A successful industrial marketing strategy starts with goals and objectives and seeks to answer how those results can be achieved. Key components for executing against your strategy include content, channels and distribution, and tools to measure and analyze the outcomes.
A successful industrial marketing strategy starts with goals and objectives and seeks to answer how those results can be achieved. Key components for executing against your strategy include content, channels and distribution, and tools to measure and analyze the outcomes.
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Industrial Marketer podcast your place for the tips, tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads to their companies. I am one of your hosts. My name is Joey and I am extremely happy to be here as one of your industrial marketer advocate guides today. As always, I am joined by Nels, Nels collects lots of shells Jensen. How are you my friends?
Nels Jensen:I'm doing fine. Doing fine, doing well.
Joey Strawn:That's, that's good to hear. It's rainy weather where we are. And maybe in the future when you're listening to this, it's raining where you are. If not great. So we're we're inside. Today we're talking about industrial marketing. As always, Nels, I I can't express that how excited I am to that we get to get together like this like once a week and just kind of chat and talk about strategies and talk about things that help clients and things that help manufacturers, industrial marketers out there. Oh, it's just it's a joy to sit here and talk with you, Nels. I hope everybody gets enjoy listening to it.
Nels Jensen:I know who thought talking about KPIs could be so fun.
Joey Strawn:Oh, I mean, I did. I've been preaching that for years. But no one's believed me. And I say please listen, and they don't but now they do. Because we have a podcast. I just needed to frame it in the correct way. Now now Nels and listeners, I have a confession to make. I have an apology. I tricked ease, I fibbed a bit. And the title of this episode is"The Most Successful Industrial Marketing Strategies." And, and I did that on purpose, because I wanted everybody to think that we had this surplus of all these numerous strategies that are gonna, you know, drive business, but I didn't. I fibbed a little. Because today we're going to talk about what the best and most successful marketing strategies have in common, because we're going to play a little bit of logistics limbo this week, Nels. And we're talking about strategy, marketing strategy and more specifically, industrial marketing strategy. And that's not 1,000 different strategies with 1,000 different people moving in 1,000 different directions. We are talking about what elements and what are the pieces that make up a strategy that can then be customized and contained for particular companies, industries, softwares, whatever it may be. So, Nels, I apologize for drawing you here under false pretenses.
Nels Jensen:I was, I was trying to guess what my answer was going to be what's the most successful industrial marketing strategy? one that worked, one that had really good outcomes?
Joey Strawn:Yeah. You know, that the working one, the one that got us a lot of money, that was the one marketing strategy.
Nels Jensen:Honestly, though, it does speak to the what makes a good strategy, right? What are you trying to accomplish? I mean, you let's let's start with the basic Captain Obvious here, that, you know, what is the strategy? A strategy is something that helps you meet an objective that's, you know, aligned with a goal, right? Oh, it's kind of business definitions. I should have an MBA, you know.
Joey Strawn:Oh, you know what? I'm learning from you right now, Nels. And honestly, if you're going to be my Captain Obvious, I'll be your Lieutenant Logistics, because this is just straightforward stuff. Like the idea. And we hear it all the time. And one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode, and we're having fun with the title up front, but we get asked all the time, I was like, Well, what are all the strategies that we could put into place? Or what are all the strategies that we could do? Or like, Oh, what is our social media strategy you need to be it's gonna connect with, you know, Tik Tok strategy or whatever. And in my head spins a little bit, because when we're talking about a marketing strategy, and Nels, you summed
it up very nicely:It's what are the, what's the direction? What's the story? What are the things we're trying to accomplish for the business as a whole, with the department or with the fundamentals of marketing. And so to think that there are like hundreds and dozens of all these strategies just willy nilly floating out separate, and I think that's where a lot of people's headspace comes in as they want, I think I need this thing over here. And I need this other strategy over here. And I need this thing here. And Nels, you and I want to take today to kind of pull it together a little bit, like, let's find what that base needs to look like. What do you what are the basic DNA building blocks of a strategy? And then how to tactics and channels and things like that actually layer on top of that, as opposed to just being added to or another, you know, strategy in the salad, if you will?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, it, it really is kind of a hierarchy. You start with a goal, right? Come up, what are your objectives? How are you going to approach it? And then how do you basically create the the content and distribute it and execute it? Right?
