SEO Success for Manufacturing Companies

Damon Pistulka  00:00

All right, everyone, it’s Friday and you know what time it is. It is time for manufacturing ecommerce success. I am one of your co host Damon Pistulka. And that pretty gentleman. Ooh, right over there. My friend Curt Anderson, now we are I just got got to confess we are a minute late because Curt got so excited for this that he pulled a hamstring.

Curt Anderson  00:25

I got Yeah, I need to go get some ice. I’ll be right back.

Damon Pistulka  00:28

But today we’re gonna be talking about SEO success for manufacturing companies. Curt Anderson friend, take it away.

Curt Anderson  00:35

Dude. I know first was the music like you caught me off guard. Like usually we have like this little I like I can compose myself. Why

Damon Pistulka  00:42

this is live and I forgot to turn the music on and bring in you know, pointed out.

Curt Anderson  00:49

Yeah, you know what, Holly, I just I you know, I get he’s, you know, he’s brand new at this game.

Damon Pistulka  00:54

I’ve never done before.

Curt Anderson  00:56

Never Done. Okay. All right, Damon, let’s dive in. So Happy Friday, everybody, man happy early Father’s Day to all our fathers out there. So wonderful. Wonderful. This this is a speaking of Father’s Day Damon. Like I feel like you know, proud dad proud uncle with this wonderful human being here. So we’re gonna dive in, drop a little note in the chat box. Let us know that you’re out there. This is going to be a phenomenal program. So Damon, we’ve got Holly McCauley. Job. I just I call her I just I just call her Irish for sure. Happy Friday. How are you?

Holly Jobe  01:28

Happy Friday. I’m so good. I’m so excited to be here with you guys. When I was doing my agenda last week to organize my week this week, I saw that it was happening. And I was like, oh my god, I’m so excited to chat about SEO and see you guys again. So I’m stoked, charged up ready to talk?

Curt Anderson  01:45

Well, let’s make it happen. And you know, how many times have you been on the program? would you guess any I

Holly Jobe  01:51

know when we last? were collaborating in Buffalo? I thought maybe six but six? I don’t know that. Maybe that’s high. It feels like six but I’d have to really go back and check Damon Do you know? He? Yeah, he’s I’m sure how many he’s been? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  02:09

I don’t even know how many

Holly Jobe  02:11

guests and I’m not on top. This is crazy.

Curt Anderson  02:14

Know what she might know. Alright, two things. Number one, shame on the hosts, we should know exactly. You know, but it’s been so many times. Like, if it gets over a certain number of days, and I just can’t count that. Hi, Holly. So that’s a that’s one challenge

Damon Pistulka  02:26

against fat fingers and toes. And secondly, now,

Curt Anderson  02:29

Holly, when you ran before I asked you who your hero was? And I know the wonderful answer is always mom, right? Mom was your hero? Do I have that? Correct? I do remember that right? 100. Now, we do need to talk to mom, because since you’ve been on the program, you knew you should be a better judge of character to be hanging out hanging out with you know these two guys? Let’s dive in. friends out there. trumpists. Know, let us know you’re out there. And if you want to learn a little bit about content marketing, you’re in the right right place. Seo. We have the authority, you know, but Damon, it’s not like she wrote a book, a woman she did write a book about it. And we’re gonna dive into the book, Holly. Any chance that you have the book handy that we could see there? Oh,

Holly Jobe  03:08

isn’t this funny? Someone just put a copy on my desk. I have a copy right here. This is inbound immortal, the undying art of attracting customers.

Curt Anderson  03:18

Now, my dear friend, what encouraged you what inspired you as a busy young woman as you are? How did you find time to write a book?

Holly Jobe  03:25

So it honestly came out of pure frustration. And so I have been working in the space for six and a half years. And I have attended the inbound marketing conference. We go to Fabtech every year, and just various other educational opportunities to talk about Inbound Marketing, SEO, what have you. And I always found myself attending webinars attending these sessions and just feeling like okay, yeah, we should be blogging, but how like, how do you do it physically? Like, what do you do and even in working with clients talking to the wonderful marketing specialists and strategists on the client side of things in just finding areas where they’ve been bamboozled or confused by marketers or marketing in general. And just feeling like somebody needs to take the time and write a guide that teaches someone step by step how to accomplish inbound marketing. And my goal was, if a client or manufacturing client had never come to us, and they had stumbled across this book, instead, they would have the same success. And so I really just wanted to answer that question and give something super tangible of Yes, everyone says you need to do SEO, you need to do content, you need to be blogging, you need to generate leads. Okay, buy under webinar, and I just always felt like that sounds super helpful. So I wanted to give a deep dive into that. And that was what my hope was with the book. Well,

Curt Anderson  04:41

that’s fantastic. And so for any for folks catching us early, just for shameless plug, we’ve got Holly at the Purdue MEP this Thursday the 20th at 12 o’clock Eastern time. That’s nine o’clock for my friend on the West Coast. Daymond Ahsoka. So I Holly real quick just for a preview and we’ll hit again at the end What are you talking about at Purdue MEP on Thursday, we’re going

Holly Jobe  05:03

to talk about AI. And I’m super excited because specifically what we’re going to touch on is using AI as a manufacturing company, and some of the do’s and don’ts that we’ve seen so far some of the best ways to increase efficiency, but also make sure that you’re adhering to what we believe to be common ethical practices, and hoping to just save marketers solo marketers time while eliminating some of the headaches that we’ve seen while experimenting with it for the past couple of months. Really, almost a year now, since since charge CBT really kind of came before.

Curt Anderson  05:37

It’s right. So here it is, guys on Thursday at Purdue MEP, June 20, at 12 o’clock Eastern time, check out just Google Purdue MEP. It’s right on their homepage right on their events page. Go. Holly’s going to be doing a deep dive on AI. This is gonna be a great, wonderful program. And if you have not caught Holly while you’re catching her right now, but catch her, you know, David, how about this? You’re here she is an action. How about that one right there. Holly, what do you what do you think what’s going on here?

