Should You Blog About Products You Don't Sell?

Sometimes, going against your long held beliefs can be helpful.

The relationships between you, my technical sales representative and industrial distributor friends, and your principals can be convoluted. Manufacturers prefer that you not handle products considered competitive with theirs, but it is inevitable that some overlap will come into play. As a work-around solution, it is common for a rep to handle only a portion of a manufacturer's product line. There are a number of other possible scenarios that may leave you authorized to sell less than the entire product mix. This creates something of a challenge when designing your website, but even more so when selecting topics for frequent blog articles.

Some blog posts come pretty close to being product advertisements, and close is generally acceptable. I keep these points in mind when I write about a product.

• Keep promotional speech minimized (preferably missing entirely)
• Tie the product to an industry practice
• Focus on technical aspects of a product or process
• Relay how it may be different
• Show how it can deliver benefits or improvements to the reader's work or process

Working toward these goals helps maintain your post as a useful and interesting piece. The goal is to provide value for the reader, netting benefit to the writer as a result of the reader's fulfillment.

You want your company to be noticed, discovered, found by individuals with common interests, since these are the people you will do business with in one form or another. If getting noticed or discovered is your goal...

Does it make sense to blog about things you do not sell, but are related to your business?

Of course it does! Remember, your goal with your social media portals is not to sell products, it is to "sell" your organization, by increasing subscribers and reinforcing their positive impressions. The more subjects you cover, with keywords for search engines to find, the better. It is useful to keep in mind that your potential customers have professional interests beyond your company's product offering. This takes a conscious effort. It is easy to myopically blog away about the products shown on the company website, and that's not entirely without merit. But there is more to write about. Being the source of interesting and useful information, being the "go-to place" for news or updates on a subject, adds tremendous social media value to your company. Here are some guidelines and ideas to consider.

• Avoid blogging about competitors directly, but be mindful of their concepts and approaches to solving customer challenges. You may be able to write about the generic concept without mentioning the competitor by name. Compare and contrast your company's approach to a similar issue.
• It can be productive to blog about facets or products of a brand that are unavailable for you to sell. For example, blog about a company's flow meters, even though you only handle their level controls. As long as you do not handle a competitive flow meter, getting the brand name out there can still be positive for you through links back to your site.
• Write about legislative and regulatory current events. There is a continuing flood of this information being released by federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Keeping up with it is difficult for your customers. Your position as an information source can yield positive benefits through followers and subscribers.
• For industrial settings, cyber security and safety are looming issues with universal impact. Find good sources of information and share them through your social media.
• Share an original viewpoint from someone in your company. It does not have to be the CEO. People that work in cubicles, people that turn wrenches, may have some very interesting and valuable things to say. I recommend you work an article such as this as an interview. Getting people to talk to you is generally much easier than getting them to write for you.
• Go completely off topic once in a while. If you have something to share that would be of interest to your industry or audience, but may not be directly related to your company's business line, publish it. This should be an infrequent event, to avoid having your blog appear unfocused.
• Write about things you do not sell, but are used by your potential customers. Your article can be non-partisan and provide insight not usually delivered by those that sell the particular product.

I think you see it now. The purpose of your writing is to serve the reader. If you serve the reader well, the reader will read another article or click on one of your links, increasing their recognition of your organization. That is your goal.

Follow, comment, reach out to me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we help small companies build their brand and web presence, so contact us anytime.

Work Your Company's Social Media To Make It Work For You

Let me set the stage for this article. This post, while generally applicable for all interested in social media marketing, is mostly for smaller firms engaging in technical sales. My definition of technical sales...

Technical sales is the art and practice of promoting products requiring consultation between buyer and seller to assure that the delivered product or service will meet the requirements and expectations of the buyer.

If you are a technical sales practitioner, you speak with your customers directly about their challenges and work toward a solution that matches specific products to each application challenge. Your challenge, as a sales professional, is to be known, be the person that gets called to help develop a solution.

