The RP Photonics Buyer's Guide and Exhibition

A buyer's guide is a convenient tool for finding suppliers (manufacturers and distributors) for specific products, e.g. industrial optics and photonics products including things like vision and imaging optics, fiber optics, laser technology, non-laser light sources, optoelectronics, and various other hardware, software and services. There is some kind of product categorization scheme (sometimes hierarchical, sometimes just a linear list), and for each product you get a list of suppliers, which is hopefully (a) more or less complete and (b) contains only companies which really supply that product. Data quality matters.

Decisions for purchases of optics and photonics products are usually not trivial and need to be justified; you are spending substantial amounts of money, and you need to take into account various technical aspects in order to find out which product is most suitable for you. So one of the first steps is to identify all important suppliers for certain kinds of products, before you check some of those more closely. Before that, you may actually need to learn more on the technology and its application, for example in our famous encyclopedia, in order to be aware of all aspects which you should consider for your decision. Such kind of research can be vital for making responsible decisions. Finding out only after purchase that you overlooked some essential criteria could be very embarrassing.

You could in principle just use an all-purpose search engine (not specialized on optics and photonics, laser technology and the like) for a first step, but that would present many other pages (e.g. technical articles), and it is cumbersome that way to make sure that you identify all relevant suppliers. It is more convenient and at the same time safer to use a high quality photonics buyer's guide which is suitable for the technological area. In addition, never forget to learn enough about the technical details, which you can do only with a high quality resource.

As an example, take our page with suppliers for laser diodes. How long would it have taken you to compile that long list of far over 100 suppliers yourself? We even sort them by location: first those from your country, then from other countries of your continent, and finally all others. For some of them, having our ad package, you can even find product descriptions and images; with those, you can check whether it is worthwhile to have a closer look at their websites.

As a supplier, you want to make as many photonics professionals as possible aware of your products and their qualities. There are many different marketing instruments available in photonics and laser technology, both inside and outside the area of digital marketing. Buyer's guides deserve your special attention, as far as they are well made:

• Obviously, it should be a convenient, reputable and trustworthy resource, with all relevant qualities to be popular in the professional community. Try to see it with the perspective of a user: wouldn't you prefer a resource which is intimately related with a famous online encyclopedia, attracting numerous users that way and keeping them happy?
• It should fit to your target audience. That should usually be the case if you need to reach photonics professionals (e.g. industrial people and scientific researchers) – but maybe not if your target audience is outside the photonics community, e.g. in some special application area. If you are trying to sell laser products to medical doctors, better go somewhere else!

• The resource should be proven to be popular in the photonic community. Operators usually publish more or less detailed web traffic data, which however are often misleading (e.g. also counting all traffic outside their buyer's guide), and you can usually not verify the data yourself. So you have to start with plausibility considerations, e.g. involving some checks of search engine ranking. However, once you have your entries in several photonics buyer's guides, you can measure and compare the referral traffic which you get from those. Typically, you will find that you get an order of magnitude more than from us than from others.

Some marketing people are very skeptical of buyer's guides. Indeed, most of those do not well fulfill the quality requirements explained above. However, don't overlook the one which really works, because you would miss essential opportunities!

Also, consider the perspective of typical users searching for suppliers:

• They will mostly use a buyer's guide, since they need to get an overview on the market. They will most often use the one next to the helpful encyclopedia which they are using all the time.

• When being presented e.g. with over 50 suppliers for a product, they will not have the time to check the websites of all suppliers. They will thus need to a make a pre-selection, but based on what information? Obviously, you don't only want to appear at the top of the list of presented suppliers, but also want to provide a short product description (as you can with our ad package).
• With a link in such a product description, they can directly get to the relevant page on your website. That is very convenient for the user, and of course good for you.

Of course, the quality of your own website is also of vital importance. It is no point to lead many visitors to your website only to disappoint them there. With a good website, you may even hope to attract many professionals directly through Google and others. Keep in mind, however, that you can usually address many more professionals by engaging on one of the most popular photonics websites worldwide. Also be aware that people usually first need to see a comprehensive list of suppliers before having a closer look at some of them; it would be sad if you would be overlooked there. In conclusion, what is needed is the powerful combination of effective lead generation with a convincing website where you can convert visitors to buyers.

By the way, when optimizing the product descriptions for our buyer's guide (where you may get useful feedback from us) you may well get valuable ideas for further improvements on your company's website.

Basically always, you can get listed for free, at least for a limited number of products. However, the operators need some revenues in return for all their work and get them by offering some advertising packages for suppliers. Some of those are just useless, e.g. because the resource has no substantial traffic and is therefore unable to produce any real value in terms of lead generation and branding. On the other hand, an ad package in a good photonics buyer's guide can produce very substantial value by letting you stand out of the crowd:

• Primarily, you can generate leads by attracting potential buyers to your own website, where you can hopefully convince them finally.
• In addition, there can be some branding effect: people see and memorize your brand and may in the future more seriously consider to work with you.

The challenge is that on such an international marketplace you are often competing with numerous other suppliers worldwide; good products alone are not enough to get the desired market share for your company. Imagine to be listed as one of 100 suppliers for an optical product in a long alphabetical list. Your first thought may be that you want to have some yellow-pages goodies, such as being listed at the top, with bold letters, a larger typeface etc. That alone will probably not do the trick. There are better things, however:

The most important aspect of an advertising package is probably that you can publish your product descriptions and images, so that users can determine on the spot whether those products should be checked more closely on your website. In our case, those things appear even in related encyclopedia articles, where many more professionals see them. Besides, there are many additional measures to promote your products.

In the best cases, the cost per click is not substantially higher than with Google Ads, for example, while the traffic quality can be much higher due to the well defined user audience of a buyer's guide. That way, the more important cost per lead is even lower. Some of our larger advertising partners receive many hundreds of leads per month, making our ad package an extremely worthwhile investment. This is why they stay for many years, once they have got the point.

Keep in mind that business success usually does not result from maximum saving of money, but from investing into most productive things, be it in the technical development or in the marketing. This holds for big corporations just as for technology startups: the real risk is not to spend some fraction of your turnover for marketing, but rather not to develop your turnover in time. Think in terms of limited windows of opportunity. You want to quickly inform people on your competitive advantage – before others catch up!

Unfortunately, quite a few marketing people simply spend their marketing budget on the same things every year, without ever checking how well they work – for example, by analyzing their server statistics concerning referral traffic. But that can give you a competitive advantage, if you make more clever decisions.

See also:

• frequently asked questions
• overview on our marketing offers
• article: Buyer's guides for the marketing of photonics and laser technology products
• article: The relevance of photonics buyer's guides for users and advertisers
• article: Good and bad reasons not to use a buyer's guide for product marketing
• news and insights: subscribe for the RP Photonics Marketing News
• LinkedIn showcase page on Encyclopedia & Buyer's Guide