Marketing Committee January 30, 2014 Minutes

Transcription

1 I. Attendance Marketing Committee January 30, 2014 Minutes John Scott Bull...Pace Industries Scott A Frens... Fort Recovery Industries Inc Daniel McLean... Madison-Kipp Norwin Merens... NM Marketing Communications Jonathan J Miller... Chicago White Metal Casting Inc Ryan O Leary... Soldy Manufacturing Company Ryan Winter... Eastern Alloys Charles Wright Jr... Rheocast Company Staff Daniel Twarog... NADCA Athena Catlett... NADCA Melisa Ryzner... NADCA Absent Bob Alexander... Alexander Industries Megan Gaaskjolen... Rimrock Corp William L Hiegel... Custom Alloys Light Metals Bob Marconi... RCM Industries Jim Moran... Cascade Die Casting Group Inc Nina Snelling... Dynacast Guests Scott Bull...Pace Industries Dean Jetter... Fort Recovery Industries Inc David Wolf... A Finkl & Sons II. III. Review of June 13, 2013 Minutes a. The minutes of the June 2013 meeting were approved. Search Engine Optimization Brian Martin SEO.COM Lone Peak Parkway Suite #100

2 Draper, UT (p) x 301 [email protected] PDF of the slides presented can be downloaded at: IV. a. Brian Martin explained that Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) is done to make your site more competitive. SEO is the process of getting your website ranked well in the search engines. This works by convincing search engines that your site is more relevant than your competitors sites for a particular set of keywords. b. Martin shared an interesting fact that the top pages that arrive from a Google search receive the most clicks and the most amount of time spent on their site. In addition, individuals are more likely to click on organic vs paid links. c. Martin shared some helpful tips for optimization, such as: 1. Avoid the use of underscores in your urls. Hyphens are preferred. 2. Link building is important Get a website or blog to link to your site. This will up the quality of your ranking. 3. Your site should have valuable content that is updated frequently. Avoid pages with repeating content. 4. Attract guest writers to provide content for your website or blog 5. Make sure that your images and video are optimized. d. A diagnostic report of Eastern Alloys website was shown as an example of how SEO.com can help in providing a report of your overall SEO rankings and issues within your website. Attendees were urged to contact Jimmy at SEO for an analysis of their website. e. During the question and answer section Charles Wright Jr asked about purchasing additional domains to redirect people to your website. Martin said that this idea is fine but you need to make sure that each site has content and that it is not hosted on the same server. Hosting on the same server will cause a red flag on search engines. f. Ryan O Leary asked about hosting a website in a particular country that your company is looking to target. Martin explained that this can help but the website needs to be high functioning and load quickly. In addition if your site is hosted from a cheaper hosting site (such as godaddy) Google may block or blacklist your site as spam. g. The last question asked was from Ryan Winter. Winter asked about the linking process that SEO will help manage and what is involved in it. Martin explained that they will help by creating content for forums and blogs. This way your site will then have a link available to it in various sites, increasing its ranking. It is also important to write guest spots for blogs and comment on forums. Listings in directories can also help to diversify your links. Diversifying your links is important in building a strong, reputable site. h. Martin was thanked for his presentation and dismissed from the webinar. Daniel Twarog added that once NADCA s new website was launched we would contact SEO.com for an evaluation of the NADCA site and report the findings to the Marketing Committee. Marketing Conference Evaluation Results - Athena Catlett PDF of the slides presented can be downloaded at:

