- ABM campaigns you can launch today
- Pitfalls to Avoid
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Five ABM Campaigns to Increase Sales' Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Mike: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today we're going to be talking about account based marketing. And what we're going to try and do is give you five campaigns that you can use to that will directly increase your sales using ABM techniques. If you have any questions, please do feel free to ask them, post them in the conversation box. And I will be very happy to answer them at the end. So please post questions as you as you think of them. And then it makes it easier for us to go through them once the webinars finished. So five campaigns to increase sales. So what are we going to talk about? Well, the webinars gonna Firstly, talk a little bit about ABM. So explain what we mean by account based marketing, and also explain why ABM is so effective. We're also going to answer one of the big questions that we keep getting asked by clients, which is how many companies should be in your ABM campaign. We'll talk then about the five campaigns that you can launch today. And then finally, the webinar is going to cover a few pitfalls that you need to avoid if you want to make sure your ABM campaigns are successful.
So what is ABM? Well, we went and had a look at Marketo. These guys know a thing or two about ABM. And they say account based marketing is a focused approach to b2b marketing, in which marketing and sales teams work together to target best fit accounts and turn them into customers. So I mean, there's some obvious things here, you know, that we've got some cooperation between marketing and sales. We're obviously trying to get customers which is, you know, not unusual for a marketing campaign. But really, the thing around account based marketing is that you're focusing and what you're focusing on is the best fit accounts, those companies that are most likely to become the best customers. And this is really what drives ABMs effectiveness and ABM success for a lot of our clients. So there are different types of ABM. And lots of people have different views as to how you should define ABM. What we've done is we've made use of the definitions by itsma, which is the organisation that really kicked off the enthusiasm around ABM. And they have definitions of strategic ABM, which is basically highly customised programmes for individual accounts. So you're building effectively a bespoke marketing programme for each account. ABM light, which is basically clustering accounts together, they might have similar issues similar needs similar requirements. And you build campaigns for those clusters of accounts. And then finally, programmatic ABM, so programmatic ABM, will use technology. And it will allow you to tailor marketing campaigns for specific accounts at scale. And I think this is, you know, really important, the programmatic ABM lets you move from having a relatively small number of counts to having very, very large number of accounts without needing huge marketing teams.
Now, to be honest, at Napier, our view is that, you know, there is some overlap and approaches and certain one right approach what strategic ABM so creating this bursary much more powerful to do with petak a versa you can never scale those bespoke programmes in strategic a two ounce that you can read actually our view is is that you know, there are approaches, but in reality most of the company work with a using a kind of blend of two or maybe some different approaches to create an ABM or get an ABM programme that works for them. So these are the different types of ABM. And we'll be talking about you know, these customised we're talking about clustering accounts and we'll talk about programmatic we'll say Well okay, so I get ABM Why is it ABM what makes it well.
We've got quotes from Alexander I think Moe was the phone, amongst other things. And, you know, he's talking about concentrating all the hand the sunrise rays burn until brought to a photo. Well, that's certainly true up in Scotland, that you do need to focus things raised to make them burn. And so fame is really important. It does a lot of thing you know, so If you're marketing more effective, and it makes it more effective by breaking through the noise, you can actually have much higher frequency of interaction with individuals within the target accounts because all your budget is focused on a limited number of targeted emotions. It lets you get to really target ROI opportunities. So everything is generating or your marketing is generating a certain conversion rate. What's going to happen is the value of those conversions go up, the more you focus on key accounts. You can design campaigns to reach the right people and really talk particularly when we look at the customised ABM means huge bend. And finally, one of the things that ABM is very important importance of making use of synergies by sales. And this really often be from everything actually understanding which of the best accounts to tie sales thing. Those that follow up loop and work with, say any of these opportunities hold up and sell them incentive to do this. You're actually targeting the Academy, one they asked you to do. So personalization, so ABM allows for very, very effective, personalised, those between the ABM lightened strategic ABM. I mean, you can either do action, which grounds you know the needs and requirements of a particular industry, or you can fully personalise and get down to individuals and typically, most ABM campaigns have personalization on the industry level, maybe personalization on the persona level. But if you have a really major target, you can do that full strategic ABM approach and personalised approach.
And the great thing about persona as Kylie and Joe some years ago, is that it reflection of how much you love that customer, you can show that your heart is oh so true. The important virtualization is personalization is not about putting the company name and an advert or console, expanding the accounts need. So the company the target accounts needs, what drives the persona. So how they are involved in different elements. So that is really ultimately about building trust is building trust by showing that you know, and what your target customer is facing what they're having to deal with. So we've talked a little bit of definitions, but the last thing is, you know, you need to be a bit relaxed with ABM. The goal is not to do a programmatic ABM, you have a certain thing that you can list on your LinkedIn. It's simply benefits from better targeting and personalization of content. And that's really I mean ABM II to achieve that, and it's a frickin it's not the end goal. Clearly, ABM also has benefits with integration. So what I'd say is when you look at ABM, let's not worry too much about whether it fits a better definition of ABM. Let's make sure that it's from any approach that you take.
So this is the first questions we ask that asked by any client account should be in our ABM programme. Fortunately, the answer is really depends. It depends on whatever ABM programme. If you're launching your ABM, your first 1000 companies, you know, you can make it work before you scale up. It depends on your resources. This is not just how you have to drive the campaign. It's also to help you and as we mentioned, KVM is great because it allows you to very large number of accounts, if you don't have the programmatic technically not going to be able to scale. And it also depends on money. And we talked about the focusing of resort viewer accounts and try and focus on please enjoy a good two, three don't break through the noise. So it really is a balancing act. And personalised can also have an impact impacts the amount of work you do. Sales support can have an impact both which account as a follow up and any other campaign. You know, unless you're running an e commerce campaign, there's very little leads if you're not from sales, so if support a serve accounts responding, there's no point having a human race twice the number of running active, more efficient, a smaller number get the other. Related to that, of course it can also depend upon the to win and service and account. If you have a very easy ordering system for new customers. Well, you know, the product need to then you might lock more accounts than a service where there's a lot of onboarding and getting up to what your company goals are. And the company will have goals in terms of revenue, and that can often be trying to an estimate of the number of company.
So I've kind of copped out I've not given you a definite answer should tell you what people do at the end of the day. If you look at this this pie chart is based on HubSpot asked us what their typical target account list typically demand basis customers, the enterprise IT See there's a huge range 13% of the counts, but almost 50% bounce in their campaign base, typically these these customers will be more towards the bend based programme. So over most likely one, one to 100, if we looked at people running ABM, but without a programmatic on base, and so you can see there's a here It really is. And so it's all about campaign that's going to meet your needs, and ultimately help your business achieve its business goals. So, campaigns that we've got about really elements of ABM campaigns, and how they can work and how they can be more efficient, actually run ABM rather than running more of a broadcast type approach.
So the first one is targeted advertising. And this is a really simple approach Rabia, see the animation here? We generate followers for a company called tech core taking Veronica and we're putting her photo into the ad. This is something that's it means what you can do is knock us your advertising on care about. But it also means you can do some customizations, so you could address for example, and get specific pain points. And you can see in the background, a landing page for ABM account campaigns, that was targeted comm supplying the airport sector and talking about what their challenges were and how we can help. There are different ways adverts and obviously as I say LinkedIn is typical to generate leads.
So you can have a LinkedIn example as follows. People would be looking probably promoting content they'd be they'd be offering other activity with the customer. So that could be for example, a webinar. And there's different approaches to personalising the advertising. So I think it's a it's interesting other ways that people and how you approach things really depends a lot on your brand to appear. So we can see here for example, forts have fought to personalising an advert, demand base as well. So if you're looking for information, they've got an article on different ways ads accounts name, you can put it in the headline, or you can put the set on company, which is obviously part of the healthcare sector. So you can either use the attribute name, Alternatively, you can talk about Street, or you can tell us the company name, address. And if you look at this approach, what you typically do is you do many different versions each in a different gets. One thing I'd say is that, you know, personalization is still quite a bit of manual work involved. There are tool sets of ad as well. But typically today, there's not end to end solution for creating and delivering dads. And so I think this is we'll see nurture is ads personalised on the fly as they deliver to potential customers. And so I think this is something that's definitely going to change. Ultimately, what it means for us is we'll probably see our company's names in more and more ads as people target us. And so targeted advertising, very simple approach. And particularly if you're looking at kind of an industry sector targeting, it's very easy to do, because you can reach and each account will have, and you can reach them all with a single advert. But the question is who when you pick from the ad, you know, you've got your targeted ad.
