Contact us today:
(847) 934-4500
tdaro@bernardandcompany.com
Contact us today:
(847) 934-4500
tdaro@bernardandcompany.com
Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to watch our clients react to the virus and adjust their businesses accordingly. As all our clients are manufacturing enterprises, they’ve needed to adjust their production scenario. Several innovative clients have gone from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 shifts to achieve proper social distancing with no decline in the output. Most clients have returned to work in the office, as of this writing. Three clients have radically increased their ad spending, with one quoting me my own line, “Smaller pie, bigger slice.” He remembered 2009, all too well. The big difference here, of course, is that the current slowdown has absolutely NOTHING to do with economics.
Continue readingBy Maureen Lepke
All industries are feeling the effects of Coronavirus. Manufacturing and industrial companies are not an exception. So what can you do in a time where trade shows are cancelled, everyone is working from home and trying to find new ways to get their company’s message out? The answer is social media. Social media is a low-cost, yet valuable marketing tool that allows your company to talk to your customers every day throughout the month.
What’s the benefit of having an agency do your social media for you? We have a full-time social media director here at the agency and we are strictly industrial so we understand your world. We are consistently posting 5 days a week. Social media is usually the first thing that slows down when a company gets busy. It becomes an afterthought when social media should be a critical part of your marketing strategy.
Continue readingby Maureen Lepke
Over the past few years, social media has become increasingly mainstream in our daily lives. As of September 2017, Facebook has approximately 2.07 billion monthly users according to Facebook Stats. Twitter, on the other hand, had an average of 328 million monthly users as of the first quarter of 2017 as seen in a Forbes article. Lastly, an article from Fortune claims that LinkedIn has 500 million users as of April 2017.
While social media initially rose to popularity with teenagers as the main users, older generations have since adapted to these changing times and have incorporated social media into not only their personal lives but also into their professional lives.
More recently, businesses have realized the immense potential of having a social media presence. No longer is social media solely for interacting with friends and playing games; today, it’s opened the doors to vast possibilities for brand recognition among businesses and consumers.
In the manufacturing and industrial markets, social media can be extremely beneficial as companies in these industries rely on monthly trade publications for advertising and sharing product news with their specific audience in the hopes of generating leads. While this continues to be important to create brand awareness, social media can lend a helping hand. By using social media, a company can easily promote their brand the other 30 days out of the month.
Social media is the perfect outlet to not only promote your brand and share exciting company news but to also share breaking news and relevant topics that pertain to your company’s industry. This allows your business to become a wealthy source of information and lends a great deal of credibility to your company within the industry.
Among those benefits is the added bonus of being able to connect with a very specific, pinpointed target market that is already interested in your industry and therefore will be a possible lead. Communication is key when it comes to any business and marketing strategy. Social media is a medium of communication that lets a business interact with consumers in ways that companies have never been able to before.
The future of social media for businesses looks bright as there are plenty of ways to reach your audience and stay relevant in the minds of the consumers. It’s important to stay up-to-date as social media and technology are constantly changing and improving.
Are you “following” the social media movement? It’s about time! See what social media can do for your company. Reach out to us today for more information or with questions on how social media can have a beneficial impact on your company. We’re here to help increase your brand awareness.
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
http://fortune.com/2017/04/24/linkedin-users/
Continue readingWHEN I WAS A BOY…
That’s how one of my favorite high school teachers started out many a lecture. Father Cochran taught me logic at the all-boys Catholic prep school I attended. From him, I learned Aristotle and Aquinas in Greek and Latin, plus all the modern thinking of the day. His opening set the tone, namely, encouraging us to keep all things in perspective and never forget the lessons of our youth, no matter what changed along the way.
My point? In today’s ad agency, we have technologies galore that didn’t exist just 43 years ago, when I was a…fledgling copy boy at my first ad agency, writing display classified ads on a “modern” electric typewriter for the agency that handled the American Grease Stick Company, maker of products such as SqueakEase, DoorEase and LockEase. Thrilling, I can hear you say.
Today, we offer clients social media, website development with full back-end tracking, augmented reality to enhance trade show and online experiences, Google ad word programs that capture people seeking their products and equipment, then put an ad in view online through retargeting with back-end tracking protocols, highly complex interactive blasts and conferencing options for training and press events, plus the very cool (is that still a multi-meaning adjective?) technology of mobile attraction, whereby we put a message from our client on every phone in a zip code or x-mile radius of a trade show venue. People come up to the booth and say “show me,” whereupon I smile knowingly at the client and say, “Told ya it would work!” And it does. Call me and I’ll tell you how. (Actually, one of the young guns here will do that.)
Continue readingMy name is Ioana and I’ve been a part of the Bernard & Company team for almost three years. My activities as a marketing information specialist help our clients increase their profits and become better-known within their industries.
One of my primary duties is to read magazines for our clients’ PR. Once identified, the appearances are scanned and archived online. When one of our clients meets with us to talk about the results of their PR campaign, they are presented with magazine clippings and online access to PR that appeared both online and in print. This benefits our clients in two ways. First, clients like Grieve and Suhner, who sell their products in many markets, see which magazines are most responsive to their PR. Secondly, it is very helpful for them to see their ROI. Some clients consistently realize ROI in the 15-20:1 range, depending on the quantity of releases, the occasion of success stories, and the breadth of their master media list. We have clients who sell to very limited markets such as forge, foundry, tire and rubber molding, while others sell power tools, electric motors and industrial heat processing equipment to almost every industry.
Continue readingFrom time to time…
After 43 years in the agency business, always as a copywriter, I’ve seen many “evolutions” in the agency business. I started in a world of print, when direct mail was the sizzle product and bingo cards were the “proof of performance” metric…a word we never used, as we said yardstick. Funny. New ads and PR took 30-45 days to appear, now we have our PR online in 30 minutes or less.
Today, the emergence of the internet and social media have radically altered the face of industrial marcom, which remains a lap behind the consumer world, but not because our business lacks the talent or foresight to implement the changes in technology.
Rather, the fundamental driver in our business…and yours, as captains of industry…is one that hasn’t changed a bit, over time. It’s the fact that all 33 of our clients sell to only a small slice of the viewing public. We have several clients with less than 1000 prospects in all North America, including one who sells tiremaking machinery. Talk about a limited head count. At the opposite end, we have a client who sells every market you can name with a piece of discretionary capital equipment, as I call it. Requires a very different approach.
Continue reading