Holiday Wisdom from The Industrial Marketer

With apologies to the Magi, co-hosts Joey and Nels offer up manufacturing marketing holiday gifts from the Indusrti in the form of industrial gold, marketing frankincense, and wisdom myrrh.

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Joey Strawn: 0:00

Welcome back everybody and happy holidays to the season two finale of the industrial Marketer Podcast, your place for the tips, tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads and revenue to their businesses. This is an exciting time. This is an exciting episode. Welcome, everybody. I am one of your hosts jolly old Joey, the industrial marketer, and I am here as always with my festive Nels on the shelf. Now, how are you?

Nels Jensen: 0:34

Good, great, Joey. Just looking forward to this episode. This can be fun.

Joey Strawn: 0:38

I think so as well. And here's what we did. You know, every year at the top of the year, people are always like, oh, let's do the EU, the trends that we're expecting for 2023 are big hypotheses for 2023 and the next year ahead of us, but we didn't really want to do that we we here at the industrial Marketer Podcast are all about giving. We're all about giving things that are going to be helpful to the people that are at the top of the food chain all the way to the practitioners down at the industrial market or shop floor, we're going to make sure that you guys are taking care of this holiday season. And what better way to do that, than with gifts right now. Yes,

Nels Jensen: 1:17

Exactly. Exactly. And these are from our, you know, industrial hearts this right. He's connects all of our wonderful worlds and one cheery package.

Joey Strawn: 1:31

And that's what we're trying to do here. This is the season of giving. And so honestly, we decided what better way than to frame our episode around the gifts that are given this season. So welcome to the holiday gifts of the industry I that's what today's episode is we're going through three Nelson I have each brought three elements, three gifts for all of our industrial marketer listeners, you can think of these as the gold, frankincense and myrrh of industrial marketing for the year because with gold, we're going to each bring you one industrial based, very, very valuable piece of information in the frankincense gift is going to be the more flowery the more perfumey the more marketing feels gift, and then myrrh something medicine something medicated something to to ease, ease those long, long 20 to 2022 pains. So we're gonna give you something for general wisdom, and lifelong forward thinking for the next year ahead. It's gonna be exciting. Again, the gifts of the industry, I come in straight for your ears. And else. Are you excited? Are you ready to give

Nels Jensen: 2:43

Our gifts? I am. All right. Well,

Joey Strawn: 2:46

Let's gather around the tree. And let's get let's get our first first industrial gold gift. Now, I'll actually give you the honors of unveiling our first gift of the industry I this year.

Nels Jensen: 2:57

All right, and this is a phenomenal resource. I know a lot of you know about it, some of you may not. But you may not have heard of maybe you have the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And NIST, as it as it is known is works behind the scenes to make sure that things work together that their standards that there's, you know, basically official ways that we can do things and they're they're experts in cybersecurity, but they have cybersecurity. But they have business because it's like, you know, one thing so that all these parts work together. Or that if you're you know, multiple vendors, there's industry standards, you know, are always helpful for a reason. And NIST is the driving force behind that in our country. And the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership is just a phenomenal resource for workforce. You know, we tend to industrial marketer, we tend to focus on generating leads, and we talk about websites and more and more manufacturing is looking for marketing help with workforce. And NIST MEP has a just a ton of resources here. There's there's the Manufacturing Extension Partnership national network, that's the home office, there's there's at least one in every state plus Puerto Rico, but they pull together at their nist.gov/mep. There's a manufacturing innovation blog that has some really interesting workforce subjects there. They have a guide for finding and retaining talent and a downloadable white paper that has a compilation of some of the best practices from around the country. They have the America Works program that has a great blog, newsletter, they're very active. The nist.gov/mep Just you know, search for the workforce on the different, you know, avenues in there. Just the best, it's the best of workforce content. It's really good.

Joey Strawn: 4:54

I'll back that up. You know, we selfishly we've worked with NIST in the past and we know a lot of the people They've either work over there now or have worked there in the past, it is an organization that just is dedicated to the industrial space here in this country. And that's, you know, that's where we live. That's where us all of all of us industrial marketers live. So if you're not familiar with the nist.gov site, that's definitely one to check. But I mean, Nelson, thank you for highlighting their manufacturing innovation blog, that is a wealth of a resource. If you're not already checking that out on a regular basis, you should, there's no better way to just kind of have your thumb on the vein of what's happening with industry.