So what are you going to, I can campaign is targeting 10 offers any different ways to do this, but it's about creating particularly relevant downloadable content. So this could be market specific content, or it could be fully personalised. And there's lots of tools to do this that can create dynamic PDFs from simply putting your, you know, target customers logo on to actually completely changing the content within a PDF. And you can see a very similar on the Napier report tool that allows you to define what a marketing qualified and so I'd leave form and produces the definition. And if you enter your details, you can click through, get the definition and download the PDF. And obviously this PDF is exactly the content that you entered. Totally customise and a relatively simple site.
A campaign that is specific, is we ran is once we love with Nokia, we'd like to work with more division, downloadable content that showcased the work we've done some of the Nokia divisions we work with to encourage so it's all looking results. It's very custom be much specific content about Nokia here. I chose to realisation we don't have on the landing paid work for Nokia you should work for us. It's not too direct.
So with your campaigns you really need to understand how much personalization you can do without becoming a little bit creepy. And this is an important thing balls are there to insert campaigns and even individuals and things like that into marketing content, may not always want to use it, because you may find that actually it becomes people find just a little bit uncomfortable dealing with such content. Very much relate to or content offer is really personalization in general. And think the big issue here is looking at how you personally elements of the customer. So we see some background, there's EasyJet for anyone to jet, you've probably seen the little infographic talking about where they tend to, you know, their favourite destination so flat organised on the website, you can see two different landing page and depending upon what the website knows about you, it might the complete staff say they're built for growth. So it will try and get content on the website. But this is not specifically it's upon role based targeting. And so what I'd advise is go beyond the basics, you know, the Hello first day, but the job role person might play in the decision making unit and when bite, perhaps the buyers journey stage understand where the particular individual being the journey stage, and a key use past engagement. If you know the pages that someone has visited, you can get a good idea of where they might be on their buyers journey. So you can then deliver personalization in this early stage of you know, gathering information start to up the funnel type issues. Whereas if they're pretty much ready to place no research into checking more information. There's not another funnel around, you know, for example, your products performance or social with custom, personalization done a name, it doesn't necessarily mean present individual, it's about around the needs of who comes and that can be the same as other people as well. There's lots of different so probably the most commonly used. So when I make content on the personalization, and segment and get those groups of people, rather, it's an almost infinite number of persons. But there's also sorts there's, you know, IP based and cookie based website personalization, where you can post upon the IP, which will and can look up and funny, they work for a little more COVID with people working from home, although a lot of people still have to log into their business through their VPN. So it's often possible to see which company people work for based upon their IP address. And then lastly, dynamic he was actually, we love the use of dynamic email. And we'll actually put different email prospects. And the great thing about always done automatically. So we can deliver content to each client in the full email without you having to fit into it once we've set up the email. So we can have a look an example of some personalization campaigns see the range of things you you can do so I mean, here is a very some campaign targeting Uber is created by slam is there basically the Uber logo and page. On the left hand side, however, is oldest tech with a big poster. But this is a graphic designers. They wanted to get some work with the agency, Ogilvy. And so they built bought the billboard that was directly out of Ogilvy office and create an advert that was specific to Ogilvy. So hundreds of people passing really cared about the people going into the job. so successful, that actually the Manage covey frequency, because he was so impressed with what they did from Ogilvy so easily use very, you know, what you might call olex. But you account based marketing, particularly interesting approach.
Another approach would be a great mailer. The thing I'd say, and again, this is maybe a little odd. But as people return to the office folks really well. And what you actually spend more on the postal mailers because you know, you're targeting and they're really sending as many as you would, entire market. But ABM is really about creativity matters on the printed card, to do something very clever. And what these mailers deliver. So often these are called door openers, they never let me forget where we sent to prospective clients. And the message was, you know, we'd love to work with you, and you're only a stone's throw away.
So anyway, we went to meet the client because they were meeting a lot just walking through the door and we did a great pitch team was amazing. We convinced them to work with us. And everybody in the office laughed because the marketing manager had actually already posted a blog about it, where he said the reason he gave us the business was the creativity of the mailer, and not our pitch, which I felt was kind of with the honesty of marketing managers. So a really useful I think very underrated and they're very easy to do when you get to a VM because you're dealing with numbers, something teams don't their entire life thing mailers into boxes or apps. So there are ways to make mailers. And there are different services that will actually do automate your mailers for you. So if you run sample you can literally basically from all works over these mailers can be generic campaign with a note, choose to make customised or branded goods three of the biggest those so and Alice Alice is very well known in the States, but currently do the operate in the UK and across Europe.
I'd encourage us to use video personalization. Because its easy create a video. You can automatically convert solely something as simple adding in somebody click here we can see then we've made as being applied to document we've got a very happy man saying hello the different people changing the background as well as as he does it. And we can employer approaches like a video that I'm interested and I would only recommend looking at your laptop who personalised videos at scale so you record the video will replace the content and so they'll replace the content. So if you've seen those, those video that they've not been personalised for you by someone nails and videos of different names, they've acted just like God.
Here's my bonus idea what an extra bite Well, it's effectively something like I don't want a free that they can drink was the salesperson talks to see people don't coffee whilst the salesperson talks them but it's a great version of kind of gift to get approach where you give them a coffee they feel I'm you know morally indebted to you and more, I'm much more likely to take the sale. Think about this as it's very simple to do because you can do it with vouchers you can do it electronically. And it scales very easily. As it does scale easily thing will not make your any your email persons thick. So definitely put the effort into personalization, if you are spending the money on vouchers.
So those are our campaigns we want it so some of the mistakes we've seen. So there are certainly pitfalls to avoid. I mean, it's having too many accounts on the programme, particularly if got limited budget limited resources or you're just you don't go big initially you get the process working and also creating enough money to break through the noise. Equally. If you've got some resources and you've you've haven't run into few accounts can also be a major pitfall fail to get the small number of accounts. I talked about being creepy. Don't ever cross the creepy line over and be as much of a problem as underpass. investment is not a magic wand is going to magically get customers you do have to have money to break. We see people, a lot of us, you know everybody gets excited about particular I mean, if you come and talk to me, I'll be reading about soldiers we work with like that offers programmatic ABM. It's really it's to me or tools is about achieving marketing, bam, and the tools help you achieve itself. I talked about personalization, no slides can be bad. His biggest pitfall and I think this is you know, pretty much the biggest pitfall for most marketing activities is failing to put in point launching an ABM campaign unless you can show that it's more previous parties.
So if I was to share key pro tips, as we call them full of things I'd recommend looking at. Firstly, you know the ABM is going to be important. In fact, some people are predicting that b2b marketing or be ABM in the future. And the maybe will just disappear as everybody moves to actually using that as their default but get on board now moving on focus marketing to start small, advisory creative and see if they work. And obviously if they work, scale them up. Definitely use the technology but don't be driven by the technology or tool. Get the sales team excited. I mean, the great thing about ABM is it can generate sales results because you're fucking actually the biggest sales. So those tips are really what I'd read to look Adams of getting your ABM campaign started interested, you know, ABM certainly please do contact me.
So you can reach me by email LinkedIn as my details here or via phone. And then I guess the last thing to say is, please feel free and we'll certainly learn them. Or alternatively, if you've got questions you'd like to talk about in more than easily please do email me and I'd be more than happy to so tips for our session we will be posting the slides on SlideShare will also make the webinar available A rebroadcast in case you want to share it, and we'll let you know all the details.
Elettronica AV and Elettronica Tech Websites Now Available in English
The Italian publications Elettronica AV and Elettronica Tech have officially launched English versions of their websites, providing visitors with the option to swap between Italian and English with a language button on the left-hand side of the main website menu.
It's great to see publications continuing to make enhancements to their sites, and this new feature certainly widens the net for the target audience, encouraging more English-speaking users to the websites.
Microchip Awarded Certificate of Excellence for Online Banner Marketing
Congratulations to our client Microchip, who has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence for online banner marketing 2020 by Electronics Weekly.
The certificate was awarded in recognition of outstanding performance and engagement by achieving the highest in-read video click-through rates, and the highest welcome ad total number of clicks.
Each year, Electronics Weekly awards the companies with the highest performing campaigns, which are identified via an annual analysis of the advertising effectiveness for every ad unit, the volume of traffic and CTR deployed throughout the year.
With the Napier team having worked closely with Microchip to develop successful digital campaigns, we are delighted that they have received this recognition.
5 Top Tips for Successful ABM Campaigns
ABM has quickly become an integral part of the B2B space, and we are continually seeing more B2B companies jump on the ABM train to generate high-quality enquiries. But with so many approaches to choose from, it can be hard to understand which tactics and strategy you should be using to generate the best level of success from your campaigns.
In this blog, we explore five top tips that B2B marketers can use to enhance their ABM campaigns, and ensure that the strategy implemented is the right fit.
