No matter how scant your budget, here are 10 actionable items marketers on the frontliners can take to boost digital marketing for manufacturers.
The reference to the industrial buying cycle is here.
No matter how scant your budget, here are 10 actionable items marketers on the frontliners can take to boost digital marketing for manufacturers.
The reference to the industrial buying cycle is here.
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Industrial Marketer podcast, your place for the tips, tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads to their companies. I'm one of your hosts Joey Strawn and I'm thrilled as pie to be here with you today. And as always, I am joined by my co host Nels Nels "watch yoself" Jensen. How you doing?
Nels Jensen:I'm doing great, great. I will try to match your enthusiam level.
Joey Strawn:You know what we're recording this on a Friday afternoon after this, we have a few client things to wrap up. But then we're going to hopefully gracefully go into a nice weekend. I'm excited. I hope you're excited. Honestly, one of the reasons I'm excited is because talking about manufacturers specifically, and how they market themselves is something we do every day. So it's easy. It's like it comes easy. I'm like, Oh, I feel like I'm putting on a comfortable blanket. And I want to talk about you know, manufacturer, manufacturer marketing tactics, like this is gonna be fun, Nels. So, I think we're gonna have a good conversation today.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, you just gonna have to cut me off, when I start getting into some long explanations about buying cycles and features versus benefits and the rest, it's all good.
Joey Strawn:I would never, we could go on about buying cycles, I am never going to cut you off. Because as everyone who works in our industry knows, those buying cycles are wicked different in the B2B world than in everybody else's. It's like other universe.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, we'll get into that.
Joey Strawn:So we all know what that means. I want to make sure that you know, everybody that's listening to the Industrial Marketer podcast, whether you're, you know, in the tools themselves, whether you're making the marketing decisions, whether - specifically with this episode, if you're working with manufacturers, or in a manufacturer yourself, trying to figure out either how to drive leads to your sales team, how to make sure the sales team is working good leads, and then that you have attributable revenue, you know, what's working, and you don't, you know, these are all questions that Nels I hear from clients, day in and day out. So wherever you are on the spectrum, hopefully, we'll touch on a topic that makes it a little bit easier. It's driving to a resource that's helpful to answer a question you've been dealing with, or maybe just give you a little bit of ammunition to take to your superiors and say, Listen, I'm not the only one who feels this way. There are things that we can do.
Nels Jensen:And this and, you know, I'm just saying that will be a big part of today's show is really the internal politics and how you market yourself in you know, I agree your company, right.
Joey Strawn:And guys, stay tuned until the very end for our on the shop floor segment, we're gonna have 10 actionable tips you can put into practice this summer, to actually make a difference for your manufacturer. So, if no other reason than to get you to stick around, make sure you listen to the second half of this episode for that. I mean, Nels, where do you want to start with manufacturers? There's, it's a whole world I mean, the buying cycle is way different than just the Oh, hey, I'm going to go to the grocery store and see a$90,000 Industrial oven. And I'm going to impulse buy that, like what are manufacturers dealing with in this economy?
Nels Jensen:Yeah. So I mean, you can you can look at a traditional, it does start with a traditional foundational, educate, do your research, consider, evaluate purchase, I mean, those exist, right, those kind of forces. But if you want to really understand the industrial buying cycle, go Google, we'll put a couple links in the show notes for you. But go Google the sort of - once you get inside the the steps inside there, we'll have one from Thomas net, and there's a couple others I can get out there. But it's like, you know, here are 15 additional steps, you know, and the biggest issue is it's not linear. It's Yeah, especially elongated. Some of these buys are super expensive, but it's not linear. So you jump back and forth, you bring in new personas, right? So the engineer find something they like, then they get the purchasing department to check it out. And they're going back, you know, to a different spot in the cycle. So it's, it's, it's really it's, it's a little bit like a puzzle. It's like a Rubik's Cube, you know, you get, you know, you almost have to get all the sides of the Rubik's Cube aligned perfectly before you convert a sale.