3 a. Athena Catlett presented a review of the 2013 Marketing Conference. Catlett reported that this Conference was held September in Louisville, KY. And that 23 individuals attended. b. Catlett reported that the conference consisted of 8 speakers which included: 1. Die Casting State and What Your Customers are Saying - Daniel Twarog 2. The 2013/14 Economic Outlook - William Strauss 3. How to Give a Dynamic Presentation - Mary Ashlock 4. The NOISE Behind Business (How to Make Tradeshows Work) - DJ Heckes 5. Green Marketing, Silver Bullet or Shiny Object - Marc Zucker 6. Keys to Success in Customer Relationship Management - John Hirsh 7. Speaking the Language of Marketing - Chad Crouch 8. Insights into the Global Tooling Industry - The Opportunity for U.S. Manufacturing - Laurie Harbour c. A survey was sent out to all attendees asking then to rate the presentations on a scale of 1-5 (poor to best). 11 of the attendees participated in this survey. d. Catlett reported that overall the speakers were all well received. All speakers ranked above 3 indicating that they were all above average. Most presentations received a score of 4 or higher. e. Participants were asked to add additional comments. Topics for future Conferences include: Social media, review of NADCA Marketing Plan, government issues in die casting and Google campaigns. Additional Conference comments included: Changing the Conference to be longer and possibly running it during the show. Increasing the number of attendees is also a concern. f. Catlett announced that the next Marketing Conference would be held in the fall of There has been discussion of making this a stand-alone conference. Not linked on to the tail end of the Expo. Future Committee meetings will discuss this event as well as speaker topics, agenda and goals of the conference. V. Automotive E-Source enewsletter- Lead Generation - Athena Catlett a. Catlett also reported on the results of the Automotive enewsletter. NADCA secured a top row advertising spot in the October issue of the Automotive E-Source Newsletter. The newsletter reached over 70,000 automotive & transportation design engineers, OEMS and new product developers. NADCA was responsible for providing a headline, 40 words of copy, an image and a web link. b. Catlett explained that NADCA gathered Sponsors for this event. The cost for sponsorship was $200 and 4 companies sponsored this event. Sponsors included: North American Casting Corp, Premier Die Casting, Lakeside Casting solutions and Madison Kipp Corp. They we included in the ad landing page with additional company information and link to company site. c. Content that NADCA provided for this ad was information on the Die Casting Design App. The landing page can be viewed at:

4 d. Catlett stated that 85 leads we gathered from this project and sent to sponsors. This is less overall then the webinar series (over 300) but also less labor intensive. e. Future lead generating projects include two runs of the 3 part Design Webinar Series. These webinars will be hosted in the spring as well as winter. Additional enewsletter placement will be examined as well. f. Winter asked if NADCA had data/feedback on the leads that the sponsors received. Daniel McLean was asked about the leads he received and he said there were a few new leads but also duplicates that his company received via their website. Catlett pointed out that is may also be from the enewletter project that directed individuals to the sponsor s site. VI. VII. Die Casting Capabilities Printed Directory Athena Catlett a. Catlett presented information on NADCA s intent to put out a Printed Capabilities Directory in The current online directory is among the top 5 most visited pages on the NADCA websites. Furthermore, NADCA received many calls and s about the directory, leading to the conclusion that there is a value in a printed version. b. Catlett stated that NADCA has not released a printed version of this directory in over 10 years. Staff will work to gather updated information from Die Casters, provide advertising options for the directory and assess in-house vs outsourcing cost for the print and send. End-Market Study Results and Proposal - William (Bill) Downey Technology Consulting Group [email protected] Phone: Fax: PDF of the slides presented/propoal can be downloaded at: a. William (Bill) Downey began with an introduction of his previous work with the industry. TCG's past work for NADCA on automotive and OEM die casting markets suggest that automotive engineers and buyers are generally more familiar with these technological improvements than are non-automotive OEMs. Diecasting is such an important technology in automotive applications that at most automotive companies, there are engineers and purchasing agents who specialize in diecastings alone. However, for the typical non-automotive OEM, diecastings are one technology to consider among many - and their knowledge of diecasting may be woefully out of date, or their engineers badly misinformed. Therefore, TCG proposes to focus on non-automotive diecasting users in our investigation. b. Downey explained the objectives of the study: 1. TCG expects this program will provide NADCA members with an enhanced understanding of non-automotive OEMs knowledge and perception of die casting technologies.

5 2. Learn about OEMs perception of competitive technologies - like powder metal, plastic molding, sand or investment casting and CNC. 3. Assess the awareness, interest in, and impact on sales from new die casting technology. 4. Identify trends in the use of die casting technologies. c. Downey explained that TCG will use trade associations to determine who should be contacted. Interviews will be conducted and data complied to assist die casters in structuring their marketing programs and decide what technologies to invest in. d. Twarog will follow up with Downey on final approval of the project. e. Marketing fund to pay for survey projects has $215k, this proposal is for $33k. f. Funding of this proposal passed approval. VIII. New Business - Marketing Committee Actions in 2014 a. The committee was asked what additional ideas they had for NADCA to address 1. Committee can market and advertise in whatever markets are deemed to be relevant based on the survey findings. 2. Host marketing seminars at universities. 3. Host seminars and tabletop to educate certain industries. 4. Review the markets that attend the design webinar and market to these individuals. 5. Market to students to attend Design Webinars. IX. Next Meeting a. May 15, 2014 Written by Athena Catlett