Holly Jobe  06:08

So we had the privilege of collaborating with insight out of Buffalo. And you of course, Kurt, myself, my business partners, Donnie and Josh and my SEO genius colleague, Zach, where were asked to come collaborate and speak at a session about SEO, and really all things digital marketing for manufacturers, and we had a blast. It was so much fun. Curt got to moderate the panel discussion. I may have chugged two coke zeros and we just had a really fun time. It was so cool.

Curt Anderson  06:42

It was it was a blast. Damon it was a great crowd of manufacturers deep dive lots of I was judged. How does the workshop go? If people don’t walk out? Right if they don’t walk out? Everybody stayed right up till the end. I’ll tell you the time. I think we I think it was like, I think was almost two hours Holly like it was over hour and a half. And it flew by tons of questions, lots of engagement. And I’ll tell you demon, Holly is a tell you when you get a chance to see Holly in action. It is truly a masterclass. And guess what? You got that opportunity right here right now. no better time than the present. Holly. Let’s go here. So again, if our friends are just joining us, we have got Holly Jobe from protocol 80 manufacturing marketing, Guru extraordinaire, had the honor privilege working with Holly for many years, how he wrote this wonderful, incredible book, how let’s break this down. Please share, what are we looking at here on this slide?

Holly Jobe  07:37

Yeah, so before we dive super deep into the pyramid itself, something that we’ve tossed around here a couple times, even in the first couple minutes is just this concept of inbound marketing. So I really quickly want to just give a definition of what that methodology is what the philosophy is. So what inbound marketing is, is the idea of providing helpful content and valuable experiences to the people who interact with your business, specifically interact with your website, and attract them to you through that helpfulness versus that old kind of like outbound way of advertising and sales. And in the book, The analogy that I use, is sometimes when you visit a website, it can feel like when you’re walking through the mall, and that person who’s like selling lotions, is like chasing you down the aisle and they’re like, please let me put lotion on you and you’re like, I don’t want lotion. I’m here to buy a dress for a wedding. It’s very stressful. I want nothing to do with this, please. Because sometimes our online experiences can feel so inbound marketing pushes against that. And instead of being that lotion salesman who’s just chasing you down is providing helpful content about why the lotion would be valuable, what type of lotion might be best for your skin conditions, all of that type of genuinely helpful content that earns that brand the halo and attracts people to them versus forcing them into interactions with you and your business. In inbound marketing specifically, works so nicely with manufacturing because of the long sales cycle. Most of the time manufacturing purchases don’t happen like that. It’s not like buying a tube of toothpaste, or even as hard as buying a dress for a wedding is it’s still a longer sales cycle than that. So providing that helpful content. And those valuable user experiences that are at the heart of what inbound marketing is, is just so aligned with how manufacturing personas or soulmates want to be purchasing and interacting with companies. So that was a long blurb, Curtin, Damon anything you want to add anything we want to rip off there before we hop into how that pyramid fits into that.

Damon Pistulka  09:35

Well, I think you know, when you think about Inbound Marketing, it works so well for manufacturers because it is I mean, we’re talking about most clients, even a small client in a in a in a reasonably I mean, it just say a $10 million manufacturer, not a big manufacturer. They’ve got a lot of million dollar clients. There’s a few of them probably in their in their top clients. So when we’re looking at inbound marketing It makes a lot of sense to really be nurturing clients because $1,000,000.02 million dollar $100 million client doesn’t just walk in the door and say, Hey, I’m ready to do business with you. They gotta they really want to understand who they’re doing business with. Because first of all that buyer’s decision, the person that’s that’s responsible for making that buyer’s decision, they’re their career could be on the on the chopping block if they don’t make a good decision. Because if we don’t make the widgets, right, and they don’t build their assembly, it doesn’t get sold. And then a lot of things bad things happen, you know. So, inbound marketing, I’ve always thought is, is a great investment for manufacturers in the in, you know, the size and number of clients is just it’s so applicable to it.

Holly Jobe  10:49

Yeah, definitely.

Curt Anderson  10:51

How about men? Holly, how about Damon just dropping the mic? How about that? Perfect.

Holly Jobe  10:57

This is why I always have so much fun hanging out with you guys. But we’re on the same page. That

Curt Anderson  11:03

was perfect. So Damon, well, great, man, put a little whipped cream on top of the desert here. So Holly, let’s take let’s do a deep dive. So again, if you’re just joining us, we’re here with Holly job. She’s just a marketing manufacturing extraordinaire. She’s written this wonderful, incredible book. Holly, let’s take a deep dive here. You’re talking about scaling the inbound pyramid? What what do we have going on here?

Holly Jobe  11:25

Yeah. So when we think about the idea of helpful content and valuable experiences as that main way to attract people to you, where do you need to start with that is making sure that you have a really strong foundation, and making sure that before you get to the point where you’re producing a bunch of content, whether that be written content, video content, before you’re running ads, to push people to your site, you’re super, you know, active on social media, pushing people to your website, it’s really important that you get those important things aligned and set up strong. Because otherwise, you’re sort of building a house on a shoddy foundation. So the four things, obviously, this is incredibly in depth in this pyramid is sort of the most important hits of each of these phases through inbound marketing, and getting from the point of just building to the point of getting sales. And I like I said in the beginning, I it is so important to me to offer tactical help and support. So the book does dive deeper into this in terms of how to build a secure modern website, what platforms makes sense, and that kind of thing. But generally, these are the most important markers of these phases as you’re moving through them. So the first one being a secure modern website. So before you’re creating content, you want to make sure that the platform, the website, the engine that you’re creating content on can support it is safe. And that’s super important, especially for Google. So both from the user perspective and, and the search engine perspective, you want to make sure your website is good. You want to make sure you have an educated and dedicated marketing and sales team. And that is super, super important. You can’t pull a poor solo marketer who’s in charge of making sure that, you know, high schoolers are coming and doing tours at the business. They’re in charge of printing ID badges, they’re in charge of somehow also doing sales. And now all of this content, this poor person is just not going to be able to execute all of that. So making sure that you’re having those conversations and putting the right people in the right places. Outsourcing if you can, or if you want to, and making sure that you have those capacities and resources set aside to do this properly. And Kurt, I think this really leads itself into a conversation about DIY, d f, y and DWI. Do you want to touch on that a little bit? Yeah,

