Quick Overview

Since 1986, IDES has published a plastic materials database for engineers, designers and parts fabricators — first on paper, then floppy disks and CDs, and then through a subscription website. Originally, only paying subscribers could access the database, but in 2004 they moved to a freemium model that allowed registered users to browse for free, but charged for advanced search features. The switch triggered explosive growth from a base of 3,000-4,000 subscribers to 310,000 free, registered users and 9,000 premium members today. Insider spoke with Josh Dorrell, Director of Business Development, and Nathan Potter, Marketing Manager, to learn they compile and update the database, how SEO drives visitor traffic, and why they’ve recently tightened their free registration requirements to gather more qualifying information about prospects.

Target Market

Buyers and sellers of plastics for manufacturing applications, anywhere in the world: 46% of site users come from the Americas; 29% come from Europe; 25% come from Asia.

On the buy-side, site users include designers and engineers from manufacturing companies looking for the right plastic to use in products, and the fabricators who take those specs from an OEM and actually create the parts.

Sell-side customers include major plastic suppliers such as DuPont, whose sales people need side-by-side comparisons of their products with competitors’, and plastics distributors who want information on lots of suppliers’ products.

Content Model

The site is built around a search engine that contains the technical datasheets for more than 80,000 plastic materials. Technical datasheets provide the information that tells engineers how a specific plastic will perform, how strong it is, how well it stands up to heat, how it can be used, etc.

The team has spent 25 years collecting that information by asking plastics suppliers to provide their materials datasheets. They originally added information to the database by hand, but now the site has direct electronic connections with major plastics suppliers to receive automatic updates.

They also use a proprietary search robot that scans datasheets on hundreds of other suppliers’ websites each month, looking for changes to that information so the search engine can be updated.

Searching the database by product name or number is free to registered users. But only paying subscribers have access to advanced search tools and services, such as searching by specific strength characteristics, searching for plastics approved by the auto industry, or searching for alternatives to a selected material.

“We charge for more advanced searching than just by name,” says Dorrell. “If we charged people just for a simple search we’d eventually be defeated by Google.”

In addition to the search engine, the site publishes a host of other free content — including email newsletters, blogs, articles, glossaries, tools, and on-demand webinars — that attracts visitors and generates registrations for the free or premium search features.

Revenue Streams

The site offers individual and group subscriptions for its premium services, but individuals account for about 90% of total subscribers.

Single-user subscriptions range from about $500 per year to $1,700 per year, depending on which modules the subscriber uses.

Company site-licenses start around $1,700 per year and go up to around $5,000. But some organizations are spending six figures on their annual site license, based on the number of users and features they’ve requested.

Custom data services are the company’s second-biggest revenue stream. The team has deals with major plastics manufacturers to power the materials search on those companies’ sites. So when visitors to a supplier’s website search for a specific type of resin, the results are actually delivered via a plugin from IDES’ database.

“[Plastics suppliers] are really good at making materials, but not as good at the data part,” says Dorrell. “That’s something we’re the experts in.”

Advertising and lead-generation services are a third revenue stream. The team offers advertisers several ways to get a message in front of the site’s large, targeted audience, including banner ads, email newsletter ads, and article downloads and co-sponsored webinars.

Marketing Tactics

Search engine optimization

After getting burned by a black-hat SEO consultant about ten years ago, the team took its search engine marketing in-house and began optimizing its website for the kind of highly specific, technical, long-tail terms that designers and engineers would use.

“People who search for generic terms like ‘plastics’ aren’t qualified,” says Potter. “Engineers don’t use those terms — they are entering a lot more keywords.”

The team creates public copies of all its plastics datasheets with the key values grayed-out. That way, someone searching for a specific product name or number will still find the site, but have to register to read the details. Those public datasheets also attract links from other relevant, high-quality websites, further boosting the site’s rankings.

It’s not unusual for IDES to rank higher than the plastics’ suppliers own sites for specific search terms. And thanks to their additional article pages, webinar pages, blogs, and other content, the site often has three or four links in the top-10 search results for a given term.

