We’ve been fighting the incredible amount of snow here in the Yorkshire Dales over Easter, battling our way to the post office to get the latest “Get Kids Into Survey” posters out the door. The brand awareness for sponsoring this great poster has gone through the roof! We’re delighted to have recently added TopoDOT’s sponsored dog, Piggle Wiggle who is just fantastic. If you’d like to sponsor a character and do your part for getting kids into surveying contact us today!
We have some spaces left for grabbing a bargain with our special discounts to Content Marketing World in Orlando, Florida, get in touch to find out more while spaces last. We also have the latest updates on the fantastic Trimble Express Days with KOREC Group find out how to sign up to learn about the latest products and ideas.
We touch on TopoDOT’s point cloud processing software, the “sexy” bit of feature extraction as well as our latest book recommendation and LinkedIn tips!
It’s all here, stay up to date with #EBTM.
Until next time…
Elaine
In our latest VLOG we talk about the, Get Kids into Survey campaign where we will be introducing the ALL NEW Smart Cities, the latest feature in our new poster which will go to production in time for the TopoDOT User Conference TUC! This time the poster will have new characters, including the TopoDOT sponsored dog, Piggle Wiggle. With more detail included in this latest poster kids will have to go and hunt down Piggle Wiggle, making it even more interactive for kids than ever before.
Get the low-down on our latest trip to Europe and the highlights of our Holland visit where we learn’t more about point cloud data and the civil side of surveying. Coming up we have a new copywriter that we’re trying as well as new blogs and research into how we get value, and extract money, out of our point cloud data.
Stay tuned… #GeospatialMarketer
In this latest VLOG find out all about the amazing Content Marketing World Conference and how we can get you special discounts, and great hotel deals for this must attend event. If you are a geospatial marketer, surveyor and/or director this is the ultimate marketing conference that you need to go to.
Find out more at contentmarketingworld.com.
For more information get in touch with me here!
That’s all for now…
Elaine
A GROWING list of great articles. I come across some amazing reads… and while I post a lot of these on our dedicated Geospatial Sales & Marketing Support Group on LinkedIn I’ve decided to add them to this page….
So keep you eye ball’s peeled….
These videos are not edited – its just a diary…. so warts and all! Especially today..
Got my butt down to Geodata in London on Thursday 30th November to mingle with the Geospatial Industry. What a nice wee conference. Loved Martyn’s (from KOREC) presentation “What Next for the Geospatial Industry” and esp on Gartner Hype Cycle and an emphasis on GeoLocation!
Todays update is as follows:
Enjoy peeps… Elaine
Remember that time one of your clients bought a complete LiDAR remote sensing system on the spur of the moment? That’s right, they didn’t. BECAUSE NO ONE DOES THAT.
Here in the geo-space, people think pretty damn carefully about the technology they’re going to invest in. It takes time to make a decision. A sales cycle can be looooong. This means that you are very, very rarely pushing the hard sell. Most of the time, you’re generating and nurturing leads, instead.
Considering how much time and effort you need to put into every prospective client to bring them to a sale, you obviously want to avoid adding any duds into the pool. The last thing you want is to find is that you’ve been expending the same amount of energy impressing someone from a company that was, frankly, never going to become a client as you have with someone whose signature-hand is practically hanging over the dotted line from the outset.
To make sure you’re focusing your sales pitch on the right places, and aren’t losing anyone along the way, here are 10 steps to help you absolutely nail your lead generation.
First, figure out where and when your ideal customers are likely to come across your brand. What Google searches bring them onto your site? What other platforms do they use to get their information? What logical next questions will they ask at every step, and how will you guide them to the next stepping stone, all the way to a sale?
You and your team can’t control *every* interaction people have with your brand. Often, people want to have a good old nose through your site and make up their minds about you, without you there to guide them.
That’s why it’s crucial your site represents you properly when you’re not there. Avoid the habit that plagues our industry to fill your site with technical jargon and vague descriptions – talk like a real human instead! Anyone reading your site should get exactly what you do, straight away, without confusion.
That’s the passive stuff covered… but in Geospatial, building personal relationships with your customer base is key. This means that your sales and marketing staff need to know EXACTLY what you want from them. They need to know what success looks like at every step, and they need to be energised and motivated to go above and beyond in building and maintaining relationships with new leads.
Here’s where working in a slow-burn field like geospatial diverges from many other sales roles: you are not pitting your sales team against each other. Considering how long it takes to land a new client, and how much work you may need to do to get there, multiple team members might need to work together to get there. Fostering an environment where people are precious about their leads, refuse to help each other without getting credit, or feel pressured to abandon a long-term goal to bring in a less valuable client is all deeply counter-productive, I’m afraid.
On a similar note, you need to encourage your sales team to take the long view with each lead, instead of pushing straight for a sale.
Showing a potential client that you are a fountain of wisdom when it comes to their business area is much more effective than pressuring them to choose fast. Make sure your team has plenty of valuable content to hand, like eBooks or webinars, for example, that they can use to follow up with leads to answer questions and keep them interested, rather than simply chasing them for a decision in every email!
It sounds harsh, but if you have people in your sales team that refuse to play nice – that pressure clients, use underhand tactics to steal colleagues’ leads or thunder, refuse to collaborate, aren’t taking steps to hit their targets, etc., then you NEED to weed them out. A few bad apples like these can suck the lifeblood out of the whole team.