Appeal to your audiences pain points
The best type of ad needs to be compelling, not only to stand out from the marketing noise but to also compel your target accounts to click through. Do your research and ensure you understand what your target customers pain points are. Ensure you communicate this effectively in your ad creative, and then continue this message flow through to your landing page. Campaign contingency is key when communicating to your audience.
Remember it's important that your target accounts ABM journey is personalized to their problems and needs, and appealing to your audiences pain points with a personalized landing page is more likely to lead to more conversions.
Work with your sales team
When implementing ABM campaigns, it's important to work with your sales team to ensure they have the capacity to follow up on the leads. You don't want to spend your advertising budget, generate leads and then find out three months down the line that they haven't been followed up.
Ensure the sales team is involved from the start when planning your strategy, and aware of the process and goals you want to achieve from your campaign. They should also be able to provide some fantastic insights into the movements and interests of your target accounts.
Clearly communicate what is expected from the sales team before you start the campaign. This could include outreach to prospects when they engage/show an interest and relay progress back to the marketing team.
Use insight to plan your messaging
It's important to look at different areas to ensure you have all the insight to plan engaging and relevant messaging. The first point of call would be to look into your past sales data. Ask yourself, what topics interested our target accounts the most? What would be the most interesting for them to hear about, have they ever shared problems they are facing?
It's also a good idea to look forward to trends that could be entering the market. Are these trends something that your target accounts would like to adapt or focus on? It's always good to be ahead of the curve if you can.
Another valuable piece of insight can be gained by tracking what parts of the website your target contacts visit the most. This can provide some integral data into what your audience is interested in, whether this is a service, product or topic. This can be tracked easily using marketing automation, and can often be easy to gather this data. Read the next tip to find out more about this...
Use automation and sales alerts to your advantage
It's important to take the time and understand what your target companies and contacts are interested in. Marketing automation platforms often have the capabilities to track what pages your target companies are visiting on your site, and automation can be set up to provide the sales team with alerts sharing which companies are viewing what on your site, or which emails they are interacting with.
This information can help you tailor your ABM campaigns, whether this be ads or emails to what your audience is truly interested in, and also helps keep marketing messages aligned, as sales should be able to share if a target accounts focus has shifted throughout the process of the campaign, or if you find a tailored ad and messaging is not working as you hoped.
Talk to experts to get advice if you're unsure
There's no harm in asking for help if your unsure what approach is best for you and your company. ABM can be complicated, and it's important to get it right to ensure your getting the best RoI from your campaign.
Tools such as our ABM tactics advisor are there to help, which provides recommendations based on your unique situation. Or alternatively please feel free to drop us an email, and we'd be happy to discuss what approach would be best for your ABM campaign.
4 Email Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2021
I recently came across an email marketing trends report from Smart Insights, a publisher and online learning platform. The report was part of their email marketing and marketing automation toolkit, which focussed on the email marketing trends we can expect to see in 2021, based on insights from surveys and 10 email marketing experts who gave their views and examples of the future of email marketing.
With email marketing remaining one of the most effective techniques for marketers, keeping up to date with the latest trends, best practices techniques and email marketing technology remains important. This blog will explore 4 key trends marketers need to watch out for in 2021 as shared in the Smart Insights report.
Emails will become more interactive
As technology continues to evolve, more companies are adapting and looking to make more elements of their emails animated or interactive. As recipients are becoming increasingly used to some kind of animation or interaction functionality, more and more marketers are using EDPs (email service providers) or AMP technology to include some form of interaction, whether this is surveys, carousels or rollovers, to engage customers throughout their decision-making process.
Whatever the functionality may be, this is certainly something that will increase in use and that marketers should consider to make their email stand out in their target accounts inbox.
Intelligent Personalization will be more utilized
Email personalization has been possible for a long time, but in fact, is something that many marketers do not utilize. Moving to intelligent personalization lies within reviewing your segmentation. Your database consists of several different kinds of people, with different interests, profiles and behaviours, and who all deserve to receive personalized emails based on their interests and needs.
Many marketing automation systems have the capability to provide automated emails to contacts that are tailored and triggered to send based on the pages they visit, the forms they fill in, as well as products they have bought before. This provides the opportunity for marketers to use this data to automatically send emails that could feature 'money off' vouchers for specific products, encouraging customers to re-engage and buy additional products.
Emails will focus on customer experience
Marketers have long lost patience with brand-centric messages, and often demanding more meaningful, relevant and personalized experiences from the emails they receive. We now live in a world of customer experience marketing, which is a newfound focus on the customer and ensuring that companies are truly responding to their customers' needs, wants, and current situation.
A/B testing which has always been necessary for a successful email marketing strategy will be a big part of this. Its important marketers can understand what is truly resonating with their customers, and tools such as our Napier A/B Test Analyser calculator can help you understand what data you can pull valuable insights from. This testing can also help you uncover insights to inform your marketing strategies across all other channels, as you can get insight into your customer thinking and motivation.
The use of AI will increase
Many email marketing and automation providers now include AI features within their platforms to improve personalization, with the aims of improving relevance, engagement and response. AI can be used to create automation of product recommendations, using the data available from the subscriber to predict which products and content are most likely to be interesting. AI also provides marketers with the opportunity to remove the need for rules-based manual configuration of email campaigns and instead evaluates historical interactions and responses to generate insights for future communications, allowing marketers to improve relevance and messaging of campaigns to generate a higher quality of results.
Although AI is certainly something that is being used by marketers already, we suspect that many more will be looking to take advantage of this technology. With several tools available, marketers don't need to invest big parts of their budget in order to use AI to their advantage. In fact, there are several low-cost AI tools that can help marketers optimize their campaigns without breaking the bank. You can read more about this in our Truth about AI in Marketing blog.
To read the full report and to find out more about the trends expected in email marketing for 2021, please click here.
Electronic Specifier Announces Webinar Summit
Electronic Specifier has announced a webinar summit, to be held on 1st September 2021. As a one-day event, the Electronic Specifier publishing team has unified their experiences with other virtual shows, conferences and exhibitions to create a unique virtual event for electronics engineers globally.
Due to some mixed reactions regarding the recreation of exhibition halls in the form of virtual booths, the Electronic Specifier webinar summit will take place without the 'lobby' or 'booths; and will instead focus purely on the content.
The event will focus on providing companies with a platform where they can discuss industry trends in electronics, and the latest products and technologies in sectors from Automotive to Wireless; focusing on topics that readers are finding the most valuable from Electronic Specifier's online shows.
The collection of live webinars which are part of the summit will be promoted separately and will be relevant to electronics engineers around the world.
Here at Napier, we think it's great to see more virtual events taking place, with a focus on ensuring high-quality content, and we look forward to hearing what we are sure will be positive feedback from the event.
If you are interested in participating in the event, please contact ben.price@electronicspecifier.com for further information.
all-electronics.de Launches New Website Design
The all-electronics.de website has been re-launched with a new design, offering users a number of new and improved functions.
With a new clean and clear layout, the website has been designed to allow visitors to more easily search for sector-specific information, and now features a company directory, offering users the opportunity to quickly and easily get information about relevant companies.
The website has also been optimized for mobile device users, to address the steadily increasing number of visitors who access all-electronics content via mobile devices. This optimization has prioritized a responsive design, ensuring the all-electronics portal is user-friendly across all devices.
We think it's great to see all-electronics.de making these changes to optimize its website for a digital world. With the new version of the website now live, visitors can explore the new features at all-electronics.de.
Electronic Component Show Rescheduled for May 2022
The Electronic Component show (ECS) has been rescheduled to May 2022. With the original show scheduled to take place in 2020, and postponed to 2021 back in April last year; the decision for this latest postponement has been taken due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.
The new date for ECS will provide exhibitors with the opportunity to meet more visitors at the show in a relaxed environment, with reduced restrictions. With many other electronics or manufacturing events moving trade shows to the last quarter of 2021, this move will allow ECS to host their show without fear of clashing with any other exhibitions.
With the pandemic having affected exhibitions for over a year now, we are looking forward to seeing the return of 'in-person' trade shows, and what these might look like in the 'new' normal. Further information about the 2022 event is due to be released soon, and you can stay up to date, by visiting the ECS webpage.
EETech Media Releases Electrical Engineering Study
EETech Media has released an Electrical Engineering Study, which provides insights into how engineers behave during the design process, as well as the challenges engineers find to be the most pressing, and how they view open source solutions.
Based on research conducted across the past four years, in partnership with Wilson Research Group, the report analyzes data from industry professionals around the world. Key questions that are addressed include:
- What skills do Electrical Engineers want to pursue?