Curt Anderson  13:39

great point. So you know, for the DIY, like you said to Holly before, so you know, shameless plug. We’re doing a wonderful workshop at Purdue University on Thursday, the 20th and you know, that’s a DIY you come to the workshop, you’re going to walk away Holly’s going to deliver some amazing gifts, opportunities on AI, we’re going to do a deep dive strategies there, you know, and it’s a DIY, you know, you go off and do it yourself. Now, let’s say you want to take it one step further. You know, that’s where, you know, like, Holly, you guys, you know, a protocol ad you offer coaching Damon. I’ve worked with clients on that DIY, hey, we’re gonna do it with you, right? Sherpa, that guide, we’re going to kind of hold your hand, but just say, you know, you’re at a level manufacturer like, I hear you. I went to the webinar. It was awesome. I still don’t quite get it. Thank you for the opportunity to do it with me. I still don’t have time muscle bandwidth. That’s where an agency like protocol ad comes in. You guys have 20 years of experience you have the muscle the team the know how the experience the the proven track record, so that’s that DFI so DIY, do it yourself DYI, and find somebody that’s been there, right? That can help you go down that path. And then a d f y. That’s when you line with a team. And that’s why you know, I love working you know, I’ve worked with a team at protocol ad for past 1012 years. And I just love bringing clients to you guys because in in a funny thing is clients I brought to you years and years ago, you’re still working with them. So it’s just it’s so rewarding. Just how you, you know, you and your team become partners in part of their, their company, part of their family almost. And it’s very rewarding refreshing to watch. Well, thanks

Holly Jobe  15:14

for saying that.

Curt Anderson  15:15

Absolutely. Okay, Damon, go ahead. What

Damon Pistulka  15:17

do you got? Well, the thing real quick on the DIY DFID, why you do a four year deal with you kind of thing is it can change over time, right? Because really, in the beginning, if you as you said, Kurt don’t have the resources don’t have the knowledge to do it. And and just really don’t know the do it for you model to get things set up may be very applicable years down the road, you may, you may re re or down the road aways, you may readjust this and say now we have someone that understands our content well enough. So we can do this, we still don’t want to touch the technical stuff. And we still need you to make the content looks good. But we can produce some right. So you start to do and over time, it’s so nice to have a resource like protocol ad that can can really make sure it’s done right. And complement your strengths and fill in the resource gaps to need. It’s just it because in marketing in the pyramid shows that if the foundation is not right, everything starts to crumble.

Holly Jobe  16:18

Yeah. Yeah. In the book, I talk about the concept of tech debt, which obviously comes from the tech space. But I think that that really applies to marketing as well and leads into our next one, the powerful and intuitive CRM as well, like, website, Team CRM are really so so important. Because what happens a lot of times is we’ll have someone come to us and be like, Okay, well, we know our website isn’t great. It’s not generating leads. Okay, who has the login to the website? What was the plan? I don’t know. Okay, um, it looks like it hasn’t, you know, been touched in a while and what, what can we do about that? Let’s try and run an audit. So, you know, can we have access to this? Well, we don’t know who has it. And the problem is, now it’s at the point a lot of times for the business where they want leads now, or they have an exciting opportunity. And they’re like, well, PM, can you just like, put up a website page about this new product that we’re launching. And it’s like, well, not really, because that would be like putting a gorgeous new stained glass hand painted front door, on a house that is in the middle of a sinkhole, like it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to spend the time, effort, energy and resources to do that. So these things are super, super important. So that down the line, you have something sustainable, and that you can build on on. And those are really the three things that are kind of non negotiable. Because even when we get into personas and journeys, those things can change over time, right, you might be targeting a different type of soulmate, you might be buying decisions change over time, but making sure that your website is accessible, it’s secure. It’s modern, it can be consumed by Google, Mobley, and on desktop, all of that kind of stuff. Having a team that’s educated, knowledgeable, also leaving some breadcrumbs and documentation so that there can be collaboration internally or externally. And then that last component, a powerful and intuitive CRM are just so important, so that you can continue to build and grow. So with the CRM, obviously, a tool like that software like that. It’s just integral for making marketers and sales people’s jobs easier. So you can set up those types of automation that is like, okay, if I’m working with a company, and I already have information from other people at this company in my CRM, my CRM will auto populate information. So a salesperson doesn’t have to go in and do that, right. It can be smart, it can make those kinds of decisions. You can set up automation and things. But most importantly, for marketers, for digital marketers, I think the number one value of how having a powerful CRM, and getting that in place before you start a lot of marketing decisions, is the data it is crucial, it is imperative to be able to say, Okay, I had spent all this time creating these blog posts making these videos and what did it do? Who did it bring in just to say, Well, I had 1000 visits in the last month. Okay, how many of them turned to leads? How many of those leads turn to customers, and then working backwards and saying, Okay, what did those leads, see if 100 People turned into customers? Did 50 of them look at one specific page, and maybe that wasn’t even the most popular viewed page of the last month, but it’s the one that brought in the most customers. And that’s how you make really, really good marketing decisions. So you don’t want to get into a situation where you’re spending a lot of this time producing, producing, producing, and maybe you’re even seeing results and you’re seeing positive numbers, but you can’t answer those core questions of like, who did it generate? What’s the bottom line? And how do we make better marketing decisions moving forward? So that was a bit of a soapbox, but I do believe that the CRM is such an important component to empower your marketing and sales teams to make the best decisions that they possibly can. So that They’re not blind and trying to just guesstimate based on what they’re seeing

20:09

stop,

Curt Anderson  20:11

Holly, we’re just we’re taking we’re calling a timeout. We call them moments of silence. We’re just going to let everybody savor we didn’t want to ruin like just the brilliance that you just shared saver Damon. That man, she just makes it so easy is where you and I aren’t going to talk anymore. We’re just going to keep Holly. So I buyer personas soulmates, critical CRM, laying the foundation secure website web page, let’s keep moving forward. Let’s go up the pyramid. What’s next? Cool,

