Industrial Marketer

The ROI of Industrial Marketing

March 23, 2021 Joey Strawn & Nels Jensen Episode 8
Industrial Marketer
The ROI of Industrial Marketing
Show Notes Transcript

The ROI for industrial marketing begins with understanding the difference between data and analytics. The essentials for determining your ROI for industrial marketing include:

  • Have tracking in place so you know where your leads come from.
  • Develop a lead scoring system to determine what are your best leads and where they come from.
  • Track conversions, which is extremely important for the long buying cycles in the industrial and manufacturing sectors.
Joey Strawn:

Welcome back faithful listeners to another episode of the industrial marketer podcast where we are talking to tips, tricks and trends that help industrials and marketers make sense of this weird world we're living in. I am one of your host Joey straw and I am thrilled to have you here. As always, I am partner next to Nel Nel wears five belts. Jensen, how are you? My compatriot? My partner, my man,

Nels Jensen:

I was doing fine until you hit a little too close to home with that quarantine. You know, concern over the belts.

Joey Strawn:

You know what we all we all are handling this in a different way. And the fact that you over accessorize is never one. It's never something that I'm going to judge.

Nels Jensen:

I can't tell you I've this the first time in my life I've ever been accused of over accessorizing Thank you yet again. You know,

Joey Strawn:

I'm going to start as many rumors as it takes to make you as famous as JLo There you go. So now so I'm gonna I'm gonna make you famous. How are you this week? Man? It's been a busy week. It's been a busy year so far. How are you holding up?

Nels Jensen:

I am I'm a holding up very well, I'm I'm doing very well. Though, I have to be honest with you here. I'm a little bit shy of knowledge on this whole marketing ROI thing that we're about to dive into. So..

Joey Strawn:

Ah, okay.

Nels Jensen:

I'm more in the mode of learning. You know, it's actionable insights will come. But they won't be dispensed from me. I'm the content guy. Right. I'm so curious to hear from the from the pros.

Joey Strawn:

Well Nels, I you know, what, I'm excited to dive into our topic of the week as well, in our second segment are in the shop floor where we've asked the actually our analytics hero, Matt hope he brings hope to us all, to talk a little bit more specific and in the weeds about that. But analytics is a game that I have run and managed and then have dealt with for years. So I'm excited. I'm excited to dive in as well. So you know what, let's let's go ahead and get on and that's our topic for the week, what is ROI in the world of marketing and digital marketing for industrials. And you know, this comes up a lot. And you know, whether you're the marketing executer out there on the floor trying to provide reports out of HubSpot or sendible or buffer Hootsuite or you know, whatever system you have sem rush SpyFu to show value, you know, is this turning around and showing value? Are you that sales and marketing guy who's actually trying to connect? How much revenue do my salesmen get from the emails that we send out? Or whether you're looking at it from the standpoint of is marketing a worthy investment for my company is will I see a return on my revenue bottom line, you know, by over extending or extending further into the realm of marketing? You know, those are whether, however, you're coming at this question of what is ROI, you know, my my view on it now, before we dive into some of your questions is ROI is the benefit that you get from employing marketing tactics, knowledgeably, knowledgeably, and successfully into the market. And I say benefit specifically as to not make it a financial benefit. The return you get could could be more eyeballs, more awareness, or people that are, you know, in your funnel, as opposed to a direct financial return. So I want to be clear, is when I say ROI, I'm talking about a positive, beneficial return on your activities. And you have to define those along the way.

Nels Jensen:

Yeah, and in many ways, marketing isn't well, it's not sales. So the ROI, what what do you do with this increased attention? I mean, you can go back to the early days of TV advertising and you nobody ever made a sale on a TV ad. But you know, it brought you a whole bunch of attention. What don't you do with that attention, right?

Joey Strawn:

There's a man and I'm gonna it may be Drucker or maybe somebody else but there's a really famous quote of I waste 50% of my marketing budget, I just don't know which 50% You know, I think that has been misappropriated or mister attributed to a lot of different people. But, you know, it is the idea of ROI is sort of a an intransigent in transient property and it's hard to put your Put your hands on and you even mentioned earlier now she like this is not a topic that I feel like I know a lot about. And so I want to demystify it a little Yeah.