Nels Jensen: 5:33

Yeah. And I think the workforce such a common it was they surveyed nationally, and that was easily the number one issue among manufacturers was finding it was talent gaps and finding and retaining workforce. So a great place for industrial marketers to go to help their clients with workforce. Well, now

Joey Strawn: 5:52

It's, I mean, you You kicked us off on a great foot, I mean, what better more valuable gold worthy gift than that I'm going to kind of follow in a similar vein with mine, because mine is also very industrial focus. But it's also forward looking, you know, you were, you're really looking at the workforce issues that are that are facing a lot of companies now. But one of the things that is has been talked about for a while and is going to be very important is the idea of industry 4.0. And especially how manufacturers and people that work in the supply chain, really kind of revolve and update their processes around some of the industry 4.0 And the automations that are coming, the gift that I've brought today, my gold gift is actually a webinar that is being put on by the semiconductor equipment and materials International Association, so the semi group and SAP, they have a webinar, specifically on industry 4.0. And what it means for manufacturing, this is one that is you can sign up for it, there is a little bit of a cost if you're not a member for to the semi organization, but it's not very much like $40-45. But this is a webinar, if you're really interested in where the future of industry 4.0 can be going if you want to hear about it from experts in the field, and people who are doing this day to day, this is a good one, you know, webinars and audio video, that type of content. And that type of educational resource is very, very helpful. And this is a good group. And this is a good people talking about some really important things.

Nels Jensen: 7:28

That is awesome. And to connect the dots, your local MEP center actually can help you with the free assessment of your 4.0 readiness.

Joey Strawn: 7:37

Wait, did you know free? It can't be it's I mean, this holiday that's it's a really great gift.

Nels Jensen: 7:42

It's a gift, it's a free assessment, and you know, at how well does your you know, do your your SAS programs talk to each other? Right? How, you know, how well do they connect your operational system? You know, it's, it's, you know, that's one of the things that MEP centers do are free assessments for automation preparedness for, you know, 4.0 So yeah, there's 4.0 is, you know, a lot of a lot of your clients out there are not as far along with 4.0 journey as you might think. So that is a great area to help as industrial marketers good one.

Joey Strawn: 8:15

I couldn't agree more. All right, well, let's move on to our second gift here. This is the gift of frankincense. In our analogy in our in our framing device nails. What we've used is essentially this is the perfume, this is the stuff that makes the area around us better and more accommodating for our for our visitors. And this is the marketing gift. Do you want me to go first or do you want to Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I'm gonna give one if you're a marketer, in the digital age, whether you're an industrial or not, this is the one that I'm bringing to the table you likely have heard about it if you're in the in the marketing space, but there is a great email newsletter called the click. And that's CLI que que it's not spelled like normal click because you know, nowadays everything has to be cool. It is really, really cool though it is a great weekly newsletter, they give you bi weekly sometimes, but there's great information in there great stories, they have case studies, and they present things in a very interesting way. I like them a lot because we can watch what they do with email marketing, and learn a lot by the things that they're testing that they're learning because they'll not only do weird things with their newsletters, but then a couple months later they'll tell you about why they did that weird thing what they were testing with it and what they found about it so it's really just a if you're interested in the world of digital marketing if you like to have you know an updated idea of what people are doing and testing and learning from out there. The click is an email is email newsletter that I highly recommend subscribing to.

Nels Jensen: 9:50

Yeah, you know, and I'm guessing they spend an insane amount of time on their on this newsletter. It's it's I've gotten used very long and thorough described it how I do it. Okay, I got you on and it's like this is this is like a in itself it's it's a case study of walking the talk walking the talk, whatever it is. It's like yeah, committed

Joey Strawn: 10:13

They are committed walkers and talkers

Nels Jensen: 10:16

They are committed to Content Marketing yeah yeah so it so they find some

Joey Strawn: 10:21

Really cool there's one there was one issue that was completely dedicated to like Keanu Reeves and one Keanu Reeves is incredible. But then they started like using like, well Keanu Reeves marketed himself like this. And this is how he connects to this. And he connected to the video game community and did influencer marketing like this. And it was just really impressive to see like, oh, I can see how all this connects the dots just like you said, it's a lot of connecting the dots. And that's what we as digital marketers are doing. So I like to see them walk that talk.