Video previews

The team created short, 1-2 minute video overviews for its services to show visitors what they get with free memberships and premium search tools. The videos include screenshots as well as simple animations that explain the services and benefits of membership in “plain English.”

Lead qualification and targeted upselling

With 300,000 free users, the team felt it had a large enough customer base to shift its focus from lead quantity to lead quality. They recently added fields to the free registration form to request more qualifying information from visitors, such as company, job title, phone number, and market.

The change caused the number of daily registrations to drop from about 350-400 per day to about 250 per day, but the team now knows a lot more about those free users and can flag certain members as high-quality prospects.

For example, anyone from a large manufacturer, such as Motorola, is automatically flagged as a high-quality user. The database feeds that profile information to customer service call-center representatives, who field telephone questions from users. That way, a rep who receives a query from a user can see if the prospect is in a high-quality, targeted group and can introduce that user to specific premium services.

“It’s a complete flip from the old-school way of cold-calling a prospect, where the rates of getting someone to pick up the phone are really, really low,” says Potter. “[The call center] takes a call from someone with a need that’s urgent, and the prospect is the one initiating the conversation. It’s a 180 degree turn that’s been really good for us.”

Technology and Vendors Used

Adobe Premiere: Video production software
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere

Arial Software: Email service provider
http://www.arialsoftware.com

AspDotNetStorefront: Hosted online store with credit card charging for the site’s plastics-related storefront and subscription sales.
http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/

BanManPro: Online ad serving technology
http://www.banmanpro.com

Camtasia Studio: Screencapture software for recording video demos
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia

Common Craft: Inspiration/model for the team’s “plain English” video previews
http://www.commoncraft.com/

Dreamweaver: Website design tool to manage articles, webinars, and other product pages
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver

Google Analytics: Web analytics platform
http://www.google.com/analytics

GoToWebinar: Webinar hosting platform
http://www.gotowebinar.com

Green House Data: Backup server hosting
http://www.greenhousedata.com

Hootsuite: Social media management platform for Twitter and LinkedIn accounts
http://www.hootsuite.com

Marketwire: Press release distribution channel
http://www.marketwire.com

PitchEngine: Social media press release distribution channel
http://www.pitchengine.com

Screencast: Video hosting platform for embedded videos
http://www.screencast.com

Typepad: Blog hosting platform for 7 IDES.com blogs
http://www.typepad.com

About Josh Dorrell and Nathan Potter

Dorrell and Potter came to IDES with backgrounds in their specific disciplines, but not directly in the subscription-content industry. Dorrell graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree and applied his knowledge of plastics first to the content development team and then the sales side at IDES. Potter is a long-time marketer who honed his online marketing skills at PlanetClick.com, a “democratic” search engine whose technology was acquired by Google.

The two credit their company founder with fostering an environment that supports continual testing and modification of their online products and marketing tactics — such as the recent move to tighten free-registration requirements and develop a lead-qualification program. “We have a small enough team and have enough support that if we don’t hit every idea out of the park we don’t have to worry that the whole thing will crash, says Potter.”

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

The IDES team understands that saving subscribers’ time and making their jobs easier are keys to creating products and services that are worth paying for. First, they made the simple act of searching for materials easier by compiling data from disparate sources into one location — creating a large barrier-to-entry for would-be competitors. Then, they designed premium services that do the heavy-lifting for users — designing custom search tools for specific industries, or creating algorithms that help answer key questions for users, such as, “What other materials can I be using in place of this?”

Shifting the focus to slower-growth from more qualified prospects is an intriguing move — and one that opens up opportunities for more premium conversion tactics. Adding customized lead-nurturing email programs or targeted webinar promotions to defined database segments based on prospect profiles are the kind of classic B2B marketing techniques that could pay big dividends for continued membership growth. We’d also like to see some of the free, ancillary content — such as a great video blog that answers users’ questions about specific resin challenges — given a little more prominence on the site. Such a move could help show how IDES is more than just a searchable database.

http://www.ides.com