-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
How to Use Social Media to Differentiate Your Company
September 15, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
From "Monty Python’s Life of Brian:"
Brian (to crowd): “You’re all individuals!”
The Crowd, speaking as one: “Yes! We’re all individuals!”
Brian: “You’re all different!”
The Crowd, speaking as one: “Yes, we are all different!”
Man in crowd: “I’m not...”
An anecdote: Everyone in the PCB industry claims that they have “99% on-time delivery” record yet my friend Dan Beaulieu tells me that the industry average is in the low eighties. So, there are either a lot of companies with an on-time delivery record of, like 9% (not 99, just nine), or there are some novel ways of arriving at 99% (“we were 50% last month and 49% the month before. That adds up to 99%!”).
My goal isn’t to make fun of the claims some companies make, but to illustrate they are making claims about how different they are from everyone else. But everyone makes the same claim and no one offers proof. So, they're all the same.
This represents an opportunity for smart companies to use social media to prove they're different. And all they have to do is use social media to give away knowledge to prospective customers free.
Chalk that one up as me once again recommending something that companies hate to do. “Give away our hard earned knowledge for free? We need to make money here. And what if our competitors copy us?” Actually, this will make the company money and competitors won’t copy them. Let me explain.
People look on the Internet for information they can use to help them do their jobs better and make better decisions at work. This is an opportunity to be the one that provides that information--either through social media or on a website. If you're the only one of five companies offering an ebook on how to do something that has been befuddling your customer, who just differentiated themselves in that customer’s mind? And, if you were to come up with ongoing new content like this on a regular basis, that prospective customer could get in the habit of coming to you and seeing you as a resource. Congratulations. Of the five companies, this possible customer trusts only yours. You have a headstart on the next sale with him.
And your competitors? They won’t copy you for two reasons: If they see you doing something, they may try and copy it, but greed and short-term thinking will take over and where you are offering “The 10 design mistakes that can easily be avoided,” your competitor is offering “Ten reasons you should buy from us.” Guess who wins that fight? The second reason is that what you are doing is hard--it takes real work to figure out what your customer may want and actually deliver it to him of her and almost every competitor will give up...or default to the 10 reasons that customers should buy from them, find it doesn’t work, figure you are doing the same thing, write you off as crazy, and quit. And you win again.
In essence, what you do with content marketing is offer a free preview of how great you would be to work with. Prospective customers have evidence that you are thinking about the challenges that they face and that you are interested in helping them with them. And if this is what you do for strangers, what you do for customers must be incredible.
And one other benefit: Companies perceived as incredible usually don’t have a lot of problems with price. Let those other four companies compete on price while you compete on value.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.