SEO Success Strategies for Manufacturers

Curt Anderson  00:00

Right. Okay. Hey, happy Monday. My goodness gracious. What an amazing, incredible, beautiful, phenomenal day. David Pistulka, how are you, dude,

Damon Pistulka  00:10

I’m doing great. Curt, I’m ready to go.

Curt Anderson  00:12

Man, I don’t did you get Did you did you get the rest? I bet you know. I know I say that lot of Mondays, but I mean, like, I mean it this Monday, did you get some rest this weekend? Out Your Lepard, that a boy, because dude, you know, at our age, we need it when we got these two amazing people on the stage. So alright, let’s give our intros. This is a multiple, multiple repeat offender, my goodness gracious, I know she might need a, I don’t know, demon. She needs to be a better judge of character. Hang out with different people. But Holly McCully Jobe, my dear friend, how are you today?

Holly P. Jobe  00:45

I’m fabulous. How are you guys?

Curt Anderson  00:47

Oh my gosh, when you’re here. Just warms my heart. I just love having you around and just thank you for joining us. You know, we might have to go back and, like, count up how many times you’ve actually hung out here. You know, it’s been quite right.

Holly P. Jobe  00:59

I’m going for the record, like, whoever has it the highest right now, my goal is to beat them. You’re looking

Curt Anderson  01:05

to beat man, yeah, we won’t. Damon, there’s a couple people come to mind. We won’t tell them that. How he is, like, she’s very competitive. WWE fan that she is right,

Holly P. Jobe  01:15

yep, very competitive. Okay, and then we’ve got a

Curt Anderson  01:19

two timer here, if I’m not mistaken, Zach, is this your is this round? Is this round two? Yeah, I

Zachary Ware  01:25

think this is or two or three. Who’s kind of

Curt Anderson  01:28

amongst friends, you know, like, so hi. So these guys are, yeah, we’ll get Yeah, just don’t, don’t come close to Holly, because they stay where you’re at. You know, Damon, remind me, we can never have Zach on, like, privately, you know, like, Holly’s bad side, you know, you know, those Irish are right.

Holly P. Jobe  01:46

Exactly, exactly.

Curt Anderson  01:48

Alright. Let’s dive in. So hey, our dear friends are with a company and agency. I just love, respect, admire the heck out of protocol 80, Holly, if you don’t mind, just give us a little introduction. Who is protocol 80? How are you guys making the world a better place? Yes,

Holly P. Jobe  02:03

so we are A, B to B, inbound marketing agency working primarily with manufacturing companies. So what inbound marketing is is essentially the art of providing helpful and content, helpful content resources on your website that attract your core buyers to you, make you a valuable input in the space and allow you to grow your leads in traffic and sales over time. So we help manufacturing companies. We act as their marketing partner, whether they need just a little bit of consulting, if they need hands on monthly support, if they just need a project here or there, and really what’s at our heartbeat, what I would say the core of what we try to do is, is demystify all of the scariness around inbound marketing. Recently, we just launched a new tool on our website that allows people to calculate what their investment might be for inbound and for each of the services. Gives a big old explainer on what it is. So even if people don’t work with us, we want them to be able to understand what inbound marketing is, understand what they’re paying for, and really just speak the language of marketers, whether or not they have that agency background themselves. So that’s who we are, and that’s what’s really important to us, is just making marketing accessible and understandable to anyone in the manufacturing space looking to promote their business. Well, what a phenomenal

Curt Anderson  03:14

tool, and that is fantastic. Love to get that shared with everybody. Hey, by the way, how about this handsome Devil’s with us today. Donnie, Happy Monday to you, my friend. Hope you had a wonderful, spectacular weekend. Don if you want to, I would love for you to one of you guys dropped that tool right in the chat box for everybody take advantage of go to protocol 80 and Damon, what we love to share is these guys, they’re not talking to talk. They are walking the walk. When they talk about Inbound Marketing. They practice what they preach. You go on their website, just a wealth of information, tons of talent. Zach, my friend, SEO guru, just share a little bit, you know, dive into, like, your role at protocol 80. And then we want, we’re going to dive right into some juicy we have some really good strategies for everybody today. What do you what do you have? My friend, yeah,