Holly Jobe  20:39

really quickly, though, too, I want to add. So this is important when you’re first starting out. But also it’s never too late. And really important critical points to revisit the triangle and go through some of these things are when you’re going to make a major push in investing in marketing. Also, when you’re going to target a new vertical, maybe a new market, maybe a new region, maybe a new persona, you do kind of have to start back at the beginning and make sure that you’re checking all of these boxes. So even if you’re like, Okay, I have a good website, I have a good CRM, when’s the last time you revisited your personas your soulmates and made sure that those are the best of luck for you in 2024, and moving into 2025. Okay, brand awareness. So brand awareness is the next important metric important segment that you want to be focusing on once your foundation is in check. So also, I feel like this is a constant plug for the book, but I do feel very strong about it into the value, and at the end of each of the sections. So once you’ve finished working through the foundation components, there is a little checklist and a to do list and exactly what to do so you know when it’s time to move on and what to look at next. So when you get into the brand awareness, that’s when you’re going to start really producing stuff. And what brand awareness is, the way that it’s measured is really by impressions, a lot of times in search, but that could also be on social platforms and that kind of thing. So the amount of eyeballs that are getting on you and your brand. And a lot of times the way that that has to happen is we want leads, we want sales, right? But working backwards, you have to have the eyeballs first, then you have to get those eyeballs to your website, from your website, you need to get them to convert and then once they convert, you need to get them to the to the point of sale, right? So those impressions in search, are what that next metric is that you’re really trying to improve and you’re trying to focus on. So that’s where SEO comes in, making sure that you’re showing up in the right places, showing up where your competitors are, and just targeting the things that are valuable for your business because they’re valuable to your customer. So identifying what their pain points are making sure that you’re talking about content and solving their problems. And that is how you up impressions there. This is like a big topic. Am I rambling? Is there any questions or things I should clarify there? That’s a big one.

Curt Anderson  22:54

That was fantastic. And again, we’re here with Holly job from protocol ad. We encourage you, we invite you We We implore you connect with Holly on LinkedIn, I put her book she has this wonderful book, it’s right here on a slide. I put the link in the chat box, please go out do yourself a favor great reading while you’re at the beach or enjoying over the weekend or whatever it might be wonderful Father’s Day gift by the way. So yes, Holly, you know talking about speaking of brand awareness, but no, you’re This is phenomenal. Keep please keep going. Okay,

Holly Jobe  23:27

and then this next one being consistent branding with updated assets. I think that this will resonate with a lot of business owners, a lot of marketers a lot of salespeople is just when our assets change hands a lot, or we don’t have concerted specific efforts on what it means to be our brand. Things don’t always look like your tradeshow booth doesn’t look like your website anymore. The one sheet that your sales team is sharing doesn’t match the branding that’s in the automation that marketing is selling. And when your brand awareness is starting to become more important, you’ve got your website in place, you’re starting to get eyeballs on your brand, it’s really important that all those things match and sync up in a way that’s logical so that you can start to develop that. So whether your color is purple, or we had a client that rebranded and they did this awesome, like tennis ball green, very reminiscent of the Seahawks that just really stood out. But that’s a really great way they know it from the show that was just for you, Damon, they knew it from seeing them at a trade show booth to seeing on the website to see it like those branding, things start to be really, really important. And that’s how you get the more intangible things like booth traffic, kind of hard to measure. But if you know you’ve spent a lot of time on your branding and developing something unique and making it consistent. When you see that booth traffic increase and you’ve been publishing things and focusing on your website, it’s really easy to see how those things have worked together to just get more people excited about your brand. Also customers referencing the website. So a lot of times what happens when we accomplish buyer interviews when we talk to our clients, customers to ask them what they like or don’t like about the website. If they use it. They’re like Oh, didn’t even realize they had a website, we’ve been working with them and loving them for so long that we didn’t even realize this. But if you’ve improved your website and done what you’re supposed to do in the foundation stage, your customers will be excited about it, they’ll be finding resources that resonate with them there and just you’re going to hear that more. And then again, you’re in that swing of really consistent content production. This is probably a session for another time all about what types of content to produce. But whether it’s blogging, whether it’s videos, whether it’s live streams, whether it’s charts, infographics, how you determine what that content should be comes from talking to your customers, and what type of content would be helpful for them. In this space, it’s also just about trying, looking at what’s working and reporting on it. So you might want to just take a stab at all of these different avenues and decide, okay, we are going to try a little video and we’re gonna try a little blog and just see what starts to be successful, what people are getting excited about. But again, a good shortcut there would be calling up your customers and saying, Okay, let’s say, for some reason, we were to go out of business, and you needed to look for a solution like ours, what would you Google? What would you want to look at? What would you want to consume? And that’s a shortcut, because they’ve just given you a roadmap for exactly where to start with that content. So that’s what you should be focusing on in the brand awareness stage just kind of the next things to be looking at to be focusing on once you know your foundation is in a super good spot. Should we move on to traffic?

Damon Pistulka  26:27

Just save run the moment? Yeah, just save right?

Curt Anderson  26:31

Just just so again, for manufacturers out there and marketing friends out there, whatever, you know, we’re laying the foundation, we’re going into that brand awareness statement, our famous line stopped being the best kept secret. Yes. And I love how, how you tie this together about that consistency. You know, and again, you know, as I don’t care what space you’re in, you know, healthcare, retail, whatever, you know, manufacturers, it’s, you know, hey, sales are doing their thing over here. marketing’s doing their thing, you know, it does, you know, sometimes convoluted or challenging to keep everybody you know, marching in the same same drum or going in the same direction. So I love what you’re seeing there. But again, like just getting that same consistent. I tell you that one big word right there, that consistency. I think that’s the best takeaway. Damon, your thoughts? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  27:14

that’s it’s really the consistency and brand, consistency in content production. It just that is so so key, because over time, it’s like building a mountain. It’s like building a pyramid. Just one little block. It’s like, you

Curt Anderson  27:33

know, it’s Oh, Holly. We’ll move on to traffic. But we have a client that we’re actually coaching with who is now all in on live streaming just yet. loves it. He was at a conference yesterday, grabs like a industry influencer, you know, we did this wonderful interview, and the line that he uses all the time, I’m shamelessly steal, I’m gonna start putting it on our show. Damon, he calls it the brand promise. What’s your brand promise? Is that a great work? So again, amazing

