This research can guide your decisions as you craft or update your social media strategy. As social media use continues to grow in the industrial sector, it’s no longer a question of involvement. You need to make smart, informed decisions on what to deliver to your audience, how to do it and what to expect as a result.

As an effective marketer you know that your most rewarding campaigns are based on solid planning, on-target messages and insightful measurement. Great effort goes into supporting these stages of a successful campaign - with tight budgets and limited resources there is little room for missteps. These six steps will help keep you on the right path, place you ahead of your competitors and lead to smart investments for achieving a meaningful ROI.

The GlobalSpec Tenth Annual Industrial Indicator Survey provides an understanding of how current U.S. economic conditions are impacting organizations in the manufacturing sector.

The survey asked respondents to identify current and projected financial performance, purchasing plans, and other business initiatives in their companies. The results of the survey are compiled and analyzed in this white paper, with recommendations on how suppliers and manufacturers should respond to current economic marketplace conditions to better achieve their marketing goals.

Learn how to understand the various marketing tactics available, and how to make the right marketing choices depending on goals, objectives and ROI expectations.

Get an inside look at how companies are spending their marketing dollars within today’s industrial marketplace.

Use these GlobalSpec Survey results to discover if you're you making the right marketing decisions to position your company to win available business and gain market share - allowing you to capture opportunities available in 2011.

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:

The GlobalSpec Ninth Annual Industrial Indicator Survey provides an understanding of how current U.S. economic conditions are impacting organizations in the manufacturing sector.

The survey asked respondents to identify current and projected financial performance, purchasing plans, and other business initiatives in their companies. The results of the survey are compiled and analyzed in this white paper, with recommendations on how suppliers and manufacturers should respond to current economic marketplace conditions to better achieve their marketing goals.

For manufacturers, distributors and service providers, GlobalSpec offers tailored marketing solutions that put you in control and expert online marketing advice to help you find new customers. We provide highly filtered sales leads and marketing opportunities, qualified Web traffic to your site, product promotion and brand advertising platforms, and a wide range of e-media advertising and marketing solutions including keyword ads, e-mail marketing, banner ad networks and industry-leading e-newsletter advertisements - allowing you to choose the options that fit your unique business needs.

Establishing your company as a thought leader provides benefits beyond what a marketing or advertising program can deliver on its own. As a thought leader, your company will gain credibility in the market and become a trusted advisor and partner. Potential customers will gravitate toward your products and services. Journalists will seek you out for quotes. Analysts will call you for your expert opinion. Industry Web sites will link to you. While this is a compelling list of benefits, what exactly does it mean to be a thought leader? How does your company gain—and sustain—a thought leadership position? What tactics will help you become a thought leader in an era when a vast majority of the engineering, technical, and industrial audience goes online in search of information to educate and help them do their jobs better? This white paper will answer these questions and help you develop a successful strategy for becoming a thought leader in your market space.

What if you could leverage all the benefits of trade shows—lead generation, network building, brand exposure—at a small fraction of the cost and without the hassle of a physical event?

The Best of Trade Shows....Without the Downside.

GlobalSpec online events enable you to do just that. Simulating the physical environment of an educational conference and trade show, these live events run for a full day and remain available for 30 days on-demand—so your exposure and lead opportunities continue for a full month.

As an exhibitor, you have a “custom booth” on the online tradeshow floor. Prospects can “visit” your booth to view catalogs, explore company and product information, or chat live with your company representatives. After the show, exhibitors have access to valuable lead reports that make sales follow-up easy. These downloadable, easy-to-use reports contain full contact details, including title, industry, worksite, and address. And you gain important information on activity within your booth, including who visited, who clicked and watched presentations located in the content tabs, who downloaded sales collateral materials, and more. So at the end of the day, you’ll have your own unique collection of qualified leads – and the knowledge about them to pursue the sale.

Qualified leads. Brand exposure. Direct connections to a hard-to-reach market. All without leaving your desk.