Joey Strawn:So it's so funny. I love that analogy. Nels, I one, I'm a huge analogy buff you you know this, that analogy is so good about that though, because when you're working a Rubik's Cube, there are a lot of moves that you make that may feel like. - well, I'm moving backwards or I'm making a move that's not putting this red piece closer to the red side. But what you're really doing is setting the stage for further success. I mean, You mentioned the buying cycle. And you know, a lot of B2C, your general marketing shows will be like, well, you, you have needs awareness, and then you have convert, you know, you have interest and conversion. And that's all true for the industrial buying cycle as well. But there are steps that B2C doesn't even take into account like a design step, most manufacturers have to deal with an engineering element or a design stage where you're looking at CAD files, or you're submitting designs for litigious review, or engineering review, or consultation or whatever it may be. And those are part of the sales process, because someone can back out at any phase of the industrial buying cycle. So making sure that you not only understand that, but have identified things of value along all those different phases. It is critical. And whether you're doing that with tools, or just playing good sales techniques, it doesn't matter really, it's just you need to account for it.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so that tees you up for one of your favorite subjects, which is aligning your inbound marketing with your content marketing, and your and your searchable content. So, you know, that's what makes industrial marketing so hard is that the content marketing needs to account for multiple phases and multiple personas. So how do you, you know, just help link the listener to the inbound marketing to the content marketing?
Joey Strawn:Sure. And I and I want to do exactly that - is that, you know, you'll hear the terms inbound marketing, or content marketing or lead magnet or these, you know, kind of marketing-esque terms thrown around. And I don't want that to turn anybody off. So when I say inbound marketing, it is essentially, there's a lot of noise on the internet. So if you're not finding a way to base what you put out into the market on the intent of the people that you want to work with, then you're just gonna get lost in the noise. So, what inbound marketing essentially means is creating flagship elements that you know, will attract the type of people that you want. So attracting them to you, as opposed to just spending a lot of money to try and be everywhere on the internet. And I, it works for manufacturing, specifically because the industry is so specialized, people are asking extremely unique questions about the burn rates on certain things, or the speed of, of air purification, or the retractability of an enclosure to an industrial specification. And people 90% of the time, studies are showing or going to Google first to ask those questions. So, in a very specific example, if you are trying to build an industrial oven, they like cured, you know, hockey helmets or something, they would be very specific space requirements, heating requirements, electrical requirements, you know, the control boxes, the training, all of that. And so if someone's searching for we have this space, or I need an industrial oven to heat at this Kelvin, and whatever. The very few people may be that specific online, there's not a lot of Sports Illustrated blogs about that topic. So if you are writing something that answer someone's question, they're then in your orbit, and then once they're in your orbit, you can get them in your sales funnel. And that's when you, like, really hand it over to the experts on your team to specify those sales, specify those needs and turn it around. So, you know, when we say cut content marketing, it's really just the element of designing content around the needs of that funnel. And that's, you know, Nels what we talked about earlier, that industrial buying cycle. So if we know that at the very beginning of someone's inquiry, they're going to be looking for space regulations, or ISO certifications or whatever, then you should have pieces of content that speak to those questions. And if you know further down the funnel, a purchasing agent is going to be looking at you know, BBB accreditations and you know, past histories and public knowledge, then you need to have information that speaks to that. And so along the way, being able to talk to experts, understand what those phases entail, for your manufacturer, is critical in being able to do this quote, unquote, marketing speak of content marketing. And that's actually I want to segue this back to you Nels, because this is your area of expertise is finding what those questions are and helping marketers fit and talk about that stuff.
Nels Jensen:Yes. And so we've we've come to the kind of universal dilemma of manufacturers, right? engineers love, engineers love, features. Salespeople need to rely on solutions. So that content marketing and inbound marketing is really the intersection. If you think of the concentric circles, you have, hey, what's the message that we want to communicate about our products and services? And then you have the other circle, which is, what do I need help solving. And the intersection of those two circles is where opportunity exists, right? You want, you want to be able to address people coming to your website looking for manufacturing solutions, you want to be able to address them as directly as possible. So how do you brag on what your features actually do? So that's where the disconnect often happens in manufacturing marketing is that a company with a legacy of engineers is not good at talking about customers, and is not good at talking about solutions. So that's kind of the the golden ticket to manufacturing marketing, is being customer centric, and solution centric.
