Quality content on its website is helping supply chain management specialist Celtrino develop its brand and differentiate itself from competitors.

A veteran in the supply chain management world in Ireland, Celtrino’s recent re-vamp of its website is allowing the company to showcase its expertise through a successful blog, as well as boosting brand recognition as it aims to expand into new markets.

Content strategy begins with research

After joining Celtrino in 2009, marketing director Michael O’Brien’s first port of call was to do a full marketing audit. With online becoming more and more important, Michael set about focusing on the Celtrino website and online presence.

“For me, the relevance of the website and being found online was of paramount importance.” Michael said his plan started with in-depth research. “I can’t underestimate how vital it is to understand the words being used online by your competitors, analysts and customers. Once you understand the ecosystem within which you are operating you can then set down a content strategy both for your own website and how you are going to engage with other online tools, like social media.”

Web content critical to search results

Celtrino’s new website went live on 27 May 2010 and within six months Celtrino dominated search engine results for all of its relevant key terms. “If I’m on the phone talking to somebody, chances are they are online typing our name into Google. Being found easily online is important for our continued success in the Irish market, but is also vital as we look to break into the UK market,” said Michael.

Developing relevant, quality content is key to Celtrino’s search engine success, according to Michael: “We need to keep producing quality content or we will lose people and cease to be relevant, and Google will pick up on that too.”

Continually refreshing the site’s content is also an important factor in Celtrino’s content strategy. “Our market is constantly changing and so our web content needs to be regularly updated to reflect that. Of course, regular content updates improve search engine visibility too.”

Content directs customers to next steps

While the homepage is the way most people will enter a website, Michael explains that because the Celtrino site is so optimised for search engines, there is a high chance people are coming to internal pages on the site through targeted search results.

Bearing that in mind, Celtrino developed dedicated content pages for each of its solutions, as well as identifying a list of ‘business needs’ that lead the visitor to relevant product pages. Clear action points were also added to each page, which makes sure that any visitor can see at a glance how they can contact Celtrino or get more information on certain products.

“It was imperative to us that someone coming to the site through a Google search for, say, ‘accounts payable solutions’ would have a clear call to action on the page they land on. This call to action could be a number of things, such as ‘email us’, ‘call us’, or ‘download a whitepaper’. Essentially, the key for us is understanding what the visitor is trying to achieve and giving them every opportunity to do so.”

Blog content gives Celtrino a voice

Keen to provide regular, fresh content on its site, Celtrino launched a blog in September 2011 and typically push out a new blog post three times a week. Michael says the blog has been a great success to date and has broadened the company’s reputation online. “The blog gives us a voice and the opportunity to engage with our audiences that we wouldn’t always have with the website. It also helps us to stand out in the market. For any companies considering a blog I would advise them to look around their sector and see what they can take ownership of in terms of content: ask themselves, ‘what can I write about that makes us stand out?’”

And when you do write a blog that gets noticed, that’s when you can really make an impact, according to Michael. “If your blog post is picked up by another blogger or commentator and shared, then all of a sudden you move up to a different level. Having your content reused around the web ensures that you are seen as a relevant and trusted source of content; the net result is that you will be favoured by Google and other search engines as they focus on delivering relevant and trusted content to their customers.”

Celtrino’s focus on developing quality content for its website has helped it create a strong online presence, which Michael said it is keen to take advantage of. “In February we plan on doing a major refresh of our website content to reflect changes within the sector and changes to our customers’ requirements. And within the next year or so, Celtrino aims to launch an e-commerce function on its site.”

This article was written by ENNclick for the Enterprise Ireland Internet Marketing Unit.

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If you are in the market for an ERP system this is an event not to be missed. It is a unique opportunity to see and compare the leading ERP systems based on a defined script, not a series of generic sales presentations, allowing for a true like-for-like comparison. The event will also provide opportunities to network and compare experiences with other organisations also planning to implement ERP.

