Internet Marketing Seo

I was sitting at home in my office recently late one night filling out my tax return online when suddenly, in a flash a thought struck me. The two sure things in life that we can all expect are death and taxes, nothing new here. So death we are pretty sure about and taxes we can argue that the Bush tax cuts presented a huge tax relief to the wealthiest Americans; depending on whether you’re a conservative or liberal. However, the fastener industry also benefits in a very substantial way from this statement in that the third sure thing is every product in life needs fastening. Think about it; the chair you sit on, the car you drive, the

golf clubs you blame for the lousy score you got on the last round you played, the TV, the Computer, do I need to go on? Again, look at one of the first inventions in history, the wheel, tell me what wheel in today’s day and age does not need a bearing? Not even McDonalds, Walt Disney, or 3M, GM, and IBM can profess that their products or services are sure things.

So why is the fastening or bearing industry and countless others not rolling in the dough? Economic conditions suggest that the world’s middle class is growing, so the need for consumer products is growing and the need to fasten those products has to be growing. The fact that

North American and European light vehicle production will remain flat at 16 million units and 20 million units respectively, in emerging markets such as China, India, and Korea, the production numbers are expected to grow by 20%. Once again, why are western commodity industries not rolling in it? Are Asian cars glued together or taped maybe? No, the simple fact is that the fastener industry was once fat, dumb, and happy, now they are just dumb or to put it a better way insane. Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. “

Let’s face facts fasteners are commodities, as are specialty fasteners or “boutique fasteners” as I like to call them.

You can say the same thing for clamps, bearings, valves, seals, gauges, etc. so why are all western Industrial Commodity Manufacturers in the same boat when it equates to their dwindling market share? Insanity is the answer. Someone once shouted through the streets of Boston “Look out! The British are coming, the British are coming!” well guess what “The Chinese are here, the Taiwanese are here, the Indians are here!” in the form of cheap offshore competition, with products that work equally as well as ours.

So let’s look at the insanity; there are many Industrial Registers out there that charge phenomenal amounts of money for your listing, ask yourself why do you want to be listed amongst your competitors

whether they are domestic or offshore? Obviously, the more you pay the better you will rank. This is an OEM purchasing agents dream to have you all compete on price. These registers have evolved from traditional paper to the Internet and so can you. I am not suggesting print is dead by any means since you are most likely reading this article in a printed magazine, but the four P’s of marketing can work equally as well in the traditional channels to business as they can on the Internet and it’s simply called Price, Product, Promotion, and Place. If someone downloads your literature from the Internet, guess what, you just saved $4 in fulfillment labor cost, print, and postage, and to top it off you have just received a lead from a prospective client. Since we are talking about industrial commodity manufacturers here, there’s a good chance your product is not glamorous like Victoria’s Secret or Ferrari for example. So when that prospect does download your literature you got to ask yourself why on earth would anyone want to look at a fastener, or a valve, or a seal, or a bearing? Oh, unless of course they might have a need for it. Ka-ching now you are in business. Why do you have that website anyway? How come your product managers are spending most of their day special pricing instead of promoting your product? Why are distributors using your manufacturing facility as a master distributorship? Did DaVinci paint the Mona Lisa to stuff in a back bedroom closet?

I developed a positioning strategy for a major fastener manufacturer that has immediately disseminated 250,000 leads to their global sales force in the last four years, and these leads are a pure marketing pull from the world’s fortune 1000 manufacturers. They contain the who, the what, the where, and the when and the information sits very neatly in the sales person’s BlackBerry alerting them to the prospects immediate needs, the why. These leads consistently identified $6,000,000 of incremental business or about 10% of new sales for the company on an annual basis and are measured through their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

On top of this, one million pieces of literature were fulfilled through customer self-service equating to $4 million dollars of savings that went straight to the bottom line. Online automated pricing strategies and product discovery methods allow any person internal or external to find and price any product without sacrificing margin, all at the click of a mouse. At the same time prospects have the ability to download 3D drawings of every product in any version of CAD on the planet. The system was designed in such a way that it never says to the user “No matches found” or the dreaded “0 products returned” and hence value was created for all.

The company sits at number 2 in Google

for generic searches for a product that they have not yet even launched, while 4 other competitors who have been selling that commodity for 30 years in the US are nowhere to be found. This is pure positioning, not eMarketing, just marketing! With 250,000 names sitting in their database they can now micro-target and one-to-one message to their massive audience at a fraction of traditional campaign costs. Physical addresses change all the time, but email addresses stay with you wherever you are positioned around the globe. The fact of the matter is that any [http://www.bayrivet.com/products.hrml]distributor and manufacturer can do this, but once again you have to read the definition of insanity. The secret is to make sure your site expounds value, and tells your story, i.e. quality, delivery, discovery, etc. and of course making sure it is highly visible in search engines for any person to find which requires a positioning strategy using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Take a look at your kids; put them in front of a computer at age two or three and they’re already off and running, clicking and pointing at everything they see. Ask yourself how is he or she going to do business with me 20 years from now, assuming you’ll be a going concern then? And speaking of going concerns, where is Digital Equipment Corporation who was once a darling of Wall St? The company’s ultimate demise can be attributed to them

ignoring the disruptive forces of micro-computers in the early eighties and continuously focusing effort on their mini computer technology. Did the arrogance of Xerox, who thought massive copiers that can do everything from copy, collate, and make the coffee open the door to the desktop copiers from offshore manufacturers like Canon and Fuji?

Next time you use an automated teller machine remember that not only are you doing the banks work, you are most likely paying for the privilege of doing the banks work freeing their staff to work on the more value-added features of banking such as writing loans and selling bonds. The same can be said for unattended supermarket checkouts, we use both of these services in the

name of value. Equate these examples to one of your prospects finding and printing your catalogue or portfolio, it’s going to free up your personnel resources to work on creating more value to your customers.

At the end of the day, if you’re an industrial manufacturer of commodity products and you are not constantly changing your methods of doing business then you are the epitome of insanity. Don’t bury your head in the sand and expect that the internet is a passing phase. I ask you to embrace this channel before your competition eats your lunch; don’t be a Digital Equipment Corporation.

Darren Byrne is leading Industrial Marketer with his company Industrial Business Marketing with 25 years of industry experience

in commodity manufacturing and can be reached at [mailto:darren.byrne@industrial-seo.com]darren.byrne@industrial-seo.com 203-264-3533 http://www.industrial-seo.com

Darren Byrne
Industrial Business Marketing
darren.byrne@industrial-seo.com http://www.industrial-seo.com