Zachary Ware  04:01

so I’m in kind of a new role in the past couple months. Super exciting. I’m an inbound education consultant. That means it’s my job to work with our clients, whether they are coming on the HubSpot, HubSpot brand new, whether they are seasoned in HubSpot and just looking to get something else done, whether they are coming into inbound brand new and looking for some consultancy work, looking for somebody to keep them honest in the world of inbound or whatever else that is specifically I’m there to help guide them through it, there to help get them in the HubSpot, there to help get them into the world of inbound marketing. Hold their feet to the fire, make sure that they’re paying attention to what needs to be paid attention to, and keep them on track. Hit the metrics they want. Well, that’s

Curt Anderson  04:38

fantastic. And hey, by the way, you know, let’s get we’ll get a little personal Zach so wonderful, amazing father, and so just his daughter was flying colors through a little surgery. So if How about, like, just positive vibes to to Zach and his family for a little surgery this morning. And like, she’s just going to be a new golden child. Even better, she was 24 hours ago, right? It. That is awesome. So thank you for sharing that, and we send just wonderful wishes to you and your family. So Holly, let’s go here. So for any friends out there that are listening and they’re like, hey, what you know, inbound marketing, okay, you know you guys eat, drink, breathe and sleep. It you guys just, you know, it’s in your DNA. So for some folks, they’re just like, I was on a call last week. They’re like, what I what? What is the difference between inbound and outbound? I don’t understand that. Can you please, like, enlighten us on that? Will you?

Holly P. Jobe  05:27

Yeah, my favorite analogy to use is outbound marketing is kind of like, if you’ve ever walked through a mall and there’s people in the middle and, like, the kiosks in the mall, and they’re like, chasing you down. And they’re like, let me put lotion on your hands, like, don’t you want to try this perfume? And they’re like, in your face, and you’re like, I just want an anions pretzel. Please let me go on my journey to my anions pretzel. So that’s kind of what outbound marketing is, right? It interrupts people in the middle of what they’re doing. It’s you’re just trying to look for a solution of how to change your oil, and all the page has is ads for toothpaste and jeans, and you’re like, I don’t want this. I just want to know how to change my oil, right? So inbound marketing has your business put their resources, put your resources in the places where people are actually searching. So in that oil change metaphor, let’s say that you are someone who sells oil or sells car parts, you would be the resource that shows up for how to change your oil, right? You would be the person who’s there with helpful and friendly resources. If you’re selling lotion, you would be the person who’s explaining the difference between different types of dryness, maybe what psoriasis is and what good lotion is. And when people are actually looking for lotion, you’re showing up there. So in the manufacturing space, because we know it can be a long sales cycle. These are not purchases that people are making overnight. Realistically. This isn’t lotion. These are big capital purchases that take a lot of consideration. It’s about making sure that your website and your brand across all platforms have resources that show up when your good prospective customers are searching for it. So I know that was very analogy riddled, but did that kind of give a helpful overview there? Kurt,

Curt Anderson  07:06

it was that was dropped the mic moment, right there. Holly, absolutely love it now. Damon, when you and I walked through the mall, they’re just not, you know, like they’re not stopping us, you know, they’re especially, you know, except for the hair products, right? They stopped,

Damon Pistulka  07:21

yeah. So I have to go the mall first of all. Yeah, right, right, right.

Curt Anderson  07:25

When’s the last time you were at the mall? Not to Not, not, you’re not. You’re not a big mall guy. I thought you were a big mall guy. You’re not, you’re not. That’s okay. All right. Let’s keep the party rolling. Zach, let’s go here. Speaking of great hair, Damon, look at this guy, man, the show, what’s going like, don’t you, Damon, don’t they know? Like they’re they, so you guys don’t know. So last Monday, we had Dan Bigger on the show, grateful head of Harry’s. He’s a Pittsburgh guy. You would love him, and he shows up at the show with a baseball hat. He takes off the head. He shaved his head just for me. So, true story, right? David with his wife, his wife, his wife was furious, and she’s like, he buzz it right down, just for me so that,

Holly P. Jobe  08:05

yeah, do we have to draw straws for who has to shave their head for? Curt,

Zachary Ware  08:10

no, I’ll take that as a volunteer. Holly, so love it. You were saying that. Oh,

Holly P. Jobe  08:19

no, yeah, we will be drawing straws. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  08:23

my Holly, you want to set the record if you’re going to set the record once and for all, that’s

Curt Anderson  08:29

right? I I don’t know. I wouldn’t mess with Holly, right? The WWE, you might want to rethink that one. So okay, let’s get back. I digress, you guys, let’s get back on track. So, Zach, let’s dive in. I couldn’t love your title more. Can you share that again? One more time? Your title is

