Modern Era Marketing

Howdy manufacturers! Jon Hoch, and today I am the Founding Father of Power Equipment Direct.

I'm here to talk about a great new invention that was just created called the internal combustion engine. And as marketers, I want you to go out there and use telegrams and the pony express to spread the word about this great new invention!

Now actually, I'm just using this as a joke. But here's what I want to do. I want to talk about why in the digital age we need to focus on... We gotta get rid of these wigs and stuff...

We've got to talk about using the internet to spread the word and get messages out.

So this is what we get from manufacturers, and this stuff is great, but it really serves no purpose for us at Power Equipment Direct.

We get nice brochures with nice holders, wonderful work and wonderful effort put into this stuff, and we get brochures, and then we get brochures, and then we get more brochures in by the box load, and this doesn't do us much good at all.

In addition to that, we get point-of-purchase materials. And this stuff is great, and we've got dust all over it, and you can see how well that's going over for us.

And even better, we get brochures mixed with point-of-purchase materials. And this is great for dealers and other people, but for us at Power Equipment Direct, this actually doesn't serve much purpose.

In fact, here's what we think of this stuff. Now, granted, I appreciate the hard work you put into it, but the cost associated with it...

You spending, every time we do this, it's nickels and dimes just being thrown away. That's what's happening with those brochures over here at PED.

So here's what we want you to do. We want you to take those nickels and dimes and reinvest them into actual useful programs here at PED. And that's what this video series is all about: how you can maximize your digital experience online.

I imagine that you've already taken all of this content from these brochures and converted them into beautiful websites. Great, that's wonderful.

In addition to that, you're working with Google to get web traffic to those websites. And let me show you a couple of examples, right?

So if you type in Husqvarna lawn mowers, you're going to see that here's Husqvarna as the number one organic listing, Husqvarna is the number two organic listing, and Husqvarna's the number three organic listing.

You should be, and if you're not, you should pause this video right now because you've got other problems to be worried about.

Husqvarna's doing the good job, and mission accomplished, right? But look who's right underneath Husqvarna - that's right - Mowers Direct, us. And if you click on us, it means the customer did not want to go to Husqvarna.com, and they wanted to come to us instead.

Let's do another example. Let's look at Snapper lawn mowers, right? So if you type in Snapper lawn mowers into Google, here look. Snapper's number one, Snapper's number two, Snapper's number three. And if we keep going down, here we go... Snapper Lawn Mowers @ Mowers Direct, right?

So again, if they chose not to click on these listings, they want to come to us and not your website.

Let's try one more. You type in Toro lawn mowers, and we go down the list. And we go, "here's Toro, here's Toro again, and here's Mowers Direct again."

Again, they're coming to us because they've chosen not to go to your website. So here's the thing, is that, while it's great that you work on your website, and it's great that you work on getting traffic to your website, you also need to worry about all of these listings that are behind you. Especially those that are on the first page, because nobody goes to page two of Google.

So when you go to our website, if you think of our landing pages as very similar to Google's search result pages, you'll finally understand how these marketing dollars can be better served and better invested.

For example, here's our listing page. We list new products, and we list our best selling products.

As we keep going further down, there are ways that you can get higher rankings on these pages; but in addition to that, there's this Feature badge which is very important. That's what we're going to be talking about in this whole series about Preferred Placement - how to get the Featured badge and how to either protect your investment up here or how to leap frog the competition from page two onto the first page of our websites.

So, I hope this was helpful. And I hope I wasn't too disrespectful. I know you guys put in a lot of hard work into creating all of these wonderful things. And it works for other channels, but for us, I'm going to show you ways to reinvest those digital dollars a lot better so that you can get more return on your investment.

Thanks for watching, and have a great day.

NEXT: Rising to the Top - How Our Listings Influence Your Exposure