Find out how GlobalSpec events can deliver your company higher ROI.

Who attends GlobalSpec online events? Influential decision makers from the engineering, scientific and industrial communities—in other words, your buyers. They gather, online in real time, to meet with key suppliers, attend educational sessions and enjoy the benefits of a face-to-face event. Many of them are simply not reachable through any other method..

The Internet has changed how industrial buyers identify, research and choose products/services, so it’s crucial for marketers to keep these needs and preferences top-of-mind.

The industrial buy cycle has been around for as long as products have been bought and sold. While the stages of the process haven’t changed over the years, the way buyers navigate through the buy cycle and where they go to get information has changed dramatically.

Learn more about the four stages of the buy cycle and the implications it has for marketers in the industrial sector by downloading “Understanding the Buy Cycle: How to Align Your Marketing with Your Customers’ Buying Process.”

The Marketer’s Dilemma:

Estimating Traffic on Web Sites for Online Advertising Purposes

It’s better to think in terms of conversions, not just traffic. In other words, how good is a Web publisher at helping convert traffic into qualified leads for their advertisers? Before beginning any online advertising program on a Web site, make sure your media partner understands your marketing objectives and can deliver a program to help you achieve those objectives. Consider how easily your products and services can found by customers and prospects conducting searches, how visible your brand and value proposition are to your target audience, and what opportunity you have to convert Web site traffic into leads with full contact information for your sales team. These factors — and not just traffic statistics—will help you make intelligent, effective decisions about where to allocate your online advertising budget.

For manufacturers, distributors and service providers, GlobalSpec offers tailored marketing solutions that put you in control and expert online marketing advice to help you find new customers. We provide highly filtered sales leads and marketing opportunities, qualified Web traffic to your site, product promotion and brand advertising platforms, and a wide range of e-media advertising and marketing solutions including keyword ads, e-mail marketing, banner ad networks and industry-leading e-newsletter advertisements - allowing you to choose the options that fit your unique business needs.

GlobalSpec.com is used regularly by engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial professionals worldwide to search for components, products, technical information and services. GlobalSpec users benefit from domain-expert search engines, a broad range of proprietary and aggregated Web-based content and 60+ e-newsletters - helping them search for and locate products and services, learn about suppliers and access comprehensive technical content. SpecSearch®, GlobalSpec’s trademarked search technology, allows users to search by specification more than 184 million parts in 2,300,000 product families from more than 24,000 supplier catalogs.

E-mail Marketing to Engineering, Technical, Industrial and Manufacturing Professionals: Proven Strategies and Tactics

Marketing experts know that business-to-business e-mail is one of the most effective ways to market to and communicate with customers and prospects. E-mail is cheaper and faster than traditional forms of marketing. You can track the results of e-mails almost from the moment you send them out. Perhaps most important of all for the industrial sector, surveys show that e-mail is the preferred way for many engineers and technical professionals to communicate with manufacturers, suppliers and service providers.

Compiled by the online marketing experts at GlobalSpec, this guide will help you use e-mail as an effective business-to-business marketing tool within the industrial sector. You’ll learn the benefits of e-mail marketing, how to overcome two common hurdles, get tips for creating powerful marketing e-mails and learn about e-mail marketing best practices.

As a publisher of more than 60 e-mail newsletters for the technical audience, GlobalSpec is in a unique position to share its own e-mail marketing experience and give you the tools you need to be a successful e-mail marketer.

GlobalSpec.com is used regularly by engineering, technical and industrial professionals worldwide to search for components, products, technical information and services.

GlobalSpec users benefit from domain-expert search engines, a broad range of proprietary and aggregated Web-based content and over 60 e-newsletters — helping them search for and locate products and services, learn about suppliers and access comprehensive technical content. SpecSearch®, GlobalSpec’s trademarked search technology, allows users to search by specification more than 180 million parts in 2,300,000 product families from more than 23,000 supplier catalogs.