Joey Strawn:I know, I, the what you just laid out there, I want to kind of break that down. Because that's the essence of what these strategies and what a what a good industrial marketing strategy needs to have is it needs to have a couple a handful of these elements in it. And you started with goals and objectives. So I want to start there. And I think that's a good place to start. I mean, Nels, you and I have calls with clients all the time, and we're talking about, okay, well, who do you think you are? And who do you think you are? Like, who do you guys, you know, perceive as you know, your value and, and all of these different things. And you always get to the heart of some great questions by basically saying, Okay, what are you trying to accomplish? Like, what do you want to do? I know how you want to say who you are, and things and that's great. We'll get to that. But yeah, talk talk, why it's so important for you and us, as you know, a marketing team or us as people who were telling our industrial stories for brands, why it's so important to know what those goals and objectives are at a business level.
Nels Jensen:So a lot of small manufacturers, legacy companies, you know, they're they're finely tuned operationally, but they haven't put the same continuous improvement mindset to sales and marketing. Right? We know, we know a lot of these profiles. So they think they have a reach problem. We just need to get awareness up and we'll sell more whatever. Well, they probably have a messaging issue. Right. So what is it that you are trying to solve? What is the customer need? What is the prospect pain point? So you kind of can work backwards from that, where, here's, here's the problem we're going to solve and the messaging, you know, hopefully is on your website about how you go about solving that pain point. And then you can work, then you can work backward with, you know, how do you distribute your solution-based content? It's not there, but it's not the reach problem. Right? It's the messaging problem,
Joey Strawn:It's essentially it's like, yo, there's you got a problem, yo, I'll solve it, kick it to my marketing department and revolve I don't know, there's a there's an ice, there's a vanilla ice joke in there somewhere. And I haven't quite nailed it. But one thing I do want to be clear on before we move on to the next, the next segment of what makes a good strategy, coherent and strong, is I do want to give a little bit of teacher definition, the differences between goals and objectives. Because as as you know, I've got that blood, I've got that streak in me, I used to teach marketing. And so I wanted to find out because you hear goals and objectives, people throw those out and use them synonymously all the time, but when we're talking about them in our context, and especially when you and I sit around the table and try and hash this out, for a client, a goal is a general thing of what we're trying to accomplish, we want to grow to be the, you know, the number one distributor in western Pennsylvania or we want to have the largest, you know, portfolio of any blah, blah, blah. Those are the goals. The objectives are very specific, measurable tactics and actions that you're going to take to then get to those goals. So, it is what Nels said is backtracking out of Okay. So, we know that we need to we want to as the business grow by X percent. So in order to grow by X percent, then department A needs to do this by this date, and department B needs to do this by this date, etc, etc, etc.
Nels Jensen:Right. So, are you backing it up by like, that means we need to sell one additional machine every quarter, just to keep it simple. But that means what? You might need to generate three more qualified leads every month. That means you may need to have 10 more cold leads every week.
Joey Strawn:Exactly. Well, that and that is what takes us into this next element of what makes a good strategy work is now that we know our goals, and now that we know the objectives and the steps and the things that we need to take care of to get there, the approach and how we get there is the next step. So Nels, let's take some of your examples. That's great. So we want to grow by X percent, or we want to, you know, hat, we need to sell this many more machines by this date. If, when you put your goals and objectives together, they're based heavily around the unit sales or the revenue gained, etc, then your approach section and the what you develop and what you plan and strategize out, will all be based around selling a machine or getting someone to a salesman to sell a machine, etc, etc. But if, let's another hypothetical would be well, what if your objective is to grow the business but the I mean, the goal is to grow the business, but the way that you're going to approach that is by acquiring other companies in a smaller space, or in a, in a state that you don't have a footprint in? Well, then your marketing tactics become a lot heavier on the internal sales process. And, you know, maybe an account based marketing play where you're specifically targeting seven to eight companies and their executives with very, very targeted direct mail pieces, or emails or, you know, salesman visits and things like that. So knowing what those goals and objectives are, allow you to define an approach that then makes sense. I mean, Nels, I can't tell you all the times that we've been in meetings, or we've been having conversations, and they're like, well write this blog post or write this thing. And you're like, Yeah, but why? Like, what is it doing? Like, why am I making this thing?