Social media can repeatedly reach out and touch your potential customers with a level of efficiency you, as a breathing entity, cannot even hope to achieve. It will put your company's name and brand in front of your customer base, reinforcing your presence and keeping you top of mind when the time comes for your customer to reach out for assistance. Sounds good, right? There is a catch though.

You, technical sales rep, must promote your company's social media presence in order to get the most personal benefit from it.

If you are a tech sales rep for a company, you are a stakeholder in that company's social media marketing program. Increases in recognition of the company brand, products, and capabilities will translate into more opportunities for you to ply your craft directly with potential customers. A successful social media effort requires nurturing on a continuous basis to keep it visible, relevant, and useful. Here are some activities that you can (and should) do:

• Be a registered follower of every company media site. Your marketing coordinator will gladly provide you with a list of links to every one.
• Once a follower, start liking and/or commenting on company posts. Your comments should add something interesting or useful to the post.
• Follow all of the manufacturers and suppliers your company represents.
• Follow trade groups and other accounts that post content that is relevant to your industry.
• Find and share good content on your company's social media accounts. You will likely need to coordinate with marketing folks to do this, but the recognition you will receive will be worth it.
• Mention the company's social media presence to your contacts and encourage them to follow one or more accounts. There is an art to doing this without being boorish. Start small and develop a useful delivery. Keep in mind that your contacts are more likely to follow your recommendation if it provides something of value. The value will likely reside in the content you recommend, so make it useful or interesting.
• Mention the company's social media presence....I said that already. Do it twice as often as you think you should. It is the most important part of expanding the reach of your company's social media presence.

None of this is difficult, but it takes discipline to incorporate these tasks into your baseline activities every day. If done well, your efforts will win recognition from your employer, as well as your contacts. You can become a go-to source for industry and product news, with your contacts recommending you to others. 

Don't overthink this, just do it. It will work.

Follow, comment, contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we help small companies build their brand and web presence, so contact us anytime.

Social Media Marketing: You're Not There Yet?

Social media marketing has many moving parts

Social media marketing can be an amorphous and vexing subject for many small business operators. After all, it's probably not your trade, along with tuba playing. You have specific skills which, combined with an avid pursuit of success and your own secret business sauce, move your business forward, day after day. Staying current within the business environment is important, as you do not want to be branded as a paleolithic company, flogging away with methods and means long abandoned by other market or industry participants.

For perspective, some clarification about my target audience. This article, while useful in a general sense to all interested in social media marketing, is directed at smaller firms that engage in technical sales. Technical sales is not merely the sale of technical products, though that may be part of it. It is the art and practice of selling products requiring consultation between buyer and seller to assure that the delivered product or service will meet the requirements and expectations of the buyer.

How does this impact the applicability or focus of the article?

My viewpoint reflects that of a typical technical sales professional or firm. Many firms and individuals engaged in technical sales are small and localized, often acting as representatives or distributors for larger national or global brands. The goal for the technical seller's social media activities is to create lasting business connections on a one-to-one basis. This differs from what many larger or non-technical selling companies desire. Their objective is to create a one-to-many connection that is generally of an anonymous nature and without much desire to forge a lasting beneficial business relationship. In a non-technical sales instance, customers can obtain all information necessary to make a purchase without any personal contact with the seller. Technical sales pros, because of their size, localized focus, and method for delivering value, benefit from social media activities in a manner that can differ from the more conventionally accepted thought. As the reader, keep this viewpoint in mind.

Technical sales pros should recognize two overarching things about social media marketing.

Social media presence will be an increasingly important element of business success.

Resources that may not currently exist in your organization will be required to implement an effective social media strategy.


For a business owner or operator, the first statement raises the question of whether theirs will be a business of the future, or one of the past. No longer are social media and internet based marketing cutting edge. They are now the plain vanilla mainstream standard. Your aging customer base is already being replaced by individuals with little to no experience dealing with printed promotional materials, supplier directories, and other bygone methods for gaining brand recognition, including static billboard-like websites. If your company is not actively pursuing the creation and maintenance of an effective web presence, let this be your final warning.

