Industrial manufacturers and resellers are the biggest industrial users of Twitter right now. Unfortunately, they are using it too often as a “flyer” to promote what they offer. The power of Twitter lies in your ability to engage your target audience groups in a conversation about topics important to them. “One off” tweets that do not generate discussion are tantamount to two four year olds engaged in a parallel conversation where statements are made but nothing comes of them: “I have a race car. Look.” The other four year old looks and says, “I had cake for lunch.” Both pieces of shared information are soon forgotten. You get the idea.

So what do you do now? Here’re some ideas:

Identify a topic of importance to your target audience group. Ways you can do that:

• Ask your sales team to relate concerns raised by customers.
• Read the trade news for issues that concern them.
• Read their company news for issues that concern them.
• Select a topic from your company news about something you offer or have introduced that helps their business to do better.

Make a list of possible Tweets. Imagine how the conversation online might go and prepare thoughts and responses in advance. It may not go the way you plan but you will have thought about it and researched it thoroughly so you will be prepared to guide the conversation more effectively.

If you haven’t done so already, invite customers to Follow you. If you really want to spark interest and build your Followers, announce the discussions you have begun on your home page, in an email, or some place you know you can reach your target audience groups effectively. Learn how to integrate Twitter into your site here.

Start tweeting, beginning with the most provocative tweet designed to get the conversation going. Keep tweeting on the same topic with your participants so that it makes it to the Trending List (seen in the right column on Twitter).

If your efforts are working but you still haven’t made it to the Trending List, sign up for a Twitter ad campaign once the ad service becomes available to everyone (I’ll let you know so keep checking back). Select keywords that will structure your campaign around the relevance of your established topic.

To support your ad campaign, select from your existing tweets relevant messages that will be promoted during the campaign. Simply click on any of your tweets that are already an organic part of Twitter to make them a Promoted Tweet.

Users who are not yet Following you can learn about your topic from related hashtags in their own timelines or by searching relevant terms that have to do with your topic. Once a user interacts with your Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends they can opt to Follow you, Retweet it, or Reply.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends can also be used effectively with regard to trade show or other sales and promotional event appearances or sponsorships your company is planning. One final point, remember to closely monitor, measure, evaluate and make adjustments as needed to ensure the best results.

While you are waiting for Twitter to invite everyone to start advertising on their ad platform, adjust your approach to how you tweet and what you tweet about. Whether it’s a policy issue, a new product your introducing, or an upcoming trade show you will be participating in, actively engage your target audience groups about what interests them. Twitter can be an effective channel to keep your company name in the thoughts of your existing and potential customers by demonstrating your knowledge of and interest in topics important to them.

Additionally, I encourage you to communicate with Twitter at this time about the specific needs of the industrial business to business (B2B) marketer. Typically last to embrace new media technologies, industrial marketers are not generally considered during development phases of ad platforms so their unique needs are seldom addressed. By voicing your requirements now, you may avoid having to conform to a system that was designed to meet the needs of business to consumer (B2C) enterprises.

The article points to the fact that many companies are not paying adequate attention to the conversions that occur as a result of social networking websites but are too focused on conversions from search alone. Knight wants you to pay attention to both equally. And I have to agree. By following and analyzing comments that are made about your brand you are able to develop products and marketing strategies that leverage both the good comments and the bad comments.

To give you an example, comparing comments made about “Toaster Strudels” versus “Pop Tarts” it was learned that  Toaster Strudels received far more positive comments than Pop Tarts; however, it was also learned that Pop Tarts were often preferred because they offered more variety. So, as Knight points out, “This is an indicator that Pop-Tarts can continue to be a force in the pastry space by continually innovating new tastes. They could even, potentially, push farther into the space by developing more nutritionally-conscious lines of the snacks.”

Do you know what your target audience groups are saying about your brand(s)? Find out and then turn that information into effective product development and marketing strategies that translate into sales and business growth for you.

On the business side, Yelp offers local business owners a suite of free tools to ensure they make the most of their Yelp advertising experience. The tools allow them to:

• Communicate with customers– privately and publicly
• Track how many people view their business page
• Add photos, a detailed business description, up-to-date information, history, and specialties
• Announce special offers and upcoming events
• Recommend other businesses

As customers communicate information about the local business they are also communicating valuable information about themselves, which can be used by business owners for more targeted marketing campaigns.

As always with these search engines they rely on pre-determined business categories into which their member advertisers must fit (see Industrial Web Search for a different model based on accurate content tagging not categories). This is not the best model for small local manufacturers whose category may not be listed among the options. However, on the positive side, the local search tool is available on both a desktop and mobile platform, making it available to iPhone and Smartphone users who use their phone for everything, including search.

Mobile search is on the rise because it is convenient and allows one to search wherever wireless access is available, including at a job site. Yelp has a feature called Monocle that allows a search to be conducted using the mobile device’s built-in camera. The camera is used to pan the location from left to right. The Monocle application displays icons for the type of business queried in the search that is nearby and even includes consumer comments. As this type of application goes mainstream, notes John Havens, VP of Social Media at Porter Novelli, businesses will be able to Tweet (post messages via Twitter.com) in real-time to passersby about products and services they are offering.