Nels Jensen:

Especially even with in the In the digital world, which we live in, it's a whole lot easier to attribute ROI. I don't know how people did it without,

Joey Strawn:

well, the idea of a tree? Well, it's funny because we can track and tag and know more. But the answer of Is that helpful is still up for debate, in my opinion, is how do you use all of that? So you actually, before we started recording this episode, you said something that was great. And I loved it, you're like for our conversation today, I just have a bunch of questions I want to ask you about, about this world of ROI. So we are introducing everybody, a very new segment in the show this week called "Nels Needs to Know". Alright, that's it. That's how we're doing it nails needs to know. So now, you told me you had some questions about marketing, analytics and ROI and value? Yeah, what's that? I'm sure. A lot of questions.

Nels Jensen:

Well, does everything in digital marketing have to have an ROI? Let's just what about social, which social media does not seem to be a good fit with a lot of industrial companies? Does? does everything need an ROI and digital marketing?

Joey Strawn:

Oh, that is a good question. Um, I think here's my, here's the here's the short answer. No. Or whether that is, you know, blasphemous in some arenas? I think no, and Matt even may disagree with me later, we can ask him some of the same questions and almost do like a honeymoon game type thing? And see what his answer is. But here's my answer to that is, everything should have a purpose. But not everything needs to end when you say ROI, and I'll even correct you a little bit there is everything will have an ROI, it's natural, the return will be something whether it's nil negative or positive, there will be some sort of return on the investment made into social media, media, spend website build, analytics, you know, infrastructure, whatever it may be, there will be a return. So whether it's positive, which everybody hopes for, or negative, which, which is is the sum total of sometimes the experience, everything will have one, whether or not everything needs to have a documented financial or percentage based goal or metric associated with it, I would say no, I would think that every marketing tactic in a plan should have a purpose, and should be driving towards a specific goal or objective there, I don't think every activity needs to have it's very, very specific one, if the sum total of all of the activities is a net positive in the return.

Nels Jensen:

So that's a good point, have a goal, even if it's an indirect goal toward a bigger,

Joey Strawn:

And I'll Break That down, I'll make that a little bit. So let's say we as a business, have a goal of we're going to increase sales by $4 million in the fiscal year of 2021. That's a great goal, that's a great business goal. But it may is that completely on marketing, or the marketing team or the sales team to do because some of those are going to be returned customers, some of those are going to be you know, maybe a government refund or rebate, you know, some sort of financial kickback that you can estimate and, and plan for, and then there's going to be some additional growth need, that's going to be required of marketing or the team or the sales team. So that's the goal that we're then looking at. So$4 million goal with maybe we need 884 $850,000, in new sales, you know, from the agricultural market, that's a way better goal to set because then we can say, Okay, how much of our marketing investment then led to that$850,000. Within that vertical? it you know, you we can specify it even down to say, well, we want social media to increase our viewing like our eyeballs by 20% over the year and have no financial goal attached to it. That's just awareness that drives up the website traffic, because we know the website converts at a 5% rate. And we can turn that 5% into at least$400,000 of sales based on our conversion funnel. So if we can use Yeah, above the website traffic by 5%, we can estimate that that'll have this return at the end. That's essentially what we want to get to,

Nels Jensen:

Right just putting customers into a position where you are prospects into a position where you can measure what they do. Okay, here's what I need to know number two. So I read this week that only about 30% of industrial marketers have inbound marketing technology. How in the world could you calculate ROI if you don't have that kind of technology marketing platform

Joey Strawn:

That Haha, that one's that that was a very good question. I would I would hearken a guest that while that number is probably a little bit low, to be completely honest, like, as people who have right now I'm

Nels Jensen:

60%, whatever.

Joey Strawn:

Right? Yeah, it still doesn't make much of a difference, I'll be honest. But people using inbound methodology, they're using it quite frequently. But the, the, it's very manual, I can tell you that having managed teams in Excel and, and documents via Excel and and, and, and source reports via Excel and systems like outlook in the past, it's very, very manual. Ideally, what you want. I mean, at that point, you'd almost be entirely reliant on your sales CRM or your Google Analytics, and neither one of those is going to give you a full picture.

