I know many industrial marketing managers don’t like free gifts, perhaps considering them to be in some way unprofessional. I disagree - some of the best branding I’ve experienced over the years has come from decent freebies. I can even name (without looking) many things which have hung around my home and office for years: a Telemecanique umbrella, a Rose+Krieger pen, an Adept Scientific calculator, and some SMC Pneumatics golf balls - and that’s straight off the top of my head.
But what have freebies got to do with online marketing, Chris? Well, here’s my current recommended approach to getting information out of people on your website. If your form asks for too much, you’ll put people off, we know that. So here’s the plan. Ask them for the minimum of information, then incentivise them to give you the rest. The sequence goes as follows:
1. (First screen) Please fill in your name and email address to receive the data sheet on this product.
2. (New screen) Thank you. The data sheet will be sent to you by email in a moment. If you’d like a paper copy, along with our latest catalogue, and a free Parker pen to say thank you, please enter your job title and company address here.
To me, that seems to attack the problem successfully.
Of course, if you disagree, feel free to let me know here, or if you have some suggestions as to the best corporate free gifts you’ve ever seen (or provided), share your thoughts here.

I was inspired to write this by an article called Rock Your Tchotkes (no, me neither) on the B2B Lead Blog. Very American (Tchotkes? Booths? Buttons? Two nations divided by a common language indeed) but worth a read.

I like articles which inspire us to go back to basics and re-assess our marketing, because we all know it’s something we don’t do often enough. In The Most Important Question Salespeople Should Ask Themselves on the B2B Lead Blog it’s suggested that not only do you ask yourself the classic question “Why should people do business with me when there are so many other options available?” but also, when you’ve come up with your answers, it suggests that you go through the reasons and ask yourself a second question about each one:

So What?

I’ve got a bit of a thing about landing pages. It really annoys me when I click on an ad and sloppily get taken to the front page of the advertiser’s website and dumped there. When I turn up at a company, I want someone to meet me in reception and usher me straight through to my meeting. Don’t you? So when someone clicks through to your website for a reason - which you’ve defined in the ad - they expect to get the information they require without any more effort. It’s not too much to ask, and both parties lose if you don’t provide it.

In this recent post on the B2B Lead Blog the basic tips on how to design a landing page are listed very clearly. There’s no excuse not to follow them!

You’re not one of those people who fills their press releases with marketing-speak, are you? No, of course not. You’ve read Dilbert for years, and you laugh in the face of people who talk about leading-edge, state-of-the-art solutions.

Except that …well… if you do, you’re in a tiny minority. I know from an exercise in analysing the first 200,000 press releases which came into the Pro-Talk network, when I worked there, that words like “solutions” occur in the majority of press releases. Have you ever heard a customer ask for a “solution”? No, of course not.

Anyway, Are You Writing Gobbledygook for Your Buyers? on the B2B Lead Blog takes up this topic and makes the very salient point: “isn’t the goal of doing a news release to stand out in the crowd? Well we’re not if we’re using these words.”

Do you still write your company’s press releases the same way as you did ten years ago? Or if they’re written for you by a PR consultancy, have your writers changed their approach over the past ten years? If not, it might be time to change your writers. The fact of the matter is that before the web became the main target for press releases, you had to write them to appeal to journalists and editors. Now you have to write them to appeal just as much (if not more) to customers, who’ll be reading them directly. And don’t forget Google is a recipient you also need to target in its own special way.

In The New Rules of News Releases on the B2B Lead Blog you’ll find a good summary of the approach you should be taking nowadays. Some people may disagree. But I think this article gets it spot on - and that’s after 20 years as one of those journalists and editors who used to be the sole target for your press releases.

A lot of your marketing emails never get to the recipient. Fact. There’s no point in bemoaning the crudity of some of the “email filters” which people have in place; they exist, they work badly, and we just have to get on with it.

However, we can at least do as much as possible to reduce the number which get swallowed up into black holes set up by some work-experience kid in your customer’s IT Department. As Editor of Engineeringtalk for over eight years, I probably sent out 15 million (all-requested!) emails to professionals, so this was a subject close to my heart. In 10 Email Pitfalls and 10 Email Power Words on the B2B Lead Blog, the author summarises an article from the MarketingProfs newsletter which gives you ten words to avoid. As these include terms like “Safety” and “Guarantee”, they’re - unfortunately - rather important in the industrial sector.

I’m going to bang on until I’m blue in the face about this subject, because I will never, ever understand why so few companies survey their customers before making decisions which will affect them. Surveys are fast, and if you already have your customers’ email addresses - free. Yes, of course there are caveats about the responses (you only get them from people who like filling in surveys, and these might not be representative of your customer base as a whole) but the results are infinitely better than just going on a hunch.

Make Marketing Decisions by Using Surveys on the B2B Lead Blog discusses the whole topic and links to two online survey tools which can get you going today. I know of a company which once surveyed its customers in the middle of a marketing meeting, and had results back before the meeting was over. How cool is that?

Most of the articles I read about “how to write press releases” I totally disagree with. And that’s wearing my hat as having been an industrial trade magazine and website editor for over twenty years. I think the articles are written with the best of intentions, but they seem to be imagining you’re aiming your press releases solely at the FT or something. In reality, I suspect the bulk of your press releases are aimed at far more mundane titles. “Keep your press releases down to one side of A4″, they say. Or “Just send out a precis with a web link to the full article, because editors are busy people”.

To which my reply is unprintable.

So it’s nice to find an article which I can actually recommend. In Keyword Optimization for Press Releases on the B2B Lead Blog, author Leigh Anne Wallace suggests there’s something new we should all be thinking about when we write press releases nowadays. Keywords.

Don’t worry if this is starting to lapse into jargon - all this will be covered in our Insider Programme starting this autumn. But essentially, “keywords” are the terms where you want your website to be found when people type them into search engines. One good way to improve your rankings in the results for these terms is to have other web pages about those terms pointing to your site. So: get the right terms in your press release, and they get on to other web sites linking to you and… you get the drift.