There are plenty of businesses out there that rely on products and services from local manufacturers and providers. Although the industrial world hasn’t embraced all these new technologies yet, the time will come when it will and it is to your advantage to be present and well represented. At least start by getting listed. Sign up at Yelp.com. Let your target audience groups know they can find you there. If the industrial marketplace is to benefit from all this technology it has to start making its presence known. By demonstrating value to the search engine providers features and applications will be developed to both serve and capitalize on the revenue-generating possibilities offered by the industrial marketplace.

Premium Company Profile on Industrial Web Search

I read a recent interview with ZoomInfo, a business information provider, conducted by Jeremy for the BuyerZone.com “In The Zone” blog centered on the value of good sales contact data. When discussing the importance of reducing costs by making the sales process more efficient, Chip Terry, VP of Products at ZoomInfo, states, “You can go back to the time allocation metric I mentioned: the goal is for reps to spend less time researching and more time selling. If you can move that dial from 37% to 47%, you’d see a huge increase in your sales results. Better information makes teams and individuals more effective.”

Terry makes an excellent point. Our goal as industrial marketers really is to increase sales while effectively managing the cost of acquiring those sales. Having the right tools and services helps us to be efficient. Allowing your sales force to spend more of their time selling and less of their time researching and acquiring leads works to keep those lead/sales acquisition costs down.

The power of services like ZoomInfo is the quality of the contact information. And there can be no better quality of contact information than that which comes directly from the sourcing professionals you are specifically targeting. That’s what is offered by our industrial search engine Industrial Web Search. Many of you were first introduced to it a few months back but I recently wrote about its new integrated sourcing tools that make it even easier for buyers to get what they need from Industrial Web Search member sellers.

Because member sellers use tags, which are keywords and phrases they use to represent what they offer, and not restrictive, pre-determined categories, member sellers are ultimately contacted by buyers they can actually sell to. Search results are based on matching what the buyer types with what the seller uses to tag his content. No more wasting time talking to the wrong buyer type. Because the buyer has used the tools available within the Industrial Web Search engine to source potential suppliers, in effect he has been pre-qualified by the system. Member sellers benefit greatly from receiving accurate contact information they can effectively act on.

Chip Terry, towards the end of his interview, states, “To get someone interested, you have to be relevant….you could go in and act like a partner or a consultant, trying to solve their problem with the info you have.” Industrial Web Search has built-in tools that provide member sellers with quality contact information from the primary source – the buyer himself – in addition to the information they will need to effectively engage the buyer in a discussion about their proposed solution. IWS members can select the option to build their own custom RFQ form, for example, to ensure they get the exact information they need from potential customers.

Providing your sales force with the tools they need to effectively do their job helps to reduce costs while increasing revenue. Industrial Web Search has been built specifically to do just that. It does the research and acquisition end of the sales process so that your sales reps are free to do more selling. An extremely affordable option, starting at less than $500 for the year, your sales team gets quality contact information that allows them to sell effectively. For more information visit IndustrialWebSearch.com.

Promising accurate, quality search results, the search engine has a unique structure that has done away completely with legacy category search. No more guessing under what category you may find the product or service you need. With this search engine the keywords and phrases you type are matched exactly with the keywords and phrases the seller members have used to “tag” their content. Accurate matches are made simply by delivering a list of suppliers whose tags match what you type. So if you are looking for ‘industrial cameras’ only the seller members who have used ‘industrial cameras’ as a tag will appear in the results.

But don’t worry if you can’t think of the exact term to search with. As you start typing in the search box, a list of tags used by member sellers that seem to match what you are looking for appear below. You can easily select one from the drop-down to generate a search result. You can even refine your search further by adding additional terms or selecting the state in which you need the supplier to offer service. There are built-in tools to help you do these things and they’re really easy to use.

Industrial Web Search has a few more features that make it stand out from the rest. First of all, the only way a seller can get listed in the engine is to become a member. The search engine is not pre-populated with unknown companies from the internet. Only companies with whom the search engine has a professional relationship can appear. This means both accurate and quality search results for sourcing professionals who no longer have to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant, low quality results looking for a potential candidate.

And it’s convenient too! Available on both a desktop/laptop or a web-enabled handheld device like your iPhone or Smartphone, this multi-platform search tool allows you to conduct a search wherever you need to, including while you’re standing on the plant floor staring at one of your machines that has broken down and needs a special part fast!

Whether you’re searching from your desktop at the office or your mobile phone on the job site, the search engine helps to put industrial and commercial sourcing professionals in contact with relevant suppliers. To that end, once you have completed your search and clicked on a link, it leads you to the Company Profile where you can learn enough to know whether you have found a good match and initiate contact right then and there from within the application.

With active one-click communications (you do have to have an ISP, email and VoIP service provider) you can send emails and place a call from your web-enabled device. So if you’re searching from your iPhone and you want to click to call, no problem. You’re all set to do that already. Depending on the level of seller membership, you can even send an RFQ from within the application.

The best thing to do is start using it!  Visit Industrial Web Search for Desktop/Laptop or Industrial Web Search for Mobile and see for yourself. Remember, the tool is still new and not pre-populated with random companies so it continues to expand with its growing membership.