Nels Jensen:

Yeah, so it sounds like it looks like it's not an old lean, lean marketing operation. If you're relying on spreadsheets not

Joey Strawn:

It's not a lot of people, you know, there's Salesforce is his dominant systems platform for a reason. Most people have either seen or use them. There are others like net nutshell or you know, HubSpot even has like a free CRM that goes along with it, but some version of a management system where, you know, customers can go into, and you can track their progress through a sale, some version of that is necessary, if you ever want to have a hope of identifying what return look for, because you need to be able to say, okay, at the end of the year, we had, and I'll use zeros, numbers to be easy, but we had 100, new sales come in. And of those new sales, 50 of them came from this trade show or virtual event, these twin eight came from salesman efforts, these, you, you What you don't want is to say we had 50, new sales, and we don't know where any of them came from. because ideally, you'd be able to say, well, we got $100,000, in new sales this year from these 100 customers. Wow, most of them came in via email, and we didn't really consider that maybe we should really consider what we're doing in email to increase that next year. So being able to identify Well, these leads are responsible for this much value in our company, and they came from this place. That's the easiest way for me to say what we're trying to accomplish. And however, whatever system you have that does that has to be able to do that automatically, consistently and correctly. Because if it's not, then you're just lost, you're just lost in. In data that's not meaningful, and you're making decisions based on things that might not be true.

Nels Jensen:

Okay, well, you just teed up my what I need to know number three perfectly. Okay, you're you might be lost in data. I'm a marketing door at an industrial company, and I am just totally drowning in possibilities, right, this tool, that tool, I've got pitches coming right and left, I got proposals. I'm not sure we're leveraging what we have I'm drowning, how do I prioritize this marketing technology?

Joey Strawn:

That is where Matt, someone like Matt comes in, at a hero level, in my opinion, because you Nelson that you know, and I know this just because we work together, but I know how much you have on your plate and how much you're doing. So the idea of you then having to go client by client into their analytics platform or their tech stack to see what is working on a functional or execution level is unrealistic. So having someone that is looking at that data and providing and this is a jargony term, but you know, the feedback loop, if you will, providing that and what that means is just we're putting stuff into the market. What's it doing? For us having that feedback loop is incredibly important. And you know, the return on investment, keeping a track of that, I mean, you wouldn't give all of your investment, you know, to a financial planner, and then just never check up on them again, you know, you'd want that feedback. So what's my money doing? Am I losing money? Am I making money? It's very important. This is my money. Like, yeah, that you should you should think that way about your marketing investment to where it's what's it doing? I'm putting blog posts out there, I'm sending out emails, what what are we doing? This is my money, you should be asking those same questions. And so having someone like Matt, who's able to see, gather, interpret and prioritize those returns. I mean, now, how great is it that we have a feedback loop that someone says, hey, these are the blog posts that are returning keyword driven traffic that are converting into leads, please write five more, five more posts on this topic that makes you I would imagine And that gives you a bit more confidence in what you're doing. Oh, yeah.

Nels Jensen:

When when Matt suggests to a client that we need, you know, more white papers on these two topics, it's like, I know I'm gonna do I'm gonna be assigned that because yeah, Matt, Matt delivers the easily he

Joey Strawn:

Knows he knows what he's talking about. So I know what else what else what else you got for me now?

Nels Jensen:

Well, I'm curious. The manufacturing and industrial sectors are very different than other b2b, we've talked a lot about this, and we always will talk about it. It's what we do. So ROI, it can be complicated. But some of these sales pipelines 2, 3, 4 months can be, you know, a shorter one, you know, some of these, we've got a couple of clients who talk about sales cycles that are up to two years long, they inquire and they don't, they do a whole long, elongated process, and they may not close a deal for more than a year. So how do you calculate ROI when you have in our sector, such long, complicated buying processes?

Joey Strawn:

That question is, if that's the boring side of ROI, to be honest, because the answer to that is math. And I'll break it down a little bit more is understanding the metrics at your disposal. And trust me, these questions are answerable, most of them are tough, and require a lot of manual effort. It goes, it requires going back through books, and looking at expense reports and client, you know, invoices and things like that, but finding out a the types of clients and businesses that you you know, that you take. So if that's an econ, I mean, e commerce makes this really easy, because everything has a price, but I'm thinking more of the, you know, custom contractors or manufacturers, suppliers. So if it's, quote, based, if it's, you know, not everything is going to be exactly the same, you're going to have to break them down into the types of services that you provide, or types of jobs that you do. And then, you know, if we sell presses that are always in this range, or we sell fabrication services, for agriculture, that's always in this range, you need to know that. And then you need to know about how many of those you get in an average year. And you need to know the lifetime value of one of those companies. So is that company? Do they come once and buy a $500,000 thing? And then that's it? Or is this a company that spends $85,000 a year, consistently every year for 20 years? Is that the type of customer they are? So once you have all those numbers, and that's all the boring stuff, then you can basically say, well, company x will last about this long, and over the lifetime of them, we will generate about this much revenue. And then you just start moving pieces around and saying, Okay, well, if we want to make this much revenue, we know that to convert company x, that gives us this much revenue over time, it takes this long, this many steps and costs us about this much money. And then it's just a game of chess at that point, it's moving things around and saying, Okay, well, we need to put 20% of our efforts to attract these types of customers, because we know it's going to take this long to get to the finish line. And then we need to really hit these guys hard during this season, because they'll turn around quick in really small increments, and help us get this big long one contract that we need for the year. And then all of those things play a part. And that's where all the just the math and the spreadsheets and the boring part of it come in. But that's essentially how you get to that. And all the way down the line, you can eventually say, I know that if a facilities manager comes to this page, on my website, then he's likely at this percentage to convert and give us a sale. So I'm going to give that person a score. And you can then score that person and say, Well, he's going to be valuable later. So I'm going to give him a high score and pay attention to him. And then you can have these systems that actually keep track of those scores, and will notify you when people say do enough or take enough interest that they have become mathematically valuable to your company. And then you can send them an email and just build on those deficiencies.

Nels Jensen:

Sure. Yeah, it's the cost of acquiring a customer you hear it like I'm shocked at people real it off like it's you know, easily

Joey Strawn:

Customer acquisition, coca coca cost of customer acquisition COCA,

Nels Jensen:

And in the industrial world, I imagine it's not so simple. So you mentioned lead scoring this idea, you know, how to qualify leads, how to segment them and you know how to adjust your turn, turn your input dials, you know, to change those to see what the outcome might be different. What are the other opportunities here for our industrial marketing friends?

Joey Strawn:

That mean honestly, the biggest Opportunity is just being digital. Because in the world that we're in, in the digital world, everything can be tracked. And you'll hear the phrase thrown out there like, Oh, it's big data or like, oh, let's take advantage of big data, or we're a big data firm, or whatever it may be. Whatever the buzzwords you've heard out there. Essentially, what that means is, there's so much that we can track on a like suicidally holistic level, that human brains can't comprehend the patterns, but computers can. And we can identify trends in markets, or sales or things like that. But the fact that everything is going in a digital direction, and not only your sales and marketing systems being integrated and communicating together, but the fact that on a grand scale, there's the ability to look at just generational and cultural trends, with all the different data points now that we're all connected, those are going to be huge opportunities for people that have the skill sets or have the abilities to connect with people that can interpret that level of data. I think it's one of those that it, I mean, it sounds scary. And I you know, I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but like movies like, you know, iRobot, or, you know, all the kind of the future AI, type fear, fear based stories and movies, I think a lot of that is going to come from the world of these types of technologies strike predictive technology, people trying to predict trends or being able to see gigantic swaths of data, and then make accurate almost as if they were predicting the future, you know, results from it, I think that kind of is, is a big opportunity that people need to stay aware of, namely, because it's coming into the world of supply chain management, and manufacturing worlds and the Internet of Things, you're here in just industrial 4.0, we hear that talked about a lot is these technologies are coming into our worlds, whether we like it or not, or understand it or not.

Nels Jensen:

Well, I bring this up all the time. So manufacturers capture a ton of data, and in many ways have figured out what to do with it. So the whole predictive maintenance, Alright, here's some signs from your data that you need to take care of this machine, or it will probably break down. And again, marketing. It's like, we've been slow to employ the, you know, capturing the data. And then what do you do with that data? So and I know, you know, Matt, will be fantastic. And he'll help us understand how you do that, too. But yeah, the, the opportunities for data on the marketing side are as limitless as they are on the operational side.

Joey Strawn:

I agree. And you mentioned, Matt, and honestly, I think this is a perfect time for us to head down to the shop floor and actually see what Matt has to say, and bring some actionable insights of all of this hypothetical theorizing that we've been doing. Are you ready to head down and make this make this actionable?

Nels Jensen:

Looking forward to it?

Joey Strawn:

Alright, let's go talk to Matt. All right. Welcome back, everybody. Here we are on the shop floor. Nelson, I have run all the way down here. And we are excited beyond belief to be joined with Matt hope i said earlier that he brings hope to the world for digital analytics. He is our Admiral analytics. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matt Hope:

Hello, thanks for having me on.