Joey Strawn:And we talk a lot about, you know, personas and target personas on this show. And when it comes to manufacturers, you know, we always recommend that you have some in the bag that you know who you're talking to. And out, you know, if you're listening to this, you're like, well, I don't have time to sit and develop like these stories about these fictional people. And that that's okay. But Nels, and I don't want to speak for you, but would definitely recommend is, some, in some way, make an idea of who it is that you're talking to. So if you know that at one stage of the funnel, you're going to be talking to engineers, and they really need specs, and they really need details and they really want those numbers, then, then have, you know, answer those questions. But if you also know that people that are coming to your site are looking for higher-level solution questions on how can I save money in efficiency with an HVLS fan and my warehouse or whatever it may be, you have to be able to speak to that level as well because not everybody's an engineer. And some of us, our eyes glaze over when we read too much content that's written for them. So we need to be able to connect with- to your point Nels, the values and the solution. So you can tell me like the x t 911 42 gigahertz, whatever, is, you know, something that was like, that's awesome. And it probably to 30% of the audience means a whole lot. But to the other 40%, if you tell me that I'm going to reduce your energy costs and your electricity bill by 20%, every month, after six months after installation, I can manually and monetarily factor that backwards to make sure that's a good deal for my company.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, we we had a fun discussion, sadly, that you weren't a part of earlier this morning, where we talked about, wouldn't it be cool if and so I just I just thought about, wouldn't it be cool if we had a database of success stories and case studies so that when someone came to our site and said, 'We need help doing X or Y, How did you do this?" And you could immediately show off. "We did X for customer Y." The longer I do this, the more convinced I am of case studies and success stories. Why? Because they address things in a way that other customers can see themselves. So yeah, it is all about the as you put it, how will you do this for me?
Joey Strawn:Right. Well, and I'm a big fan of content hubs of like collectible filterable experience based hubs, especially for manufacturers, B2B, industrials, because there's a lot of questions for a lot of needs, that need to be answered. And so you know, there are tools that can do it. And that's, and and I hear the people listening already saying, that sounds like a lot of work, a lot of work, and it is a lot of work. So don't get me wrong, we'll talk about some very easy, actionable things. But if you have the ability, or if you have engineers on staff who are writing articles, or people who give speakers who love to write, if there's a way to collect a lot of content around your expertise, great content hubs are awesome. There are other ways you can take immediate action and see benefit that don't require months and months of work. So stay tuned.
Nels Jensen:And right and starting small and keeping it simple, is the best way to get, to get going. And it's just. you know, if you basically said what are the two most common questions that we get asked what are the two most common solutions we're providing? It's like Okay, do a success story for each, you know, it's - it doesn't need, you don't need the my fantasy database of, you know, solutions, you can start small with a couple of success stories and you don't even need to get into the, you know, I get it, manufacturing, it's ... no one wants to divulge specifics about who their customers are and how much money they saved. And, I get it. But there are ways to tell those success stories, using real metrics without sacrificing any kind of intellectual property or any kind of agreement you have with your clients.
Joey Strawn:And honestly, if you're thinking "man, we're so strict about our NDA and we can't talk about anything", let me tell you, as someone who works in this industry, that's pretty common. So don't feel too bad about it like, People have found ways to do this. And you can too, you know, one of the things and Nels, this is something that I want you to talk about, because you, when we were planning this episode, one of the things that you brought up that I just loved, were like, well, don't forget, a lot of these marketers have to market marketing within their manufacturer to be able to get anything done. So yeah, there are marketing doers, listening to this right now probably saying, you know what, guys, that sounds cool. But there's no way Darryl is going to let me do any of this. Like, I have to sell him and make a marketing presentation every time I want to get, you know, more than$1,000 to do anything. So Nels, I love the dedication to helping our listeners out in this. So how do marketers market marketing within their manufacturers?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, it's a microcosm of the industry. So if there are two things that we see the two biggest commonalities we see with our clients, one is making the case for digital transformation. Right? Your your a legacy, trade show, personal sales network outfit that relies on engineers and features, right? ain't gonna work moving forward, that tipping point has already arrived. The second...
Joey Strawn:Last year was a big one for that, like a lot of people met a harsh truth. Last year, when they're like, wow, a lot of our sales come from trade shows, and we didn't realize how important it was that the world is open. So a lot of people had to make some quick adjustments last year to deal with that. And there's a lot of new normal that sticking around in that.
Nels Jensen:Sure. So the two things that these companies are facing, right, making the case for digital transformation, and then marketing with scant resources, right, let's be honest, the vast majority of the, you know, 20,000 manufacturers in the US are not Sandvig or Schneider Electric or Boeing right? They're small and medium sized manufacturers heads down, we're dealing in a small niche, you know, so they have not, do not have a legacy of marketing as the foundation of their business. So those two conditions, basically, you just drill down, and that exists, the marketing doer out there is going to have to make the case to their own company, to the department heads to the executives to the facility manager, you know, the plant manager, what's the case for digital transformation? In that case, the plant manager might be easier than you think, because they've been dealing with this operationally. So how do you make that digital transformation with marketing. And then the other thing was, with scant resources, I think is where you're gonna really, you know, hammer this point home in the second segment, because there are so many steps you can take that are foundational, that will help you later.
