Chicago, IL – A proprietary new marketing system, trademarked IMC3.0 was introduced at a conference this week by Neil Brown, Managing Partner of FUSION b2b, a full service marketing agency based in Naperville, Illinois.

The IMC3.0™ Marketing System is the use of traditional integrated marketing communications (IMC), with Web3.0 features including social media and search optimization, to realize dramatic marketing results. Traditional marketing including advertising, publicity, and trade shows are categorized as Inbound and Outbound marketing. With IMC3.0, higher cost marketing tactics can be reduced to a supporting role to more cost-efficient internet, social media, and publicity-focused initiatives.

The new IMC3.0 system has been tested and deployed over a number of client marketing programs, including product launches and new company introductions. Initial implementation of IMC3.0 has realized measurable improvements in search engine results, sales lead generation, publicity placements, social media connections, along with awareness building and most importantly, identifiable sales.

IMC3.0 was presented Wednesday, October 20 at the Manufacture America Conference sponsored by the International Trade Commission, and the U.S. Department of Commerce in Arlington Heights, IL. This presentation will be available on Fusion b2b’s YouTube Channel. To request a free white paper titled: Traditional marketing Obsolete? Hot to Implement IMC3.0, Complete the registration form on the FUSIONb2b website

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

Register for ELEMENTS™, a free eNewsletter from the leading, award-winning marketing agency FUSION B2B!  ELEMENTS™ will share tips, ideas, white papers and insights into business-to-business marketing best practices! Registration is fast and easy.

Register Here

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

The Importance of Marketing Plans

In the midst of this severe market recession, more effective marketing is more important than ever before. Marketing budgets are being scrutinized more than ever before. Surely, the skill and quality of marketing planning can support both the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing. Likewise, understanding marketing planning best practices can aid marketers at all levels in realizing their potential.

This whitepaper will consider the different types of marketing plans, how to establish marketing budgets, and how much some top business-to-business (B2B) brands spend on marketing. In addition, a marketing planning checklist is provided, along with a link to the results of a survey regarding 2011 marketing plans.

Types of Marketing Plans

There are several varieties of marketing plans from tactical marketing plans, to specific project or functional plans, to strategic marketing plans.

The most common type of marketing plan is the tactical marketing plan, which often is in the form of an annual marketing activity plan, along with corresponding budgets and schedules. This plan is used by construction brands and corporate America to efficiently coordinate and implement the multitude of marketing activities.

The tactical plan doesn’t focus on strategic issues like market segmentation, or competitive intelligence; but instead focuses on identifying the specific details of all known marketing programs, campaigns or initiatives. For example, vertical email campaign to design engineers; monthly frequency, content themes include frequently asked questions, design tips, and testimonials; goal of 2000 leads.

Depending on company size or budget, project or functional plans can be part of the tactical plan, or separate. Examples of project plans might include the plan for a new website development, or a new sales training program. Whereas functional plans might include advertising/media plans, trade show plans, and publicity plans.

Strategic marketing plans are the most rigorous of plans. What differentiates a strategic marketing plan for a tactical marketing plan is the longer time frame (typically 3-5 years), the analysis and research aspects of a strategic marketing plan, the potential financial aspects of a strategic marketing plan, and the consideration of new business or marketing initiatives that may be quite different from your existing business.

Strategic marketing plans are most often used by large brands or corporations, or when a new marketing regime or executive team takes over. Often, the strategic marketing plan is updated on an annual basis to include new research, or changing economics. The strategic marketing plan might include one or more of the following:

• Company or brand financials (historical/projections, revenue, units, margin, ROI, payback, break-even)
• Market analysis, sizing, segmentation
• Secondary research (internet, association studies, publications)
• Syndicated research (analyst Reports, research/consulting firms, other)
• Primary research results (surveys, interviews, focus groups; awareness, preference, purchase intention)
• SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
• Competitive analysis (share, positioning, intelligence)

Marketing Budgeting

A very important aspect of market planning, whether tactical, project or strategic is the budgeting of marketing expenditures. Inevitably, marketers must get approval for marketing budgets from executive management.

Business-to-Business brands and corporate America develop budgets based on one of three approaches: a percentage increase (or decrease) over last years budget, task and objective budgeting, or a percentage or (forecasted) sales based on industry or competitive benchmarking. Often budgets are developed using a combination of these approaches.