Joey Strawn:

Great. Hopefully, there's like this round of applause. Or if as people are listening or just clapping for you, I really hope that's happening. We couldn't be more happy to have you here to talk about what is ROI in the world of industrial analytics. You're just you're a master at it. And I'm gonna I'm gonna have you go into your your background. But again, thanks for taking time out of your day to join us and talk about some nerdy stuff.

Matt Hope:

Yeah, for sure. Great to be here.

Joey Strawn:

All right, well, now so you're ready for us to dive in and start a pepper and Matt with questions. Matt, just to catch you up. Nelson has been playing nails needs to know round with me, peppering me with Whoa, great, great analytics questions. So we're gonna get your take on some as well. But before we do that, why should we listen to you tell us a little bit about your history. And why why you're an expert at this.

Matt Hope:

So I have a I have an interesting path to analytics. I graduated and didn't really know what I wanted to do with my career. But I started at my first job working with Excel and I started working with with numbers and I kind of I was in something I was really interested in and we had a team that was doing some industrial actually back home. It was doing lighting retrofits, so our customers would be guarding large industrial facilities, changing out all the lighting fixtures to save energy and save on their bottom line. And none of our engineering team really knew how to track all these projects, we they were out in the field constantly inspecting and auditing all these lighting projects. But no one really had a good way to bring all that information together and say, how much energy are we saving? And, and what's the financial return of that savings. And so I was like, I raised my hand, I said, I'll try and build a tracker, you know, that can do that. And I got started really worthless analytics, I have all that. And that led me down a road where later I moved on to a company called home advisor, which was helping to give service professionals inside of your house to fix up anything you have broken, or just to do additional projects. And I was tracking how to grow that network of service professionals. And so what we are trying to do is every time we put marketing out there to capture the attention of the service professionals, I was trying to track the return of that marketing and saying, you know, hey, when we spend a million dollars in Google this month, you know, we need to be shifting some of that spend next month, into this ad group under this section of the campaign, because it's performing really well. And we can help grow our network that way. So saving people and making people money Exactly. Exactly saying money is a huge piece of it. And spinning efficiently, I think is a big piece of ROI if you can understand where your money is going. And then how it's it's coming back in the form of return that count we say okay, this month, we learned now next month, let's spend more efficiently.

Joey Strawn:

I love it. And and so far, and just I'll pause real quickly for our listeners, because I've heard you use the term return and say that our key word of the day, which is ROI. So Matt, I'm going to put you on the spot, easy question, super simple. What is ROI?

Matt Hope:

ROI is return on investment. So as you're studying

Joey Strawn:

What does that mean to an industrial?

Matt Hope:

What does that mean? So it's thinking about when you are spending on, you know, that can be whether you spend$10,000, to buy a new machine for your production line that's going to hopefully improve your production, you can track the return on that machine by saying, well, we spent $10,000 to buy this new machine. And over the course of the year, we expect it to deliver $50,000 in savings. Okay, so the return on that is you spent 10,000, but you got $50,000 in return on that. So you can apply that to purchases you're making, or also to your marketing, you can say we spent $10,000 on marketing, and we actually got $100,000 in new sales from that marketing. So we're thinking ROI is a ratio of return on that investment.

Joey Strawn:

See now as I tell James sound soup, yeah,

Nels Jensen:

Yeah, well, and but marketing ROI also isn't always financial, right? Sometimes it's indirect, sometimes your goal is getting leads, which obviously can help you make money later. But marketing ROI is is a little more nuanced than just a strictly financial measurement.

Matt Hope:

Great, great point, especially as we, you know, with industrial companies, especially are going to have much longer sales cycles, not always an immediate, I spent this money on marketing. And tomorrow I have sales, unlike a company like Amazon that can spend money today and literally see the sales on site the same day, some clients are going to have a lot longer return and a lot a lot longer sales cycles. So just because there yes, there isn't an immediate financial return, you can say I spent this amount of money in marketing, and I got 20 new leads. And you're what the way to think about there is what's the expected value of those leads. And that can give you an idea my marketing is working, even if we don't have new sales on the books today.