The ERP HEADtoHEAD™ event is taking place on February 22nd-23rd, 2012, in the Carlton Hotel,DublinAirport where 9 leading ERP products will be pitted against each other over the two days. Products from Epicor, IFS, Infor Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, QAD, Sage, SAP and SYSPRO will be demonstrated.

This event will be facilitated by BSM – leading independent ERP consultants. BSM has managed over 100 ERP projects and will share project experiences and ERP selection and implementation knowledge during the event. For more information and to register, phone Linda Davey at 091-746900 or e-mail info@erpheadtohead.com or check out http://www.erpheadtohead.com for further information.

And if those 9 ERP providers aren’t here , here are some more EI Clients specialising in ERP solutions.

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The reason for the Smart Energy workshop is to stay one step ahead of the competition – smart meters are installed in over 60% of commercial properties and households in Finland, and energy supply companies are eager to commercially exploit this growing industry. As Ireland commences the implementation of its own Smart Energy infrastructure – based on successful recent trials – many opportunities exist in this sector, notably from ICT, demand side management and product development for both domestic and export markets.

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The Smart Energy workshop, hosted by Enterprise Ireland in association with Pöyry – a leading specialist in Finland’s energy sector, and the provider of strategic, commercial, regulatory and policy advice to Europe’s energy markets – will provide perceptive insights into this area. If your business is smart meters, and you’d like to learn from Pöyry’s tried, tested and trusted implementation programme (which constitutes a multi million-unit meter rollout), then reserve your place at the workshop as soon as possible. You know it’s the smart thing to do!

The Innovative Energy Solutions and Smart Meters Workshop takes place at EI Head Office, East Point Business Park, Wednesday February 1st, 2pm-5.30pm. Topics covered include the status of smart metering in Finland, Smart Energy infrastructure, and Commercial Opportunities. Places on the workshop are limited, so reservations are recommended. Contact me , Simon.Bradshaw@enterprise-ireland.com for further details before close of business Monday January 30th.

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Given the work that EI and its clients are undertaking in the retail solution area, I am delighted to announce that we are holding a second Retailer Solutions Forum on Thursday 9th February in Eastpoint Dublin. It will include the following topics; Social Media, Retail in Germany and Multichannel Retailing and is aimed at CEO’s of supplier companies targeting the retail sector in the UK and Europe.

You can find the agenda for the day below. Places are limited so contact me allyson.stephen@enterprise-ireland.com or  +44 (0) 20 7438 8714 to book.

• ‘Social Media in a Business to Business Context’ . Michael O’Brien, Head of Marketing at Celtrino, will share his experiences of the adoption of social media as a strategic part of the company’s marketing mix.  Adrian Goodsell and Pete Wood of Steak Digital will add context and background to Michael’s story.
• ‘Retail in Germany’. Michael Gerling, Managing Director of the German Retail Institute, will provide in-market insight into the German retail scene. He will give a general overview of the German market, type of stores, trends etc. with much opportunity to ask him about this challenging but potentially rewarding market.
•  ’Multichannel retailing in Europe’. Martin Newman, CEO of Practicology, will address the topic of multichannel in Europe. He will use practical examples to describe the retail scene in various European markets, to look at strategies of key European retailers as well as compare trends in e-commerce, m-commerce and f-commerce across Europe.

There will be a chance to interact with and question these speakers through networking over coffee /  a light lunch. We will welcome your feedback, and inform you of the planned activity for Retailer Solutions for 2012.

Follow the EI Retailer Solutions Twitter account @EI_rsolutions for all the latest information about the work EI is doing in this area.

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As mentioned in my previous post, this is the first in a series of case studies focused on how Irish SMEs are delivering real results using Internet marketing. This interview features Siobhan O’Dwyer, VP Marketing at Nualight, a client of Enterprise Ireland.

Nualight puts email marketing in the spotlight

LED retail lighting specialist Nualight is using email newsletters to build its brand and promote itself as a thought leader in the fast-growing LED lighting market.