In good times, management is inclined to simply increase budgets gradually based on prior budgets. Given the economic turmoil of the past few years, I will suggest that budgets are no longer “rubber-stamped”, but rather closely scrutinized.

With detailed tactical, project and functional planning, task and objective budgeting becomes more feasible, and is intuitively appealing for relating directly to planned activities. Sometimes called zero-based budgeting, task and objective budgeting involves a detailed build-up of anticipated marketing expenditures, often prioritized to allow for elimination of budget items and programs.

Percent of sales is more often a vestige of times when advertising was the largest expense, and also when advertising expense was widely reported through information service providers. The author suggests the use of the Schonfeld report, one of remaining resources that tracks advertising and marketing expenditures of public companies. The report lists expenditures as a percentage of sales, allowing for some benchmarking which can be useful, for example, when requesting budget increases.

As a reference, following are marketing expenditures for several leading construction brands.

Marketing Planning Checklist

As discussed, marketing plans come in a number of “shapes and sizes”, from the annual tactical plan, to project or functional plans, to the detailed strategic marketing plan. A Marketing Planning Checklist can be a useful tool to help identify a broad range of items to be considered for typical marketing plans.

A given marketing program may range in complexity, budget and requirements. Different markets and products likely require vastly different marketing strategies and tactics. So a Marketing Planning Checklist should allow for a range of marketing scenarios. This checklist is based on a typical construction and/or business-to-business marketing scenario.

1. 1. Company or brand
      • Historical sales, margins, volume
      • Economic drivers (macro)
      • SWOT analysis
   2. Customer targets
      • Demographics (decision makers)
      • Market segments
      • Channels
      • Sales process (incl. cycle)
   3. Competitors
      • Market share
      • Branding/positioning
      • Key marketing initiatives
   4. Prior Marketing Programs and Results
      • Sales
      • Inquiries/sales leads/new customers
      • Website traffic statistics
      • Other measures
   1. Sales (Revenue, Volume, Margin)
   2. Market share
   3. Other measures
   1. How to achieve objectives, not specific tactics
      • New products
      • New markets
      • Promotions
      • New Programs
      • Customer initiatives
   1. Branding
      • Re-branding
      • Naming
      • Identity
      • Sub-branding, trademark registration, identity standards
   2. Internet
      • Website development, re-development, microsites, landing pages
      • Search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM)
      • Social media (profiles, followers, blog and forum posts)
      • Email campaigns (landing pages, registration forms)
      • Webcasts, webinars, web conferences
   3. Advertising
      • Media (research, planning, placement, traffic)
      • Print (trade publications)
      • Online (banners, directories, Google AdWords)
      • Broadcast (TV, radio)
   4. Publicity
      • News releases
      • Press list
      • Press kit
      • Press events
      • Article (writing and placement)
      • Media relations
      • Distribution (internet, wire service)
   5. Sales Promotion
      • Programs
      • Training
      • Contests, coupons, sweepstakes
   6. Collateral
      • Brochures, product sheets, flyers
      • Catalogs, manuals, instructions, installation
      • Educational pieces (white papers, guides, how-tos)
   7. Trade shows and Events (national, international, regional shows, dealer open houses)
      • Exhibit design
      • Booth graphics
      • Pre-show promotion
   8. Channel marketing
      • Dealer or distributor programs
      • Promotions
      • Merchandising support, POP, packaging
      • Training programs
      • Launch kits
      • MDF and Co-Op programs
   9. Direct marketing
      • Direct mail
      • Database marketing
      • List procurement, email, webcasts
   10. Photography and video (supports all tactics above)

BACKGROUND

OBJECTIVES (quantify)

STRATEGIES

TACTICS

Getting Started

It’s that time of the year to develop annual tactical marketing plans, functional plans and strategic marketing plans. If you have undertaken any of these in the past, the new planning cycle should entail updates and modifications. If not, starting from scratch can be daunting.

A number of marketing plan templates are available on the internet. For tactical or functional plans, we prefer a spreadsheet with grouped projects, monthly columns, and budgets that can be modified easily.

