When it comes to integrated marketing services, the range of programs can run the gamut depending on your company’s budget and its primary markets. For the high-tech and industrial B-2-B community, the mix of traditional and digital marketing methods continues to hover somewhere around a fifty-fifty split. This is partially a result of the narrow market niches for which many companies manufacture their products, as they know who and where their customers are and more or less how to reach them.
OEM cut a similar profile. Most are engineers and product line managers with long tail careers that tend to stick with what works for them in terms of data collection, idea sharing and methods of communication. Online advertising has definitely increased, but for all the shrinking printed publications have done, engineers are a stubborn demographic and many still like their catalogs and tech briefs in hand so they can flip through them and, I dunno, roll them up and smack flies around the plant floor. So yes, digital marketing methods continue to steal large chunks of budget dollars from the more tactile forms of industrial product promotions, and even though many ads are reproduced in the form of landing pages, digital communication hasn’t yet rendered printed materials totally obsolete as many had predicted.
SMS places both print and online space for a number of our clients and has done for many years. We work closely with them to customize message to the medium, write product literature and reviews, determine ad schedules and make insertions well within strict deadlines. We also work closely with space reps who appreciate the repeat business and are willing to tack-on significant freebies. When we say we’ve been around for forty years, this is one of the areas where that kind of longevity pays off for our clients. In fact, the value-add from our long-held relationships with space reps pays off in real dollars. A significant portion of client ad budgets work double-shifts, conditioning online marketplaces which keeps brand recognition extra healthy and drives coveted branded searches.
SMS media placement specialist Anita Nicolo has this to say:
“Display advertising can be expensive. To be a player in the industry, your participation is essential to building your brand. The question you need to ask is are you leveraging your space dollars to give you the most comprehensive presence possible. Do those same advertising dollars provide you free banner ads? Free email blast sponsorships? Free new literature or product reviews? Most companies don’t have the time to handle basic space placement duties let alone field space rep calls and work their contacts. Luckily for them, we do.”
We say it around here all the time: marketing partnerships are still, in their essence, all about people. Like any relationship, it’s important to maintain strong bonds of loyalty, dependability and consistency. So if you’re placing space and only getting what you pay for, maybe you could use an agency that knows quite a bit about precisely those things.
– S. Norton
For more information on media buying in your marketplace, simply contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation or fill out our short contact form.
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