B2B marketing used to be straightforward, at least for companies with an established market position. There was far less competition, so existing customers were more loyal, and few options existed for product advertising: trade fairs, specialist magazines, mailings by post and visits by sales reps. This changed only when online marketing gave us advertisers completely new possibilities. So many, in…

Are there still manufacturers that don’t do exports? Hardly. The overall share of sales generated abroad is steadily increasing. This explains why many companies have set up multilingual websites. These companies gain a significant competitive edge by addressing potential customers in their native language. With each additional language, they increase the number of sales leads from the corresponding countries by…

If you don’t have any experience with stand-alone mailings, you’re probably asking yourself “What are stand-alone mailings? What do they achieve? Are they worthwhile for our company?” At least that’s how I felt many years ago as the Head of Marketing at Schleicher & Schuell. I wasn’t really convinced by what the third-party providers were telling me. Nobody wanted to,…

“Our customers all speak English. That’s why we save ourselves the trouble of translating into other languages.” If you share this opinion, you’re giving away enormous potential that you probably don’t even know exists. A few years ago, I found this out myself. The website content and catalogs of a global market leader from the UK were available exclusively in…

How do you assess how well your company is known in the industry? Is every potential customer aware of its range of products and services? Or might there be thousands of users out there who have never heard of your company? The bad news first: You are probably overestimating how well-known your company is because it is so important to…

Forget everything that you, as an exhibitor, have learned about trade fairs. Simply waiting for sales leads to accumulate at trade fairs no longer works. While in the past many exhibitors have been able to rely on the pull effect of global corporations being there as well, these days they have to attract their own booth visitors. What visitors expect…

“Topic Worlds? Sounds like a sales campaign at a department store. What’s that got to do with me, a B2B supplier?”, you might be asking yourself, when such campaigns are best known to do well by focusing on “all your kitchen needs” or something similar. “What would that achieve in B2B?”, we at LUMITOS were thinking about two years ago.…

Does this sound familiar to you? You’ve prepared well for that important trade fair. You want to gain new customers at your booth. Later, after the trade fair, you discover that 95% of the visitors were again only existing customers. This is what happened to me many years ago with my trade fair preparation for the analytica 2000. As a…

Do you know the feeling? You’re interested in buying something, whether privately or professionally, and spend hour after hour searching the internet for the right product. Eventually you get the feeling that it’s got you nowhere. Well, your B2B customers are no different. Just like Lukas, a laboratory manager at a contract laboratory. Plenty of orders have been coming in…

Where do the member companies of SPECTARIS, the German Industry Association for Optics, Photonics, Analytical and Medical Technologies, stand when it comes to sharing know-how by offering webinars? To answer this question, we analyzed the websites of the member companies: Who offers webinars for existing and potential customers? Are the webinars made available live or on demand? How many webinars…