Holly Jobe  28:01

if sales

Curt Anderson  28:02

is to Holly’s point of sales, the same one thing in marketing is doing something else. And your email is over here. And there’s just you know, there there, it hurts trust. Yeah, it hurts. And that’s what’s everything that we’re doing. We’re trying to we’re building relationships. We’re building trust. And he’s like, you know, he’s an apparel. And all he’s talking about is like, what does your brand represent? What is your brand’s promise? Are you on time? Do you have quality? Do you have? Do you care? You know, those types of things? Holly, let’s keep the party rolling brand awareness. We’re graduating into traffic, what do you have for us here? Yeah,

Holly Jobe  28:36

so when once you kind of know you’re in the traffic phase, and what to start focusing on here will be because you’re seeing these positive signs, so your traffic is improving monthly. Not only are the impressions going up that you’re seeing in Google Search Console, in whatever recording tool you’re using, now, you’re starting to see clicks to your website improving, there’s people coming, their conversions are starting to come in. And if you’re just starting out there, maybe not the highest quality yet, but you’re probably getting a couple strong marketing qualified leads, maybe a couple strong sales qualified leads coming in. And what’s most important about this is data. So what you’re also getting is you’ve spent all this time and your foundation and your brand awareness just producing, producing, producing. Now you can kind of start to look and say, Okay, what is working? What’s not working? What should we spend time on? What should we spend time on and starting to run a B tests in terms of like, okay, so we know this asset is our most important downloaded one. What happens if instead of it being our brand red, we change it to our brand purple? Do we get more convert, like that’s where this is really where things get fun, and you can start to play around with that data. And you can also start to get things like automation in place. HubSpot CRM, which is what we use for protocol at what all of our clients use in the manufacturing space. They just find it really conducive for their sales, marketing and service teams. But you could do this in any way. otter in strong CRM platform is getting some of the lead scoring in place that may be that is determined by the parameters of your persona like location, revenue, size, company size, specifically, what they converted on what they’re looking for, and giving them a score so that you can start to set up automation for those people that’s starting to nurture them. Daymond made that amazing point in the beginning about how this is a long cycle, look at how steep this pyramid is, this is a long pyramid to climb. Once they come in, and they’re looking at your website and they’re looking at you in search, we’re so maybe talking years before they become a sale. So starting to get at this point, that automation and that lead scoring so that you’re sending the right messaging to the right people at the right time is so crucial. And because you’ve built this amazing foundation, and you have all of this wonderful data, you know how to set up that automation and make those decisions based on what people want. So this is why when I said earlier, it’s really, really important to make sure that you have that infrastructure in place. And this is why so that when things start to come in, and your sales team is like, Listen, I’ve got a lot of leads here with free email addresses, maybe in your sales teams, like I’m not gonna waste my time following up with those people. But you as a smart marketer know, hey, I don’t know maybe that for email addresses actually an engineer who was just on their personal account, let’s send them into some automation and see what happens. This is the phase to really be focusing on that you’ve got people on your website, how do you take advantage of that? How do you maximize that and just continue to improve what you’re producing. And I will say this phase, let’s say you are a manufacturing company, who hasn’t really made any concerted efforts on marketing, yet, you embark on a website redesign project, you get all of this foundation in place, you will likely if you’re keeping up a strong production cadence of producing valuable resources, whether that’s videos, podcasts, blogs, on a weekly basis, you will start to hit this point about 12 to 18 months after you started. So that I think is really important to touch on in that brand awareness phase, you are doing a lot of work and you’re sitting there for a while, but you should be watching your numbers start to climb. In then after that 12 to 18 month point, you’re living in this traffic space at about 18 to 24 months is when you enter this nirvana of this lead generation space where things are really kind of starting to explode from a conversion standpoint. Yeah, things are really just climbing up into the right you’re increasing dramatically before we hop into lead generation. Anything. Anything you guys want to touch on or sit with for a minute.

Curt Anderson  32:39

Because Nevada Yeah, yeah. No,

Damon Pistulka  32:43

it’s It’s amazing how the how you explain that timeline because I’ve seen it myself in our company, you know, undertaking a major redesign, getting the CRM set up, right? And you’re sitting there and you’re watching, you’re going, man, nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening. It’s like crickets. You’re like, oh, and then over time, you just keep keep for the faith. Keep doing what you needed to do. And pretty soon you go, Huh, we got to download. That’s pretty cool. You got now we got some newsletter, signups. That’s pretty cool. Next thing, you know, you’re going, Wow, we’re getting one a day. And you go, that’s really something when you go it went from zero to something like that. And a manufacturer especially because now we’re like, Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot. If you just look, if you did one a week as a manufacturer, and it was a good solid, you know, potential soulmate. My goodness, that’s 50 plus a year. That’s incredible. 100%.