To help you get started, it often helps to do some benchmarking. What are competitors or other B2B brands planning for 2011? To this end, please share the results of the recent survey, 2011 Marketing Planning Outlook. You can receive this report free, for a limited time, by simply completing the quick and easy survey at: 2011 Marketing Outlook Survey

Wait, there’s more help! FUSION B2b will provide a Marketing Plan Review, complete with analysis and recommendations, under non-disclosure, for the modest fee of $500. Questions or to request, use the contact form at FUSIONb2b.com, and reference Marketing Plan Review.

Happy planning!

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

Want insight into 2011 business-to-business marketing?

Find out what your B2B marketing peers are planning for 2011 by taking a quick and anonymous survey via Survey Monkey!

The quick and easy survey questions include marketing spending plans, top marketing priorities, and increases or decreases in activity or spending by key marketing tactics. A demographic qualifier will allow results of the survey to be reported by company category (manufacturer, service firm, consultants, etc). Please complete the survey  by 9/20/10!

Sponsored by FUSION b2b, the goal is to determine the 2011 marketing plan trends for business-to-business. A complete report will be available to participants by October 1 (2010) or sooner.

Link here to access survey:  2011 Marketing Outlook Survey

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

(PUBLICITY: PART 2 of 2)

Per the prior post, the popularity and use of free publicity historically increases when the economy tanks. In the midst of this seemingly extended downturn, PR is certainly gaining priority in the construction marketing mix. At the same time, PR is changing significantly. So how can you refine your PR to realize greater results?

PART 1 of our series will examined how PR has changed, and how your PR program can change to leverage new PR opportunities. PART 2 of this series focuses on the specifics of PR distribution options.

As always, please share your comments and personal experience to bring some broader perspectives to our discussion!

News Distribution Tips

As you might expect, there is no “silver bullet” or single solution that address all needs. Most marketing practitioners use a combination of approaches for getting news and PR releases in front of editors and influencers.

Fusion B2B, and PR programs for Fusion’s clients use a several options for news distribution. Heather Hawes, Account Executive shares her process. “First we post news on our websites and blogs. This allows for Retweeting and bookmarking. Next we distribute to our own editor (email) databases. The news announcements are also formatted to included links to these respective internet domains. Depending on how “big” the news item is, we will then distribute using both free and paid services. We still realize the majority of placements thru our own, custom editor lists.”

“Distribution services increase news reach and placements, particularly across the internet, and with blogs that would be hard to identify“, adds Neil M. Brown, Managing Partner of the Fusion B2B.

So which service should construction marketers use for distributing news announcements and press releases to your targets? No question, there are more options than ever. The following table list some of the top news distribution services that range from free to substantial fees for more value-added services. The table includes CMA’s ranking based on quality, costs, network scope and Google PageRank. Note that the service name hotlinks to the respective websites.

#	Name	Cost	Distribution Network	PageRank
1	PRWeb	$80	250k RSS, 30k journalists
2	BusinessWire	$395-$675	Nat’l/Regional Selects/200 Industry Selects
3	PRNewswire	$415-$715	85,000 registered journalists
4	Marketwire	$285-$485	300k RSS, 8k news & broadcasts
5	24-7 Press Release	$0-$49	60,000 editors/journalists/bloggers
6	PR.com	$0-$199	Vertical Industry Selects
7	Cision	$250-$350	300k outlets/Monitoring
8	Vocus	$380	250k RSS, 30k journalists/bloggers
9	Free-Press-Release.com	$0-$30	Country and Industry Selects
10	1888PressRelease.com	$0-$29	Websites, RSS Feeds,Blogs

Per above, depending on the importance of the news, you may opt for free distribution for minor releases, to the highest level of services for news that requires the broadest distribution, or specific features like financial disclosure compliance which BusinessWire and PR Newswire both support.

Our staff often uses a combination of free and paid, thus ensuring that multiple news sources will pick-up the news.

Fusion ranks PRWeb highest by virtue of the combination of reasonable fees, broad distribution and high Google PageRank. Upon review, Businesswire and PR Newswire are the top-end services, and very similar. Although Businesswire pricing is more reasonable for smaller clients.

We have experienced excellent search results using 24-7pressrelease.com and Free-press-release.com. After this exercise, we are inclined to further evaluate PR.com.