Joey Strawn:Well, and one of the things that I want to definitely key in on, and you mentioned this earlier, I like this phrase, this, the idea of starting small, I personally dealt with it in my tenure of dealing, you know, trying to have people listen about the importance of marketing or whatever it may be. And so one of the things that I ... there's a couple of things that, you know, outside of the great advice that Nels just gave that I want to add is, if you can find an internal champion, find one person of a higher rank than you that also believes in marketing. So that way, he doesn't always have to be you that's chasing down the positive marketing can work, marketing can work, you can have someone that sort of champions, when you bring something forward, that that makes a much bigger difference than anyone thinks. And I've seen it work wonders of having one other voice to say, you know what, they have a good idea. The other side of that is really start small. And that's what I want to key in on that you said Nels. Find one problem for one person that will make a difference for you, and solve it with marketing. And then prove it with data. Make sure you have the data but if there's a way to say, look, I heard you complain last week, about 50% of the calls that you get are people looking for sanitation services and it's a problem. I went in and use this too. Filter these out. Did you know and I noticed in the data that calls volume went up 20%? Did you guys notice the difference. And if that is, if you can make a difference and prove it for one person, then you've recruited another champion. So start small, find easy ways that you can solve a problem for one person, using the tools that you have at your disposal, we can talk about those steps, and the second half, but starting small, and then using those success stories to say, listen, our competitor did this on this channel, and they landed, you know, a job with with uh, Boeing, you know, those success stories can go a long way to providing that social proof that you need to get some support.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and let me give you an anecdote. I'll keep it short. We have a new client that deals with industrial fuels, right? And one of the things that we've already been able to do is determine that a huge percentage of their searches are propane near me, which is not the way industrial people search for propane. That's what you and I search for propane. So we can grill on Saturdays. Right? Right. So, eliminating propane near me from our keyword list will only help because business to business. The industrials who are searching for industrial fuel are not searching for propane near me, you know, one very
Joey Strawn:Let me ...
Nels Jensen:But, it's a good example. It's a good example. It's like small, there's data to support it. It's simple. And it shows you know what you're doing.
Joey Strawn:And, and I'm going to tie it back to another thing because taking it a techie step further, if we're not spending click cents on people that are searching for propane near me, then we're saving money on a budget that we've already mentioned is probably scant. So the fact that it was, hey, we not only increased the value of the leads, but we save money doing it. That's, that's a one-two punch of success if I've ever heard one. Yeah. So yeah, I love that example. Nels, thank you for bringing that up. Yes.
Nels Jensen:That's it. But this is, there, there, is there is a lot of managing up that has to do with winning over, you know, especially in the manufacturing field. And there's a lot of hard lessons learned about, you know, you don't throw something out if you don't know what the answer is at a meeting, right? So you go behind the scenes, and you get consensus. And what would you think if we did this? And if there's generally support from your key stakeholders, then you can bring it up in a meeting, but don't ever ask How about if we did this? If you don't know what the answer is? Because, right, you know, that not just the champion might support you. But there also could be that one or two people who consistently shoot you down. So you know, it's a no, yeah, no, the room, and it's a lot about managing up and across. But you know, what, if you're going to win over the marketplace, if you're going to win over prospects, a good proving ground is winning over your own company, stakeholders.
Joey Strawn:And, and, and this, and those conversations of marketing, for marketing within your manufacturer. There's a lot of doers out there. And we talk to them every day, who we know we're dealing with that there are probably a handful of you listening who are like, Well, we've got, like three marketing agencies that we're working with, and we dedicate, you know,$4 million to this a year, like we know what we're doing. But we're just we don't know, what the value is, like, we don't know where this money is going, or what is making a difference. And so, you know, it's really the tech stack that we need help with, it's kind of understanding where the marketing tools and the sales tools Actually, yeah, not.
Nels Jensen:How do you know if there's a right tool?