Holly Jobe  33:41

And that’s why I think it’s important to think about things in terms of these like markers, because I know what everyone wants when they embark on something like this is like what’s normal? I know, I’m like that all the time. Like, let’s say I just came down with the flu. I just tested positive for COVID. What’s normal to be feeling right now what I always want to know, am I within the normal range? What do people normally wear to this type of setting? Like I’m obsessed with that constant reassurance and validation. So I also wanted to provide this and it’s a little bit more in depth, in terms of like in the traffic section in the book, it has actual numbers that are like okay, at this point, you should be up 35% month over month and your clicks. If not, you might want to produce more like all of those kinds of parameters because I’m just addicted to stuff like that. Like am I unhealthy normal range? Yes. Cool, cool. But to your point, amen. Because you can be sitting there being like, I just spent all this money to redesign my website and nothing’s happening because what you’re thinking about is those leads those sales, but it’s far too early. What the triangle tells us is what you need to be focusing right now is growing your impressions. And then after that you want to be growing your clicks in your traffic. And if you’re doing that, they will come the the opening line of the book is the thing about Inbound Marketing is it works wonders 100% of the time, I know this is gonna sound really hokey and fake, but it’s not I’ve literally never seen it fail. We, when you are producing content, you’re doing the right thing you are reaching out to your customers pain points, you’re adhering to this. It literally works every time. I have dozens and dozens and dozens of charts for manufacturing companies that go like this. And what’s important is, that’s not to be like, Oh, Peony is so great. Like, it’s the philosophy. It’s the methodology. It’s doing this that works. And sure partnering with us or another agency that might be on your journey to help you get there. But it’s not necessary. If you follow this, if you adhere to something like this, if you adhere to these best practices, I swear to God, it works 100% of the time, and what’s evidenced by that and Kurt, you got to hear my colleague, Zach ware and I talked about this, my favorite place on the planet is the SEO subreddit. Because everyone there is just always having a meltdown at Google and about all the updates. And why that’s happening is because people who do not adhere to this, and they find quick hacks through SEO and they’re like, I’m going to keyword stuff here. And I’m going to pay for backlinks here. They’re melting down because Google has sniffed them out, and they’re getting punished for it. But on the converse side, people who have been doing this, our clients, other inbound marketers are just sitting back and watching their metrics continue to rise and being like, I was operating from a place of being helpful and producing good content this whole time. And Google knows that my customers know that. So I don’t know. Like though, Daymond to your point it that is such a stressful time, right? Investing all that money and being like, okay, now I just have to sit in wait. So my hope is that by chunking things out and thinking of things this way offers that like, I can’t compare my success of where my business will be in five years to where my business is eight months after I started this, you know, like, that’s just not fair. And so hopefully this gives that like, you’re in healthy range. You’re doing the right things. Keep it up, keep going. You know, that was another tangent, but I get excited talking about this stuff. You guys like I it’s so hard not to get fired up. Damon,

Curt Anderson  37:06

I think I do. I think I pulled another hamstring. I’m so excited. Like I got up and down. And man as she I like she just You’re such a gift Holly. This is Yes. This is like a masterclass for you

Holly Jobe  37:20

guys. Oh, my goodness, I just I hope it’s helpful. That’s like the number one thing like we talked about with the book with this, I just want it to be helpful. You know, I want to

Damon Pistulka  37:31

and you can feel that or you can feel that. Well,

Curt Anderson  37:33

the look, you know what, Holly? Let’s keep that momentum. Let’s not slow it down. Everybody’s on fire right now. Let’s keep the party rolling in what in the big tech line? And that section right there works 100% of the time. Yeah, all the is on record. She’s putting her reputation on the line. I agree with you 110%. Let’s keep climbing the pyramid here. What do we have next?

Holly Jobe  37:59

70 reach the lead generation phase where your conversions are improving monthly, where you’re at the point where maybe you’re like, Okay, I can be a little choosy. Now with leads. Obviously, when you’re a little like you said, Damon, you see that first download come in and ever it’s like, the whole sales team is like, gonna get to take it like, Oh, my God, it’s working, we’re so excited. But on this is one things are coming in. And it’s like clockwork things are really rolling through. And maybe now you’re talking about not just setting up marketing automation, but sales automation. So having your marketing team help with sales enablement, which is just essentially the philosophy and the practice of arming your sales team with content and templates, and whatever they might need to do their jobs better. And my colleague, Josh, he is sales of PD and something that he always does. And this is why I can say he always says salespeople are not always the best writers. So tapping into your marketing team at this point to also help with some of that sales automation to get those people in the right places to make one to few or one to many communication feel very one to one, that may be a necessity at this point in time when you have all of these different leads to parse through and figure out where they’re gonna go what the quality is. And this also may be when you’re at the point of discovery and development of new personas, something we’ve seen with clients who have been with us for, you know, past the two year mark and two years. 345 is that’s when it starts to be like, Okay, we’ve never gone to the west coast before, but our business is growing. So what does it look like if we wanted to start to ship to the West Coast? How do we target those people? And then you’re starting back at the beginning, not square one for everything. You’ve still got your existing stuff rockin and rollin. But you’re spinning up these new campaigns, these news ideas, these new personas, that could be a new product, a new market that could be getting into a different supply chain, maybe you want to I just attended this amazing conference on Tuesday for retool western New York which is really focused on clean energy manufacturing, specific to our region of the world. And so much of that was how do you get into those supply chain for electrification, for wind for solar, and this would be a really great process to take if you’re looking to break into a new supply chain. So maybe you’ve already got healthy lead generation healthy marketing, but you want to do something new. This absolutely applies to kind of starting at square one and fleshing that out. You might be at that point, you know, a couple of years on from starting this marketing, because you really are starting to see it, work and pay off. Anything on Legion?

Curt Anderson  40:33

Man, all right. That’s all right. Let’s, let’s unpack a couple of things there. So you mentioned, you know, covering my expanding west coast, you talked about, you know, different industries, different technology, maybe something was sustainability. We’re doing a little workshop on Thursday about AI, that’s a little you know, something new. So, you know, you’ve you’ve uncovered a lot Daymond What do you want to piggyback on here?

Damon Pistulka  40:59

No, I’m just, I’m just listening.

Curt Anderson  41:03

We’re just students right now, just taking notes from the teacher. So yeah,

Damon Pistulka  41:06

because really, this is this is this is a framework that literally any company can develop if they want to. Yeah, I mean, inbound marketing, to me is, is the, it’s a long game, many won’t do it. That That to me, is like a diamond, just setting there to be found. And because people won’t put in the effort to do it, they’re gonna want to just think I can go out and buy Google ads. Okay, great. You can employ that strategy a decade ago. But Google clicks have I’ve probably quintupled or more in cost, sometimes 10x Easily. Yeah. And and, and you just can’t afford to do that. But when you develop the inbound strategy, and you’re helping your soul mates, it is something that your investment of time or investment and resources to develop this. Yes. But you don’t you have almost you can do this with almost zero ad costs, if it’s Oh, 100%. Yeah. And that’s the thing over time, that is the real gold, you’ve got competitors out there. If they shut off the ads, they’re done. You build this engine that just kind of it’s like a perpetual motion machine, right? Just keeps going. That’s the thing is so cool about Inbound Marketing.