Zachary Ware  08:46

the inbound marketing sorry, inbound education consultant, I swear I know

Curt Anderson  08:49

my title. Yeah, I stumped you. But what a line that we constantly use. Holly, you’ve heard me say this over and over, is, how do we out teach the competition? So Zach piggybacking with Holly’s describing this content marketing for our friends in manufacturing. Just give us a little insight on on how you’re educating folks. I know, like we’ve done webinars, jam sessions, we did a fun session in person together, so I know what what magic you perform when you’re educating folks. Just share a little bit of like, how you’re helping people on the education side with manufacturers rolling up your sleeves and just diving in.

Zachary Ware  09:25

Yeah. So I’ve got a really good example for somebody that I’ve been working with for, oh, man, quite some time now. So for this client specifically, we meet bi weekly, and usually once per quarter, maybe even in the middle of the month. We’ll set specific goals that we want to see whether it’s a specific landing page or types of product pages that they’re working on, then we get to sit down, and I like to refer to this type of SEO as like brute force SEO. So we get to sit down determine specifically what they want that page to rank for the structure that they have in place. Now compare it against what competitors are doing for their primary topic. Primary keyword, whatever the user’s perceived intent is for that keyword, and then go through basically line by line, identifying what the structure of the page is, any areas of optimization, and then identifying areas for further mentor betterment, so not just optimizing what we have, but seeing where else we can take it. So that’s just one example from an SEO and content marketing perspective of what this entails. Well,

Curt Anderson  10:27

love it. Hey, let’s give a shout. We got a couple people who are dropping notes. So, hey, we’ve got coffees in the house. Coffee. Good morning to you, my friend. Hey, Whitney, Houston is here. Whitney from Houston. So Whitney, you should definitely connect with Holly and our friend Zach. You guys have a ton of in common here. It’d be great to connect with you guys. Who else we’ve got? We’ve got Saraj here today. We’ve got Whitney coming back saying hi to Diane. We’ve got Samara, if I’m seeing that correctly. Happy money to you guys again. Drop us a note. Let it hey, I think I missed one. Dana, how about Sunil from India today? Man, we’re going global. We’re taking you guys global today. So drop those notes in there. Let us know where you’re coming from. Please connect with Holly. Connect with Zach on LinkedIn, man, you’ll just you’ll thank us later. One more here is our dear friend, Diane buyer. Diane,

11:12

I think now, Dan, I

Curt Anderson  11:13

thought you’re supposed to be on vacation this week. I hope you’re, uh, yeah, wherever you’re at, you’re having a great time doing whatever you’re doing. So again, guys, connect with these guys on LinkedIn. Drop us a note. Hello, Holly. Let’s dive in now. I’m going to pull up a couple sides in a minute here, but just as we’re describing content marketing, say there’s a new manufacturer. Okay, brand new. Now, we just had a really fun workshop, and I know you guys are crushing a couple people are so in captivated with what you had to deliver. They now. They take it to the next level. They start engaging with you. Walk us through like those, what are some of the first steps of like one on one engagement with protocol 80. What does that look

11:49

like? Curt, I’m going to steal a word out of your toolbox and say the first thing to do is figure out who your soulmate is, right, your ideal buyer. So where we usually start with that is by identifying the people that you currently work with or the people that you would really like to work with, and interviewing them and figuring out what makes them tick, what drives them, what their pain points are, what their buyers journey looks like, and getting all of that documented. And then from there, it’s really about auditing your website, your social media, any digital representation of your brand, and making sure that all of that language is showing up where those soulmates are searching, and how they are searching and also speaking to them. So a lot of times, when people are looking to shift their marketing, especially manufacturing companies, it’s because there’s a new supply chain opportunity or a new area that they’re trying to target, a new market, a new persona, new soulmate, something new has come up. So that’s really where we start, is by digging in, discovering what makes that person tick, and then how do we target them? And that’s a mix of talking right to them and then also doing research. And what we call that stage is sort of the foundation setting. And we think it’s really important to spend a lot of time doing that, auditing your efforts, talking to people, doing interviews, doing research, and laying that really strong foundation before you get started, just putting a ton of energy and effort into pumping out marketing materials. Because if you don’t know who you’re talking to, and you don’t know how that’s going to hit them, what the most effective messaging is, then that can kind of just be a an inefficient waste of a lot of resources. So that’s typically where we would get started. And Zach, do you want to speak specifically to what we do from the SEO standpoint of that?