Nels Jensen:And what if it works? And what's next? Yeah.
Joey Strawn:And that's where all the ideas and what you were talking about earlier, the ideas and the distribution is like, Okay, well, if we know that we need to sell, if our, if our goals and objectives are to earn X more revenue and grow by this percentage, then in order to do that, we know we need to sell 500 additional machines than we sold last year. We know that for every 25 leads that we get, we can sell one machine. And then we know you just kind of work the math backwards to say, Okay, well, in order to do this, we need to sell, you know, 3,600 more machines this year than we did last year, breaking that down by month, we need to sell this many on this day. So we can do it math-wise that way. But the ideas of Oh, well, then how do we do that? And what are the best methods of getting that information out there? That's where the rest of that strategy comes together. And you can actually add in the channels and the things that we've been talking about, but they should all work together. I mean, Nels it's again, it's it's like that blog post like, Well, why what does it connect to? What is it driving people towards? At what point in their marketing journey are they when they come across this thing that we have? You know, that's for someone who lives in the content world, like you, having a purpose for the pieces that you're creating, and knowing which channels they're going to be distributed to, I can imagine that just invaluable information and stuff you have to have to be able to get started.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, you know what'd be really helpful for me, is if you can tell me which of those sources close deals faster. If you can, if you can tell me that lead scoring, hey, we need to do more around X or Y and, and it works best on sources A, B, and C, then you know, then we can really help sales out, right? So you know, your, your marketing automation, your lead scoring, you know, your department's going to really fuel what my department should be doing, right?
Joey Strawn:I, I couldn't agree more. And that's one of the things with that. I'm glad you mentioned because this idea and I mentioned it earlier that everybody will comment like, well, we need a content strategy, or we need a video Yeah, adjusting the input dials a little more of this, a strategy or a social media strategy. And where and while those are good conversations to have, I'm not I won't nitpick the terminology as much after this episode as before, but I do want to let people know that words are important. And when we talk about strategy here, those channels can fit onto this in the ideas and distribution and kind of that tail end of how it all fits together. So Nels, to your point, if we're looking at everything, and we know that our goals are to get a certain number of more machine sales, or leads, or whatever it may be, then I can then turn around and track all of that to say, Well, if we send an email, we see this many results. And if we create a white paper, we see 20 times that. And if we make a video, we see 50 times conversion rates. Those types of valid data points little less of that, you know? are very, very valuable to you and the content teams, because then you can say, Well, I need to make five new white papers, and not worry about doing these, like 10 emails that aren't going to do anything or, you know, whatever it may be. Giving yo that focus allows you to r ally, really decide what strateg cally is going to make the be t and biggest i Yeah, I love like content is I think is they say, you know, content is king and I, I am a big advocate for that position. But the idea of always creating content and always being, you know, out there answering helpful questions, is, is a type of layer that most strategies will need and can benefit from. So the idea of what are our biggest questions, what are our biggest needs, and then what strategically based on the goals, objectives, approach, ideas, channels, things that we've just been talking about so far? What elements of those make sense together? So that's why I want to talk a little bit about the industrial marketing channels, and how they can align because different strategies can prioritize or use different marketing channels in different ways. So you know, for instance, like if Nels if we're putting together a strategy that's focused completely around awareness. You know, people just need to know about either a company or a product or a service or whatever it may be. Like what types of content pieces or what would you expect to make if all they want to do is get the name out about who they are?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so, you know, it could be ... Actually, that one's really broad. So that could include a lot of different things. But it could be, it could be success stories, though, that is a little more solution based, but it could be just blog posts about, you know, even anniversary stories: we've been in business for 10 years, and we do X and Y, but, you know, it could be the, you know, testimonial video. It could be, you know, there's awareness, it's, it's like you're you're trying to convey probably some kind of mission statement or some kind of value proposition, right? What we do for, generally speaking, we provide you with end to end service, and we're your partner for every step along the way for the long term. Okay, so I didn't really tell you even what we do, but, you know, I've told you what our promises is.