Nualight is one of the original pioneers of LED food lighting and counts Tesco, Morrisons, and Sainsbury’s among its key customers. Co-located in Cork and Amsterdam, the rapidly growing company has been making a name for itself in the buoyant retail lighting market helped by its content-filled company newsletters.

Monthly newsletter keeps customers up to date

A monthly e-newsletter – called Bright Thinking – is used to keep Nualight’s 4,000-plus customers across Europe and the US updated on company news. “We launch products on such a regular basis that it would be impossible to keep our customers up to date without the newsletter; it really is the most effective way to tell them our news,” said Siobhan O’Dwyer, vice president of marketing with Nualight.

The monthly e-newsletter is teased via a HTML email sent to a subscriber list, with snippets of content that link back to the Nualight website. “We’re keen to direct people back to our website, where we have so much content and information we’d like them to see. Newsletters are a great way to do that.”

Brand building with quarterly e-zine

In what has become a highly competitive market, with some of the biggest companies in the world vying for market share, Nualight’s newsletters have become a vital marketing tool.

“One of our main goals is to position ourselves as experts in our area. With our newsletters we can reinforce that position regularly using content that is interesting to people and, of course, telling people about our ongoing product innovation,” explained Siobhan.

The company’s 32-page online magazine – Bright – is published each quarter. It delivers company news as well as industry-related features and expert interviews. “Our expert interviews in particular are very well received, and they’ve really helped us to align ourselves as thought leaders.”

Creating company spirit globally with staff newsletter

Having just completed the acquisition of a company in the Netherlands, as well as having a manufacturing site in Poland and a global sales team, Nualight was keen to knit its team of over 200 employees together. A monthly email newsletter is sent out to all staff to keep everyone updated on changes within the company, local news from each site, as well as product launches and industry trends.

“The staff newsletter helps us integrate our global team together, and makes sure everyone knows what’s going on in the company and in the industry,” said Siobhan.

Weighing up what’s working

On average, Nualight’s newsletter open rates are at an impressive 25 to 40 percent, with a 47 percent click-through rate. Constant testing and analytics help Siobhan identify which articles are proving most popular.

“We’re learning as we go along. We know that the HTML emails are crucial to pulling people through to our site so we make sure to create really good content hooks and put some real thought into our subject lines. We’ve identified that readers are interested in innovation, so we make sure to put our product news front and centre. Visual works for us too; our industry is all about atmosphere and ambience so we have upped the image content in the HTML mail.”

Divide and conquer

With customers all across Europe, Nualight decided to develop its newsletters in English, French and German, with the subscriber database split into the three languages. This strategy has had a positive impact on open rates, according to Siobhan.

Nualight is also planning further segmentation of its subscriber database. A recently introduced newsletter signup box on its website asks people to select their interest in one of the company’s two distinct product lines: “case lighting” or “accent lighting”. Nualight plans to develop a newsletter for each of these lines.

“I would say without hesitation that email marketing is one of the most effective things we do. Customers in our sector are information-hungry and our newsletters have really helped us to tap into that requirement,” concluded Siobhan.

This article was written by ENNclick for the Enterprise Ireland Internet Marketing Unit.

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Being based in EI’s Toronto Office , I’m delighted that we’ll be able to showcase some of these opportunities in Dublin at the ‘Doing Business with Canadian Financial Services‘ event in EI Eastpoint on the 26th January at 11am (more details below, signup link here, places are limited). The seminar is aimed at  for Irish companies who are interested in doing business with the Canadian financial services sector and will offer you strategic advice on tendering, partnering and advice on selling into the various institutions.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markwhitt/

The event will be moderated by Chuck Wilson, a Senior Financial Services Executive based in Toronto. Bank of Montreal (BMO), one of the top tier Canadian banks will also be represented on the panel. The session will be an interactive discussion on the Canadian financial services landscape, challenges facing the banks and institutions in Canada and address potential opportunities for technology companies in 2012 onwards.