Zachary Ware  13:30

Yeah, so from an SEO perspective, getting into content marketing and beyond, whenever I get to onboard somebody, I typically like to say, in a perfect world, if you can give me three to five topics that you rank for or that you want to rank for whenever somebody makes a search on Google, being Yahoo, Yandex, whatever the search engine is. Let’s start there, so we identify those core topics, and then it is a lot of research following that to come up with those those subsequent topics too. And then it’s a tremendous amount of competitor research as well identifying these are the core topics. These are the related keywords, the secondary keywords, tertiary, whatever they may be. And more importantly, what is the intent behind each one of the keywords? As we’ve been seeing more and more, we’re moving from like a single keyword based ranking, real algorithm ranking system, to an intent based ranking system. So it’s no longer enough to say, these are the keywords, these are the semantically related keywords. But more importantly, what is the intent, the perceived intent behind each one of those keywords, and then using that information to start guiding the content creation strategy.

Holly P. Jobe  14:36

That sounds really complicated and really tool heavy and research heavy. And to a degree, it is, and it can be, but it also can be as simple as, okay, when you started talking to your ideal buyer, they were saying that what they look for a lot of times online, are they’re looking for resources on the best type of marine grade stainless steel for their architectural applications that are outdoors by an ocean. Right? And so in your head, that can really be as simple as being like, okay, let’s work with our engineers and put together a guide to marine grade stainless steel types and when they are and aren’t a good fit. And yes, of course, there’s absolutely Google’s tools. There’s some nuance there. You’re going to want to learn the intricacies of SEO. But like Zach said, that key piece of intent, like, you know, people are looking for that. If you have educated people who are subject matter experts in that area, and you produce content around it, there’s a really good chance that Google is still the other search engines are still going to serve this to the people that are looking because they know the intent behind the content is really good. That’s a little bit of an oversimplification on SEO, but generally enough to kind of get started while you learn all of the intricacies. Like someone like Zach knows that

Curt Anderson  15:46

is a perfect example. Absolutely love it. Thank you. Wait. Great job tag teaming that. Now, one I want to slide into a term, Damon. I can’t remember how he’s heard this before. I don’t think Zach has Damon, can you like Google has this thing called Google eats. Can you? Can you tell Holly and Zach like you’ve put a little spin on it? Can you share with these guys what your spin is?

Damon Pistulka  16:09

I don’t know if I have or not, but I it just came to my head one day, Kurt and I were doing something. I said, if people feel the Google eats bucket of love, they can get more, better rankings. And it, you know, basically what I, what I was thinking about is that the people that genuinely try to produce good content that really helps, really helps their industry, really helps their soulmate customers, are generally rewarded for that. And, you know, quick, quick methods, anything like that, you know, is if it was really trying to just say it’s a long game, but it’s a good game. Yeah,

Zachary Ware  16:46

definitely. Damon, you hit on a really key point there, that people are producing the content that are actually trying to help the people consuming the content. That’s a such a significant part of it that I feel is often lost creating content, not just for the sake of creating it, but for that sake of being helpful.

Curt Anderson  17:01

Yeah. Great point. Zach, so alright. So with that being said, So Holly, you know what I love to preach is, like, k y s, know your soulmate, h y s, help your soulmate, if you just do those two things, right? Like, all this, like, technical, hey, how about those balloons? Right? There you guys jump. So, I so with the with, you know, when we dive into, like all the geeky SEO, if we just constantly, just relentlessly, dedicate ourselves to knowing our soulmate inside and out, understanding their problems or challenges, frustrations, goals, and then just dedicating ourselves to helping our soulmates, man, it’s just going to make life so much easier than you parlay you partner with a team like our friends at protocol 80, and then you just dive in and you’re going to take a next level. Zach, so since what you guys think of the Google eats bucket of love, Zach, you going to start using

Zachary Ware  17:50

that you’re more than welcome. I love that you like. When

Curt Anderson  17:53

can you please enlighten folks when we say Google eats, just share with everybody. What do we mean by Google eats?

