Buyer's Guide … the one with the Encyclopedia!

Buyer's Guide Entries for Suppliers:
Basic Entries and Improved Entries with the Advertising Package

Dr. Paschotta

Do you want to talk to RP?

Learn about our marketing offers:

  • Step 1: why RP Photonics is your ideal partner for digital photonics marketing
  • Step 2 (this page): general information on free and enhanced buyer's guide entries – why and how our advertising package multiplies your chances on the market
  • Step 3: details of our advertising package – features, price, how to get started

For further details, see the navigation menu.

encyclopedia and buyer's guide

When you have understood why RP Photonics is the ideal partner for digital marketing in photonics, here you can get all the essential information you need to know for understanding

  • the basic structure of our buyer's guide,
  • what buyer's entries are available, and
  • why and how our ad package multiplies your chances on the market,

while we refer to a separate page for details of the ad package (features, price, etc.).

The unique feature that separates the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide from other photonics marketing platforms is its intimate connection with the RP Photonics Encyclopedia – an immensely popular, high-quality resource for photonics professionals. Advanced buyer's guide entries based on our advertising package (see below) let your product information appear even in the encyclopedia. It's not just the usual yellow-pages stuff, with bold letters, logo display, etc.!

Note that our resource works primarily for suppliers of photonics products, but also for professional societies and publishers, for whom the appearance in our virtual exhibition is of particular interest.

Supplier Profiles and Supplier Listings

Buyer's guide entries concern supplier profiles, supplier listings and encyclopedia article pages:

  • Each of the 1634 registered suppliers has a supplier profile page, containing contact information, a table with all registered products, and with our ad package a lot more vital details. Supplier profiles can be reached (a) via the general list of suppliers and (b) via the lists of suppliers for specific products.
  • Usually, a user searches for suppliers who offer a certain kind of product – often with the intention of selecting a suitable supplier for an imminent purchase. Therefore, our 739 pages listing all suppliers for a certain product are of crucial importance. (For example, see the list of suppliers for laser diodes.) Users can get there in various ways, e.g. via product categories, via list of products by starting letter (e.g. for A), and via encyclopedia articles.
  • For many products, there is a one-to-one relationship between a list of suppliers for a product and a corresponding encyclopedia article (e.g. on laser diodes). Users can easily move from a supplier list to the encyclopedia article and vice versa. Further, information from suppliers with our ad package is also embedded in encyclopedia article pages. Note that encyclopedia articles typically receive much more traffic than supplier listings, so that product information (with company logo etc.) placed there has an important branding effect.

For you as a supplier, it is essential that many users find your profile page and visit your website within their searches.

Free Basic Entries

As a supplier, a basic buyer's guide entry will give you:

  • A basic supplier profile page, containing your contact information and a list of your products – up to 100.
  • For each product, your company appears (with your contact information and a link to your website) in the (often quite long) list of suppliers for that product – but without giving details on what you offer.
  • Also, you get a simple booth in the RP Photonics Virtual Exhibition.

Although such a free entry is a good starting point, it cannot benefit you nearly as much as an improved entry with our ad package:

Enhanced Entries with the Advertising Package

With our paid advertising package (in short: ad package), you get a much improved entry. (We explain the details on another page.) The ad package allows you to achieve far better visibility and significantly more referral traffic to your website. First see that it really makes a big difference:

referral statistics for suppliers without ad package
referral statistics for suppliers with ad package
Figure 1: Relation between the number of displayed products and the number of obtained referrals to the supplier website within one month – separately for suppliers with the ad package and those with free entries only. (In the latter case, for each number of products, the average of all referral numbers has been plotted, rather than all data as a point cloud.)

As you can see, with the ad package a company can acquire thousands of visits from photonics professionals within a year – quite certainly more than you get from any other photonics website. That implies a quite moderate cost per lead, even when interpreting the whole cost of the ad package as cost for lead generation, thus completely ignoring the valuable branding effect.

How Does That Work?

Our ad package contains a lot of nice features, but here we concentrate on the by far most important one for boosting your success: publishing your product information both on your company profile page and in all the listings of suppliers for those products. Why that is so essential?

Take the perspective of a typical user. He or she intends to purchase a certain product – say, some laser diodes – and needs to identify a suitable supplier. The user's search leads to our list of suppliers – which contains well over 100 suppliers!

Clearly, nobody has the time and patience to search through over 100 websites of suppliers, each time starting on their homepage and finding their way to their product descriptions. Therefore, the next step of the user is inevitably producing a short list by selecting the most promising suppliers – for example, five of them.

Based on what information will that selection be done? Of course, primarily based on published product information because this is what is most relevant. And that can be published only by those having our ad package. Conveniently, each such product description contains at least one link to a page on the supplier's website, so that the user finds more details without first navigating through the page structure of the supplier's website.

So you realize now that the mere application of yellow-pages features – listing your company on top, giving it more space, showing your logo, etc. – would not be nearly as effective as what we are doing. The point is to aid the users by providing them with the information they need to do their pre-selection of suppliers. If you help them that way, you will be among those surviving that selection.

Many other ways of marketing struggle to grab people's attention, often with quite limited success. However, by presenting your product description in a supplier listing, you provide the users with exactly what they are looking for, since you meet them in the moment where they need that information for doing their current work. Therefore, it is much easier to get their attention.

If you need it, find the detailed features of our ad package, also the price, on another page.

Video Explaining Digital Marketing with RP Photonics

This video explains how your digital marketing becomes effective: by choosing the right platform and using the right type of advertisement.

Time to Act – How to Get It Done

Now having understood why it is essential to upgrade your entry with our ad package, you can move forward as follows:

  • If anything is not clear yet, contact us, and you will receive diligent help.
  • Check whether your company is already registered in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide, e.g. using the list of all suppliers.
  • If you find your company, go to its supplier profile page. On the upper right side, find the red button labeled Edit profile data. Complement the information in this pre-filled form and use the submit button near the bottom of the page. (If the information is not yet complete, just come back somewhat later, after we have processed the information, so that your previous inputs appear in the form.) Alternatively, you may also send the relevant information by e-mail to us.
  • If your company is not registered yet, register it with our form for supplier registration. That is the same type of form, just not yet pre-filled with existing information.

Try out the ad package (e.g. with a three-month test), see the results (e.g. with your server statistics and the statistics we will give you), and we bet that you will be fully satisfied!

In case of doubt,:

You may directly contact the managing director:

RĂ¼diger Paschotta

Do you want to talk to RP?

The founder and managing director of RP Photonics will be very helpful – for example, personally explaining anything you need to know, e.g., how the ad package works and how to get started.

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