People that you can learn from at the session;

•  Chuck Wilson, Senior Financial Services Executive With almost thirty years of senior level financial services experience, Chuck brings extensive knowledge in the banking and insurance sectors. With a background as an executive at RBC Royal Bank; Country Manager for a retail banking consultancy and technology provider; Independent Consultant; Insurance company CEO; and most recently as a senior executive with Aon Corporation; his perspectives will help participants understand the unique nuances of the Canadian financial services landscape.
• Philip McAuliffe, Technology Head, Institutional Equity Products and Financial Products, Bank of Montreal Philip heads up a Technology unit at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, with responsibility for Equity and Financial Products. Prior to joining BMO in 2010 Philip worked with Davy Stockbrokers for 11 years. From 1992 – 1999 he worked for Bank of Ireland in their Technology division

If you’re interested in learning more, click on this link to register, or contact Amy.doyle@enterprise-ireland.com Date: Thursday, 26 January 2012 Time: 11am – 1.30pm

• Location: Enterprise Ireland, The Plaza, Eastpoint Business Park Enterprise Ireland,
• 10.30am – Registration / Refreshments
• 11am – Introduction by Chuck Wilson
• 11.30pm – 1.00pm – Presentations by panellists and subsequent Q and A
• 1pm – Lunch .
• Participation Fee: The participation fee for the workshop is €100 per company.

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From talking with our clients and examining the results of the benchmarks, we’ve identified 7 key areas of activity and capability that make up an effective Internet marketing strategy, as follows:

• Online Advertising
• Web Traffic Analysis
• Continuous Intelligence Gathering/Customer Relationship Management
• SEO
• Content
• Social Media
• Email Marketing

We’re not saying that your company needs to become an expert on all these areas, but you should at least have a good understanding of what they are, and what impact they can have on your existing online sales and marketing strategy. To help with this we’re going to publish a series of blog posts here on BestConnected over the coming weeks, each one focused on how an Irish SME is succeeding online by adopting the principles outlined above.
First up will be an interview with Siobhan O’Dwyer, VP Marketing at Nualight, who will be sharing her experiences of effectively using Email Marketing. Stay tuned to the blog, the interview will be published here before the end of the week. If you’ve any feedback on the benchmarking, or if you’d like to suggest some other case studies, then please let us know.

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Rich Mironov is the author of “The Art of Product Management” and since 2002 he has been writing “Product Bytes,” a blog on product strategy, technology and product management read by C-level product champions around the world.  He writes and consults in the areas of agile product management, product ownership, and how to build commercially successful products with agile development teams.

Rich will host an open forum on agile product management and product ownership for those getting to grips with the challenge of working in an agile environment.

• What implications are there for day to day management?
• Do management roles need to change?
• Where now for product strategy?
• How do we derive market requirements?

Booking is Required as  Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis. For more information and to book your place contact Susan Kelly at susan@isa-skillnet.com  or call 086-8067200.

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Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities. This trend is expected to continue. Between 2025-2030 of the approximate 8 billion people who will live in the world 5 billion will live in cities. Yet the majority of our city infrastructures are based on inherited historical layouts and systems.

Science Gallery’s 2012 flagship exhibition and festival Hack the City will rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos – to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures. It will capitalize on Dublin city’s history, legacy, population and infrastructure, transforming the city itself into a nimble “playground” and live urban hack lab.

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We’re looking for proposals for experiments, exhibits, events, apps, mashups and visualisations which go beyond Science Gallery in to the city of Dublin and even connect multiple cities globally. Potential venue partnerships include The Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin and international partnerships with ZER01 in San Jose, California. We are especially interested in submissions which utilise Dublin’s position, geography and demographic – as the capital of a small island, on the periphery of Europe, struggling to recover from a post-economic boom and the European home for a number of key multinational tech companies (IBM, Google, Facebook), innovators and entrepreneurs

• Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland is seeking proposals for an upcoming major exhibition Hack the City
• Call Closes: Friday 20^th  January
• Exhibition Duration: 22 June 2012 – 07 September 2012
• More details : http://www.sciencegallery.com/hackthecity

The exhibition and events will explore hacking for good – the repurposing of useful resources, the innovators who customise existing tools for new uses and who purposefully challenge existing hierarchies. What creative ways can we release untapped resources, harnessing what maybe considered as by-products or waste, to create alternative systems for public good?