Joey Strawn:

That was and I'm glad that you you reference that because that is something that Nelson I talked about earlier is we got around to diving into the importance of understanding your customers not so much on the level of what they do and what they sell and how much they spend with you. But getting to the math of all of this is how much are they worth over the lifetime of their account? What type of service or product or invoice are they on an average sale value? How many sales per year on average, and like getting all of the math pieces in place. So you can essentially play that game of chess is to say, well, we need to put 20% of our resources here versus Yeah, here because of this timeline where this can go here because of this timeline. Yes. Like the math of it all, if you will.

Matt Hope:

Exactly. And I think one thing that Lisa too is, we've talked about it at prior companies you can't always be chasing whales, right? So every company, you probably know who your five biggest best potential clients would be. And if you ever were to land one of those clients, you'd be swimming in money for years to come. But you can get too distracted by trying to land one of those whales that you're not paying attention. Well, there's a lot of smaller companies that you could work with that would provide a really healthy stream of revenue for your business. And you should be thinking of marketing to those and getting a handful of those along the way instead of only trying to pursue the big whales.

Nels Jensen:

So really, what when Joey mentions math? You're talking about math and science? Can you? Can you talk about the difference between data and analytics? Because I think a lot of marketing folks could use help in discerning really there. How are they different? How is how is data and analytics different?

Joey Strawn:

A lot of people use it interchangeably? So that's a good question enough.

Matt Hope:

Yes. So I think data is there's a lot of numbers pouring into any business, you've got how many people visited your website last month? How many of those turn into leads, meaning someone who maybe gave you their contact information and said, I'm interested in learning more? How many phone calls you're getting? Right? analytics is saying, Okay, let's say last month, we got 10 leads, and this month, we only got five. Okay, so if you're just looking at data, you would say, we had a worst month because our total number of leads was down, right, we went

Joey Strawn:

Make sense five is less than 10.

Unknown:

Data tells you we had a bad analytics is looking at the potential value of those leads and saying that the 10 we got last month, we're each worth$1,000 each, maybe in revenue. So we have 10,000 potential return there from last month. But this month, we actually got leads, and they're way better quality, and they're bigger companies. And there's actually more like $20,000 worth of value for each one of those leads, the expected return of this month is more like 100,000. So just because some numbers are down month over month, analytics is applying one more layer to and saying Well, there's actually more to the story than just the numerical number of leads you're getting every month.

Nels Jensen:

Sure. And that's a really awesome analogy that really helps. Yeah, and it well. And where did those better quality leads come from? Right? So like that?

Matt Hope:

Yep. You know, analyzer. Yes, you can say that, you can tie it back to marketing say, Well, you know, we got the 10 leads that were average quality, and those came in from this Facebook campaign that we ran. But the five really good leads came in from LinkedIn. And so next month, as we learn analytics is saying, Let's learn from that. And next month, let's actually put a little bit more of our budget into LinkedIn, because we saw a better success there. Right? So it's taking what you're using, and using those learnings and insights to actually apply things going forward. And to be more proactive, instead of just doing the same thing you did the last month and hoping that things improve. So how do we balance?

Nels Jensen:

Yeah, how do you bounce sample size? You know, because that's, you know, I'm a big baseball fan. And it's one thing when some hitters red hot for a, you know, a couple weeks, but it's another thing when they can do it year after year after year. So you might see fluctuations month to month, but how do you know if that's meaningful?

Matt Hope:

Great question. And so when I was at home advisor, we had a great scenario, because we had a, it was a really big website, millions of pageviews millions of interactions every month. And so that immediately gave you very meaningful sample sizes in a small amount of time. So we can make decisions on the fly, because we knew we had enough data to be confident in our analysis. But with some of our clients that we see now, and in the industrial sector, it's there's not just an overwhelming pool of data, because you might only be getting a handful of leads every month. And so that's it's hard to say, Okay, well, you know, this test worked or not, because you just don't have the data there. So there needs to be a little bit of you need to be patient with yourself and say, Okay, we're trying to move fast. And we're trying to improve things. But you do need to wait until there is more of a meaningful sample size. And sometimes, you know, one thing you can look for is statistical significance. There's a lot of calculators for that, where it's basically saying, it will tell you, if you're testing two things, whether you have like a certain confidence interval, if it's like if the if those numbers suggest that you're 95% confident in this hypothesis, then you can move forward, you might not get that in as section where you have smaller sample sizes. And so at some point, you will have to maybe lean on your gut, but you're gonna have to still use all the data that you have in hand. You never just want to be making gut reactions and saying, well, this, you know, this landing page looks better to me. So maybe we're going to go with it. You need to use the most meaningful data that you have at that point to then start to make decisions.