Nels Jensen: 10:51

They are they're passionate about what they do.

Joey Strawn: 10:55

Shout out to the clikk if you haven't already So subscribed to that newsletter, that's my marketing gift today. Now, in your realm, what did you find that you think valuable and

Nels Jensen: 11:05

Helpful? You know, I'm kind of an old guy and I might not be as passionate about video as some of you folks. But I get it and I understand then video is under utilized in the industrial marketing sector. And a lot of us have to help our clients and ourselves get up to speed with video. So this resource is the Content Marketing Institute. Okay. Love those a lot of you a lot of you may know about them may not they just sent out I believe it was might have been this week might have been last week 27 content marketing statistics to help you succeed in 2023. So it's basically a larger article, but they had a little section on video. And there were two links that I'll put in the show notes. One of them's is four ways to win with video, who you know, and they describe video as the it content format for 2023. So they'll tell you

Joey Strawn: 12:03

If now if we had had an episode that was like the five trends that you need to be aware of in 2023, we just spent about half this episode talking about video, I feel Yeah, it's so

Nels Jensen: 12:14

The beauty of the beauty of this articles is this isn't gonna spend, you know, 15 grand on a on a four minute video, right? This is easy to use, easy to do. Some of its do it yourself, it's, but it's basically you gotta get started, right, you gotta get started, this is a way to do it. So four ways to win with video is a really great resource out of that, you know, article, the separate article, link in there. And there's another one that is how to repurpose video content for bigger and better results. And I think that's one of the keys that we underestimate about video is the ability that you know, yes, you produce a 92nd video, maybe it's a product demo, maybe it's something about the machine, maybe it's something about an application or process, you know, it, it's, it's social content, it's potential blog content, it's, you know, easily distributed, it's popular, you know, it doesn't have to be fancy, you could have an engineer, you know, on the shop floor, showing you how something works. Everybody loves watching how things are made. So there's

Joey Strawn: 13:20

What's that show, it's called how it's made. Yeah.

Nels Jensen: 13:23

So that, you know, we are industrial marketers have a chance to help their clients become a little bit more digitally active, maybe not savvy, or, you know, maybe they're not, you know, maybe we're not the wise men of video, but we can all help, you know, we can we can help you get there. And I would just encourage industrial marketers to help their clients dip their toes in the water, get into your ankle, whatever analogy or metaphor you want to use. But video doesn't have to be expensive and difficult. So the Content Marketing Institute has some resources for you to help encourage people to become more active with video.

Joey Strawn: 14:09

And that's great, because I would also guess that some of our listeners, some of the people that are out there have wanted to do video if thought about doing video, whether you're a CEO at the you know, at the top of the pyramid and you're just thinking it's cost restrictive. Or you're, you know, you're working in the field of digital marketing and you want your superiors to give you the budget or approve the budget for video. There are a lot of ways that it feels like it's cost prohibitive to get started. But nowadays, it's really not. And yeah, I would heavily heavily encourage everybody like the article that's going to go along with this episode and especially the article that's going to be written on industrial marketer.com for this month is going to have all of these links that you guys can go look at and go download can go read through. These are very, very valuable, thought provoking articles. about how to use video without breaking your bank and without destroying and rethinking your whole marketing.

Nels Jensen: 15:06

Exactly. And in the Content Marketing Institute where I started with this has resources that you can use to make your argument. There's lots of data. There's lots of industry specific, it's, some of it is b2b, but they also dive into some things, you can find some great things on there specific manufacturing. So, you know, yes, it's, you know, arm yourself with with data when you're when you're pitching for money to do something, or when you're going to, uh, you know, a client and suggesting you know, how to spend their money. Content Marketing Institute has tons of information to help you make the case.

Joey Strawn: 15:46

I love it. That's a great, I mean, the links that you got for everybody, for today's conversation, I think are incredibly valuable. But the gift alone could just be if you haven't gone to Content Marketing Institute, go there right now. And that's your that's how you can spend your Christmas break. Like, guys, I know that we're marketers, I know we're looking forward to being off for the holidays. But I know that your brains are going to be churning, I know that you're going to be thinking about what you need in place for 2023. So this is great stuff that if you have some downtime, read it. duck away from the family when they're annoying you and go read some Content Marketing Institute. Enjoy

Nels Jensen: 16:21

Some eggnog with your Clikk newsletter. Exactly.