- What types of content do they turn to for information during the design process
- How has COVID-19 affected engineers and their companies
- What emerging types of content do engineers prefer when learning about our industry
At Napier, we are always interested when a new report is released, especially when it's one that provides some critical insights on the inner thinkings of engineers. With the aim to help the industry understand the information needs of the engineering audience, this report provides some fantastic insights into relevant and timely topics such as COVID, to assist companies with their marketing plans in 2021.
To find out more about what the research has revealed, please sign up for the on-demand webinar by EETech, by clicking here.
Hardware Pioneers Max 2021 Postponed to September
Hardware Pioneers Max 2021 has been postponed to 23rd September 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aimed at connecting technology and service providers operating in the IoT development sector, the event was due to take place on the 3rd June 2021 at the Business Design Centre in London.
Due to the roadmap of restrictions being lifted in the UK, the new date should allow technical decision-makers and entrepreneurs working in IoT to network and attend the event in person.
With more details due to be released shortly, we will look forward to seeing the return of 'physical' events, and the response from the industry.
For more information on the event and how you can attend, please click here.
Growth Acumen Podcast Interview: B2B Sales and Marketing Trends in 2021
Napier's Managing Director Mike recently sat down with Steven Norman, owner and host of the Growth Acumen podcast, which aims to help B2B sales leaders upgrade their knowledge and skills.
In the podcast interview, Mike and Steven discuss marketing campaigns that deliver a sale advantage, and how Napier strives to align the sales and marketing functions in order to drive targeted, high-value results.
Listen to the full interview here, or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
Elettronica TECH and The IoT Radar Join Forces for New Video Channel
The Italian web community Elettronica TECH has announced a new publishing partnership with Wisse Hettinga, producer of The IoT Radar, an independent video production company with a strong focus on the Internet of Things and related technologies such as Edge Computing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Consisting of a series of weekly video interviews, The IoT Radar is hosted on the Elettronica TECH website, with the aim of informing and engaging electronics engineers, and hardware and software developers. With videos no longer than five minutes per interview, the series provides 'first-hand' information to help professionals in the IoT ecosystem from design, production and integration through to research, and educational companies and publishers.
It's always interesting when a publication takes a unique approach when interacting with their readers, and here at Napier, we think its great to see Elettronica TECH use The IoT Radar to educate and inform their readers.
To find out more about The IoT Radar series, and to watch the interviews that are already live, please click here.
Electronics Weekly Releases Advertising in a Crisis Whitepaper
Electronics Weekly has released an 'Advertising in Crisis' whitepaper which focusses on understanding whether advertising in a crisis is truly worthwhile. The whitepaper explores the impact on both immediate and longer-term companies' decisions to either cut, freeze or increase their marketing spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, by analysing the performance of campaigns across numerous sectors.
The analysis provides some interesting results, finding that there was a significant impact on website performance when reducing marketing spend, as 'company A' chose to cut their advertising spend by 90% for the rest of the year. This resulted in seeing the number of total users being 84% less than in 2020 compared to 2019.
When comparing company A to company B, which chose not to reduce their advertising spend, Electronics Weekly has found that company B increased its market share in 2020; and whilst company A retained just over 16% market share, Company B soared over 80%.
The whitepaper reveals some intriguing results, presenting a clear correlation between reducing marketing spend and seeing an immediate impact on results. It's also interesting to see that the decision to reduce marketing spend can actually provide competitors with an advantage, which is why its vital to maintain momentum and visibility even during a crisis.
To read the full report for yourself, please click here.
Publishing House Fiera Milano Media Acquired by the LSWR Group
Publishing House Fiera Milano Media has been acquired by the LSWR Group, an Italian leader in scientific and professional knowledge, through the Quine publishing house.
Providing the latest updates and news for engineers, technologists, and IT specialists, the acquisition allows Quine to expand its range of information and professional training, due to Fiera Milano Media's speciality in technical publishing, B2B communication, managerial training, and digital services. The media house's publications in Industrial Automation, Mechanical, Electronics, and ICT sectors will all move to Quine from the 1st March 2020.
The acquisition of the Fiera Milano Media magazines further extends the LSWR Group's activities led by Giorgio Albonetti, which strengthens the group's leadership position in the engineering sector. Giorgio Albonetti, President of LSWR Group commented "The pandemic crisis has accelerated the transformation and evolution of professional skills. The report, 'Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum' at the end of 2020 reveals that 50% of all employees will need to retrain by 2025 following an increase in technologies, the economic impact of the pandemic, and the increasing in automation. These are the reasons why we believe it is essential to increase training, updating, and quality professional information right away; we believe it is essential to increase our commitment to the evolution of people's professional skills. The skills and assets acquired by Fiera Milano Media help to consolidate Quine's role as a cultural reference in the field of new technologies and technical knowledge".
Marco Zani, CEO of Quine added "Quine constantly increases its commitment to training and communication in the professional field, also qualitatively, with this new acquisition. The portals and magazines expand the already rich offer provided by Quine with products in the Tech, Construction, industrial production, Ho.Re.Ca., and information and communication technologies; the goal is to continue the work done so far by offering increasingly useful and increasingly interesting content to effectively respond to the challenges that the pandemic crisis and digital transformation impose".
Here at Napier, we are always supportive of an acquisition, and we are looking forward to seeing the direction Quine will take the Fiera Milano Media publications in.
PCIM Europe 2021 Confirmed as Digital Event
PCIM Europe has been confirmed as a digital event for 2021. Having originally been postponed to the late summer, organizers have now made the decision for the event to be fully digital, due to the ongoing challenges faced by the current pandemic, with the industry reluctant to commit to an on-site event.
PCIM Europe 'digital days' will take place in an online format, across five days from the 3rd-7th May 2021, and will offer suppliers and users the opportunity to expand their knowledge on key developments, and connect with other professionals.
In addition to exhibitor profiles, the conference program will provide a mix of live and on-demand presentations, followed by discussions with the speakers.
Although this is an unsurprising move from organisers, with the future of the pandemic still unclear, it's great to see that a virtual event will go ahead, especially considering that the first PCIM Digital Days last year, was very successful.
To find out more information on the event and how you can attend, please click here.
A Napier Webinar: Landing Pages: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Here at Napier, we understand that landing pages are a key area of your marketing strategy. If your landing page is not optimised for success, your results can suffer.
Napier recently held a webinar 'Landing Pages: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly', which analyses the layout and content of landing pages used by a variety of B2B technology companies. We address:
- Our honest opinion of good and bad landing pages
- Factors that influence landing page performance
- What makes a landing page generate leads
- Tips, and tricks for easy landing page fixes
- How the best companies optimise landing pages
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Landing Pages: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Good afternoon and welcome to our latest Napier webinar. In this webinar, we're going to look at landing pages, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And hopefully I've got everything set up. So it's all going to work now. Apologies for flicking backwards and forwards when we started to make sure all the the content was set up. So what are we going to do? Well, today, we're going to actually look at what makes a great landing page. So we're going to really try and understand not only what landing pages actually are and what their purpose is, but also how we need to make landing pages and what the industry thinks are basic rules of thumb to make good landing pages, we're going to look at what people do in terms of different landing pages. So we'll look at the automation industry, the software industry, will actually look at what some agencies are doing for their landing pages. And we'll also look at the experts, the people who run marketing automation platforms. And what we'll do is we'll try and have a look and work out what these guys are doing and what's good, and what's not. Or, in fact, what's the good, the bad and the ugly. And at the end of the webinar, we'll finish as we always do with five tips. So top five tips for landing page design, based upon, you know, partly best practice, but also a lot about what we've learned during the during the research we did prior to the webinar when we put together the content.
So we're gonna move on and start off by looking at what a landing page is. This is a Wikipedia definition of a landing page. And there's there's a lot to it. But basically, it comes down to what's highlighted in red. And so the first thing is a landing page is a single web page. I guess that's pretty much given away by the fact it's called a landing page. It is just a web page. But the key thing is, is the landing page display, directed sales copy, that's a logical extension of whatever is promoting that page. So an advertisement or search result or a link. And landing pages are generally used for lead generation. So these are the key things from what Wikipedia thinks is one page that fits within a campaign is a logical extension of whatever drives you to that page. And it should be used for lead generation. This is not necessarily what everybody believes in the landing page. And so we will see that the way some people use landing pages is slightly different. And we'll talk about whether that's the right or wrong way to do it in particular, how important it is to generate leads from a landing page. So we tried to do some research on what makes a great landing page. And lots of people on the internet have lots of very strong ideas about what works and what doesn't in landing pages. In fact, there were so many different ideas, we decided to pick out some of the more fun ones. So people recommended having the right sent to the landing page or the appropriate colours, or to include pain or to include pleasure. And these are all genuine recommendations from the web. And I think you know, the truth is, is that, as we'll see, there are some good practices that people should observe for landing pages, particularly when you're trying to focus on lead conversion.