Hack the City is Science Gallery’s major international exhibition and festival for 2012 and a flagship programme of Dublin City of Science. Suggested areas of focus include:

• Augmenting the City – submissions that repurpose the physical city environs to allow a significant unique interaction with the surrounding city landscape, including AR apps
• Projects which allow the city dweller to interact with and interject into the city, both in terms of its systems and infrastructure as well as it’s physical form.
• Projects that have a significant visual impact or presence in the city itself and are designed to be economic with the available resources and tools. These projects should also contain a significant element that can be integrated into the Science Gallery exhibition space.
• Projects that may have an element of longevity that can exist beyond the time span of the exhibition itself.
• Future of the City – submissions, which think broadly and diversely about how we live in cities, support subversion and play and allow our audience to experience live mappings of the dynamic city (flow of energy, transport, capital and people) and gain new insights into our future cities
• Playing with data – submissions for works, which connect data forms and physically embody data streams, bridging ‘on’ and ‘off’ line worlds.
• New business products and services – ideas which have commercial viability and provide sustainable solutions for our urban needs, including the use of open data, data mash ups and remixes

Funding

We welcome projects that come with external funding. The maximum amount of budgetary support available for each approved application is €5,000. Each project must be delivered within this maximum production budget, which should include all fees, materials, shipping and travel costs as well as any other cost that may arise from participation in Hack the City. Please note that the production budget available for event-based proposals is significantly less and support will be given on a case-by-case basis.

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At a reception in the Japanese Embassy in Dublin last week, there was an interesting  discussion about one topic that’s hot with Japanese CEOs, i.e. the need for Japanese exporters to adopt a “China plus One” export strategy.

The current concern among Japanese CEOs is that should something happen to the Chinese economy then Japanese exporters could be left with little alternatives within Asia. Currently exports from Japan to China are doing well. However, a more balanced approach to exporting can mitigate against market risk. Japanese organisations are now focused on targeting multiple Asian markets: i.e. adopting a “China plus One” strategy meaning, for instance, “China plus Vietnam” or “China plus Malaysia”.

At Cipherion we believe that this concept could be used to Ireland’s benefit, albeit slightly modified, to encourage Irish CEOs and exporters to be more adventurous and more ambitious in their business development efforts.

By adopting an “English plus One” export strategy, Irish organisations would focus on, for example, exporting in “English plus French” or “English plus German”.  So as well as targeting our traditional English-speaking UK or US markets, Irish exporters should be encouraged to take the leap and target another non-English speaking market – for example, the large French, German, Spanish or Italian markets where there are over 250 million consumers.

What’s the real challenge for Irish exporters?

The real challenge for Irish organisations is therefore to overcome an “English-only” export strategy, something that has served us well in the past but which is now acting as an obstacle to growth.

An “English plus One” strategy would also necessitate some fundamentalDNAchanges in how we run our businesses. We would need to focus on language skills, cultural adaptability and so start to create the organisational flexibility and agility that this shift in focus would require.

The question is whether these new skills and thinking would help us in marketing and selling internationally?

The short answer is “Yes”, they would.

Targeting export markets requires an outlook and thinking that has less to do with being Irish, and more to do with what the end consumer in those countries requires. Stepping outside the box and developing an export strategy based on the concept of “English plus One” could provide a practical platform for Irish exporters to grow their business, extend their market reach and win business internationally.

So instead of Nike’s famous slogan “Just do it”, every Irish CEO would start the day with an email to staff:  Remember, today’s focus is “English plus One”.

I wonder if the organs of the state would get behind such an initiative and create a dedicated program to enable business to do just that?

Youroshiku onegai shimasu.

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