According to Forrester's Marketing Effectiveness Survey, conducted in the second quarter of 2006, the top priorities of business marketers include:
- Difficulty in reaching decision makers
- Paying for Results
- Generating more leads
- Improving lead quality
Are these priorities any different for suppliers and distributors of electronic components? We don’t think so. The good news is that new tools are now available to help you with each priority.
1. Difficulty in reaching decision makers
As a marketer in this space, you know there are three key decision making groups to reach: Design engineers, component engineers and buyers.
- Design engineers can get you locked into a design win that pays for years to come.
- Component engineers fill-in all the details behind the design engineer. What is the exact part number? What alternatives are available to a part? What sources are available? These engineers can get you on the BOM.
- Buyers are the last stop to revenue is getting the order placed with your part number. They buyer is the last gate for every part on the BOM. Though their ability to change out part numbers is limited, their proximity to large volume purchases makes them a core decision maker.
In each case, these players are quickly changing how they interact with distributors and component manufactures. The faster they find something, the happier they are. Increasingly they do not want unsolicited sales calls or stacks of unrequested materials. In fact, they avoid websites that require registrations. These decision makers look primarily to the web to access accurate and timely information.
2. Paying for Results
We hear time and again your consternation about paying for trade shows that have poor attendance. Concerns abound over buying expensive magazine and catalog ads where you can't measure leads. Search engines are the missing link in your go-to-market campaign. The decision makers above all rely on the web - and you can directly trace leads in this medium. Further, with engines like SupplyFrame and Google, you can know exactly what you are paying for each lead you receive.
3. Generating More Leads
The key to generating more leads is in knowing where your decision makers go to get their information and serving them in a manner they want to be supported. Study after study shows engineers and buyers spend more time on the web than any other medium. You must be there too, delivering the information in the most useful forms possible. Help the engineer to speed up their process - they will thank you with loyalty and orders. Because engineers can smell marketing people from a mile away they will be quickly turned off if you fill your sites with online brochures of boilerplate and propaganda, instead give them easy access to engineering information.
4. Improving Lead Quality
The fact that you are reading this probably means your have already learned that giving away free T-Shirts gets you lots of leads that are worthless. You probably also know that handing your sales people bad leads is a sure way for them to stop supporting you. On the internet, the same quality versus quantity problems apply. You can cast your marketing net very wide and spend a lot of money to touch a lot of people (see what you get if you buy a keyword like "Red LED" on Google!) but these leads aren't very qualified. Start by finding your leads in places that engineers go on the web - the less marketing and newsie the site and the more technical information it offers, the more likely it’s used by qualified electronic component decision makers. Use specific calls to action that engineers appreciate - offers for education, specs, reference designs, application notes and samples are good starting points. Think of the process like a funnel where the visitor self-qualifies as they move deeper into the information. When a user reaches the end of the funnel they are highly qualified and you have influenced them to consider and try your products.