But actually, ultimately, for all the advice on the internet, the great landing pages are the ones that work best. And there are two things really that landing pages need to do the first obviously, if their lead generation tool is to generate high quality leads, so landing pages should maximise the high quality leads. But also, and we'll look at this later on as we go through. Actually there is a real benefit in landing pages, minimising the number of people who register who aren't potential customers. So minimising the time wasters is a secondary thing, but actually, I think an increasingly important thing for great landing pages. And so I mean, in conclusion, you know, we've been out there we've looked at what all the experts say, whether they be marketing companies or marketing automation tools, vendors. And, you know, there are some general best principles, but few people agree on really what defines a great landing page. And so ultimately, we'd suggest that finding the pages that convert your audience, that's what really matters, and that's what is the most important thing for you and for anyone else building landing pages.
Those of you who are Napier clients, I know some Napier clients and some non-clients here, the Napier clients be familiar with our four step process. And our four step process actually works really well when it comes to looking at landing page development. So our four steps to determine focus, deliver and enhance, the first step determine is really to understand the situation. So what's the goal of the landing page? How does it fit into the campaign? What's it trying to achieve? And that's really important, because that then lets you set the metrics against which you're going to measure that landing page. The second step is focus. That's all about the audience and the messaging. So who are you targeting with the landing page? And then what are their motivations? What's driving them? To engage with you and download the content or fill in the form for whatever other reason? And particularly what stage of the customer journey are they likely to be in? Content offers and landing pages are very different for people who are existing customers, when compared with an audience that perhaps isn't familiar with your brand. So in that focus stage, really think about where the person might be in the customer journey. Delivery is obviously about creating the patient that's about following breast best practice. And what I'm trying to show you is that, you know, whilst there are people being very creative and putting a lot of effort into landing pages, actually, you can create fairly straightforward standard landing pages that are very effective without too much effort. And then the last stage in our four step process is enhance. And, you know, clearly, with landing pages, they are very measurable. So definitely measure test and test again, on those landing pages. It's important to remember, though, that, for a lot of b2b companies, the volumes are not huge.
So a lot of our clients are not looking to sell, you know, a vast number of products, as a consumer company would. So quite often, you'll find that the volume of people completing the form is fairly small. And that may not be enough to signify that any difference is statistically significant or not, I'm not going to go into the massive statistical significance. If you want to understand that a bit more, please play about with our tool we have on our website, which is an A B test tool. And it will actually tell you whether the difference is statistically significant or not. Basically, what that means is once it's statistically significant, the difference is probably due to performance actually being drift different, as opposed to just randomness of who goes to which page. And we see quite often people making decisions, when the sample sizes are so small, that actually it's far more likely to be randomness causing a difference in results, that a difference in performance. So, you know, please make sure you understand that when you do testing. And for this reason, we often see people doing different tests over a long period of time over several campaigns. So you may only be able to AB test one thing in each campaign you run, because you're focusing on high value, but relatively low volume form fills. So if you can keep learning from each campaign, the next campaign and the next campaign will be the best. So it's not necessarily keep testing and testing within one campaign, but across all of your campaigns. So this is really the way to approach it is to think about what we're doing today use this determine and focus stage to really understand what we need to do before we build the landing page and then test. From my point of view, where I see problems is where people think that it's all about design hacks, and it's all about using, you know, the right shade of red in the headline, it's not actually poorly planned campaigns will not really benefit from design hacks, they'll still perform poorly. And the only thing that is really going to work is planning the campaign well, and that needs you to think through the goals, the objectives and the audience and the messaging before you start building that landing page. So here's some ideas on what we think are great landing page designs. We've got eight points that we'd like to bring out. I think like everyone else on the internet, everybody's got their own views this is our view. And it's inevitably not that different from some of the other things you'll see. So the first thing and the most important thing is the landing page must fit the flow of the campaign. If you remember the Wikipedia definition, said that it should be related to the ad or the link that drove people to the landing page. This is crucially important and it is Incredibly often forgotten. So we'll see some landing pages today that really don't fit the flow.
The second thing is a great headline. And it's a great headline is one that resonates with your audience. It's interesting that HubSpot did some research A while ago. And they showed the single most important factor on a landing page, in terms of conversion was actually the name they gave to the content that they were offering. And that obviously is driven in the headline as well. So it's really important to make sure that the title of the content and the headline a really compelling clear layout is very important. It's generally a good idea to include bullet points to make it very easy for people to pick out the reasons why they need to download the content, or what they'll get from downloading the content. And typically, landing pages or standard are laid out in two columns, the left hand column, displaying, you know, what the content is about, and the right hand column being the form. And we'll see that used several times going forward this clear, simple, straightforward layout. And we can compare slightly different approaches from different companies. Calls to Action are very important on landing pages. And if we look at calls to action on landing pages, they really need to be calls to action. So don't be subtle or clever, you really need to very directly say, the reason why people need to download or why they need to fill in the form, and then drive them to do that. And we see people using calls to action very effectively in the headlines beneath the body copy above the form, and in particular on the form submission button as well. And here's a useful tip is on the form submission button, we always recommend highlighting what people are getting. So get my white paper now or download my white paper, rather than what they're doing submit my details. So if you emphasise what they're getting, that will typically increase the conversion rate, because psychologically, people are thinking about the benefit they get, rather than the cost in terms of the data they're giving up. The right copy is very important. And this just needs to be very clear and explain what the person will get for filling in the form. Make sure that copy is very direct. And don't make it too long, make sure it's concise. Shorter is always better on my landing page, the whole goal of the landing page is to get people to convert it is not to get people to spend hours reading detailed copy. So all the copies should be directed towards encouraging people to fill that form out. And as part of that, you really need this inescapable why and I guess this is what a lot of people call, you know, highlight the pain on landing pages. But hopefully the product or service that you're promoting through a landing page will actually have something that they solve. So a challenge or a problem that is going to be solved. So really making clear what the problem is and how you solve it. That inescapable Why is very important as part of that copy.
And we found that urgency definitely helps. And that can be as simple as download now or download today. But I think certainly, you know, what you don't want to do is have more laid back copy, it needs to be very enthusiastic copy. And it does need to say, you know, download now fill in the form now. And that, again, will increase landing page conversion rates. And then finally match the form fields to the offers. And this is a really interesting thing is that when we've looked at form fields, and how many fields are on that form, it's not always that shorter is better. And we've actually seen some landing pages convert better when we increase the number of fields. Now typically, most people particularly in b2b, have more fields than the visitor is prepared or keen to fill in. So typically, I would say reducing the number of fields, reducing the information is going to get better conversion rates. But sometimes when you offer a particularly high value piece of content, or you're offering something that's going to involve work, perhaps you're offering, you know, some sort of assessment or you know, an analytic tool for the customer, then actually then where the value is high. putting more formfields in can actually help increase the conversion rates. Because simply asking for an email when you're offering something of high value, it creates dissonance with the landing page visitor, whereas asking for details if you're clearly giving something of value It reinforces that value. And it seems to work. So really work on making the fields match the offer. And again, ultimately, the only way you can be sure about the right number of fields is by testing. So these are ideas that they are, I guess what you call hacks, as I referred to them earlier, so they don't compensate for poorly planned campaigns. So it's really important to make sure you do the planning. But all of these tips will help you. And we'll talk about some of these as we go through and look at different landing pages. So firstly, we need to find some landing pages to look at. And that's actually potentially quite challenging because most companies don't expose the landing pages that they use, they tend to only be accessible through campaigns. But they're fortunate there is an easy way to find landing pages. And that's by viewing Google ads. So here, people are paying ads and directing to a defined landing page that they've chosen. And so I think we can go and have a look and see what some companies are doing in terms of their landing pages for Google ads.
So the first search we did was looking for a 10 kilowatt variable frequency drive. So this is basically electronics that will power a motor. And a variable frequency drive is is an efficient way of doing that. And 10 kilowatts is a relatively low power level. So it's not a particularly difficult or unusual search, pretty common search and automation. And we produced a number of results when we ran the search. Obviously, if you've run any of these searches, now, you may see the same results, you may see slightly different ones. And this is why we've embedded it in the PowerPoint. So we've got the the pages we wanted to see. So if we look at this, there are four companies that appear at the top in the four potential ad spaces for variable speed drives. And so we're going to have a look and see which ones have the best landing page, what we'll do is we'll actually flip between the browser and the PowerPoint, so that you can see the landing page in full otherwise we'd have to truncate it on the presentation. So let's go have a look at who these four companies are and what they've done. So this is the first company, I'm not entirely sure how we pronounce it. But that is a Chinese company offering drives. And you can see, they've just routed to a product page. And this isn't great, because I'm left with a product page that I can scroll down, I'm not really sure even actually whether they make 10 kilowatt drives. I mean, I do know they make variable frequency drives, which is a start. But I don't know if they make the product I want and all the work is being left with me, I've got to do all the work to find out whether it's a Gd 20, or a Gd 350 that I really care about. And clearly, unless I'm experienced and know that different family names, none of these family names are really going to help me in terms of finding products.