Holly Jobe  42:25

And that’s especially topical with AI and everything else too. Like one of the big questions right now is what happens with Google ads with you know, AI, we’re seeing obviously, AI generated search results showing up in the top part of Google Now sometimes even above ads, what does that mean for this trillion dollar business of Google ads? And what does that mean, if to your point, you’ve been banking on that? And there’s obviously lots of questions and concerns about okay, well, what does that also mean, from the organic perspective, ensure we may see organic traffic on some awareness stage things take a little bit of a dive over time. But what’s important then is you’re still building this and you’re helpfulness. And you can’t purchase a solution through AI, right? You still need to find a partner. And so even if someone is taking to something like chat, GBT and educating themselves on a concept, determining their solutions, narrowing it down, eventually, they’re still going to need to talk to a person, talk to a company, talk to a whatever. And there’ll be well beyond the point of ads at that point. Yes,

Damon Pistulka  43:26

and you make a great point about Google and Google search. One thing that will not change with Google. If people can’t go to the solution provider and get their solution Googled, Google doesn’t exist. doesn’t do anybody any good. Yep. So how it gets served up, can get served up a lot of other ways. But even now, when you look at the results with the Gen AI results, there are links at the bottom of their their summaries, right. Yeah, you and Kurt and I were talking about this yesterday. If you fill the Google eats bucket a love. Yeah. And you are better than anybody else. You will be in that spot.

Holly Jobe  44:12

100% It’s one of the things we’re like, I’m not worried about AI thinking it can only help us I think we can only like right now is obviously in a very early face, like, like some of those ludicrous Google results that are making the rounds on the internet, where it’ll be like, how do I think in my pizza sauce, and the AI result will be like ad Elmers glue, and people are like, whoa, but what that’s doing to your point is driving people to look for places of trust, of authority of so it shouldn’t scare you, it should look like an opportunity for, again, just your valuable business and your valuable content edging over the rest, whether that’s just poor faith, marketers or that’s AI and especially in the manufacturing space, and we’ll touch so much more on this next week with the Purdue MEP session. But it’s very hard to replicate that knowledge of an engineer or of a technical perspective, that is still something where charge up to your generative AI is just don’t compete at this point in time. And maybe they will someday. But also, the important thing to know is, if your content is good and valuable, and you are a company that is innovating, you have solutions, you’re the best kept secret. You are the only person that can produce that and write about that, because it doesn’t exist yet. So AI can’t possibly offer up those solutions. So for so many reasons, yes, yes. Yes. Statement. You hit the nail on the head. I completely agree with you.

Curt Anderson  45:39

Holly, have you ever heard of David, what was that phrase again? The Google eat

Damon Pistulka  45:45

bucket of love Google

Holly Jobe  45:47

evite of love. No, I’ll have to tell back.

Curt Anderson  45:51

Holly, that might have to go in your second book, right? He dropped that on me this week to Google. So if you’re not familiar with what we’re talking about, eat, Holly, do you want to explain eats Google eats for anybody out there? What on earth? Are these these goofballs talking about? Yeah,

Holly Jobe  46:08

so Google is just E at its expertise, experience, authority and trust. And those are the four things that Google is looking at that the Google algorithm is looking at, when they they I always say that like it’s sentient. It’s not when the algorithm is looking at what it is going to show to the users. On the search engine results page. It is looking for experience, expertise, authority and trust. So what that means is, it’s more important now than ever, for there to be a person behind what you’re producing from a content perspective for that person to have an author bio, and also a LinkedIn where they’re producing content and having all of those different social signals and things. blogs that have been going for a long time will do better than things that are brand new, but things that are brand new, can offset some of that with just really building up that experience and that authority in that trust. So essentially, it’s just an acronym for saying what’s highly, most most most important to Google and what should be at the heartbeat of all of the content you produce. If you want Google to show it to your soulmates?

Curt Anderson  47:12

Yes, so two takeaways Google eats bucket of love coined by the one and only Damon Pustaka. Do not put Elmers glue in your pizza sauce. That is not that is that is not enough. And so how we are is you guys are killing me today. So as we are coming into time, please watch it. How about tie up a little bow and just wrap this president up? What do we have last?

Holly Jobe  47:37

Yeah, so we’ve got your SQL czar, improving monthly. Your ROI is tremendous on your marketing, your building decision stage resource diversity. And what that means really quickly is just we talk about things in the journey that your soul mate takes from having a problem to deciding that you are the solution is the awareness, the consideration, and then the decision stage. So decision stage assets are the ones that are all about your company. When you’re starting out. You want to focus on awareness, stage assets, because no one knows who your company is yet. So if you’re writing all these blogs that are like, here’s why PID is so great. It’s like cool, but nobody knows who PID is. So that’s not super helpful. You want to be talking about here’s why inbound marketing helps manufacturers solve their problems, here’s how to get with those types of things that solve the problems for your customers. So at this phase, you want to really be building out why you are the best solution because you’re starting to move people through that funnel and then they can look at okay, I’ve got my problem solved my question answered, What are potential solutions for solving this problem? Who should do it okay, it’s this company whose website there’s a lot more about that that that can be taught all of this honestly can be talked about for days and we just don’t have that kind of time. And then also b2b e commerce incur I know you are the absolute God of b2b e commerce, you have the tips, you have built the resources. But what can be really important here, I’ll just give a brief overview then tossed off to you is if there are those things that you are able to build ecommerce around build a contained user experience on the website from thought to purchase, this is a really great time to build it because you have that reputation, you have the infrastructure, you have the traffic coming in. That’s not to say you couldn’t build it sooner. This is obviously very, very much dependent on the business. But sometimes even for companies who hadn’t considered ecommerce before this can be a phase where it makes a lot of sense because you have so many leads coming in is there something that doesn’t need to be custom that you could put on E commerce and like I said, Kurt, you I am now swimming in a pool that I do not own but I would love for you to take the baton and talk a little more about that.

