Over the last few years, a dramatic change in the research and sourcing behavior of engineering, technical and industrial professionals has led many suppliers to take a closer look at their marketing strategies.
With increasing pressure from executives to account for marketing expenditures, marketers are intent on obtaining measurable results from their marketing programs—targeted branding and exposure, qualified web traffic, and sales and marketing opportunities. Many marketers faced a challenging economic environment that left them unable to increase marketing investments or even forced them to cut marketing spending. The important question during a downturn isn’t whether or not the economy will recover—it will; it always does. What’s important to ask is whether your company will be in position to surge as the economy grows. To a large degree, the level of your success will depend on your marketing efforts and capabilities—what you have done during the downturn and what you put in place now to win business during the recovery. You need to make strategic decisions about choosing new media, entering new markets, and positioning products.
Success will also depend on the timing of your efforts. Now is the time to establish marketing plans—formulate strategies, make media choices, justify expenditures— so you are ready to go with an approved marketing plan as your company’s budgets open up and you have marketing funds to invest. GlobalSpec created this Marketing Planning Kit to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your current marketing choices, calculate the value of existing marketing programs, understand changes in the marketing climate and plan more effective lead generation strategies for 2011. Our intent is to help you define and achieve your marketing goals and objectives for the year ahead.
Engineering, technical and industrial professionals with purchasing influence regularly use GlobalSpec to actively search for components, products, services, and technical information. For suppliers, GlobalSpec offers expert online marketing advice and tailored solutions. We help you become highly visible to, and discovered by, potential customers—through a searchable online catalog of your products and services, e-newsletters, targeted banner advertisements, online events, keyword ads and more, GlobalSpec delivers customers … not clicks.
Using this information provided in the 2011 Marketing Planning Kit, you will be able to answer tough questions every business manager faces: