In the 45 years I have been active in the compressed gas business, our core assets—cylinders— have maintained the same look. The tools to market them, however, have been transformed. Sales representatives used to drive around industrial parks, knock on doors, and sometimes walk right in the back door to the production area searching for customers.
Open houses, printed flyers, and The Yellow Pages were used to identify and contact potential customers. Today, a sales rep need not leave his or her desk to identify potential customers. The internet, not the interstate, is the pathway to sales leads.
Internet Marketing
While our industry is reputed to be slow to change, it has taken advantage of the entirely new online marketing strategies created by advanced information technology systems. As a partner in TAP Resources (www. tapresources.biz), I work with compressed gas distributors on a wide range of operational issues, including marketing and sales management plans. About three years ago, a distributor/client told me they were thinking about trying an online marketing program to help generate new business. The program, EdgeUp, was developed by Edgeworks Group (edgeworksgroup.com) to help attract, identify, and connect regional Gas and Equipment Distributors with potential customers using the web. Given my lengthy history of finding business as a sales person, I was skeptical about the benefits of this new tool. After considering my personal use of the internet, however, I realized how much I now depend on it for sales and marketing information. Most of us no longer wait for a sales rep to knock on our door. Our search for products and services usually begins on the web.
As a gas industry consultant, I have long understood the necessity for a distributor to have a decent looking website. But my “marketing” plan tended to go no further than an attractive home page with links, information, a contact form, and some key Google search words to draw customers to the distributor’s website. As it turns out, internet marketing is not that easy. Edgeworks revealed the countless websites competing for search ranking against my client’s site; the average person does not look past the top five results, and there are potentially millions of pages contending for the highest search ranking.
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