Joey Strawn:Exactly? Well, and there may not be that's kind of one of the great things about one, the age that we live in, if you will, is there are unique, specific tools to do almost anything for almost any niche of business. We have the ones that we like, and that we've love, like marketing automation and CRM systems that automatically tie together. But if you work in a very esoteric industry, you're like, like we were working in the veterinary you know, cryo genetic delivery industry, and there are five of us in the entire company, or in the entire world, you know, that may not be you know, we may not need a Salesforce type tool, it - there is a right tool for your business, but most often it's going to be a right tool stack. So understanding how important email is going to be and how important sales team you know, tracking is going to be funnel generation are and how important your website is going to be in that mix. And then connecting the dots with it with a professional. You know, sales enablement really comes into play really comes into play when you're trying to understand which elements of the marketing that you did for your manufacturer made a difference. So, if, if you're able to tie the thread of, we send an email through this trade organization to this database, we got this many leads from that database, and this many turned into deals, we can now connect those marketing contacts to the sales deals and say, oh, at the end of it, we turned around $850,000 worth of attributable revenue back, you know, you trace that back, it's having the tools connected is more important than having the quote unquote, right tool.
Nels Jensen:Yeah. And you and you really did a nice job of summarizing that sales enablement is red hot right now, because sales enablement unifies your company, in terms of you don't know that you're still traditional sales network. You don't know who these people are, when they're initially looking at your, your goods and services. They're doing research before they ever contact you. Sales enablement is the, you know, basically tools and people involved that unite all this, they they're dealing with the intersection that I talked about between what you offer and what people want, they help take the tools help connect the people who are looking with the people who are offering sales enablement is hugely important in this new dynamic where trade shows and personal sales networks are on the way out, you know, well, in sales, sales enablement is huge, right?
Joey Strawn:Well, and one thing I want to say about sales enablement is that it is a big word right now. And it's big, you know, buzzword, everybody's talking about it, but essentially, at its core, what it is, is everybody else, figuring out a way to enable the salespeople to do their jobs better, or help them support them, whether that is it's basically everyone being of service to the people bringing in money for your manufacturer. And that's very important. So I always try to make sure when we're talking to clients to say, any tool system or tech stack that we're enabling there any sales enablement conversation is not to make you be better, but to help us provide you with better stuff. And so just a simple I would bet at every single man, I don't want to say 100%. But 100% of the salespeople that we talk to have clients that come on, if we ask them, Do you have every resource, like designed and developed in a folder that you could pull from that would help you in the sales process? Answer questions that you get all the time, every single one of them is like, Well, not really. I mean, they're good, although I would like it if I had more like more brochures or case studies or like turnaround thing. Yeah, everybody has that. So those are things that everybody can build. And that's a part of sales enablement, is making sure that sales people have stuff that will help them sell.
Nels Jensen:And I think that's where we're going to go with the next segment, we're gonna go down to the shop floor with these actual items. And I thought about it in this context. So who are the successful sellers in manufacturing? There are people who know their products and services, right? They're not people who just got out of grad school with an MBA, there are people who have been there people who have been with the company, there are people who have been with competitors in the industry, and you know, what they need help with, they need help with the tech stack, they need help with figuring out how to connect with these prospects with these leads, they, they know the material, they don't necessarily know the marketplace. So that's where I think, go ahead...
Joey Strawn:That's another way to save budget too is that we always comes back to well, we don't have the budget for that. And you don't need to trust me, I'm speaking from the marketing side as I would love every company in the world to have a fantastic budget to allow them to hire a marketing agency, you know, group or have a marketing staff internally to help with this stuff. But the reality is, is not everybody does. But you can pay for a session with an expert team to help train your staff on a process and get it rolling. That won't cost you as much as hiring an agency for like five years under contract. So there are ways to make it work. And actually, you know what, this is a good segue to go ahead and head down to the shop floor because that's what we're gonna be talking about is we've got 10 actionable things that manufacturers can do this summer to make a difference with their marketing. So are you ready to head down to the shop floor and talk about those?
Nels Jensen:Absolutely. And we'll have these in the show notes too. For people who you know, you don't want it you don't need to write down all 10 you can go to our - the Industrial Marketer website and this will be there for you to reference.
Joey Strawn:Just listen and enjoy. Yes. All right, we're heading down the shop floor. Let's do. All right, here we are, Nels. So this, we don't have a guest today, you and I were talking about the, what we really needed to do for the listeners who are in the manufacturing space and dealing with these marketing challenges. And we kept coming back to "we just got to give him stuff to do" - like there are things that everybody can do. And maybe you don't have hours a day to research online. So you know, as always head over to industrialmarketer.com like, that's, we've got a bunch of resources there collected for you. But, in this episode, we're doing top-10 actionable things manufacturers can do now this summer. So number one...
Nels Jensen:Can I, can I jump in real quick just to set?