Following are some additional services we found but did not analyze. In the meantime, what services do you prefer and why? Please comment, Retweet and bookmark!

#	Name	PageRank
1	Newswire Today	PR6
2	Press Release Network	PR6
3	Thomas Net News	PR6
4	PR Log	PR6
5	PR-Inside	PR6
6	ClickPress	PR5
7	PR Leap	PR5
8	PR Zoom	PR5
9	Pressbox.co.uk	PR5
10	Free Press Release Center	PR4
11	EcommWire	PR4
12	PR Free	PR4

( PUBLICITY:  PART 1 of 2)

The popularity and use of free publicity historically increases when the economy tanks. In the midst of this seemingly extended downturn, PR is certainly gaining priority in the business-to-business  marketing mix. At the same time, PR is changing significantly. So how can you refine your PR to realize greater results?

PART 1 of our series will examine how PR has changed, and how your PR program can change to leverage new PR opportunities. PART 2 will focus on the specifics of PR distribution options.

As always, please share your comments and personal experience to bring some reality to our discussion!

PR Has Changed

So, how has PR changed? Not to overstate, but in the last few years PR has changed more than in the last 30 years combined. How? The changing roles of journalists and marketing practitioners, and the rapidly increasing use of social media in PR.
No doubt, the recession has taken a toll on journalists with layoffs, and those remaining having greater workloads, tightening budgets, and added responsibilities of writing for multiple mediums. According to the 2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey, 59% of traditional (print) journalists are the author of a blog, and are also expected to contribute to online news, Twitter and other channels.

With greater workload, the research tools used by journalists might identify opportunities for marketing practitioners. Not surprisingly, Google and other search engines rank highest. 95% in 2010 per the PRWeek survey, followed by company websites (93%), Wikipedia (47%), newswires (36%), social networks (33%), and blogs (32%).

Social Media Emergence

While the hype of social media pervades marketing practitioners, the use of social media for publicity is growing rapidly, and becoming a major part of both journalist and practitioners PR activities.

According to the survey, in 2010 79% of journalists have a Facebook profile, 46% have a LinkedIn profile, and 58% have a Twitter profile. Only 11% have no profiles. Twitter realized the most dramatic increase from just 22% in 2009.

In addition, 43% of PR practitioners use social networks to pitch media, with 76% using Twitter and 49% using Facebook. One of the key reasons practitioners use social media? Search engine results! Often posts to social media channels rank higher than even company websites for key search terms. And as noted above, journalists use search engines 93% of the time for research.

A discussion of PR and social media would be incomplete without acknowledging the growing importance of blogs. Per above, 59% of traditional (print) journalists write blogs. In addition, 45% of journalists have quoted a blog in an article, and journalists use both general blogs (24%) and company blogs (23%) for research. On the practitioner side, 66% are targeting bloggers more than before.

“The corporate, brand or subject matter blog can be the hub of an integrated PR program, using social media channels for news distribution,” suggests Neil M. Brown, Managing Partner at Fusion B2B.

The New Rules of PR

So what are the implications of the changing PR landscape to practitioners or client-side marketers? Clearly PR strategies and tactics should embrace these changes, and leverage the opportunities.

“Now more than ever, practitioners should be deploying blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles. Wikipedia pages. Bookmark and Share links on website pages. The blog and all profiles should be linked to the website, which should have RSS feeds. News announcements should be formatted to include links to these assets and other relevant information sources,” shares Neil M. Brown.

Fusion B2B is a good example of effective PR and integrated social media. Heather Hawes, Account Manager for Fusion B2B agency sums it up. “Just a couple of years ago, we would email a news announcement to trade editors. We still distribute to trade editors, but we also post news on our websites and blogs with RSS feeds, use Twitter, Facebook, and social Bookmarking tools to distribute the news and submit to free news distribution services. If the news item is big or strategic enough, we will submit to paid distribution services. Finally, we can measure placements with alerts and searches. Its faster, deeper and more measurable.”

What are your PR experiences? Please comment below. And by all means, Retweet, Share and Bookmark. For automatic alerts, sign up for email feeds of all Construction Marketing Blogposts above.

Next: PUBLICITY, PR Distribution Options.

