As you develop your marketing strategy specific to the snow and ice industry, I thought I'd share some thoughts and then a list of websites in the industry that might be helpful for you.
Before I give you the list, here are some tips we've learned over the past several years:
• Get engaged at sites that have solid, specific snow and ice communities, like Plowsite.com, Goplow.com (owned by SIMA), and others (see below for a good starter list of sites in our industry). Advertising is important on sites like these, but being involved in the popular communities is also key.
• Use Facebook and LinkedIN as ways to develop stronger relationships with snow contractors and to personalize your company. SIMA interacts and shares information with hundreds of snow professionals via our SIMA Facebook page. We also get some good discussion and interaction occuring at our LinkedIN SIMA group, and use Twitter to share information between Facebook and LinkedIN.
• Use video: Snow contractors are visual folks, and especially if you have equipment or services that are best described visually, use this medium! Also, video testimonials are a great way to illustrate how you can help your customers. Also, Youtube is becoming more popular with many snow contractors. Create a Youtube channel and upload your videos, and then link it to your Facebook page, then you’ll have video content in both places with one click!
• Give people online an opportunity to provide you feedback on your products and service. You’ll hear some things you might not want to hear, but you’ll also learn a great deal about the way the market views your business.
Here is a good working list of the major websites out there in our industry. Some sites below are owned by SIMA, and some are competing sites; my goal is to be as objective as possible for you:
Plowsite.com: Many of you have most likely visited this site, it is by far the heaviest-trafficked site in our industry to my knowledge. This site is a wide-open forum, and SIMA has been engaged there for years, most effectively I think in the last 2. This site is essential in my opinion to getting a solid understanding of the snow and ice industry; it is a great place to lurk and see how people really feel about issues in the industry. It is also a great place to get feedback on your products/services, company image and more. One tip: the community is very open, and don't be surprised if you occasionally get a little beat up sometimes. We've learned that those people sometimes have valid points, and we've also learned to respond respectfully and clearly when necessary. For every 1 person who may belly ache about something, there are another 100 who are just reading the posts, that is the audience you should be speaking to on the site.
Advertising on Plowsite is something SIMA has done in the past and will do more of in the future; the biggest advantage of advertising on the site is the heavy traffic, the disadvantage is there are many advertisers and the ads are relatively small. You can get some great exposure by asking Plowsite.com to create a thread for your company. They may do so depending on the relevance to their community. At the least you should keep coming to this site to stay on top of what is of interest to the industry, and participate where you can.
Goplow.com: This website is a joint venture between Snow Business magazine (SIMA’s publication, published by a third party) and SIMA. This site is new since June 2010, and features both content and a snow-specific community. It is also the digital home of archives and the most recent issue of Snow Business magazine. It is generating strong, sustainable traffic, though not at the levels of Plowsite.com. It does have a core audience of SIMA members who frequent the site, many of who do not frequent other industry sites actively. From an advertising perspective, the traffic is lower, but the quality of ads is higher and more affordable than Plowsite.com, and there is less competition for space. The other great benefits of this site is suppliers can get engaged and involved for free by creating user accounts, making friends, and uploading any videos to the Community Videos section of the site. There are now over 100 snow-specific videos uploaded by members of the community at Goplow.com, many from suppliers to the industry.
SIMA.org: This is the home of SIMA online. It has a relatively long existence on the web (10+ years now), which gives it some strong search engine rankings. It has sustainable and solid traffic and is the single-best place to learn about SIMA online, including our certifications, events, Symposium, and more. Over half of all SIMA membership renewals now occur at this site each year. It has a SIMA news section on the homepage that is updated several times a week for fresh content. Advertising has been available and sustainably sold for several years now on the site, including on the home page and the members-only Learning Center.
Snowplownews.com: This site recently changed ownership and went through a makeover. The platform it’s built on is pretty flexible, and they've done a good job of leveraging the functionality of the platform. They get sustainable traffic and do have a community that is growing it appears. The other beneficial aspect of the site is that it does appear to focus on a slightly broader audience, including municipal snow folks. The site membership is not free, which may limit membership numbers; however the owner of the site does run specials consistently to try and grow the community. This site does a good job of aggregating newsworthy items from the industry, and is working on appealing to quality community engagement.
www.snowandicemanagementmarketplace.com: This site is owned and operated by a company called Multi-view Inc., who has partnered with SIMA to provide the industry’s only comprehensive online buyers guide for snow professionals. The site is exclusively dedicated to being the ‘Google’ of the snow industry, helping contractors and end-users find products and services. Listing on the site is free, and there are some options for enhanced listing for a fee. Some of the proceeds of this site go back to SIMA, which we allocate to various projects throughout the year. The marketplace's main point of entry online is through direct search or at the searchable widget at Goplow.com.
LetsTalkSnow.com: This site is very similar to Plowsite.com in its design, as a basic threaded discussion forum. The site was created years ago when a number of community members at Plowsite.com did not appreciate some of their more controversial posts being pulled, so they started their own site. This site does not generate the traffic of Plowsite.com, but there is a smaller group of committed individuals who love the site and continue to patron it.
If you have other sites you’ve found interesting or useful in our industry, share them below!
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It can be the electronic property of archives as properly as the most current matter of Snow company magazine
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