Many industrial marketers devote resources and effort to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a group of techniques to help a company’s Web pages rise higher in the search engine results for specific keyword searches. When done correctly, SEO can drive relevant traffic to your Web site, which can be converted into qualified leads and sales.

The business benefit is certainly attractive, but there is a misconception that SEO is “free” because you don’t pay for the traffic that gets sent to your Web site from organic search results.

In reality, SEO is not free. While the basics can be performed at low cost, advanced SEO techniques require time, expertise and budget. Therefore, any investment you plan to make in SEO should be measured against the benefits you could achieve investing in other marketing programs.

This white paper will help you understand how SEO can fit into your marketing strategy, calculate the resources required for SEO, and become familiar with the range of basic and advanced SEO techniques you can implement. You will learn what SEO can and can’t do and you will be able to weigh an investment in SEO vs. other marketing programs, which will help you make the best use of your marketing budget to achieve your objectives.

Founded in 1996, GlobalSpec invested early on in SEO. We have our own internal team of SEO professionals. They make sure GlobalSpec is found by engineers, technical and industrial professionals using search engines to locate products, services and suppliers. Our team manages a database of more than one million keywords to help drive qualified traffic to suppliers represented on our site. In addition, we manage paid search campaigns in both major and niche search engines and can help you understand how paid search and SEO might fit in your marketing portfolio.

As a marketer, you know leads are only as good as your company’s ability to respond appropriately and track them through the sales process. If you are experiencing any challenges in managing leads or need to increase your number of highly-qualified leads, this paper will be of particular interest to you.

Generating Quality Leads Online – Find Customers, Not Just Clicks

In a recent survey, 73% of industrial marketers stated that customer acquisition or lead generation is their primary marketing goal. Statistics show that over 90% of a manufacturer’s target audience is using the Internet to find the products and services they need. It makes sense that industrial marketers are shifting more of their marketing dollars to online marketing programs because they are proven to be efficient, effective and flexible despite the challenging economy.

With your success in mind, we've assembled this kit containing the tools and marketing best practices that will give you practical ideas and solutions to be successful within this challenging economy.

Read content such as:

• 5 Steps to Becoming a Marketing Hero
• Everything You've Been Asking for in an Online Marketing Partner
• Put Your Marketing Dollars to Work

Achieving your marketing goals begins with the knowledge that points you in the right direction.

Act now. Success is within your grasp.

This industrial marketing focused e-book delivers valuable and timely news, research, analysis and more, such as e-mail marketing, search engine optimization, and lead generation. The book is broken out into four separate sections for easy reference

Enjoy reading as you gain useful information that you can use right now to help you build your brand and your business.

Table of Contents

• Take Online Events to the Next Level
• The Top Eight Trends in Industrial Marketing
• The Top Ten Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
• Marketing Must Change as the Economy Recovers
• Make Your Company an Industry Thought Leader
• Four Ways to Increase Qualified Leads
• Tips for Building Strong Customer Relationships
• Ten Low-Cost Tactics to Market Your Business
• Three Tactics that Belong in Your Marketing Mix
• Five Things to Include on Your Web Site—and Five to Avoid
• Seven Ways to Keep Your Web Site Content Fresh
• Winning Landing Pages: An 8-Point Checklist
• SEO Tips for Industrial Marketers
• Why Your Web Site Isn’t Enough
• Five Steps to Implementing a Content Strategy
• E-mail Marketing: Five Dos, Five Don’ts
• Five Reasons to Advertise in e-Newsletters
• How to Create a Stronger e-Newsletter Ad
• Improve E-mail Marketing: 10 Quick Tips
• Tips for Growing Your Opt-In E-Mail List
• What You Need to Know About Social Media (Part I)
• What You Need to Know About Social Media (Part II)
• Five Questions to Answer Before Ramping Up Social Media Efforts
• Video + Your Marketing Mix = Success (in just three steps!)
• Eight Tips for Better Blogging