Joey Strawn:Yes.
Nels Jensen:Even if you've already done these things. There often are intermediate levels and advanced levels that it's like, okay, I've already done that. But you could do a deeper dive, or you could do take it wider or so, you know, all of these things have utility, whether you are, you know, at the very foundational phases of your marketing, or you're an experienced, seasoned marketer.
Joey Strawn:That's a very good, that's very good, because all these things that we're putting together are, well, most of them are things if you haven't done, you should do but if you've already done, check them, see'em, do 'em again.
Nels Jensen:Open up the hood, take a look.
Joey Strawn:But Alright,
Nels Jensen:Sorry.
Joey Strawn:Number... no, no, no, that was great. Number one, segment your contact database. There are some people that are like - facepalm, and are like,"Oh, of course." And there's some people like, "Yeah, we know." My thought here really is there may be current sales contacts and Jerry's Outlook and Cynthia's gmail and whatever, or you have a long list of contacts, but they're all just in a big bulk group. And you don't have it divided by which are in the agricultural industry or which are in the food and restaurant business. Whatever your segments may be, find three or four ways - it could be industry, could be job title, it could be company, type it, whatever it works for your manufacturer, go through your contact database, and segment them to group them into the types of where those contacts fall into.
Nels Jensen:But that could be geography too. I mean, like this is, this is not an either or, you could do it by personas. And you could do it by geography, and you can do it by customers versus past customers. Right?
Joey Strawn:Agreed. So they're, whatever works, whatever the best way is that you know, to break it up into the way you think about it and talk about it internally, do that with your contact database. All right, number two. And Nels I have this and from specifically from conversations that you and I have had, talk to your sales team, and gather the common questions that they all get asked, and then write one article about it. Now, I didn't say blog post, I didn't say email, I said article, this could be something that is shared as a letter from the CEO. This could be shared online on just a page on your site. It could be a blog article, it could be something that you write for a publication that you have a connection with, but answer one common question in a written lengthy article that you then can use somehow. Now, this comes from you on talking to the sales teams and understanding those questions. Do something with that is my is my advice. Yeah.
Nels Jensen:And we talk a lot about atomizing content, you know, so this also could be you start with something about five questions about X or Y. And you actually develop each one into a separate piece. It doesn't need to be complicated, right? And these pieces do not need to be long,
Joey Strawn:No 500 words, just like keep it just, you know, just a little poof, this is how we answer this question for our sales team. And now it's on the internet. That easy. Number three, this one is pretty easy. Share five pieces of industry news. If you're a marketer, if you're a CEO, if your C suite, if you're an executive, you're most likely reading about things that are happening in your industry, things that will affect your company's trajectory, things that may affect if you're a marketer, you know, Google News that are gonna affect your on an online search rankings. If you work on LinkedIn, if you like Facebook, if you have a company newsletter, find a way to take the information that you read, that's valuable to you and your constituents and share that out five times you can do that everybody can do that. Probably every one of your executives could do that. And sure helps, it helps grow that thought leadership and it helps start to establish you guys as helpful voices in that space.
Nels Jensen:It could be trade publications, It could be the Industrial Marketer podcast, it could be lots of things,
Joey Strawn:Please, please share the Industrial Marketer. But you know, somebody would value from this, you know it. Daryl, if someone named Daryl is listening, they're like, wow, that'd be great. Alright, number four. And this was very specific. And this one is could be if you've done it already do it again, sign up for three industrial directories online. Whatever industry, you work in whatever niche you have, you know, you mentioned thomasnet, they're a major player. But you know, MacRae's blue book or process register, there are a handful of industrial directories online. And if you get into the specific industries like hydraulics, and pneumatics directory, there are major ones for almost every industry. Find a couple for yours, and see if they have a free option. Most of them do. Most of them have an ability to put your name, your company address, your website link, and the your services on their site. And that's going to help your site rank better, it's going to drive traffic to your site, get as many of those out there as you can, that are attributable and applicable to your business, linking back to your website, but start with three, most of them are free. Any thoughts Nels on that one?
Nels Jensen:No, Ithink and if not, your next item is even more foundational than that.