These six steps are nearly everything you needs to overhaul your lead generation efforts… but there’s one more very important factor here: who you partner with. It is SO important that you work with a marketing company that gets you, your industry, and the specific challenges and opportunities that come with working in Geospatial. Get that right and before long you’ll start reaping in the profits.
Ready to dive right in? Give Elaine a call on +44 (0) 7825 517 850 for an in-depth chat about your geospatial lead generation strategy today.
When I say “killer marketing campaign” what do you think of? Billboards? Magazine spreads? Halftime ads at the Superbowl?
If so, stop right there, because the only thing marketing like this will kill is your budget.
Believe me, a really awesome marketing campaign is no longer about splashing as much cash as you can. It’s about being super smart about how you reach out to people, and what you offer them when you do. Get THAT right, and you’ll make a big impact… with surprisingly little spend.
Here’s how.
Did you know you can produce slick, high-quality email newsletters incredibly easily with free tools like MailChimp? You don’t need coding skills – you just drag and drop the pieces into something that looks great, with your logos and photos, links to your website and blog, and even video.
Sending something like this out each month or week is an awesome way to stay top of mind, giving you an excuse to keep in touch with prospective clients without being pushy or salesy.
But how do you get people ON the list, you might ask? Well, whatever you do, don’t go out and BUY a list. Not only is it pricey, it’s spammy. This tactic works best when you’ve already made a connection and are jogging that person’s memory, not pestering strangers!
Adding a sign-up button to your blog or website is a good start. Using gated content to get people to hand over their email addresses is a great shout. But even without these, you’ve probably also built up a mountain of contacts that you could easily add to the list.
Whack your existing clients’ and prospects’ emails on there. Next time you’re collecting cards at the ILMF or GeoBusiness conference, don’t just throw them in a drawer or send out a follow-up email and forget about them: add them to your email list. Someone contacts you to ask about your product? Add them to the list, too.
Continue like this and before you know it, you’ll have hundreds of people on your mailing list that you can reach out to on a regular basis, with (as we’ll see in a moment) plenty of useful, valuable content that they’ll love. And then who do you think they’ll call when they need to make a purchase?
Once you have your goldmine of contacts and your beautifully put together e-newsletter, what on Earth do you fill it up with?
This is when you need to start thinking about the kind of things your customers really want answers to. What kind of content could they use to make their jobs easier?
Company news is fun, but deep down, do you reckon your network is THAT excited by what your team gets up to? I hate to break it to you: they probably don’t care. But you know what they DO care about? Getting answers to the most pressing questions in the industry. The ones that really impact on their ability to do their jobs as well as they can.
This means that your customer base will probably be much more interested in an FAQ on how to use drones in adverse weather conditions than hearing about the new head of HR you hired.
… A lot more impressed by an in-depth blog post on best practices when assessing potential earthquake damage than by news that your sales are up 14% this year.
… Far more grateful for a timely how-to video explaining how to extract useful insights from your Location Big Data tools than an update on how your work Christmas party went.
You get the picture.
The point is, you need to think about a) what your audience wants, and b) what you, with your unique perspective and expertise, can offer. Find the sweet spot between those two things and you can create content that’s infinitely more compelling than an expensive ad campaign!
Lastly, once you’ve created your content, share it using every free tool you can. We’ve mentioned emails, but don’t stop there! Share your awesome content through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – anywhere you think your audience might be getting their information from. As we’ve seen, it’s all about the smarts, not the spend!
How many Trig Pillars are there in the UK? Watch this video to find out!
A slightly different look and feel towards my video diaries this week – the weather has changed and ‘boy’ was it dark recording it.
This week looks at the following:
There is no right or wrong answer, they are all good but its a good way to compare who is getting it right….
Comparing ‘mobile mapping scanner’ VIDEOS,
WHICH VIDEO SOLVES THE PROBLEM(S) AND DESCRIBES IT THE BEST??? WHICH MAKES YOUR LIFE EASIER TO CHOOSE WHICH IS BEST FOR YOU?
While i’m being a little heavy on these guys, their videos are very good! What i’m trying to get across to you all is ‘reduce the amount of features’ and solve your customers problem. Solve their problems and ‘selling’ will become much easier! Think about it when you buy something!
Overview of the videos are here:
So, overall… they are all good videos but what is missing is focusing on an application or buyer persona to focus why it is the best solution for you to purchase!
What do you think?
Another crazy week in the Elaine Ball Camp!
The Get Kids into Survey Campaign has taken off and its been great to see how humble the Survey Community has been. I love this Industry and together we can show the world how exciting it is!
I would like to say Thank You to Andy Roberts of Formby Surveys in Liverpool, England for sending me the ruler wrist bands – just shows how POWERFUL Instagram actually is! A big thank you to Serena Ronan from The Chartered Institute of Civil Engineering Surveyors for her 20 copies of the poster! And a big old Thank you to Graham Mills for taking his 120 poster to TeenTech Event in London this week! I hope the kids enjoyed it!
A wee update on how to find specific “Marketing” content related to you be it a surveyor or manufacture. Excited to share with you that Elaine Ball Technical Marketing will be sponsoring 2018 TUC Point Cloud Processing Conference with owners of TopoDOT: Certainty3D Inc. #HappyFriday everyone Enjoy!
Keep your eyeballs on Barry Gleeson, a cracking speaker. Barry is program engineering manager for BIM at Network Rail. Other little gems were Alan Barrow of ABA Surveys rallying everyone together to PROMOTE our industry as ONE VOICE!