And inverters UK do a similar thing. So perhaps a less attractive landing page. But here again, we see we've we've got a list of products. And we've got the opportunity to buy online or read more. I mean, unfortunately, with some of these products, we don't even know if the product is at 10 kilowatt drive. So we don't even know if it matches. So buying online is not going to be very helpful here. Because I'm not going to go and buy something, if I've got no idea whether it's the right product. And another company here on softstart, UK who are promoting Delta drives, they have an even more sparse product page. And this reading to product pages is quite common as a landing page. And generally speaking, it's a really bad idea. And you know, I have no idea where there are 200 or 2000, or as cp 2000. Drive is what I'm looking for. And it really doesn't help me it's putting all the work back onto me. And I'm very likely to move back and look for alternative suppliers that are easier to find. This is really not a great landing page again. However, not everybody routes to product pages. We actually have a company here KB who brought you to the homepage. And this is interesting because we've searched for variable speed drives a 10 kilowatt variable speed drive and variable speed drives don't actually appear on the landing page. So we go to their homepage, and we scroll down and it's going to tell me about their trade shows. But it's not actually She's going to tell me about their variable speed drives. So, again, not a great solution routing people to the homepage.
So let's summarise what we learnt here. So the product family landing page, so I'll call it, it's not really a landing page, it's a very lazy approach to doing things like Google ads, all you're doing is routing people to an existing page. And in this particular example, we've got a number of problems. So you know, there's a very weak headline, the layout is kind of confusing, there's an awful lot of links all over the place that I could click on. The copy is poor, it's not optimised for lead gen lead generation. And actually, if you look on the right hand side, I mean, the the hero banner primarily shows products that are not the product I want. And they do have a chat icon. So I mean, there's a potential there, I guess, to generate leads. The top thing is search your products. Well, I've already searched I mean, they should know what products I'm looking for, because they know what I searched. And then it's all down to me to try and understand which products and typically products are organised by product families. But the chances are, if I'm coming to the landing page from a Google ad, or from a LinkedIn ad, or some other web source, I probably am not an expert on the company, fact, I've probably got very little idea or awareness about the company, which is why they're running advertising. And so to then require me to navigate via a set of proprietary product family names is really hard work. And it's not a great way to great experience.
So it's not a great way to create a landing page. And the homepage is even less effective. As I said, it prevents presents content that is not related to our search. There's lots of distractions. And even if we click on the menu, and go and have a look at what they're good in Drive technology, even that doesn't tell me where whether or not they have a 10 kilowatt drive. So I have to start going in and looking and researching. It's, again, it's not a great solution. And it's a really bad experience for customers. So don't route people to the homepage. So we've given the world industry information quite a hard time over their landing pages. So perhaps we ought to either pick on another industry or find an industry that does it better. And so let's look at the software development industry. So static analysis is a general term for software that looks at code and tries to identify issues. We did try and search for a specific version of a static analysis tool. But actually, most of the time when we did that we were returned ads that weren't about static analysis tools. And this is very interesting, because we've actually seen some issues, even with this, these results here of poorly targeted ads. So I certainly think you know, one of the things we've learned is that software industry isn't very good at targeting. Anyway, let's have a quick look at some of the landing pages that we got from this search.
So the first landing page is a landing page here from synopsis. And it's an interesting landing page, I mentioned this two column layout, and you'll start seeing people use it in the software sector. So it appears that the software industry is a little more sophisticated. They are thinking about ways to drive leads and generate leads. And they have a landing page here with a form. That's, you know, using a pretty standard layout, it's a pretty ok, kind of landing page. The only problem is it doesn't really follow the flow. If you look at this, apparently synopsis is a leader for sassed, which is static application security testing, which is actually something that is slightly different from static analysis. So it's not quite the same tool as I was looking for. And it's also somewhat self centered in terms of a headline there. You'll also see there's a lot of different menu options here. If the goal is to get people to download the report, then why are you offering all these menu options, it makes no sense to do that. And it's just distracting from the the form, which is where you want people to concentrate. Parasoft is another company, again, similar layout. So we've got two columns here. Interestingly, they've used bullet points and made the bullet points very, very clear, which is generally a very effective way to increase conversion rates is to highlight what you get. And there's a couple of downsides to this page. I mean, the first is is the headline is anything but compelling. It doesn't actually even tell me What they're offering.
So there's a form, but it just tells me, you know that they make static code analysis tools. It doesn't tell me what it's offering, you have to read the text to do that. And you actually have to go and read the text on the form. And the other problem we see with this particular landing page is that were offered a white paper on how to choose a modern static analysis tool. But on the left hand side, the body copy that we have this paragraph of copy is all about how amazing parasoft is. And so again, in terms of that flow, I'm not sure I'm going to read how amazing parasoft is, and then believe they're offering me a truly independent white paper that that's going to help me choose the right tool, I'm just thinking, they're going to offer me a white paper that tells me choose parasoft, because that's the one we want to sell. And you'll see as a couple of extra foot film fields here. And so they're asking more information, which is likely to reduce the conversion rate, although phone numbers optional. And like synopsis, they've got a very clear message, download white paper on the button. Per force is another company, they're doing almost exactly the same offer as parasoft. So they're offering a white paper on how to choose the best static code analysis. But if you look at this, this is a little bit easier to read, it's a little bit nicer layout, don't have such a huge amount of body copy at the start. And they actually have more fields in their form. But I think this is, you know, possibly the best layout in terms of being something that's compelling and interesting. And again, of course, they're using the standard bullet points there in terms of making it clear as to why you need to download. There's nothing in the way of urgency here other than they've changed the download white paper to download now. So they've got a little bit of urgency with the other two didn't. But it's not really pushing and having clear calls to action. And then lastly, we've got a product here called sahi. Pro. I don't want to talk about this in too much detail. But they're offering a an option for a demo rather than downloading a white paper. So the question is, our people when they first discover your brand, likely to want to demo is the very first thing, or would they like something else? before that? So I don't know. I mean, these guys may be right. They may, they may be experts, but it feels a bit of a lazy landing page. In particular, they've got a completely useless form field here, which is your message. So this form you fill in to request a demo? I'm not sure what the message would be other than Can I have a demo, please. So we've got a completely pointless field in here that we really don't need. And I strongly recommend that they take it out. So let's have a look at a bit of a summary. And we'll also have another little dig at sorry, pro when we look at the the page in more detail.
So,again, we're trying to categorise these landing pages. And this is the independent report or White Paper Type landing page. And I think synopsis you know, did they do an okay job of it. It's not brilliant. It's not. It's not something that's compelling in terms of the offer. But the layouts clean, we could do with fewer menu options to distract us. And also, I guess the question is, you know whether this is the right thing for top of the funnel, and it may, it may well work for static analysis. I'm not sure. But often people want analyst reports once they've shortlisted companies, rather than right at the start. As I mentioned before, you know, unfortunately, it's actually about a slightly different topic, or a very specific form of static analysis. And this is an issue with some of the analyst reports. We see this with clients, where they've spent a lot of money on analysts reports. And I understand that, you know, these things are not cheap. They involve a lot of research, and they are really important to the company. But sometimes they get used a little too broadly. And it doesn't matter how compelling This is. If I want a static analysis tool to evaluate the code I've written for my automotive engine management system. I don't care about stuck in a static application security testing. It's not relevant to me because it's not security I want I'm looking for bugs. So they've pushed this white paper, in my mind to a little bit of a broad audience. And that's a mistake with landing pages is when you think you've got a great content offer. You try and offer it too widely, and then you don't fit that flow. You're not in the middle of the flow that really matters. The parasol font is similar, we're going to call it a white paper.