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

Naperville, IL—July 21, 2010

Marketing agency FUSION b2b is pleased to announce PINpoint™ Internet Analysis and Rating Service based on over 50 variables, and includes a complete report with detailed analysis and recommendations,

The proprietary FUSION PINpoint system is unique in it’s analysis of both website and social media for a comprehensive evaluation of Internet presence. Ratings are based on key search engine data, website meta structure, website traffic, social media integration (use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), inbound links, indexed pages, site design and usability, and other variables.

“PINpoint Internet Analysis and Rating Service considers search engine optimization (SEO), and how social media integrates with websites, which are key drivers of search engine results”, states Pavel Solyak, Internet Director for FUSION b2b.

The Free Internet Analysis and Rating Service is available to qualified companies, and will be completed and emailed to your attention in approximately 48 hours.

To request a free PINpoint Internet Analysis and Rating service, simply submit your website address and email address HERE.

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

by Pavel Solyak

Blogs by senior company officials-often referred to as CEO blogs are a great way for companies to engage and connect with their customers, prospects and investors as well as to talk about goings-on inside the company. Other benefits of business-to-business blogging include building a hub for all your social media initiatives, reinforcing the company’s brand, making company announcements to which people will pay attention, open new marketing channel for products and services and in some cases, even create a dynamic mean for providing customer service and support. B2C companies have been blogging for years, often having separate blogs for their product lines, customer service and investors. Some will keep company blogs, some – employee blogs, and some will go as far as hiring professional bloggers specifically to write posts in a manner consistent with expectation of blog-reading customers.

B2B customers are no different from B2C: fed up with companies that have grown detached from them, they are likely to favor companies that make an effort to connect with them and engage in dialogue and knowledge-sharing.

While your business needs should drive the approach your organization takes to blogging, in B2B industry CEO of Executive blogs are typically the best way to go. The New PR website contains a list of more than 270 blogs by senior executives around the world. Although the list hasn’t been updated since 2008, here are just a few examples of executives who blog:

• Randy Tinseth, VP Marketing of Boeing (Randy’s Journal)
• Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Jonathan’s Blog)
• Bob Lutz, CEO of General Motors (FastLane Blog)
• Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO at Hitachi Data Systems (Hu’s Blog)
• Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott International (Marriott on the move)

Don’t panic, who authors an official company blog or CEO blog isn’t important. I would seriously doubt Bill Gates or James Skinner spend all day blogging about their companies and responding to all the comments and emails. However, those blogs offer executives a channel to share their perspectives and talk about issues facing the company. Hearing from company’s leaders and executives, people charged with a power to make highest-level decisions and planning corporate strategy, can make the whole organization stand out, heighten the perception of transparency and enhance reader’s ability to comment. Think about it this way: customers feel they can get in direct touch with the top dogs and project their opinions and questions. Giving your customers a voice will in turn engage them with your brand and eradicate much of the skepticism about your organization. Yes, we said skepticism. Customers have grown more distant from brand, having lower levels of trust in both B2B and B2C. But can you blame them with business practices of WorldCom and Enron, car recalls, Chinese lead-filled children’s toys, outsourced customer service, bank failures and government bailouts? Having a transparent company or CEO blog will set you apart in the eyes of customers who are used to companies not caring what they wants, not talking to them and trying to rob them blind for every cent.

Remember, a CEO blog is much different from a CEO’s letter to shareholders or annual report. While you may be able to cut some corners and repurpose content from your reports and internal news for your blog, keep in mind the differences between the two. An annual report appears once a year (unless your organization is doing quarterly reports), the writing is usually formal and blend, and pages are full of numbers, charts and graphs. Such reports usually addresses broad array of issues and gives strategic recommendations and projections. More importantly, there is no way to respond to it. A blog, on the other hand, will appear frequently and focus on a specific issue. The writing is more authentic and candid, opinions are welcome, and of course audience can comment on any posts.