Joey Strawn:I agree. So the next one is number five. This is use a tool and I were going to have one in the show notes. The one I'm going to mention is Moz, M-O-Z listing checker. But there are a bunch, but check your website address, and see - not website address, check your street address, and make sure that the listings online match your company name, match your website address, it can show you all the ones that where your company is listed and where the addresses are either verified, validated or awaiting verification. And then you can manually go through and validate and claim all of those but see what's out there, the better unity you have among those listings, the better local search you're going to find. And that's going to help a lot. And then actually, number six relates to that, but is different outside of the listings checker, which will do, you know, yellow book, and a handful of others, go to Google My Business. And there's going to be a link in the show notes for that one as well. But the Google location tracker, and this is Google Maps, this is when pins and company names show up on the maps and on your phone, make sure that you have claimed and verified your company web address and street address with Google My Business, it's free, you need to do it. It's easy to do if you own your website. And it will tell Google very specifically that this is your company. This is what we do. These are the industries we work in. And this is our address. So if people in your area are looking for any services that you have, you will show up in their local search. It's very important you do that. And the step that a lot of people miss.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and those last two steps also will drive more success on employment sites, too. They know. They're scraping. They're scraping things like that, right.
Joey Strawn:Google jobs apply looks for stuff like that, too. So it'll help with it with a lot of different aspects. And it's easy. It's stuff you could do in like in less - in the morning. You could do it in one morning. All right. Number seven, set up website tracking. Most of - the most common one is Google Analytics. But there are a lot of others. There are very expensive ones that some major organizations may already have. And a lot of people may be saying, Well, we've already got Google Analytics set up on our site. Great. If you don't, please set up something to know how your site does, which are people leaving immediately does no one ever come? which pages do well? Just having some insight to how your website is performing is extremely valuable. Considering the day and age we live where most people are going to interact with that or a version of that first dealing with your company unless they meet you in person. Right. Number eight. This one is just spend some time, so this is an easy one. Spend 30 minutes on Google Bing or whatever search engines you prefer. Looking at different competitors and questions and phrases that are asked current commonly in your industry and just see what other people are doing. This doesn't sound like a lot but you can learn quite a bit by just dedicating some time on a search engine, seeing what other companies like you are writing about, seeing what pages they have on their website, seeing what trade organizations and articles are frequented and show up highly on search engines, just see what's out there. And you might see glaring issues or glaring areas that are missed, it happens more often than you think.
Nels Jensen:And that's another thing to help you with your selling marketing throughout your company to because if your teammates haven't done so, you know, you're bringing fresh information about the market to them. And this is a great time to do it between interruptions and supply chain between them just changes in the landscape. There's there's a lot of things that have changed, and a competitive analysis right now is gold.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Nels Jensen:And this doesn't need to be an analysis, it can be, hey, and here's two observations about our competition, right?
Joey Strawn:I would almost guarantee and it's always surprising when I have people sit down to do this. But I would almost guarantee that if you just spent 30 minutes with no other objective than just to look and see what's happening in the world of your search queries and competitors, that at least one or two glaring things will pop out that you'll say, Oh, I could do that pretty easily. And we haven't done that yet. Or we didn't write about that. But that's a good idea. Oh, it happens almost every time. So coming to the end here. But number nine. So you're looking, you know, by now you've installed Google Analytics or some sort of web analytics, and you know which pages on your site do well, you know, like, which ones are visited a lot. Pick one of those pages, and update it. Go in and add a paragraph or two of content that's relevant, that asks a question that you may have uncovered earlier in this list. You know, if there are important words or phrases that you know your clients ask, make sure they show up on that page, but just pick one. Look at your Google Analytics, look at your page, see which pages have the most traffic and update one of them. And that's it. That's it, pick one page and add some content that's relevant to your sales people, or your target audiences?
Nels Jensen:Sure. Or if you're in there, you might, Hey, how are H1s and H2s. And you might do a quick review on the page structure, because that's one of those things that you know, you got to open up the hood and look underneath the hood on that stuff. And I do that every every so often, right? Keywords change, all sorts of things change and ...
Joey Strawn:Keywords change, algorithms change, we're seeing one now, um, the - and we'll probably have an episode on it, where I just sort of walk you through what's going on. But this core web vital stuff that's going on. Well, yeah, well now making a huge algorithm change based on nothing else on then do people like experiencing your website. And they have factors and data that points to those and they're called core web vitals. And we now have to adjust all of our optimization strategies, because of those because now new things are being prioritized when they weren't before. But outside of all of that, you know, just pick a page that you can make a little bit better. And you can add words and phrases and terms that you know, your customers ask, that's an easy thing. It's one page.