As I mentioned, you know, one of the issues here is the copy is not great. And the headlines not great, I think there's a lot they could do in terms of tidying up what they've written on the page, making it cleaner and clearer, and less of a marketing puff piece, and much more of a reason to fill in the form. Because ultimately, that's why they're running this campaign is to get people to fill the form. And the other thing as well we see with parasoft, is that parasoft have social media icons on their, on their landing page, I see this quite often, it's not uncommon. I always wonder why they're there. You know, I'm not sure anyone's going to tweet, hey, look, I've just clicked through on a parasoft Google ad, I think it's an unlikely thing to do. And I'm really not entirely sure whether they work or not. If they're rooting people to this page from other sources, maybe it would be more useful. But if you're looking at something that's purely driven by advertising, I'd probably remove those, because again, it's more distraction. And then finally, we've got the Asahi pro one, it's an interesting layout, it's still two cons, it's very broad, very wide. And the other thing as well is actually apart from very poor English in the copy. Once you've read the copy and understand what the product is, you actually work out it's not a static analysis tool. So one of the issues of offering something like a demo, is that if you get people requesting it, but you're not targeting the right audience, you could end up not only wasting their time, but wasting your time. So someone looking for a, you know, a C sought static analysis tool might end up arranging a demo with sorry, broke, because that's the only option they've got. And then very quickly, find in the demo, that they're wasting their time. And it's costing you as a company time to set that demo up. And it's also causing a really terrible experience for that user, who might well want test automation software in the future. But at the moment doesn't. So demos are very interesting and are used widely. And we'll see, particularly with some marketing automation tools, it's a very common offer. But equally, I think you have to be very careful that you don't make the big offer straightaway. Because although it's easy to pick on, you know, someone like sypro, who who've not targeted Well, it is actually very easy to find your ads, reaching an audience that's not quite the one you wanted. And you could end up with these spurious form fills. So that that's really where we are in terms of the software. And so what we'll do is we'll go on, and we'll have a look at marketing automation agencies. So we're not running any Google ads, I mean, but clearly, we're going to marketing automation agencies, these are the experts, these guys are going to be awesome. They gotta be awesome.
Although actually, you'll notice SharpSpring, which isn't a marketing automation agency, is running Google ads against marketing automation agency, which probably isn't great. And those guys should really know because their marketing automation company, and again, you know, maybe it works, maybe it's amazing, but my gut feel is almost certainly SharpSpring is probably not getting great results from this particular search. Because people don't want a platform, they've got to run themselves, they want an agency to do it for them. So these three ads, we're gonna look at two, we're gonna look at the the two agencies. And we won't look at the SharpSpring ad that's not related to agencies. So let's see how good the experts are. Interestingly, and none of these were set up, by the way, they all these searches were done, and put together based on some ideas that came to mind. I wasn't looking for things that didn't work. If I click through to protocol, they send me to their homepage.
These guys are the experts in marketing automation, and they send me to their homepage. And if you look at this, you know, it's not really what I want to see if I'm looking for a marketing automation. I mean, there's a special offer here how to unlock the potential of marketing automation. I don't actually want to unlock it. I want an agency to unlock that for me. And okay, as we scroll down, that there are more relevant calls to action. So here's a speak to a consultant today call to action. And we can scroll down and there's actually a free ebook about what is market automation. So they do have some offers that will route to landing pages that have forms and we can have a look at one of these forms now. By clicking on the E book, and you can see again, a slightly different version on what I call the industry standard sort of two column landing page with the pitch here, and then the form on the right. Interestingly, if you look on the right, they're only asking for first name and email address, which actually I think is very worth worth considering. Because these guys do understand about conversion. And they know when they get to the form, that you actually don't need to get everything first time. Once you've got that email address, you can keep communicating. And you can use progressive profiling, keep asking more questions, to understand more about that person. And interestingly, as well, they've got a download and read button here, really pushing the benefit, you're not just going to download an ebook, you're actually going to get to read it. So really highlighting the benefits side. The other agency that appeared on the Google Ads was a company called clevertouch. And interestingly, again, here, clevertouch don't actually read a specific landing page, they read the page that talks about their Marketo services. Now, the first thing I'd say is that Marketo isn't the only marketing automation system in the world. In fact, you know, the good news is, is SharpSpring told me that when I searched, but also obviously, there's HubSpot, and aliqua, and pardot. And all these other systems. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to get people coming, looking for a martial Information Agency, that then get routed to a landing page that might immediately turn them off. And it's very interesting. So I think here, you know, clevertouch are being very clear. I mean, they're saying their market. So it's really clear right at the top. And they're prepared to pay for clicks from people who don't use Marketo. Because they clearly feel that marketing automation agency is the right search term for them. So they've, I think, almost deliberately got some dissonance here between the ads, and the search term. And then where they route people to, they do actually mention on the ad their market partner as well. And then if we scroll down the page, we can see that there's lots of different information. There's some social proof with some awards. And also some customers. And then as we get to the bottom, we have the form. And they have a fairly simple form here. And they're asking for a job title, company name. And they're also asking for phone number. So asking for quite a lot. So two very different approaches from agencies that are basically direct competitors. But overall, I didn't really see anything that was particularly different from the software, guys. I mean, you know, all the previous companies, so there was a homepage routing. And there was actually a product page. But what I'd like to see is, you know, really what marketing automation companies do.
So these guys have the best data, they have more data on what works and what doesn't. And they should really know. So we're going to have a look and see what's current best practices. So we did some searches. And one of the things we did was was Have a look at HubSpot very popular marketing automation system. I wonder what competitors say and one of the competitors a company called engagement. It's quite a small company relative to HubSpot. And they have a landing page that I found fascinating. If we look at clarity and compelling copy, they're very direct. It is the best HubSpot alternative apparently. And so they're making it clear what they're doing. Don't buy HubSpot by us. They're also highlighting the pain. And HubSpot has a reputation for being relatively expensive. And you can see here there's a very clear highlight of the difference between the HubSpot cost and the engage PayPal cost. So they are being very, very aggressive in terms of highlighting the pain and how they fix it. And they've also got some great bullet points here, you notice they don't have any body copy at all. It's some headings and bullets. And I think a lot of us marketers, we actually quite like writing we quite like the look of our own copy. And sometimes we should take a step back. This is really quite a compelling landing page. And then lastly, and they only asked for the email address, so they're not asking for anything else other than the email address. These guys know that with marketing automation. Once you have an email address, and you can engage with somebody, you can then start building the lies you don't have to get it all up front.
A similar approach is taken with a company called Active Campaign. Active Campaign, I basically routing to a landing page, very different copy. Again, they don't use bullet points, they just asked for your email address. And both of these are starting free trial. As I mentioned, this is very copy and marketing, very common in marketing automation. We can scroll down and see that they've got, you know, rankings from GT, which is a online ranking site. And then they've got lots of information here about the product. And when we get to the bottom again, we've again got a form. So they've got two forms on the page. And they're looking to get people to sign up and promote that is obviously targeted around getting as many leads as possible. But interestingly, you see, they're trying to ask the questions, answer the questions first. So there's quite a lot of information here. And actually, this may be might be an indication of a landing page where a company is trying not to overdo the, the number of leads and focus on people who really are genuinely interested.
So just to recap what we've seen there. And really, I mean, this is what we call the competitive landing page. So this is the HubSpot versus engaged Bay. And we think it's a great example of a good compelling landing page, where you're looking at comparing yourself against another vendor. The immediate trial, as I said, it's not unusual for software as a service, probably won't work in many other industries. So it's not necessarily something we recommend quite often with, you know, clients we're working with, they're offering, you know, b2b equipment, technical equipment, that can cost a huge amount of money. So free trial is not the way to go. It's much more about providing information. But because of free trial costs engaged by nothing, it clearly makes sense for them to do it. So we kind of dropped a hint on recent landing page trends. And it's interesting to see where some of the other marketing automation companies are going. And our opinion is, is that actually, they're really focused on high quality leads, they're not focused on quantity. And this is interesting, because pretty much all of these marketing automation platform companies, they produce platforms, that will give you pure conversion rate, you know, there were this many form fields for this many pages, and no indication of quality in the standard reporting. And so it's interesting, these guys have worked it out. But maybe they haven't quite fed that back into the tools. So what we're going to look at is look at a couple of, you know, longer content rich pages. And there'll be seen to be split into sections, you'll notice different calls to action, and actually different ways of achieving the call to action as well, that we'll talk about as we go through.