Get with the program or face brand oblivion.

"Resources that may not currently exist in your organization will be required to implement an effective social media strategy." Let's break that down some, as there are still many of you technical sales pros out there who have yet to fully digest the social media marketing concept.

To be effective, a social media marketing endeavor requires continuous nurturing. New and interesting content must be located or created. Analytics should be gathered and assessed for their applicability and usefulness. There are innumerable small tasks and considerations that combine to make a successful program.

Two basic resources are needed to launch and maintain a useful social media presence. One is time, the other is money. It is possible to execute a useful strategy with any mix of these two resources. A candid and careful evaluation of the skills available within your organization, as well as the available budget for marketing, will move you toward the best resource allocation. 

Marketing activities are time sensitive

An obvious solution for the social media marketing challenge is to outsource the whole program and let someone else handle it. Your function would be to select an appropriate vendor and evaluate the general results, assuring your company's brand is being promoted well and that a solid social media presence is maintained. A distinct advantage of outsourcing is that it will detract little from the revenue generating activities of those currently on staff. Outsourcing is less disruptive and allows you to move forward quickly.

For most small organizations, the decision to save on direct expenditure and run the social media operations using existing staff is a perilous one. 

Effective social media plans are developed and executed by marketers. 

It is essential that social media be done well and done continuously. Otherwise, results are likely to be minimal to negative. Yes, it is conceivable to get negative promotional results from poorly conceived or executed social media activities. Turning over the day to day social media marketing activities to the only person at the firm with a Twitter account does not qualify as good decision making. Rigorous scheduling discipline is needed to maintain the quality and currency of the content, and to complete tasks at times that will produce good promotional results. Creativity, along with a marketing skill set, are also traits of a successful candidate for this position. Selecting a staff member to accomplish all that is necessary, without assuring they have the proper skill set and available time, sets the probability for failure higher than that for success.

Get your social media marketing going in the right direction

If you have not yet started a serious social media promotional effort, or feel your program is lacking in impact, it may be time to create a new effort. Learn from what you have already done and make your next social media marketing campaign more successful. If you are starting from ground zero, proceed slowly and gain knowledge as you progress. Avoid making big moves until you gain some experience.

Follow, comment, contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we help small operators build their brand and web presence, so contact us anytime.

Is Your Web Site Ready for "Mobilegeddon" ?

In late February, Google announced that it would be changing its search results ranking algorithm to favor websites that are mobile-friendly. As of April 21, 2015, websites that provide a mobile-friendly experience will see better performance from its mobile search results.

Below is an example of the notices they are sending to Webmasters.

This is pretty serious stuff. Google knows that the future of search lies in mobile, and is pretty much forcing everyone with a web site to get their act together.

This is particularly timely for the process control / instrumentation / valve automation / industrial automation world (let's call them "process control" companies for short). It's estimated right now that only about 20% of process control companies are friendly to mobile viewing. That means 80% of process control web sites are NOT MOBILE!

This morning (April 2015) I received a press release from Spirax Sarco, promoting their "newly designed, state-of-the-art website in the first quarter of 2015.  The customer facing website effectively promotes the Spirax Sarco brand, company capabilities and value proposition. "

Guess what? It's not mobile! Although their press release says the site is "programmed to provide a site visitor with clear, easy to read appearance no matter what device and/or platform they use. Whether the site viewer is on their desktop computer at the office, or viewing the site on the go from their mobile device, their interactive experience will include well-structured navigation and useful content." - NOT.

How does that happen? I mean, Spirax Sarco is one of the biggest brands in process control. I am assuming the new web site design was an active project for months. What were they thinking? I don't blame Sarco. I truly feel bad for their marketing people. I blame whomever they hired to build the new site. They shouldn't have let it go live without this critical function.

Anyone out there, in the process control world, who wants or needs to discuss the mobilization of their web site should email me at info@cms4i.com. I'm happy to give you a free appraisal of your site and honest advice on the best path toward compliance.