Take a look at the blog from General Motors‘ Blog. Here is a review of GM’s recent posts:

• A piece on Chevrolet team donating year’s supply of diapers, new car seats and other baby supplies to a customer who gave birth while driving GM made vehicle
• A webchat about with the winner of EcoCar NeXt Challenge – a GM sponsored event
• A piece about strong auto sales and continued growth in May
• An item about GM’s green initiative and what it means to be green
• GM’s announcement to repay government loans and its future plans for plant investments

Let’s look at another blog from Boeing’s CEO:

• Firm’s progress on the new 787-9 Dreamliner jet
• An article talking about recent World Trade Organization ruling about company’s biggest  competitor Airbus and what that means for Boeing
• A series of hot weather test flights for a Boeing 747-8
• Blog talking about the importance of airplane inspections and Boeing’s stance on safety

Customers and investors alike are more willing to do business with a company whose leaders are displaying though-leadership, expertise and candidly addressing topics and issues about which customers are interested.

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

by Eric Gagnon

Many agency and marketing folks often consider running only full-page ads in their B2B campaigns, under the mistaken assumption that a full page ad always makes a bigger splash than any smaller ad size.

But you can run a successful lead-generation advertising program using smaller ad sizes, if you focus on highlighting the boldness, clarity, and readability of your product’s major sales benefit, you can make a small ad generate even greater sales response than full-page ads.

In fact, once I’m able to un-hypnotize a client from thinking they need to run full pages, I usually advise them to start a new advertising program with half, quarter, and (sometimes) even one-eighth ad sizes, to reduce the risk and expense of their print ad buys, and to test the response of the publication, sales message, and promotion used in these ads.

It’s a Fact: Ugly Little Ads Work

If you flip through successive issues of any trade publication, you’ll often see the same smaller half, quarter, and one-eighth page ads repeating every single month.

This is often a telltale sign these fractional-space ads are paying their own way by generating solid sales leads for their advertisers, where larger, prettier, full-page ads in the same pubs often appear and disappear like footprints along the beach.

In fact, some fractional ads have become legendary for their pulling power and longevity. According to top ad executive Fred Poppe, the late co-founder of Poppe Tyson, the ad below for Downs Crane and Hoist ran in trade publications for 35 years, outpulling the average ad in these publications by 50%:

Who Can Benefit from Running Fractional Ads?

Just about any type of product can be advertised effectively in a smaller page size, but companies selling a product or service that customers order when they need it—such as industrial supplies, commodity products or materials, or specialized engineering or technical services—are especially suited to smaller ad programs.

These are the kinds of products readers want when they need it (and not before), and they’ll usually buy it from the last company whose ad they remembered in the latest issue of their industry’s trade publication. And to meet this need, a smaller ad (if it’s effective) that repeats, issue to issue, is often more memorable than a one-shot, three-time run of full page ads.

Keys to Fractional Ad Layout and Presentation

Let me show you a few techniques you can use to boost the attention-getting, persuasive power of a smaller ad for any B2B product or service, to make it do the work of a much larger ad.

Let’s start with a rough sketch of the ad copy layout. These were sales copy benefit points we developed for a company selling a fiber-optic visual inspection system that helps technicians pinpoint leaks and flaws in pipelines, engines and other closed mechanical components:

We’ll create a one-quarter page ad (3-3/8” W x 4-7/8” H), but these techiques apply to even smaller ad sizes all the way down to one-eighth page ads, although some elements would have to be scaled down, or removed, as appropriate.

Setting the Headline

For smaller ad sizes, text usually does a better job of communicating sales benefits than product shots or illustrations. So when you’re producing a fractional ad, you’ll want your headline to do most of the work of attracting attention to your ad.

The copy for this headline presents a very effective and compelling sales benefit, so let’s make it the boldest feature of this ad, and give it about a third of the ad’s total space.

Bold, sans-serif fonts generally work best for headlines, so let’s set this one like so:

Set like this, the headline above doesn’t make the best use of the one-third space we’ve reserved for this ad, so let’s work on its line breaks and justification to make it fit better into this space.

When working with text, you can often improve the readability and appeal of a headline by changing its line breaks. While we’re at it, let’s increase the font size of the headline, which obviously makes it bolder:

—the tweaked headline on the bottom looks much bolder and more readable, but we can make it even bolder by reversing the type and placing it inside a solid color box. Muted blues, greens, or reds look best for this effect:

See how reversed text makes this headline look bolder and more readable? Reversing text in solid color is a great technique for increasing boldness in a fractional ad.