Joey Strawn:And I've seen your logo now and I know it's in front of me. I probably saw it on like, machining digest or something. So I know you're related to that.
Nels Jensen:Yeah. Well, hopefully I've said, you know, we're your, you know, fluids and coding provider, or that we're your widget maker, or that we have the best cutting tools, you know, in our segment, you know, something like that, right? So and awareness is just wide distribution, right? It could be social media is fair, you know, obviously, it could be, you know, newsletter distribution blog posts. So, your SEO, it could be, you know, paid media that's on, you know, trade sites. There's brand awareness is a pretty big playing field.
Joey Strawn:And so we start big. And then from there, we might have a strategy that's like, we need to acquire two metal forming companies in central like in the central United States. That's a very different messaging platform. That's a very different strategy. I wouldn't imagine Nels that you would be writing a ton of random banner ads and a ton of blog posts and a ton of social media posts about a company who's trying to acquire two metal fabricators.
Nels Jensen:No, well, that's that's very, that's very, very segmented, very, you know, your account based marketing approach. I mean, that's almost personalization when you get down to that.
Joey Strawn:So like we're talking for that one, it might it's like, oh, well, digital media, well, we need like a digital sales kit with brochures and collateral and sales things that then can be used in a one-to-one conversation or, you know, we need to really dive into LinkedIn and follow and find every single person associated with, you know, these two companies.
Nels Jensen:Sure your, your pool of, you know, those two companies, you might be looking from a pool of 400 potential prospects. So, you know, that that is just a very targeted segmented play, as opposed to brand awareness is the opposite end of the spectrum, right.
Joey Strawn:So again, that's where I wanted to get back to, and before we kind of move into how to measure it, or why you should measure it, and then are on the shop floor segment. That is what I want to circle back to is this on this in this idea about what makes a successful industrial marketing strategy, knowing that you have the base, very, very secure, allows you to then customize the specifics. It's not a one size fits all. But it is a process that you should be answering the questions that we laid out up front. So goals, objectives, approach, ideas and how.
Nels Jensen:If you're trying to acquire a certain target, you know, there's undoubtedly some nurturing involved, right? It's not, this is not a one off, this is going to be a series of communications, where hopefully you get a little bit deeper, more involved as you go along. You know, there could be some type of I'm gonna use the term gated, though that's not the right. There could be some type of mechanism for collecting information, whether it's a configurator, or some calculator, or do, you know, does does your company fit into this box, so to speak. So I mean, there could be.
Joey Strawn:A calculator is a fun tool that a lot of industrials, if you have the tech know how, or if you have a
Nels Jensen:Well, and, you know, if we're talking connection to you know, a digital studio, they can build one, most industrials value some sort of automated calculator. And it is a way to say, you know, strategically if we're driving value and want to help our customers, then that fits into this strategy, it fits into this plan. So yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned the calculator. I just, I want to fit that into as many conversations acquisitions, too, which is a pretty narrow marketing strategy by itself. You know, you're also not just talking about manufacturers, you're talking about brokers, you're talking about small business brokers and family offices and other people who play in the, you know, investment banking and M&A space. You know, that's not a, you know, yeah. Again, you don't want to do that for any old investment banker, but there are companies that specialize in manufacturing in those areas in investment banking, in private equity, in family offices, you know, so again, all very specifically targeted very far end of the spectrum for that.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, I agree. And I mean, and finally, to wrap it all up, you know, we mentioned earlier that objectives have to be specific and measurable. I think everybody's heard or somewhere along the line, what is it the SMART goals and SMART objectives, they have to be specific, measurable, oh crap
Nels Jensen:Actionable
Joey Strawn:Actionable, thank you, time based and realistic, or realistic, and time based of making it smart. And so if we want it to be a real SMART strategy, we have to be able to track it, we have to be able to know that we're doing it, we're making moves towards the success of it. I mean, you know, Nels, a lot of people will just stop. They say, we have a plan, we're going to put stuff out there, we know what we're going to do. But then then it stops there. And I, I'm a big advocate, we had Matt, our analytics maven on a while ago, and we're gonna have him back. But he would be rolling over in his non-grave if he was thinking we weren't talking about connecting the dots and actually bringing data and KPIs and things back to the table. Because, again, I'll use the blog post example that I was calling out, but you are asked to write something. Why? What's it going to do? How do we know that it's doing what it's supposed to do? It's important.