Nels Jensen:

So I enjoy if you don't mind me throwing another question or so when we get to like variant testing a B variant, or let's, you know, so valuable, yes, but has its limits in our industrial world, just what give us a quick rundown of a b testing,

Matt Hope:

AB testing, I think is very, very valuable. And the only thing there is, you might just have to have more patience than you think sometimes when you you know, and what we're saying this is, let's say you build a new landing page of your website that's really gonna, after you're sending traffic from there from some of your marketing campaigns is this new customer you're trying to get a new type of customer you're trying to go after? And you want to know, is it better to have this image up at the top of the website, you know, image a or image B, what what image makes people really understand what they're what they're potentially buying. And you always want to be testing those to see which one gets people more excited to say, I'm interested in what you're offering, and give you their contact information or reach out to you directly. And you just have to be patient with those tests. Because if you think about, you know, maybe after a few months, you see that there's a 5% difference in landing page a verse landing page B, if you you know, make that decision. And you're then that 5% return 5% lift keeps compounding every month going forward, you're going to be getting 5% more leads 5% more leads 5%, right. So even if the difference in the in the A B test isn't a huge number, you have to think about, well over the next year, we're going to get right up to 5% more every month. And that is what adds up. And that's why a B testing is important. When I would think that resonates

Joey Strawn:

Specifically with an industrial audience to because everybody listening knows what the value of one good customer

Unknown:

Value of one good new lead can change your business. And it's worth putting your best foot forward, especially as we're thinking about, you know, if it's your website, if it's all this great marketing constantly out there in your best foot forward committed difference between landing one new great customer and missing out on that great customer.

Joey Strawn:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So what like in the industrial mindset, what is what's something that most industrials, don't think about it they miss when they're thinking about ROI and analytics? Like, where would you think the biggest misstep is?

Matt Hope:

I think one big misstep is just the tracking itself, it's hard to get the tracking in place to know if you got 10 leads last month, where did those 10 come from didn't work 10 of them from your Google campaigns where five of them just from organic traffic, and five of them were from Facebook, I think one thing is getting the tracking pieces in place at the front end, because one thing you can't look backwards and say, I didn't Oh, whoops, I didn't have tracking in place. Now I'm trying to scramble and figure it out. It's one of those things where you have to have the tracking in place before things go live. And then you can look back and say, Okay, I got 10 really good leads from Google this month. And I know that because I have the tracking in place. So all too often, we see that people just come to us and say can you magically tell us where our leads are coming from and there's no magic wand to backtrack, and then get tribution in place. So so getting your tracking and getting your attribution links, correct on the front is the best way to figure out where your good leads are coming from.

Joey Strawn:

That's awesome.

Matt Hope:

And then also attracting them as they convert. So sometimes you have these long sales cycles, right? So maybe it took you a year to close a single customer, then you have to remember and tell yourself, you have to go back and look a year prior and say where did we get this lead from? Because it's a long period of time. But you don't just want to say, Oh, we closed a customer. And now we're just gonna go move forward doing or whatever we're doing, you have to look backwards no matter how long ago it was and said we you know, sometimes we see deals closed like two, three years down the line, it's really helpful to go back and now well, we actually, you know, this person originally found us this way, right? you nurture them this way, you know, we emailed them along the way we and and that led to the sale and that is very valuable, no matter how long it takes. I would agree with that. And actually one of

Joey Strawn:

Things we mentioned earlier, Matt, it was the idea the of big data and how larger trend data can be useful as well. So even if going back for that one individual sale isn't important for that one individual sales knowledge. If you do that for every sale over time, you can identify a trend with those types of sales and then be able to gather analytics and knowledge and insight from that piece of data. So like the the act of validating information and logging those bits of the maths, as I said earlier, still matters even if it's not going to benefit your knowledge of company x, y, z.

Matt Hope:

Yes, exactly. And, and one thing that I point is, as we've seen, especially coming out of COVID, we've seen that last year was maybe just for a lot of industrial, it was like a survival year, it was like, let's, you know, keep the ship afloat, keep things running. Now, there's, there's a little more light at the end of the tunnel. And some of these companies are saying, Okay, now we got to have a great year, because we had a tough year last year. So we have a 20% growth goal of 20% revenue growth. And my CEO, you know, maybe you're the head of marketing, or you're just head of sales, and your CEO just gave you $100,000 budget and said, Go grow our revenue by 20%. It's sometimes it can be daunting to be like, I don't know where to go, you know, if you don't have good intimacy, don't have an understanding of your data, you'd say, Okay, I have $100,000. But I don't know where to spend it, you know, so you're just spinning it dark. And that's where you're wasting spin. And, and there's stress there and pressure, because it's like, I have to hit this sales number. But I don't know where my marketing dollars are going. I don't know the ROI that I'm going to get on.

