InQuest Marketing – Helping to “Make America”
As you all know, Inquest doesn’t make things, but we help people gain prosperity. Together, we’re responsible for making America more prosperous, more efficient and more competitive. And as part of our nation’s manufacturing industry by way of our professional marketing services, we have many stories to tell about how we as an agency help “make America.”
An industry trade group that we belong to, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers launched the I Make America campaign in 2010 to show Congress that tens of thousands of working men and women support new manufacturing policies that create jobs here in the U.S. They’ve had great success and made a difference in Washington already, and Advantage Marketing, a Division of InQuest Marketing. LLC has been acknowledged as a bronze level sponsor of this movement for our efforts in joining the campaign to stand up for American jobs.
“We are encouraging every friend, family member, employee and client to be a part of the campaign by signing up at www.IMakeAmerica.com, and hope you will ask your family, friends and employees to sign up as well. You can help us make a difference just by signing your name as a supporter.
We all have friends and family or neighbors who’ve lost their jobs since the recession began. Over the past 10 years, manufacturing in the U.S. has shed 5.5 million jobs, and unemployment in the manufacturing sector remains notably higher than the national average. So it’s critical to all of us that we send a message to Congress, encouraging support for policies that protect and grow industry.
Please take a moment and visit www.IMakeAmerica.com, or follow the movement on social media via Twitter @IMakeAmerica and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/IMakeAmerica. Let’s show pride in our mission to help bring jobs back to America and show support for our friends and neighbors in the manufacturing industry who may be out of work by asking Congress to support manufacturing policies that create jobs in our state and communities.
Thanks, from all of us at InQuest Marketing.
Social Media in the Construction Industry
5 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Construction Company
Jennifer Hennion, Account Manager for our equipment, manufacturing and construction division – Advantage Marketing – discusses “5 Ways to Use Social Media for Your Construction Company” in an article recently published on Construction Business Owner.com.
Like many business owners today, construction business owners want to know how social media can help them promote their business to drive leads and increase sales.
Social media may not necessarily be the best marketing tool for every business but should be used regardless. With more than 200 million adult Internet users in the United States, 2 million Google searches a minute and mobile devices projected as the primary Internet connection tool by 2020, you must have a presence on social media. According to eMarketer, more than two-thirds of U.S. Internet users regularly use a social network.
Your customers can now control the messages they receive and how, where and when they receive them. In the past, companies have attempted to reach their customers by pushing a message out through a local newspaper or a radio advertisement. But today, customers look for information online to find the products and services they need.
Social media and other digital technologies provide a great way to deliver relevant content to interested customers. U.S. companies ranked LinkedIn, company blogs, Facebook and Twitter as the top four social media tools that helped them generate leads.
Click on the link below to view the article in it’s entirety on Construction Business Owner.com. Then come back and read a bit more on how our Advantage Marketing team is equipped to help OEMs, dealers and rental companies around the world achieve their sales and revenue goals.
Why Tracking Your Results Is More Important Than Ever
Given the challenging economic times of the past few years, we’ve seen many companies scale back their advertising spending to meet increasingly tight budgets. Along with these reductions, companies are understandably asking for more and more tracking of results and justification for the advertising dollars they spend.
There’s a famous quote by John Wanamaker that has followed us through the years, “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” The good news is, for those willing to invest to target and measure their advertising, there’s no better time than now.
Tried-and-true mediums like print, direct mail and television are more trackable than ever. It’s easier than ever for customers to respond to offers – and easier for agencies to monitor results. Your target audience can enter contests or ask for free trials by calling, texting, email or social media. A QR code gives prospects more information about your product – and you get more information about the prospect. Unique URLs or dedicated 800#’s also help you track campaigns. With just a bit more upfront planning, and very little cost, you can get the information you need to justify (or modify) where, when and how your marketing dollars are spent.
Now let’s talk online, email
and mobile marketing. These still relatively new technologies make it easy to track campaigns – and make changes “on the fly” based on response. Take a Google Ad Words campaign, for example. You can have different ads running using a variety of search terms. In real time, you can monitor your ads and make immediate changes when an ad’s click-through rate significantly jumps or drops off. Gone are the days when you could only change your creative every 30 days. Now you can do it every 30 seconds if that’s what it takes to drive results.
Regardless of which media mix is right for your products and target audience, be sure to build in a way to track your results. Believe it or not, few companies are out there leveraging these new tracking technologies. It’s really more an investment of time rather than money. But it can be a challenge for marketing managers whose staff was scaled back along with their budgets.
The time-tested components of a successful marketing campaign must still be incorporated into each creative component. These include knowing who your most-profitable prospects are, how they want to be communicated with – and when they are ready to buy. Combine this data with a relevant, timely message, and you’re sure to see a boost in response rates. This increase can be measured and used to justify the budget dollars spent, and it’s vital for intelligently planning the next round of spending.
Agencies shouldn’t just sell advertising or creative. When you partner with a reputable agency with industry-specific experience, you get a full team of dedicated professionals with specialists in each key discipline.
Like a good accountant, a good agency will pay for itself with results.
Our Favorite Bill Bernbach Quotes
The other day, we ran across a listing of Bill Bernbach’s most famous quotes on advertising. Paying homage to this advertising pioneer and founder of DDB is a natural for InQuest. Out of the more thanseven pages of single-spaced entries, we found many strike a chord as harmonious in the 21st century as they did when Bill first uttered the quotes decades ago.
Here are our Top 5:
#5 – “I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.” We agree completely, in fact good advertising is a combination of science and intuition. The more we learn about our clients’ customers, the better we can interpret how they’ll respond to a product or service benefit.
#4 – “Word of the mouth is the best medium of all.“ Amen, Brother Bill. And this has never been more truthful then today when brands can be celebrated or trashed in the blink of an eye via social media. Five years ago a bad experience led the average person to verbally share with 8 others. Today, it can be tens of thousands who get the message with a click of a mouse.
#3 – “It’s not how short you make it; it’s how you make it short.” Everyone is rushing to simplify their story and message. However, the fewer words used, the tougher the assignment. A good copywriter understands this and celebrates when he or she creates the minimum number of syllables in a cadence that resonates with the audience like a symphony.
#2 – “The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.” While we don’t take as many pictures as we once did, the rest of this quote is VERY true and why InQuest places such a premium on measuring the results of our communication efforts with our clients.
#1 – “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” And based on what we all saw this past Super Bowl, there were many more new lows than highs.