Nels Jensen:Sure. Yeah. Yeah. How many? You know? Is it improving your overall search rating? Is it drawing hits to your, to your site? You know, what do those people do once they get to their site, your site? Are they looking around at other things? Are they filling out a form or a configurator tool? Are they just bouncing off the site right away, you know.
Joey Strawn:Well, and that's what we mean. That's what we mean when we say KPI. And if you haven't heard us to define it before, you'll hear me to find that right now a KPI is a key performance indicator. And all it means is a data point that matters to you. So if RFQ submissions matter, and they're a good indicator that things are going in the right direction, then it can be a KPI. If you ranking on page one, for a certain term, a sheet metal fabrication, or whatever it may be, is important to your business and matters, then it's a key performance indicator. That's all that that term means. So if you hear me and Nels say KPI, it just means a measurable, verifiable data point that is, in fact, important to your business. Sorry I just wanted to make that very, very clear.
Nels Jensen:Well, Captain Obvious here, again, from the broad to the specific that the RFQs, you know, you may know that okay, at least 20% of the people who asked for a quote, are going to buy something, versus 2% of the website visitors are ever going to be a qualified lead. But you know, the data shows you that for every 1,000 website, visitors, you get a couple of qualified leads, why not draw more people to your website, you know, you can't say exactly how that works. But you know it works.
Joey Strawn:Well, and Lieutenant logistics here, you need to be able to have the systems in place to track that. So if you know that website visits are important, then either have a Google Analytics or a HubSpot or Accenture, there's a bunch of them out there that you can do Smart Metrics. There's a ton that you can just connect to your website and get data on how many people are coming, how many people are filling out forms. Google Analytics is free, super easy. But yes, you got to have the logistics, you got to have the tools and the pieces in place. And I'm not going to come here and say you have to use a specific tool. But you do need to use a tool. So if you're a big fan of Supermetrics, or you're a Google Analytics guy and or gal and you've been certified, and you're like Google all the way, great, but use it know it know those data points, follow those KPIs, if it's important to your strategy, if it's a dollar value, if it's a number of machines you need to sell, if it's a number of meetings you need to schedule with potential acquisitions, whatever those KPIs are, know them, state them, and track them regularly. Because otherwise your strategy is just something you did in a fun, you know, group session with your colleagues, and then you didn't get any benefit out of and that's not what we're trying to do here. We're all about Kumbaya, and, and fun stuff. And hey we're marketers, aren't we? We love to tell stories, but we're industrial marketers, so it matters, the numbers. The outcomes matter to Nels I, as I'm sure they matter to you guys. That's my soapbox. Sorry, Nels.
Nels Jensen:There you go. Go, Joey.
Joey Strawn:I am. Well, you know, after that little outburst, I think we need to take a quick breather and probably walk on down to the shop floor. We need to put some of this stuff that we've been talking about into action. So Nels, do you want to head down to the shop floor? Sure, talk about this a little bit more?
Nels Jensen:Let's do it.
Joey Strawn:Let's go. Alright, here we are on the shop floor. And this is where we actually put the, our, our metal to the money, we put our feet where our money is all of those phrases that people say we're actually talking about how to put this into action. So we've talked a lot about strategies and how people can incorporate them and make them work for themselves, what elements make up a good strategy, and how you can use specifics within those strategies. So Nels, for our homework today, I asked each of us to go find an example of where a manufacturer someone that we didn't work with has done something good strategically that we can then talk about. And so I have an example I've asked you to bring an example. So share. Let's let's open up your time and see what you've got.
