Marketing 101: What Canada’s Best Electrical Marketers Are Doing!

 

Sept 17, 2018

By John Kerr

As we enter into the fall budgeting for next year, many firms are discussing budget allocations and discussions as to what tools to use to build the marketing plan. Today too, challenges from the corporate team demand more and more analytics and return. 

In the current period recently, many companies and their marketing teams are relying on softer returns around brand value to try and demonstrate a marketing return, but many of these measures don’t support the brand but rather the tactic.

When we look at the electrical industry in Canada and view its marketing campaigns, we see the stronger brands continuing strong and outperforming in so many ways, including share, channel support and engagement, and preference. We also see that these firms are all concerned about a longer-term view. 

Social media strategies can work but in the B2B space merely reviewing numbers alone is a dangerous path. The true return on the marketing initiatives is better measured alongside business driven ones than softer metrics like likes and follows. To gain the resources they need to drive brand, successful marketers are doing more longer-term thinking, linking tactical plans to actual results and measuring returns in terms of time as well. 

So, what’s missing in Canada and where are the mistakes we see?    

1. You can’t reinforce brand awareness and build preference in a vacuum. These two soft goals are the foundation of all we must do. Brand and preference give you the edge, you move up the buying journey, and more often that not your brand is where the buying and specifying begin. Brand building is lost on so many companies here. Many default to our customers know us or our channel knows us.   

2. You can’t drive likes and follows especially if the total market does not know you. Reliance on social media channels alone limits the reach, dulls the return, and can mask the weakness in an overall plan. Yes, one needs to be there, but a marketing campaign can’t be built on this alone, which so many are.    

3. You can’t build your business and increase share when all you market to is who you think you know. Many firms forget to segment and define their core customers and even more never go out to find more of who they really want.    

4. Sending out newsletters to those customers you know keeps only 10% of those folks informed, based on the best open rates we see. These campaigns require a huge commitment of time and money. Years ago, the likes of BMW and other key brands decided to use their own in-house magazines to drive demand. It was a great keep customers tactic but got ever more expensive as the content demands increased and as readership crashed. BMW subsequently cut back the frequency and added spend to other marketing tools.    

5. You can’t succeed without specific plans and goals, such as       
a. defending the brand first        
b. making our brand the preferred brand       
c. driving sales of a segment of products        
d.  driving sales by a target segment of customers        
e. determining who you don’t know and not relying totally on who you do

Today the best electrical marketers in Canada are typified by the following attributes:   
1. They have a solid brand awareness and preference campaign as part of their strategy.    
2. They market to the entire country in both languages in a coordinated way at the same time.   
3. They capture data (not metrics) as the first default to allow them to drill down by region, product, line of business or customer, or market.    
4. They have adopted the strategy to provide meaningful educational content first above product-only material ,and lever it across their own their channel and other media platforms.    
5. The lever new product announcements, company news and PR as a part of their content campaign, not as its focus.    
6. They use social media as one tool alongside everything else to make sure prospects and customers who use this can consume the content where and when they want it.    
7. They believe the brand value is the core and is a longer-term strategy.    
8. They do Canada-targeted campaigns often.   
9. They tie their campaigns to business outcomes.   
10. The engage the senior team from CEO on down to buy in, support, understand and champion their efforts in all they do. Time to reset and rethink and be careful about what you measure. 

John Kerr is Publisher of Canadian Electrical Wholesaler.

Photo source: rawpixel.com