This technique also works well when producing a black and white ad, by using a 50% black screen instead of color:

Filling in the Subhead

In this ad, the subhead we developed from th three-step copywriting exercise:

Highlight Potential Surface Flaws and Other Surface Defects With IntelliScan AVIS

— starts to tell the story about this product, rounding out the main sales benefit expressed in the headline.

Get the subhead right up close to the headline by snugging it right up under the headline, so the reader’s eye moves from the headline, down into the subhead.

You can set this subhead in the same type as the headline, or in a slightly less-bold variation, like so:

You may notice we also shortened this text a bit, so we could make the subhead line a little bigger.

Show Me the Product!

Smaller ads require tight, close-cropped product shots. A photo of the product in use is always better than a standalone shot. Here’s a good shot we can use for this ad space:

Now We Negotiate…

Optimizing a small ad for maximum sales impact always seems to be a negotiation between the major elements of the ad—headline, subhead, product shot, body copy, and call to action/contact info.

Since we’re making the headline do most of the selling for this ad, the product shot will stand behind the headline and subhead, but we want to make it equally prominent with the body copy.

Placing the Body Copy

By placing the product shot directly to the left of the body copy for this ad, we’ll save space in this ad, and boost the readability and interest of both:

Make Me an Offer, and Tell Me What to Do Next…

The purpose of B2B advertising is to generate quality sales leads for your company’s product, and ads will always pull better if you offer some kind of FREE promotional premium or FREE incentive for the reader to contact your company.

For sales of technically-oriented products, FREE premiums, like software utilities, special-function calculators, or white papers, or any other FREE deliverable that puts your product into the prospect’s mind and/or helps him/her to do their job better, or more productively, is a definite motivator for sales response—that is, getting the reader to call your company, contact a rep or distributor, or visit your Web site.

(Did I mention that it should be FREE?)

Here, we’re offering access to a Web video and a white paper on technical aspects of materials inspection.

We’ll also place the company logo and contact information at the bottom, with the phone number and Web site link, set large and readable.

And here’s our final ad:

Now, let’s pull this ad up alongside any other full-page ad we might see in a typical trade publication, and see how it stacks up:

As you can see, this ugly little ad more than holds its own against a full page ad costing three times as much. The secret is using a bold, readable headline that answers a prospect need (it helped that we reversed the type on it, too). Once you draw the reader’s attention with the headline, the rest of the elements of the ad can do their work.

Ugly, little, hard-tugging ads like this one won’t win any design awards, and your CEO won’t wave them around in front of his board members, but they’ll likely pull solid sales response while keeping your marketing budget under control. For my money (and yours) I’ll put my trust in these ugly little ads every time.

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!

by Pavel Solyak

Starting up a Blog for your B2B company has proven to be of great benefit for a variety of reasons. Think about all the internal links and search engine optimization gains, a new communication channel for company’s news and services, a chance to prove thought-leadership and authority in the industry, not to mention a creative space for brand awareness. Most importantly, corporate blogs bring traffic to your site and in combination with other social media tools can become a great lead generation instrument.

There are many different ways to set up a blog and a number of blogging platforms to choose from. WordPress is the most popular, however some companies prefer Typepad, Blogger or even develop custom platform that fits their needs. Mashable has a great list of 40+ free blog hosts to get you started blogging, but before you do – think of a topic that would be interesting for you and for your readers.

Any B2B blogger will tell you that the hardest part is coming up with topics to write about. Sure they know their company and their product, but when operating certain industries and niche markets it’s difficult to think of topics that will excite and interest readers about the company. Here is a list of 25 topic suggestions to help you get going with your B2B Blog

The more you blog, the easier it will be coming up with interesting topics. Remember to blog regularly so readers keep coming back for more. Have fun with it: use humor, photos and videos to spice things up and break away from boring corporate copy. Provide content that adds value to your company, don’t be afraid to put your best stuff out there – don’t share your trade secrets, but do give away some free information. Don’t assume you will reap the benefits overnight – it will take some time. And if you are lost – don’t worry, there are always content experts like Fusion B2B out there willing to help. Twitter us at @fusionb2b. Happy blogging!

Please Retweet, Facebook Like and Digg/Delicious this blog post!