Joey Strawn: 16:26

Oh, man. All right, well rounded out we've we've gone through our goal, we've gone through our frankincense, we're here at the myrrh no one really knows what Myrrh is, but we looked it up. Myrrh is an aromatic, medical, aloe. So it's basically medicinal. And this is our general information, we want to bring you something that's going to make you feel good, make you knowledgeable and help you in the next year. So I'll get this one started, I brought a fun infographic for this one is actually put together oh man who made this. I was just looking at, oh, it's aptean, the app TN and they put together five profit driving priorities for North American manufacturers, especially in the age of, you know, COVID, supply chain issues 2022 and beyond. And this was one that has five really interesting things that people haven't thought of, or the realities that we're dealing with now of you know, how to have better visibility into your supply chain resilience, you know, knowing what your supply chain paths look like, and how, you know, you can increase and better engage with that, you know, really looking at your inventory and aligning it with the customer demand, and the customer journeys, how to empower your own workforce. I mean, now, so you talked about workforce being an issue in, in manufacturing, and in the industrial world, you know, this talks about that, and looking at how you can empower your workforce and really focus on some of that. So yeah, this infographic is one that I thought was fun, it really dives into the industrial world, but specifically looking at ways that in the marketing realm and even outside of the marketing realm, in your tech stack, you know, is your inventory tracking technology? Does it have gaps in your data? And how to look for that? And how to think about that. So this was just one that I was I was really thinking if we're going to focus on 2022 and beyond in the realm of industry, industry 4.0, what are things that manufacturers need to be thinking of? And this one I thought summarized it really well. So I was like, man, what better gift than to do the searching for people and give them this information?

Nels Jensen: 18:37

Yeah, driving priorities for driving profit. That's a that's what a great reminder to get people to hone in on, you know, growth strategies, and don't take your eye off the target, so to speak. That's

Joey Strawn: 18:51

One of the things from this, from this article is saying 80% of manufacturers have already invested somewhat in technology to overcome critical business challenges of this modern day era. You know, if if you're one of those companies that is invested in that technology and isn't using it correctly, then you definitely have a priority that to focus on in 23. If you're one of the 20%, who is still like, oh, man, we're stuck in spreadsheets, and we've got a, you know, we're stuck outside of the digital realm, then this may be the year to start thinking about some of those investments, because, you know, behind the time, so there's a lot of really interesting insights to be gleaned from some of the studies that have already been done.

Nels Jensen: 19:34

Yeah, it's, uh, it's interesting. So so my wisdom, my piece of wisdom is a little bit on the opposite end of the spectrum, but it all ties together really nicely. And that's basically do not underestimate the power of reducing friction, wherever you can. You know, it's one of the biggest trends in manufacturing is what they call quality management. systems where manufacturers are more and more, making sure that they have efficient processes, whether it's for payroll, whether it's for purchasing, whether it's for inventory controls. And one of the reasons is that you talked about supply chain resiliency is more and more OEMs are looking to their suppliers and saying, We want to know that you are running a sharp business, and we want to make sure you're going to be able to deliver, as you promise. So there's increased transparency, you referred to that, you know, there's increased visibility into the supply chain, all the way down to, you know, we want you to be certified, you know, the International automotive technology, something I ATF, you know, it's like, this is a standard, you have to meet to work with an auto OEM and now they're basically telling that, you know, what the tier one suppliers are saying to their tier twos, hey, that needs to flow down to you. And hey, that needs to flow down to the contract manufacturers? Well, there's a massive, you know, effort to build in transparency for that resiliency. And what that comes down to my original point here, reducing friction. You know, continuous improvement is a really powerful mindset for any organization, whether it's a manufacturer, whether it's a marketing agency, whether it's a bank, right, you can always make improvements. So this could be ecommerce for manufacturers, it's like, you know, reduce the friction that somebody's going through on their customer journey on their buying journey. Right? It's, we've talked about this a lot in the past year, take a virtual trade show approach to your website, you know, make it easier for prospects and customers to find what they need, look at, you know, overall equipment efficiency, you know, manufacturers like, man, they dive into their operation, and they, you know, they know how to save 20 seconds on the, you know, on the hour long process, and what that means, take that same approach to their back office operations, right? You know, do you do, you know, some people do batch processing of invoices in their back office, and you know, what, that really screws up the can screw up the inventory, if people aren't paying for things or ordering things, when they need to, as opposed to oh, well, I wait till my pile is, you know, I got 12 or 15 things to, you know, transactions to document, what oh, if you, you know, whatever, whatever the right process is, maybe it's do it right away, because other people in your organization are depending upon it. So whatever you can do to reduce friction is going to help your organization, the more you can document it, the better off you'll be, especially with this increased transparency. And that's not just going to be I predict, you know, I could be wrong, it's not just going to be for manufacturing, I think there's a lot of people who want to know from their partners, that they're going to be reliable, and that they're going to be able to meet the demands that are expected of them.