Nels Jensen:And for and for people who want more specifics on this, it'll be in the show notes. If you go on, you know our Buzzsprout page for the podcast, it will have a link to this. My example is a small machining shop in Pennsylvania, NaviTek Machining. They do precision component engineering or auto, medical, electronic, nd even some aerospace. They re a classic legacy company that relied on the owner's pers nal sales network to succ ed and they did for many year. Pandemic came, business jus, you know, as you might gue s, for that kind of sit ation. No more trade shows, no personal sales visits. They ha a historically successful 46 lead conversion rate. But as as things fell off the ta le, you might believe that so di their sales. So they decided to do basically nothing sexy. Bu they did a very fundamental in estment in a customer re ations management system. And th y basically built up content on their website, attached it to a RM, and they brought in a new bu iness development manager. An she hit the ground running be ause she had data for the th ngs they were doing. Right? It s not sexy, right. But it's a investment where they had to get to the current world of igital marketing. And th y were able to do so with a very fundamental approach. Built up the content on the website, came up with a distribution pl n largely around SEO, paid media and some blog posts, added a ewsletter, and they basically, were able to turn it around nd build the customer base.
Joey Strawn:And that's awesome. Because it applies all the different things we were talking about in the first section. So they didn't just rely on one thing they didn't just build some blogs and leave it at that. They didn't just set up social media. And all of the things that they did weren't working in disparate with each other. They all had a purpose and they were all pointing to the same types of things, which were, hey, here are helpful things that we have for you around our expertise.
Nels Jensen:It's an inbound, it's a classic inbound marketing strategy. So we're going to improve our website. They weren't updating the website previously. They figured out how to update the website, how to provide new content, and then how to distribute it. And and they were smart enough to not just do that, but to establish a tracking mechanism for it. So yes, was that a big investment for them? Yes. But it just goes to show you the fundamental strengths of inbound marketing for industrials, for man facturing firms. You know, you got to have a customer-foc sed website that talks about sol tions and how you can help. Yo know, customer-focused website
Joey Strawn:Yeah, I love that. And it's funny, my example is kind of similar to that. I found a an electronic components distribution company. So there is RS Components, they're a large electronic product distribution company. So casings, and all the things that go with all the electronic products everywhere. But they sell all over the world. So they're in a lot of different languages, and they don't have a very good website. But one of the things that they did, because their big thing, because they're a distributor is education, like why are these products the best? Why are these situations and strategy or why did these situations call for these types of things, here's how we can help. So what they ended up doing was creating a social hub of helpful content. So they didn't build it on their website, because it's not the best. And it's a global site. So they do a lot of elements. They just didn't want to touch with that. But they built everything on social and they built it in four different languages. And they had it link to very specific educational and helpful content pieces throughout their websites and throughout their universe. So while their site wasn't the easiest to navigate, they were able to find a way to use a social hub. And then things pointing to that hub as a way to very targetedly get people to the information that was helpful on their site. They also built a free tool generator, we talked about calculators, but this is like a free kind of tool planner that they had on their site that people could use. And so the design tool that they download, or they created was like, down was a number more than 60,000 times then, than anything they had before. The news, the new content hub gathered 45,000 members, and all within their first like, first 12 months. So they saw so many new, so many new people but what I loved about it was that strategically, they were like, okay, we need to grow, but we need to grow by people understanding our products and reading and spending more time with us. So they created that content hub, very, very heavy content strategy play. But I loved how it all just layered back to we have to have we have all this great content. We have all these great tools, but people can't get to them. So how can we make that easier? And they streamlined it and made it a lot more a lot more impressive, and saw some good numbers from it, which I also like.
Nels Jensen:So when you talk about a social content hub, what do you really mean? What is, what does that translate for the way that most of us consume information?
Joey Strawn:You bet. And that's actually a good question. So Facebook is probably the easiest way to do this. LinkedIn will allow you to do this as well. LinkedIn does it via what they call a showcase page. So if you have a brand page on social on LinkedIn, you can then build a showcase page, which is like a mini brand page within your company page. So you can show off a product or an article or a collection of things, if you will. Facebook will allow you to custom code and develop tabs. So if you're, when you're on Facebook, you see like Home, Info, Hours, About, you can have custom tabs. And essentially, that's what they did. They developed a custom tab.
Nels Jensen:So you're hosting the content on Facebook.
Joey Strawn:And then it would link either to the direct PDF on their site, or the place on their site that that information was hoiused. And then, you know, LinkedIn would have a showcase page. I don't know if they use LinkedIn. But that you could do that with a showcase page on LinkedIn as well.
