Creating a marketing department

[Abed]

Hi

I work for this international upholstery fabric company that mainly sells fabrics to B2B customers. The company does not have any marketing activities as it gained success through its public relations and great products' quality, as well as some exhibitions it has joined throughout the years.

Recently i have been assigned to start a marketing department as the company is willing to create an international presence.

The marketing techniques that depend on the website, social media marketing, exhibitions have become traditional. Therefore i would like to add something else to these marketing activities.

Any suggestions of a plan or anything that could help ?

 

[billmccallum1957]

"i have been assigned to start a marketing department"... why on earth would you take this on if you don't know what to do?

 

[GaryParsonsUK]

Have you thought about engaging an experienced marketing employee @Abed ?

 

[Needl Analytics]

If its an international B2B business, then I would have thought that the events/exhibitions is where the main buyers will collect. Unless your order value is small, in which case you really should stick to online. I cannot believe that print will offer much opportunity unless there is an established 'global' specialist press market? and if there is, they will be transferring online if they had not done already.

 

[Maulik Patel]

Congrats! Abed, you have great opportunity.

And also, you are doing great.

Anyways, you have the challenge to bring new international leads from your website, right?

To achieve this goal, there are lots of things you need to do in the well-organized way that gets you fruitful results. There are different strategies to market the product and services.

Here I would like to share something related. My suggestion is to choose the best marketing channels for short and long term goals. For example, PPC, Paid Social media advertising for short term, Inbound marketing and SEO for a long term.

Then decide the budget for each channel you can spend. Then set up a SMART goal for each channel with your marketing manager or marketing partner firm.

Now, you must have clear work reporting formats for each team and the individual employee. On regular interval, you should check report and progress towards the goals. If you find any glitch or inactivity, set up a meeting and resolve it quickly. By doing this kind of approach you will achieve your business' short and long-term goals.

 

[Deleted member 244558]

Check out the inbound marketing tutorial videos on Hubspot they are free and will tell you exactly what you need to be doing...

 

[Oliver King]

Hi there.

I would recommend taking it a step back and first of all creating a marketing strategy. For example who your competitors are, how they market etc. From there, who is your target audience etc... I thank having that piece of work in place will be very helpful in guiding you as to what you need to focus on. Obviously you will have digital / web, offline / publishing, social media, content etc considerations but I think honestly just choosing marketing channels without actual groundwork will lead to issues.
I hope this helps....

Oli

 

[webgeek]

Hate to point out the obvious, but if you aren't dead confident sure about how to do this, then you're waaaay in over your head.

Inbound Academy, Inbound University, a 4 year marketing degree and 10 or so years experience should be about all you need to be ready to take on this challenge.

The 'traditional' things you list are traditions because they've made so many companies so much money over the past decade or two. Thinking outside the box is great, if you're trapped in a coffin. However, you're not - so why try to reinvent the wheel?

Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention - follow the basic steps - sounds easy right?

Keep in mind that you cannot take a working recipe and replace the key players with $5 an hour outsourced writer and $3 an hour link builders. You might as well pile your money, douse with gasoline and set it alight.

We have no idea your skillset, what team is in place, what budget is available, what the website and content have to offer, your current rankings, PPC in place, email campaigns and list building, lead gen, lead nurturing, branding, advertising, PR - nothing, nada, jack.

No one can tell you what's missing without knowing what's in place and how much cash is available to make it happen.

 

[The Byre]

No one can tell you what's missing without knowing what's in place and how much cash is available to make it happen.

This!

 

[Mark T Jones]

Homework?

 

[yourmoneytree.co.uk]

OK so I've been in your position before, I got my first job selling furniture B2B to little shops up and down the country.

There's three real ways I learnt to do this:

1. Spunk a lot of money up the wall on poorly targeted traffic i.e. trade shows and magazines
2. Make a brochure and get in a car and go and visit your potential customers
3. Take a step back and figure out what your customers real drivers are.

I'm going to dwell on point three a little bit here, because well it's really important. Say you sell fabrics to your clients; do you think your clients exist to purely sell fabrics to their clients? Or do they like you have homes, families and lifestyles they need to pay for.

The main reason they exist is to make money and pay for nice things; so despite how great your product may be in your eyes, if they didn't buy from you would their profit level go down? Probably not.

You see you might be able to give them a great deal or introduce something new, but the fact is unless you can show them how much MORE money they are going to make and guarantee them that leaving their long trusted current supplier then they aren't going to buy from you.

In this instance then your marketing needs to be focused at giving them customers. Do you think that apple writes to people to ask them to sell their phones? Or do you think people write to them all the time to humbly ask for a chance to sell their products?? That's the world you need to operate in.

In order to do this then, what we did is we actually used our marketing budget to find customers. We set up instagram and pinterest accounts, because furniture is sold best in picture form, and we used google adwords to find the people looking for our type of product. We wrapped a whole sales engine around them dedicated to being able to walk into our target store and say "here I have 10 customers for you".

 

[RMByrne]

Look at who is leading the way in your field, analyze and innovate

 

[Nochexman]

I work for this international upholstery fabric company that mainly sells fabrics to B2B customers. The company does not have any marketing activities as it gained success through its public relations and great products' quality, as well as some exhibitions it has joined throughout the years.

Recently i have been assigned to start a marketing department as the company is willing to create an international presence.

The marketing techniques that depend on the website, social media marketing, exhibitions have become traditional. Therefore i would like to add something else to these marketing activities.

Any suggestions of a plan or anything that could help ?

Hello Abed, it is a month since you posted here; would be interested to know what you have achieved since then?