Achinta Mitra

Tiecas, Inc.

Achinta Mitra calls himself a “marketing engineer” because he combines his engineering education with 20+ years of practical industrial marketing experience. He has helped many engineering companies and manufacturers improve their lead generation, conversions, and marketing communications to increase sales. He is the founder of Tiecas, Inc. – an industrial and business-to-business (B2B) marketing company in Houston, Texas. Achinta writes regularly about industrial, engineering and manufacturing marketing on his blog at http://bit.ly/cSxH5e.

Manufacturers Use Evaluation Kits for Effective Lead Nurturing

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Posted on 2012-02-13
Lead nurturing plays an important role in industrial lead generation programs because it is rare that an industrial sale is completed on the first call or the first visit to the manufacturer’s website.

Forrester, CSO Insights and Marketo reported that lead nurturing produced much better results. Here are some of the significant findings from their research studies:
- Reduced the number of marketing-generated leads ignored by sales to as low as 25%
- Raised win rates on marketing-generated leads by 7% and reduced “no decisions” by 6%
- Helped 9% more sales reps make quota and shortened ramp up time of new ones by 10%
Still not convinced? Read my earlier post, “Lead Nurturing Is Not A Marketing Option, It’s A Sales Necessity.”

Lead nurturing is usually done by sending out helpful content to prospects and moves them from...
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Align Industrial Websites with Sales Process

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Posted on 2012-02-04

If you want your industrial website to generate qualified leads and drive sales (Who doesn’t?), make sure the site is aligned with your sales process. Without this critical link, your newly redesigned industrial website may be nothing more than eye candy that does very little for your sales.

In my daily conversations with manufacturing and industrial companies, I find the mindset is still very much centered on marketing the old way. They want their site visitors to call and their crack sales team will take care of everything to close the deal.

Even though these people have read all the industry studies, they have a very difficult time accepting the fact that their buyers are no longer willing to engage with their salespeople until they need a quote. Now it boils down to price and delivery time.

It is too late by then. You can talk value until you’re blue in the face but your customers...

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Industrial Marketing Content that Helps Buyers

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Posted on 2012-01-26

It is very common to find marketing content from manufacturers and industrial companies that is all about how great their products are or that their technology is innovative. Sellers may be too close to the forest to see the trees and firmly believe their marketing content is helpful to their buyers.

Buyers can easily find information about your products and that of your competition from their online research. So ask yourself this question, “Is my industrial marketing content really helping my buyers make a more informed decision and is it moving them closer them to a RFQ?”

I suspect most of you already know the answer otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing and reading the same objections to content marketing from so many manufacturers and industrial companies. They know the “why” but are having a difficult time figuring out “how” publishing content will help them sell more of their industrial products.

IMO, the key to content marketing success is ...

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Website Evaluation Comes Before Site Redesign

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Posted on 2012-01-18

Many manufacturers and industrial companies consider a website redesign during Q1. The two main reasons are 1) Not showing up in Google search results (SEO – Organic Search Engine Optimization) and/or 2) Not getting enough qualified leads from the website (Traffic and Conversion).

You know your industrial site needs a major makeover but diving right into a site redesign without first doing a website evaluation or a site audit can be a costly mistake.

Poor SEO and conversions are the symptoms that are obvious to you. Only an in-depth website evaluation can diagnose the underlying causes. Without that, a website redesign will only be a cosmetic facelift and cannot address all the issues that are stopping your industrial website from producing results.

Keep in mind that SEO is not the same as a website redesign. They do go together...

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Internal Links – the Secret Sauce for DiY SEO

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Posted on 2012-01-10

It is no secret that link building is critical to SEO success. However, some people often ignore internal links because they are just not aware of their SEO benefits. To most to do-it-yourselfers (DiY), link building for SEO means external or inbound or backlinks. These are links that originate from another site and point to a page on your domain.

Don’t underestimate the SEO power of internal linking. They are not only great for increasing the number of pages indexed by Google but also help you target a larger number of keywords, especially long tail keywords. The number of site pages indexed by Google has a direct impact on your online lead generation. For every 50 to 100 pages indexed by Google, expect double-digit growth in the number of leads. (Read my earlier post, B2B Lead Generation Using a Business Blog).

The best news is that building internal links is completely in...

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Create a Content Series for Industrial Marketing

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Posted on 2012-01-03
Happy New Year!

This is my first post in 2012 and I want to start the New Year by answering a perennial question about content marketing for manufacturers and industrial companies. The question – what do we write about?

The answer – create a content series.

Just like popular TV serials, you want to create a series of short blog posts that revolve around a common theme. There are many advantages to this content marketing strategy. The most important ones are:
- Bite sized content is easier to consume online and on mobile devices
- Regular doses of short blog posts are good for building stronger relationships and thought leadership over time
- Improves engagement by creating anticipation among readers with each installment
- Fresh Content = Better SEO
- Optimize for long-tail keywords + More linking opportunities = Better SEO
You are probably wondering how in the world you are...
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2012 Content Marketing Trends for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies

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Posted on 2011-12-16

I just finished reading an excellent research report from the good folks at Content Marketing Institute (CMI). This report is chock full of statistics and graphs about B2B content marketing. In this post, I want to focus on some of their findings that I feel apply to content marketing for manufacturers and industrial companies.

Even though the content marketing adoption rate for these companies is at an impressive 83%, I am surprised that it is even that high; the Manufacturing/ Processing industry (as defined in the report) is dead last among the six industries studied.

What is encouraging though is the fact that 68% of companies with 10 – 99 employees maintain a blog as compared to only 55% for larger companies that employ this content marketing tactic. Many of the manufacturers and industrial companies fall in the smaller size category.

That’s not the only good news for blogs. Even though other marketing tactics like in-person events and webinars are still...

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When the Going Gets Tough, B2B Marketers…

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Posted on 2011-12-09

…fall back on tried-and-true marketing tactics that they have relied on for years. In the current tough economy, cutting edge and innovative marketing is taking a back seat to proven strategies for lead generation.

B2B companies are spending more of their marketing budgets on channels such as trade shows, Website design, management and optimization and e-mail marketing. Those three marketing channels received the largest allocation of the budget. The trend holds true across the board even though the mix may be different depending on the size of a B2B company.

Smaller companies, those with less than 100 employees, tend to spend more on digital marketing tactics like Website design, e-mail marketing as well as traditional outbound marketing channels like direct mail. Not surprisingly, they tend to spend less on trade shows.

Those are some of the findings from a MarketingSherpa survey of more than 1,700...

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Creating Digital Content for Industrial Marketing

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Posted on 2011-12-02

“We don’t have the time or the skills to write copy for digital content” is the most common reaction I get from clients when discussing their industrial marketing programs. I can sense the confusion in the room or over the phone when I tell them that creating engaging digital content is much more than copywriting. I have to quickly shift into my explaining mode right after that.

Creating digital content is neither easy nor quick. It is definitely a process that involves much more than copywriting and clever wordsmithing.

Myths and truths about digital content

Myth: Content for digital marketing is the text on your Website or blog.
Truth: That’s just the tip of the iceberg! It also includes downloadable whitepapers, eBooks, product datasheets, application notes, technical articles, how-to and best practices guides, FAQs, videos, webinars,...

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10 New Google Algorithm Changes Announced

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Posted on 2011-11-16

Google changing its search algorithms is not news to most SEO experts. It’s a fact of SEO life. What is new with the latest algorithm changes is that Google is being more transparent and talking about them openly.

What caught my attention and IMO applies to industrial marketing, are these four changes:

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