Joey Strawn:

Yeah, I think that that just kind of perfectly encapsulates, like every like the importance of than the need for this question in this conversation in this discussion. Matt, thank you so much. Yeah. Before before we end, though, we always like to in the in the, in the shop floor segment. But what's one thing if you had to give one piece of actionable advice that companies could do this quarter? Or this month? Or like, what's one thing that they could do? It'd be good, even if it's small, just like something that they should do something they should think of? You know, just to give you an example, in the last episode, the piece of advice was, if you haven't gone through the experience of looking at your website on a mobile device, you need to do that. Yeah, yeah. So something something along those lines,

Matt Hope:

I think a good one is a very simple system of lead scoring. So when you get when you get 10 leads a month, don't just call out, you know, maybe you have someone in your sales team who just calls out to them. And the ones who you hear back from you keep the conversation going, and the ones you don't hear back from they just dropped out of your radio, maybe you don't even have a CRM, it's really helpful to go in and take notes on those leads every month and say, Good, we got 10 leads, these three are good, these three are medium, and maybe this one was bad, okay. And as you compound that, over time, as you go every month, you get a better picture, even if the financial return isn't there yet. You can look at your marketing activities and say, Okay, well, you know, we're spending this money and 30% of it is really good leads. And that's now a metric that you can improve on and can focus on what too often we see that these people get leads, you know, customers have leads coming in, and they don't track anything, they don't write anything down. There's no notes. So then you kind of look back at the past year and go, Why don't I don't really know how well we did I don't know. I don't know if our leads are good. I don't know how many are bad, it's helpful. Just to jot a note, it's better to do it in our CRM tool if you have it, because then it sticks with it. But even if you're working on a spreadsheet or anything like that, write down a list of your leads and some type of score or note of if it was a good lead or or a bad lead, and that will help you go forward.

Joey Strawn:

I love that. I think that's again, it's an easy thing that people can do. It's one of those sort of just keep walking steps, baby steps. Yeah. time being time a bit

Unknown:

Different takes you two minutes takes you a minute to do for each lead, if not less, and it'll really help you when you look back over time.

Joey Strawn:

Oh, that's that's incredible. Now it's anything for Matt before we let him get back to work. No,

Nels Jensen:

I really liked the advice though of the get the tracking in place. And then if you do good lead scoring that will also help you figuring out your lead conversion to they work together.

Matt Hope:

Yeah. Love it. Well, thanks.

Joey Strawn:

Analytics. Thank you so much. We're all we'll have you we're gonna have you back. We're gonna like dive in to specific topics later this Yeah,

Unknown:

This is just the tip of the iceberg. But there's always there's always more data. You know,

Joey Strawn:

There's all smaller data. That's exactly that's gonna be the name of this episode. There's always more data,

Matt Hope:

Always more data.

Joey Strawn:

Well, thank you for joining us today. And

Unknown:

We'll let you get back to work man's Good. Thank you guys talk soon. Bye.

Joey Strawn:

Oh, now another great conversation. I feel like we've learned a lot this week.

Nels Jensen:

Oh, yeah. Yep. There's there's data and then there's analytics.

Joey Strawn:

That's right. So everybody, put your data caps on get your analytics, do your homework that Matt gave you. And as always, if you haven't already subscribed to our show, please subscribe to the industrial marketer podcast. We're here every week. We're here, bring it out here every other week. We're bringing the insights. We're bringing Knowledge. We want to we want to grow a community. So if you haven't already follow the show, please do that. If you know somebody who needs to listen to it, please share it with them or sign up for our newsletter and forward them to emails. You can find us on social media, if that's your bag, or just look up industrial marketer on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or wherever it is you take in the socials. And we will be there we want to share those tips, those tricks and those trends that really make a difference for industrial marketers like us. We're in it every day. And this is this is our live so we love sharing what we can find with you guys. So reach out to us, subscribe, let us know and let's build a community together and until next time, guys have a great