Alliance Day Highlights – Beyond Traditional Marketing – Part 1

For those of you who didn’t make it to the Alliance Day of NIWeek, you missed a great presentation, Beyond Traditional Marketing, by Joe Quinn, NI Regional Marketing Communications Manager for the United States and Canada. He discussed how, in today’s economic environment, marketers are going beyond the traditional means to reach new contacts and drive new opportunities. Attendees heard about new NI marketing communication programs that engage decision makers outside the NI database including those targeting stimulus-funded projects. He highlighted what Alliance Partners are doing and explored ideas that you can incorporate into your marketing programs.

Mass vs. Micro Marketing

The majority of NI’s marketing is related to our major campaigns, for instance Automated Test or Industrial/Embedded Control. Our advertising, PR, tradeshows and direct market programs build the awareness and create the general demand for NI products.  This fuels the NI Lead Generation machine and pipelines.  Many of these programs build the NI database, nurture these contacts to drive sales interactions. Let’s first consider how you can take advantage of these traditional mass marketing.

Making Your Presence Known

NI’s greatest marketing tool is ni.com. It’s our most cost effective and farthest reaching tool we have.   ni.com receives over 1 million visitors a month.  Our web group have invested heavily in not only driving traffic to the web through search sites, but has made the investment in improving search capabilities on the site. 

So, the more you increase your content, the more you can increase your search results.  For example, Cyth Systems increased their content from 51 to 220 locations of over the past two years ago.  Examples include entries in the solution section of your Alliance profile but also responses on the NI Developers Zone. Cross-linking back to ni.com from your website can also improve your natural relevancy.

Case Studies

Sharing your successful solution benefits not only you but also the industry. We distribute these case studies on our Web site – ni.com – and we print and distribute many of them to prospects and editors. We also use some in our newsletters, solutions brochures, and annual report. If your article has broad appeal, our PR staff may work with you to also place it in trade publications.

The priorities for 2009 can also be opportunities to work with our PR department. And, many times when can start a dialogue with someone outside the database by promoting a case-study to build credibility. 

Getting in the News

Another way to increase your visibility is through PR and press releases. When posting press releases to your website or posting them on the wire – engage NI’s PR team. They will check for accuracy and post on ni.com/news in the NI Network News. Over 4,000 people per quarter view this page and it includes an RSS feed. Contact our PR department for more information.

Join the NI Community

A new means of building awareness is through our ni.com/community. We are already seeing over 130,000 visitors per month and over 30,000 downloads. You can take advantage of this major investment by NI to create your own community web presence.  For instance, you can create a page based on your User Group that you host, on an application area of expertise, industry, geographical area.  Blog, post polling questions, invite others, collaborate online, post presentations.  You might even consider posting some of your code and see who collaborates or may be interested.

Next week, I’ll post some of our new ideas and efforts for micro-marketing.