Curt Anderson  49:45

Well, what did I just scratched the surface because I want to just we’re just really marinating and just you know, loving this. You know everything on your book, everything in the pyramid here from a b2b commerce so Damon we had coach Kevin from Bigcommerce He was our guest on the show last Friday and man had we’d do a deep dive, you know, publicly traded company incredible SAS products as solution. So you can go back and check out that episode. I just did a live stream on Tuesday with my dear friends at swift otter, they are the equivalent what protocol 80 is to inbound marketing. Those guys are to b2b e commerce. We did a deep deep dive on configurators. So you know, there are configurator opportunities, we can talk about customer portals. So if you are a manufacturer, I’m a little bit biased. If your E commerce is no longer a nice to have, it is mission critical. So you know, connect with me connect with Damon connect with Holly, we can do a deeper dive that on that. So that’s enough. I’m on b2b e commerce. Holly, let’s start wrapping things up here. What are some parting thoughts? What how do you want to like tie this whole this whole thing together for our friends out there.

Holly Jobe  50:55

I want to start by saying this was probably super overwhelming. There’s so much here that this is probably like drinking from a firehose. And it’s important to just start. So even taking a look at your website. If that hasn’t been done in a while starting there rolling the ball seeking resources, everyone’s talking to your local MEP is great, they might be able to point you in the direction of other resources, you could take advantage of potentially grants to do this kind of thing. So just starting to get the ball rolling. One of my favorite phrases in the world that my mom always says is progress, not perfection. This is so overwhelming. And like we just talked about this takes years to get to the top of the pyramid. So just getting started starting to think about these things seeking resources, whether it’s my book, HubSpot has so many free Academy courses on inbound marketing, that will get you a lot of this information as well. Hopefully, there’s enough here to get you started with research enough terms and things. But I would say it’s starting is starting. And the best thing to do is move forward. And this kind of thing can be very overwhelming, especially for a solo marketer, but it is possible and the best thing to do is just just to begin as small as that step might be a still step forward.

Curt Anderson  52:11

Drop the mic. That was I’d say this is you know what in the US it definitely could be overwhelming. But you know, I’m shamelessly going to share you know, grab Holly’s book and how he breaks it down and just such simplistic form easy to understand, Damon, we got to our dear friend Harry giacca question here. So Harry says, great presentation, Holly, love your energy. Is there one more phase to delight your new customer and turn them into a promoter? My goodness gracious does do you have? Does that happen to be in your book somewhere? Here

Holly Jobe  52:44

I did we just become best friends. There is a part of the book. Part three is called floating above the triangle and it looks like this. And what those little clouds say are, one of them is inbound customer service. So that is what kind of comes after this. I wanted to focus exclusively on like marketing and getting people in. And then so that really could be a book of its own. But to your point, Harry, yes, keeping those customers happy, delighting them, turning them into evangelists for your business. This is so important. And some of that goes along with setting up those good customer service platforms that enable you to do surveys to set up a way to make it really easy for your customers to leave reviews and interact with your company. And all of those types of things is so so important. I’m so glad that you touched on that. Yes, I don’t have tons of resources to deep dive on that today. But that is so important and to your point is kind of that next once you’re in heaven once you’ve climbed the pyramid that is what you want to focus on. The other two areas are trade shows, and conventional marketing and looping the inbound philosophies into those three things are sort of the next ways to like you said continue to delight. Customers take it to that next level. Yes, yes, yes.

Curt Anderson  54:07

Are you on mute? Damon?

Damon Pistulka  54:09

I did that again. I think we just figured out that Holly’s got a couple more books to write.

Curt Anderson  54:13

I think Holly has another book. I think I Daymond she might use you know just for the record she might use Google eats bucket of love. Just this right now might have bought it so hey, I just want to first off what I I’m like a proud uncle right now I just how he and I I mean this from by my heart. You are just such a breath of fresh air. You’re just so refreshing. Brilliant. Your energy is off the charts. We have you back at Purdue MEP, go to the Purdue MEP, sign up for her webinar on Thursday, June 28. That’s at 12 o’clock it’s completely free. Again like you got just a wonderful hour masterclass with Holly here connect with her on LinkedIn, go to protocol ad check they have a wealth of information resources. They talked not only they don’t talk to talk, they’ve walked the walk everything that Holly just preached they’re doing for themselves and for their customers. Holly How about David have a big round of applause for Holly Jove for just magic National Grand Slam Every time she’s on the show. So

Holly Jobe  55:26

what a gift for having me and I just want to say if anyone wants to connect on LinkedIn throw me a question. If you have something specific to your business you didn’t want to ask publicly say I don’t know if you can tell but I love talking about this kind of thing. So I would love to help you can shoot me an email you can shoot me a chat I’d love to brainstorm with anybody who is looking for more info or reads the book and has more questions or anything like that. I just love to talk about marketing and I’m so grateful you guys gave me the time and space to do so this is so much fun.

Curt Anderson  55:55

My Are you kidding So you I tell you our dear friend, we just love what you’re doing we respect admire, just worship the ground that you walk on and you are just auto marketing guru we appreciate you highly so can’t wait for Thursday you and we have a we have a we have all sorts of fun things coming up. Working together with our dear friend Holly and the team at protocol 80. So my goodness gracious. Damon, let’s close things out. Let’s go here. Man. That was like one of the fastest hours I thought, Man this was good. So be someone’s inspiration man. Just like our dear friend Holly. Big round of applause for Holly. Just absolutely crushing it. Damon, I want to wish all the fathers out there Happy Father’s Day. Why don’t you close us out my friend?

Damon Pistulka  56:41

Yeah, yes. Yes. Thanks so much, Holly, for being here today. Sharing your thoughts like always just wow. Enjoy the conversations and what we get to learn from you every time we have you on. Thank you. Also thank everyone listening and the people commenting, Harry and I couldn’t see the second person we can’t see your name. But hey, thanks for being here today. And siddik Thank you for being here today. All of you that are listening didn’t comment. We appreciate you being out there. We appreciate your support. And if you got in late on this, believe me. If you care about Inbound Marketing and building your sales for your company, you need to go back to the beginning and listen to this and pick up on some of the things that Holly talked about. Also, check out Holly’s book. Inbound immortal. There we go. We’re gonna make sure I was so excited. I just about lost it there. And, and just as as Kurt said, Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there. Have a great weekend, everyone and we will be back again next week.

Holly Jobe  57:52

Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone.