Engineering type companies really can’t do online

For a number of years I have owned and run an industrial website called www.lubricants.co.uk that has over 200,000 unique visitors per year. On the site there are a number of companies who have taken a place and enjoy very high positions on Google for their key phrases. This has generated significant levels of measurable enquiries and has also put their name in front of huge levels of highly specific website visitors.
As it stands now, when looking for their company name on Google they are number 1 or 2 and they also appear as a recommended supplier on a site that attracts enquiries for product specific items such as “high temperature oil” for example. 

I received a letter today from this company and have been asked to take it all down as they are now planning to look after themselves and their online activities with their own blogspot platform. A blogspot platform! For B2B communications and more? This is the broadcast equivalent of leaving the BBC and taking a position on the local TV in the Shetland Islands. Traffic and interest will be extremely low. Enquiries will be few and far between.

Some of the lubricant company’s plans are to buy various web addresses and point them at their blogspot. Whilst this may bring in some people who already know the company and have guessed at the web address, it will not do anything to increase new traffic or strengthen their blogspot web position. Folklore says that pointing domains has a good effect on web rankings…complete nonsense and untrue. Significantly online marketing is about attracting new customers and not just looking after existing ones. This is often a major flaw in plans drawn up by inexperienced marketing executives…it turns into an online vanity exercise and senior executives go along with it. In reply to the question about maybe doing email marketing, I was told that it wasn’t of interest and they couldn’t see any benefits. I was later told that he had used an agency in the past to do it. Like the majority of companies trying to do email marketing, it will have been done incorrectly…the usual inward looking newsletter probably. Incompetence and fragile opinions are easy to recognise.

When we look at the blogspot itself, we can see that the author has no understanding of writing with online in mind. It is very different to brochure copy in both substance, shape and length. In addition to this standard online error, the author is unaware of the other jobs that need to be done to make the content Google friendly. Even then, it just isn’t a significant or powerful enough platform from which to operate. When I asked about the financial expectations for their new online activities, I was told that there weren’t any. Wow, easy life!

So it’s true. Engineering types don’t understand online and perhaps think it’s rather too fluffy for it to be useful. Having made significant profits for many clients, it’s rather disappointing to get a letter from a company that doesn’t understand the new business that they have received. The financial facts have always been plain to see.

Let’s hope they don’t make any more mistakes like using my copy or tags. That’s copyright infringment and a very expensive mistake. So goodbye, Kluber, let’s hope you enjoy your Shetland Islands level of exposure. 

The big monthly question remains: “How much have we made with our online activities this month?”

I despair of opinionated junior marketing executives with no financial or ROI ambitions .