Troy, NY - (Business Wire) - 8/4/2009 - Generating leads and acquiring new customers remains a top goal - and challenge - for industrial marketers in today's difficult economic environment, according to the report, "Trends in Industrial Marketing 2009: How Manufacturers are Marketing Today." This fourth annual survey of marketing and sales executives and managers in the industrial sector was conducted by GlobalSpec (www.globalspec.com), the leading specialized search engine, information services and e-publishing company for the manufacturing, technical, industrial and engineering communities.

Forty-four percent of respondents stated that customer acquisition is their primary marketing goal, with another 29 percent choosing lead generation. An additional 13 percent of respondents selected customer retention as their primary goal, up from five percent in 2008.

While lead generation is a key initiative for industrial marketers, lead quality outranks lead quantity when deciding where to allocate marketing budget. The survey also found that three out of the top four marketing channels for generating quality leads are all online.

The proven ability for online marketing to deliver high quality leads has encouraged many industrial marketers to shift to online marketing. Forty-eight percent of respondents reported that online is a greater portion of their marketing budget in 2009 than in 2008, and nearly one-third surveyed said they will be spending more than 50 percent of their marketing budget online. At the same time, 30 percent of respondents are reducing tradeshow attendance and 28 percent are reducing print ads.

Despite the increased shift of marketing dollars to online media, respondents still face a number of challenges in their marketing efforts. More than half of all respondents selected "too few marketing resources" as one of their top three marketing challenges in 2009, with "generating enough high quality leads for sales" and "need to improve my marketing ROI" rounding out the top three.

Other top findings from the 2009 GlobalSpec Industrial Marketing Trends Survey include:

• 63 percent of respondents will closely evaluate the performance of marketing programs and reduce or eliminate those that don't perform well
• 43 percent will expand marketing efforts to reach new industries
• 88 percent of respondents will spend the same or more on online marketing in 2009, as compared to 2008

Results including full color charts and graphs of the 2009 GlobalSpec Industrial Marketing Trends Survey can be found at: http://www.globalspec.com/wp/2009_MarketingTrends_WP.

About GlobalSpec, Inc.
GlobalSpec, Inc. is the leading specialized vertical search, information services and e-publishing company serving the engineering, technical and industrial communities. GlobalSpec users benefit from domain-expert search engines, a broad range of proprietary and aggregated Web-based content, and more than 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 186 million parts in 2,300,000 product families from more than 23,000 supplier catalogs. For suppliers, GlobalSpec offers highly filtered sales and marketing opportunities, product promotion and brand advertising platforms, including the GlobalSpec Industrial Ad Network, and a wide range of e-media advertising and marketing solutions.

GlobalSpec, SpecSearch, The Engineering Search Engine and The Engineering Web are registered trademarks of GlobalSpec, Inc.

Contact:
GlobalSpec Marketing
E-mail: marketing@globalspec.com

Back to GlobalSpec News