So this example here, which is Active Campaign is a good example, where each different section describes a little bit more about the products. So it's a good example of, of the sort of layout, but we see this with many other vendors. So here's another vendor. So Salesforce, and here you can see Salesforce, creating a landing page that's quite long, that's got a call to action at the top to watch a video, it's got information on Salesforce here, we've then got a guided tour offer, we've got more videos in the tour again. And then we've got to talk to the experts. And then we've got a free trial right at the bottom. So Salesforce have taken the view that actually if people get to the bottom, they're probably interested. And so they're probably at the point where I want to try and convert them to a free trial. But they don't want to do it at the top. So unlike Active Campaign, they're looking at a slightly different approach here. But you notice there's different ways to look at content. So you can view a video or you can talk to experts, or you can have a free trial. And that's mixed on the same page. Now, this is very interesting, because typically, you'll hear a rule saying don't mix calls to action, one call to action per page. But actually, all they're trying to do is get you to engage. And I think it's actually very much the same type of call to action. But for different formats, whether people want to see a video, or talk to a salesperson or try the product themselves. That's what they're offering. So it's the same offer, but for different ways for really to meet the needs of different people who could land on the page. HubSpot also do something similar. Now interestingly, HubSpot leave a few menu options at the top. So a limited number of menu options, not the full website menu. And I can tell you that you know, two years ago HubSpot was telling every agency to take out every menu option from the top it didn't work so they've done some testing and changed their mind. on that, but this is a another uncompetitive landing page. And interestingly here, they're pushing a demo. So we've got a button at the top to get a demo, we then got a button almost immediately get a demo in the middle, we then start talking about why, as we move on, there's a lot of copy here to work through. As we keep going lots of lots of copy, lots of information about the products, and eventually another call to action to get a demo. And clearly, this is, you know, looking to make sure people really understand what they're getting when they when they use HubSpot. And so that was the landing pages that we wanted to cover. I mean, I think it's interesting what we're seeing with some of these content, rich landing pages, they do require an awful lot of effort to create. And I would say that if you're not at the stage, where you're creating, you know, really solid two column, you know, landing pages, and you're targeting multiple landing pages, so that the content on the landing page matches what's driven the person for the landing page, don't try and get into building these content, rich landing pages, they're very time consuming, very expensive. And you're just going to struggle to build enough that work. You know, and HubSpot, literally, for example, has a landing page that looks at how they compare to competitors for all their different major competitors. So they've built multiple long landing pages that are just those competitive ones.
The one thing I would say about some of these longer landing pages, though, is that they're actually very good for SEO most landing pages are terrible for SEO, because we're not trying to put content in to make people read the copy, we're trying to put content in to make people download the form. And so they're not desperately engaging pages from Google's point of view, whereas these longer ones are. So there may be an opportunity to create some here. But as I say, you know, you have to get right. And these more complex landing pages require a lot of testing, because if you're not careful, all you do is you distract the person from the call to action, and you never get a conversion, it's much harder to get to get conversions from here, you've really got to design the page, right? So you need a volume of people coming to that page, and you need time to test it to make sure it works. So our recommendation initially is actually the standard two column for most clients, and for most campaigns, is probably the best and most effective way to create landing pages that will give you the best return on investment.
So what are our top five landing page tips? Well, tip one is to create custom landing pages, don't ever route people to your homepage or a product page, it just isn't a good experience, and create many different custom landing pages so that the experience is as smooth as possible, from whatever search or LinkedIn ad, or even link on your email that you've provided people. The second thing is get the targeting rights. And of course, you know, one of these landing pages I talked about that try and filter out the people who are not really interested, they're important if you've not got the targeting, right, if you have got the targeting perfect, and you're only attracting people or potential customers, just get them to fill the form. And straightaway, there's no need to do any more filtering. And I'd recommend being clear and very direct. And and you'll notice that you know, the people who are the experts, the market automation companies, they're not shy about being brave. They're not British when it comes to landing pages. So be very clear about what you're offering and why people should fill it in, and particularly on the calls to action. And we've talked about getting the why right, you know, and I think the engage Bay landing page where it really highlighted the issue of cost and limitations on HubSpot versus engage Bay. That was a pain point for a lot of companies. And they were very clear about how they solved it by charging a lower price.
So I think getting that pain point, right, the pain point for probably most of the people listening on the call today for everybody will not be price, it'll be something else, but understand what you're solving and make it really clear. And finally, don't ask for too much information. And if you look at the the forms that you get from the market information companies, you know, typically they're just asking for email because they know they can use the tool to then get the other information about that person. And there's also data enrichment tools you can use as well that you can generate information as well. So if you've got an email, you can sometimes look up you know, company name and things like that. And then finally, you know, the bonus tip and if you've sat with us through this whole webinar is probably a bit of a downer, but your audience is unique. Nobody's got the answers. We certainly don't have all the answers. So do test different approaches, I mean, follow best practice, but don't follow it to the point that you're not prepared to try different things. You know, some approaches will work with some audiences, and some will work with others. But, you know, it's really important to test and find out what works with you. And then finally, as a summary, you know, the landing pages take work, I mean, it really does take time to create these landing pages, particularly of creating a significant number. But if you're spending a lot of money driving traffic to your website, through ads, or through social or through email marketing, getting the landing page, right is really the key thing in terms of driving the number of leads you're gonna get. And so the payoff from getting the right landing pages is huge.
So thank you very much for listening. And I'm afraid I'm very aware that we've overrun our 45 minutes. So what I suggest I do is if anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me, Mike at Napier b2b dot com, all post in the chat. And what I do is I will make sure that I reply to everyone and cover all those questions by email. And so if you've posted in the chat, I will get back to you via email. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. And hopefully we can work together on landing pages.
MachineBuilding.net Welcomes New Editor
Last year, we shared the news of MachineBuilding.Net 's new ownership, and so we were delighted to receive an announcement from the MachineBuilding.Net's team who are welcoming Brian Wall as their new editor.
Known by many in the industrial sector, Brian began his career as a 'classically trained' journalist before moving into technical and engineering publishing. He has been an editor and feature writer across a number of leading titles including Transport Engineer, Engineering Designer (published on behalf of the Institution of Engineering Designers) and FAST Magazine.
With Google analytics revealing that visitor traffic at the website has more than doubled, and sales revenues having also leapt significantly since the acquisition, it's clear to see it's an exciting time for the publication, and we wish Brian the best of luck in his new role.
Handling and Storage Ceases Publishing
The Handling and Storage Publication in Madrid has announced the decision to cease publishing of the print magazine and associated news portal due to the retirement of long term Director Tomás B. Abascal.
Although we are always sad to see a publication close its doors, we wish Tomas the very best in his retirement.
Electronic Specifier to Host 'The Electronics Industry, COVID, Brexit - what will 2021 Hold?' Webinar
Electronic Specifier has announced a new webinar titled 'The Electronics Industry, COVID, Brexit - what will 2021 hold?'. Due to be held on the 24th March 2021, 2pm GMT, the webinar addresses the unprecedented year we all faced in 2020 and will feature industry experts who will offer their perspective from three different areas of the industry. The experts will take a look back on the last year and how it affected the electronics industry, as well as providing insight into 2021 and what the future may hold. Speakers will include:
- Adam Fletcher, Chairman of the Electronic Components Supply Network (ECSN) who will provide the perspective of the electronics industry as a whole.
- Rob Rospedzihowski, President of Sales EMEA of Farnell an Avnet Company who will provide insight from the world of distribution.
- Mark Davies, Global Head of Sales at Harwin who will provide the point of view of the manufacturer.
At Napier, we are looking forward to what will be a really interesting webinar, and what we are sure will reveal some fantastic perspectives into the current shape of the electronics industry.
To register for the webinar, please click here.
The Energyst Launches Modern Fleet Publication
The Energyst publication has recently announced the launch of its new EV magazine, Modern Fleet.
With the EV market growing rapidly, Modern Fleet aims to address the issues businesses face in the energy management sphere. With a focus on targeting those responsible for managing fleet and energy infrastructure within an organisation, the publication addresses energy problems that were once a side issue for fleet managers, but which have now come to the fore due to the UK target to have Net Zero emissions by 2050.
The magazine is split into three core areas and covers:
- The latest electric cars, and development in fuel cell vehicle technology
- News on charging infrastructure, covering the latest charging kit, apps, maps and standardisation and battery management
- Energy management including V2G, onsite generation, grid connection and hydrogen supply
At Napier, we are always delighted to receive an announcement of a new publication, and it's great to see that Modern Fleet will address relevant and important issues within the EV market.
To find out more information, and to read the first edition of the magazine, please click here.
Electronic Specifier's Podcast Continues to Grow
In May 2020, we reported on Electronic Specifier's new podcast series, which aimed to provide listeners with the latest updates and information about the current progress within the electronics industry, covering a wide range of content, including a look into the current technologies shaping the new world, and reviews from all the top electronics shows.
So we were delighted to hear that the ‘Electronic Specifier Insights’ series, is continuing to grow, with several new podcasts live, covering topics from the Women in Electronics community to the latest from Farnell.
At Napier, we think it's encouraging to see a podcast going from strength to strength, and with the UK still in lockdown, its great see Electronic Specifier continue to use its platform to provide readers and listeners with the latest updates.
Listeners can access the podcast via all major streaming services, or via their website.