So much is changing about marketing that sometimes it’s hard to know what to prioritize. So
turn for advice to the best place possible – your customers!  They’re clear on telling us what works, and what doesn’t. Our newest eBook goes through five of the most important suggestions customers are whispering in our ears:

Topics: Marketing, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business, brand awareness

Goldstein Group Communications earned Gold Level status as a Hubspot Value Added
Reseller (VAR).  Hubspot, a marketing automation software company, has more than 2000 VARs, but only 50 have reached Gold Level status to date.

Topics: lead generation, marketing automation, Hubspot, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business

“People get hired for what they know, and fired for who they are.”  That maxim for making the right employee hiring decisions holds true for making a good decision when hiring a b-to-b marketing agency today.

Topics: Marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, business-to-business

Topics: video, PR, business-to-business, Public Relations, blogging

Email inboxes have become a true horror story for many of us.  The flood continues, and it’s getting to be a daily chore to manage the flow of information.  So that presents a problem for those of us who rely on email marketing as an important lever of lead generation.  In fact, for the last few years, most companies have seen a steady decline in click through rates from a 6% overage to something more in the 3% range.

Topics: Marketing, advertising, email marketing, 2014 ad planning, business-to-business

Topics: advertising, marketing strategy, 2014 ad planning, business-to-business

Topics: technology, advertising, 2014 ad planning, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business

Grab me, entertain me, engage me, THEN teach me. It’s related to #11 and #12 above, but we have to find more creative and clever ways to talk to our engineering customers than just posting white papers. That’s still important, but creating engaging and fascinating web environments in the new parallax animated web environment, creating infographics, constructing engineering calculators, producing animations of our products – those are all must-haves for technical marketers today.

At the end of the day, if we help engineers do their jobs better, we’ll be valuable to them. But we have to get in front of them first, and we have to push our ideas to the clever, engaging side of what we produce rather than just packaging everything in text. Try new ideas. Approach your prospects from the left instead of the right for a change. The best part of marketing for 2014 is that, because so much of it is online, we can see what works in an instant. The analytics drive us to what works, with none of the guesswork of the past. It’s a great time to be in marketing!

Topics: 2014 ad planning, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business

Engineers like to laugh, too . A group of interns at NASA’s Johnson Space Center created a parody of the popular Gangnam Style video that has generated nearly 5 million views! It’s quite well done, but it’s also a great example of how engineers will pay attention to messages that are entertaining and fun, rather than just the dry spec-sheet facts. One client generated 100 times the response to a video with a “campy” title to a webcast, “Campfire Songs from the Network Edge.” The content was just as tutorial as their others, but the title seemed to break through that clutter and get attention from engineers exposed to too many messages that are too similar, dull and routine. Keep them laughing, and we’ll keep them coming back for more? Perhaps, but it’s a direction worth exploring for technical marketing.

Topics: Marketing, video, marketing to engineers, business-to-business

Teach me something, but don’t make me read it. We’ve talked earlier about how time pressured our engineering customers are. They don’t have time any longer to read an eight-page white paper. Our trade magazines have responded as well with shorter articles – 1200-word pieces are far more common today than the 2000-to-2500-word features we used to write. It’s all about the pictures, videos and graphics we can use to tell our stories. Here’s an example: a client created a tremendous giveaway promotion for a behind-the-scenes trip to a NASA facility. One of our media partners wrote a few blog posts, inviting readers to “click here” to enter. The posts did fine, with each blog post generating 10–15 entries. However, one post generated 147 entries! What was the difference? The editor changed the “click here” link to a “click here” jpeg of a picture of the entry form! Engineers responded far more dramatically to that simple picture than to the words “click here.” Strange, but true.

Topics: marketing strategy, 2014 ad planning, Goldstein Group Communications, business-to-business