Nels Jensen:And then you can and you can just share that with your team to Hey, we updated this. Anything else we should low hanging fruit for updating, engage? Great idea part of it, right? Part of it is engaging your fellow stakeholders. And if somebody is like, Hey, we did that. How come we can't do that? We can. What do you want?
Joey Strawn:Oh, I love it. Yeah,
Nels Jensen:Yes.
Joey Strawn:Get your update.
Nels Jensen:Yes, Here's how, right. Help me. Right.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, exactly. Then you have more champions. So again, it's all about growing momentum and doing little things. You know, let's take the manufacturing mindset on this. And Kaizen, you know, let's improve little bits over time. The Toyota Kata method works here is being focused on little improvements over time to make things better. So the last one, though, I put this last because I know some people are going to roll their eyes at it. But if we have learned anything, looking at the data for every industry, and everything that we've done, there is a way to use Google PPC to your advantage, whether it's driving people to a page that, you know, gets a lot of conversions, whether it's driving people to a consultation page or a request for quote page based on terms or questions that they're going to ask, but take$500 and put it towards a Google PPC campaign around a very common core question or concern that you know, your website can answer and see what happens. And that's it. If nothing happens, fine. You've done it. You've experimented with it. But we can see time and time again that there is usually some value in getting your name out there on page one of Google when you may not be there right now. Just that name awareness, name recognition and some bit of search traffic can get you a couple conversions that can make that $500, or to be quite frank, the 12 cents you're gonna spend on the ad that brought that one conversion in very worth it.
Nels Jensen:I just I'm going to be hitting you up for some assignments I have coming up in a couple of weeks, because you've just hit the intersection of making the case for digital transformation, and marketing with scant resources. So, you know, Joey, I will be hitting you up for the how do we spend our first $500 on Google PPC? And just the right just Hey, answer, Right, you know, Alyssa, here, here's three or four things to do. And here's how you might benefit or here's approaches to take. And that is great advice for the marketing doers who have a really big uphill climb, and they feel like they're pushing the boulder up the hill, you know, some of these things can help rally, yeah, internal champions, and they can win over stakeholders and, and they do provide data and success stories. SoI love it.
Joey Strawn:If you're that internal champion, give these tactics to the person, you're helping your duer make sure that they're doing these easy little things to make your business better. There are ways I mean, and we all deal in the industrial space. But one great deal can make a big difference to some of these manufacturers. One ongoing returnable revenue contract can can sustain some of these companies for years and so we really want to make sure that we're focused on these tactics that were driving helpful people to helpful resources but that they you guys are putting you guys are in the best position to make a difference for your departments and your manufacturers. And so you know, that's something again, that's why I was excited now. So this is something that we we live in, we talk about and, and the manufacturing sector is one that's near and dear to both of our hearts. So this was a fun episode to dive in. And I was I was happy that we got to do it today.
Nels Jensen:Excellent. And my mind is racing with all the things we could do with the I know you know, success stories, the engagement, the you know, how I succeeded with my first$500 I mean, whatever it's like, uh...
Joey Strawn:Hahahaha
Nels Jensen:You know, Joey, you're tapping and you've tapped into the, you know, I'm going down a rabbit hole and we'll see where this goes. I love it.
Joey Strawn:I'll just write a musical on how to succeed marketing without really trying and only $500. It won't be like a Broadway musical, but it'll be good. Good enough. As always, guys, thank you for listening to the Industrial Marketer podcast. We will be back in two weeks with another episode, probably diving in for more manufacturing topics. So stick around. If you aren't already subscribed, what are you doing? Subscribe to the Industrial Marketer podcast - the buttons right there on whatever you're listening to us on. Or if you're watching us, subscribe there too. Whatever you're doing, make sure you're listening and you're subscribed. Also, check out industrialmarketer.com. Outside of the resources that we're going to link to in the show notes, we've got articles diving into every facet of industrial marketing, whatever industry, whatever level, we have something that's going to be helpful for you there. So go there, sign up for the email,
Nels Jensen:And that newsletter as updates. Yeah, that newsletter is very good and it aggregates some really interesting headlines. Jake really knows what he's doing with that thing. So yet to sign up for the Industrial Market newsletter. It's it's a ...
Joey Strawn:We'll do the work for ya.
Nels Jensen:It's a, hey... it's well worth the cost of the free signup.
Joey Strawn:Exactly. It takes like zero minutes and it's free and we do all the work for you getting you the information that's going to help you with this. So, as always, thank you again from Nels I and until next time, we've been the Industrial Marketer podcast if you've been incredible. Until next time.