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!
This week in “The Diary of a Geospatial Marketer” Elaine has had quite a hectic few days, she unveils something of interest to Surveyors as well as their children….. planning is now in full swing with Certainty3D owners of Point Cloud Processing Software “TopoDOT”.
And…. Elaine shares two new books to check out: Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestly and Buyer Personas by Adele Revella. Enjoy!
Hear what Elaine is up! This week has been a belter! Elaine and her team have come up with a poster all about survey.
It will go into the delegate bags at the TSA (Survey Association) Conference coming up on 8th November 2017 in England. Elaine also shares some new blogs related to Geospatial Start-ups and “how to get the most out of a tiny marketing budget – for surveyors”. Enjoy!
What company isn’t looking to turn a profit? Yep, no doubt about it; these days the geospatial industry is a hot-mess of companies all searching for the holy grail…real life paying customers. But so many people don’t invest in one crucial revenue source: the humble website. Yes you know who you are!! Sure, you can make it shiny and pretty, but that doesn’t mean it works for you. You can make it very easy on the eye, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to convert. At all. I’m going to give you 4 easy tips to turn your website into a revenue machine. Let’s take a look…
It’s very simple – people love watching video. Communicating visually is such an easy way to engage and get across what you want to say concisely and effectively.
Some groovy examples are: Me updating everyone every friday about my weeks progress – short, sharp and to the point
Or Storm Geomatics doing a spot of fun filming showcasing their actual skills and injecting some creative ‘watching’ into it.
Doing a spot of Parrett surveying with captain @JamesPorterSG & @Steve_R_D following a 2am start. Early bird and all that. 😴 pic.twitter.com/FwJ9grezQr
— RiverSurveyor (@RiverSurveyor) October 19, 2017
One study on the ROI of video showed that users are 27 times more likely to click through with videos than copy. It offers more information than text, it’s more engaging and you can easily demonstrate your products and offering.
My lovely B2B Marketing friend Nicola Ray demonstrated this recently on LinkedIn, posting the question “Doing a video experiment on LinkedIn over the next few days, let me know your thoughts. First question: what do you think of video updates?” while she got a mixture of comments, it proved a very interesting ‘in-face’ video clip with 21 likes and 16 comments.
So get those cameras out and get creative! Even a steadily-held smartphone can do the job these days if you’re on a shoestring, but if you can shell out for a more professional video, then you won’t regret it.
Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. In fact a recent study in internet usage by Mary Meeker, shows that mobile usage is more common than desktop browsing at 51 percent vs. 42 percent respectively.
It’s your job to make sure that those potential clients who land on your site via their smartphone aren’t seeing a jumbled mess because it’s not optimised for mobile. The amount of Geospatial product manufacturers who still don’t have an optimised website is crazy, let alone the surveyors in the world! Some don’t even have an online presence!
Consider these points: How does it look on mobile? How fast is it? Is it easy to navigate? You know exactly how annoying it is when the web page doesnt load on your phone, I know I do! Aarrhh!
What makes you the only choice for your potential customer? You need to identify your customer’s key pain-points/ needs and solve them, all on your homepage – it needs to create an instant connection.
Don’t have a value proposition? It’s time to get your act in gear and create one!
Remember, the root of your value proposition needs to answer the burning question in your customer’s mind: ‘What do I get out of this?’ If you can convince them that they’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose, you’re on the right track.
But make sure you’re clear and direct with your language. Don’t scare them off with salesy, flowery language that they can’t relate to.
Let’s face it, we’re not all wordsmiths. Selling your products and services one-to-one? Yep no problem, you’ve got the gift of the gab. Translating that salesmanship to your website? That’s a whole different ballgame.
Invest in a copywriter who can take your brand essence and turn it into all-singing, all-dancing words that make your customers go ‘Ah, that’s exactly what I need in my life!’ or ‘Yes! Finally a Geospatial company that gets what it’s all about!’
Once those leads start rolling in, you won’t look back!
That’s a wrap; but remember, don’t let your website just sit there looking pretty. It’s not just the aesthetics that matter, it’s the nuts and bolts that get customers to sit up and take notice.
Until next week!
Elaine
You’ve taken the plunge into starting your own business; all those tales of overnight success stories and raking in the big bucks are flying around your head. It’s great to dream big, right?
But annoyingly, the ‘build it and they will come’ theory just isn’t always true. Marketing your business is essential to get your new brand out there into the world, in front of real-life paying customers. And for a start-up the marketing challenge is even tougher, because of limited funds, resources and time. Let’s face it, you’re stretched enough as it is!
But worry not – we’ve got 5 top tips to get your marketing machine well-oiled and working for you, rather than wasting your precious time.
In a nutshell, what is your key selling point? What makes you stand out from other companies out there? This has to be in line with what makes your customers tick; your USP (unique selling point) needs to resonate with their pain-points so they think Ah! Here’s the answer to my problems!
Know yourself and be consistent; staying true to your brand will only make you more powerful and pack a hefty punch in your industry.
Everyone jumps on the social media bandwagon, without stopping to think are my customers actually using this? For example, if Pinterest’s largest demographic is teenagers, they’re unlikely to be using your geospatial products any time soon.
Talk to your potential customers, find out what social networks they use. You need to market your brand where your customers hang out, or your efforts will be fruitless. For example, surveyors are going nuts over Instagram at the moment. Remember, Instagram is very much a ‘look at me’ medium, so think carefully on how you can attract their attention if ‘surveyors’ are your market.
Spend a couple of hours a week studying social channels to see where your customer demographic is spending their time online.
Find out who the key influencers in your industry are and start interacting with them. It’s a super-effective way to get more exposure, by simply following and sharing their content on Twitter and LinkedIn.
How does it work? Well it’s all about reciprocation. If you’re sharing and promoting their content, the powers that be will be more likely to respond in kind. The result is your brand being exposed to their humongous followers and all you’ve invested is a bit of your time. Check out Daniel Priestley and his book, “Key Person of Influence” – it’s jam-packed with goodies; including a whole section about ‘partners’.
A great examples are Surveying with Robert (who sells Trimble equipment and has become a world wide name within the Survey Profession for his brutal honesty) or Lee Landman (Surveyor in South Africa who has over 10,000 followers and a true Trimble advocate)
‘Content’ is a bit of a marketing buzz-word right now, for the simple fact that it’s a powerful marketing tool (if done right). Get a blog set up on your website and create engaging posts that reel your customers in to create a following. Focus on two or three potential buyers (Buyer Personas) and address their goals and pain-points with super-valuable posts that leave them wanting more.
This KissMetrics post gives top tips on creating a killer content strategy, including blogging, ebooks, webinars and videos.
Don’t forget to take a breath to analyse how your efforts are paying off. If you don’t, you risk just blindly ploughing on with no real understanding of which bits are working and which aren’t doing anything for your business.
Remember, your startup needs a marketing boost to give it the exposure it needs (and deserves). In this day and age, resting on your laurels just isn’t an option. You need to get focused, get active and get up to speed with marketing; I promise, your competitors will be.
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