Joey Strawn: 23:04

And I couldn't agree more. I mean, you know, Nels here at industrial Marketer Podcast, one of our guiding principles is Kaizen, you know, it's getting better. Yep, it's, yep, it's incremental improvement. It's incremental progress. And that is a good theme for a lot of this. Because, you know, going back to some of the tangible things we talked about earlier in the episode, let's say video, is something that his is enough that you guys have wanted to crack in your marketing strategy. But you've had, you've had resistance against either budget, or the time it would dedicate to create the resources, take those kinds of approaches, and look for easy baby step opportunities to kind of dip your toes in those waters, find little successes and then grow off of those. I mean, now's what you were talking about in reducing friction is it I mean, in hell in the supply chain world, if you can shave a second or two off of every part that's created or divert or whatever, you're saving hours of production time like little incremental improvements, exponentially gather to create massive opportunities. And so that's really a you know, the the idea of reducing friction is finding those little things that you can do that over time will cumulative cumulatively improve your either operations, your organization, your relationships with your customers, and those are the those are the little wins that you can do every day to really

Nels Jensen: 24:31

Push push these as as industrial marketers, how can you be more efficient in the things that you're doing and then how can you make things easier for your customers as well?

Joey Strawn: 24:41

Right exactly. I mean, we're here giving you guys these gifts of the industry I but you can turn around and then pay it forward, make working with you in 2023 easier for your customers than it was in 2022. And what ways can you do that look for ways and min nails that's great wisdom, just say If we can make working with us, our brand, our company and our service better in 2023, than it was in 2022, that I bet you business returns come right on the tail end of that.

Nels Jensen: 25:13

Yeah, it's amazing the lessons we can learn from lean and Kata and Kaizen and everything in the manufacturing world is it's all applicable to us.

Joey Strawn: 25:23

It's almost like we love it and live it every day now, I I've been excited this is this has been so fun i I love being able to come together and talk about happy and joyful things I love more than anything finding helpful resources that our audience of industrial marketers will be able to use. You know, if you're listening, hopefully you've subscribed to the show. If you haven't already subscribed to industrial Marketer Podcast and make sure that you have, we're coming out with new content every month, and making sure that throughout 2023 that you always have new information on the industrial marketing, space, tips and tactics that you guys can use. If you're already subscribed, email us at podcast at industrialmarketer.com and let us know topics you want us to talk about or guests that we should have on the show or questions that you want us to dive into. This is a community that we're building and we love all of the interactions that we get from you guys and from all the listeners and in that vein, go to industrial marketer.com engage with the content share the content, share it on social media follow us anywhere that you have socials a Facebook's your Twitter's your Instagrams, we're out, we're out there in the world. So find us follow us and share. It's going to be we want you as part of this community and we want to hear your voices and share your stories as well. I mean, now, any any final words of wisdom and things to look forward to and think about in 2023?

Nels Jensen: 26:55

Yeah, you know, gifts of the industry, you know? It's, it's, it's good stuff, Joey. So, nice job and Happy Holidays to you and yours and all the people out there in the industrial marketing world,

Joey Strawn: 27:12

and I hope you and yours have a happy holiday as well. And here's looking forward to us and all of our industrial marketing community having a successful and very, very industrial 2023