Nels Jensen:Well, I've got a quick bonus, if you want a bonus,
Joey Strawn:I was gonna say, I only asked us to bring one. You brought a bonus, Nels? I want to hear it.
Nels Jensen:I don't want to make it sound like an overachiever. But this one was just like, Oh, this is kind of cool. And this is not as industrial in that it's not there, there is a weird little consumer bent to it. But this is a company in I believe it's a Massachusetts. It's called TrueBounce. And they make basketball backboards.
Joey Strawn:I love it.
Nels Jensen:So they're trying to reach people who are going to put up basketball hoops. So you're talking about indoor or outdoor. And the cool thing about this product is they have a different material. You know, not we're not talking glass, right? We're not talking about optimal glass backboard for basketball, we're talking about they basically have a different material, and they put holes in it to make it bounce more true than a metal backboard. And they, they basically figured out that they needed a little bit more awareness. And so they used social media to build up this TrueBounce. So it's by raising the awareness among basketball players, they were able to reach the people who make decisions about community center gyms and playground, you know, the outdoor equipment, you know, this thing stands up to weather and everything else. So they basically, traditionally if you were just trying to sell backboards to, you know, cities and community centers, and, and parks and rec and all that, you wouldn't use social media, right? You're targeting very specific rec type people. But they were able to raise their awareness by using social media. So it was a, it was one of those things where in this case, they have a cool product. So they were able to, you know, believe it or not, the people who decide on what backboard you're gonna buy for your playground are people who are interested in basketball.
Joey Strawn:Well that's the great thing about like, that's a wow, man, I love your bonus, I love your bonus example, Nels, because that's a very specific audience. And social media being a part. Okay. So our strategy, our goal, and objective is we need to get our basketball goals into the hands of these people. But that's a very specific group of people. There's not just like, you know, gym owners monthly, you know, magazine going around, maybe there is. I've never seen that. But what you can do is you can use social media to target a niche segment, easier than almost any other channel outside of like, maybe a programmatic buy, or a specific newsletter.
Nels Jensen:Which is going to be way more expensive, right? Programmatic is going to be way more expensive than social in this case.
Joey Strawn:So I love that that was, so they have a very niche audience. They know their strategy needs to be focused heavily on finding a specific target and a specific type of person. And how do they do that with the budget they have? Social and then they're leading, they're using social to get people's attention, and then dragging them back to other content or other ways to convert. And that's strategically thinking through the logistics and I love it.
Nels Jensen:People who are searching for terms like gymnasts, gymnasiums, and basketball hoops, you know. I don't know. Not a lot of people probably search for basketball hoops. But in this case, it worked.
Joey Strawn:Either dads and cul-de-sacs or people who need to build industrial gymnasiums. Yeah. oh, this is this was great. I again, sorry everybody for tricking you at the beginning of this episode but this has been such a fun conversation to dive in on what makes an industrial marketing strategy successful. Not a dozen, dozen, dozen different strategies, but the DNA and the building blocks that allow you to customize a strategy that will be successful. Nels, did you feel good about what we we talked about today?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, yeah, it's, um, it's, it comes back to basics, right? The KPIs, you know, what are you really trying to accomplish? And then, you know, how do you tweak what you're doing to get the best possible results. But yeah, it's no it's no surprise right Captain Obvious signing off here. You know, you're you're aligning it with your goals and objectives.
Joey Strawn:And Lieutenant Logistics following up here, sir, connected to your tools and make sure you're getting the right data. Yes, sir. This is awesome. Nels, it's always a pleasure to chat with you and listeners, industrial marketers of the world who are listening, it is a pleasure to get to talk to you about this. If you have questions, shoot us out on social media. If you're following us make sure that you are, Industrial Marketer, you can find us on any of the networks that you're in. But make sure that you subscribe to the show, make sure that you are listening when new episodes come out. And if you want more information about the industrial marketing world and tactics and tools and reviews, go to the website, industrialmarketer.com. There's more stuff than me and Nels could ever talk about that exists on that site to help you guys out. We live this every day. And we know that you guys do, too. So until next time, we can't wait to hear how your industrial marketing is going. And we will keep bringing you our insights along the way. Have a wonderful day. And until next time, bye.