Zachary Ware  18:00

Yeah, so eats is expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness. It’s not necessarily a ranking system, but it’s a system that Google uses to analyze the helpfulness of content at the end of the day. So the ease expertise and experience. How well versed Are you in that specific topic? Do you have people who know what they’re talking about? Do you have a storied history of creating content, or at least operating in that specific vertical that you’re creating content for? Authority can be determined a number of different ways, and we’re seeing this one grow a little bit traditionally. It’s been what is the quality and quantity of backlinks that your site is generating, what is the relevancy for those backlinks? What about the anchor text to them for those backlinks, rather the recency for the backlinks? But now we’re starting to see, in the age of AI contents, where anybody can create content at the push of a button, additional stakes being put on social proof. So are your engineers engaged on social? Is your brand engaged on social? Are you creating more than just written content? Are you creating videos, podcasts? Are you doing the live sessions like this? Where else are you operating and then, are people engaging with you? And are you engaging with those people on those different platforms? And then trustworthiness is what it all boils down to, how trustworthy is your content? At the end of the day, people go to Google because they want their questions answered. Google wants people come to them because they can answer the questions, and they only want to serve the most trustworthy content.

Curt Anderson  19:33

Excellent. Okay. Great. Answer. Now, Holly, if I’m not mistaken, did you, Hey, what did you do this past year, did you write a little somebody come in your life? Did you write, hey, what? What’s this inbound immortal, like, what’s going on the screen here? Can you please enlighten folks curious minds are burning to know. Please share what is inbound immortal, and do you know the person that authored this wonderful

Holly P. Jobe  19:58

I do. So this. Is inbound immortal, the undying art of attracting customers. This is a book that I published in October of 2023 and the goal was aimed at giving people a guide to practitioning, inbound marketing, all of these wonderful things that we’re talking about. If either they don’t have the resources to work with an agency, they just don’t want to work with an agency, but some of this information, like I talked about at the top, oftentimes feels like it’s very gate kept and very frustrating for the average manufacturing marketing manager or VP of Sales and Marketing at a manufacturing company to access like truly in the brains of what agency people know. So the goal of this was trying to demystify that and give them a guide, either to help them work with an agency better, or work on their own without an agency to lead their own teams. And this beautiful triangle we’re seeing here is sort of the basis of the book, I can say beautiful humbly, because Donnie designed this. These are just my words. Donnie’s wonderful design here. Mine was a very crude drawing on a whiteboard, and it was color coded, and he really made it magical. But the idea behind this is just like we were talking about with the foundation stage. You want to know who your buyers are. That’s that bottom defining your persona and journeys. You want to work through your SEO and all that kind of stuff. This is the pathway from I’m going to start today on my inbound marketing efforts to the point where it’s like, I feel like I have a 24/7 sales person who’s nurturing my leads before they need to get to my actual sales team and all of that kind of stuff. This is the journey that you take, and that’s the journey that the book walks through, and it is separated into these sections, so it’s kind of a the overview of what we’re looking at here. Awesome.

Curt Anderson  21:38

So Zach, if you want to chime in, since this is your partner in crime here, from your perspective, from an SEO standpoint, what do you want to what do you want to add or contribute to Holly’s wonderful, amazing book here,

Zachary Ware  21:52

oh man, from an SEO perspective, from an SEO perspective, yep, I think a lot of times when we think about SEO, especially in the early phases where a book like this is like, super, super applicable, or for trying to get to work with an agency and learn how to better do that people get really focused in on the the traffic side of things, and it’s really easy to because that’s such a great vanity metric. How many users are we driving to a website on a weekly basis, daily basis, monthly basis, quarterly, whatever, but understanding that it goes one step beyond that too. It’s the quality of the traffic which really gets hit hard in steps four and five here. So you know, the foundations, the brand awareness, the traffic is all super important from an SEO perspective. But don’t let that be where you stop. Make sure that you’re focusing on driving not just a high number of users to the site, but the right users to the site, excellent. Alright, hey, we’ve

Curt Anderson  22:45

got someone dropping a note here saying, hey, amazing tips. And our dear friend Donnie actually dropped a link to wonderful, incredible book here. So guys, strongly encourage you, if you’re again, as Holly just mentioned, if you’re on that DIY side, drop a click that link. Do yourself a favor. Grab that book. Diane says hello to Whitney and Hey, Dan bigger has been mining shave his head for a while now. I’ve been talking about for months. So Diane, we finally put him over the edge. He did. He looked more handsome than never. I must. I, you know, I

Damon Pistulka  23:13

think he, yeah, he had a definite, definite aura. He had a definite aura.

Curt Anderson  23:18

I thank you, Damon. I love that. So, alright, let’s talk about, if you guys don’t mind, I grabbed a little screenshot here. We’re talking about results now, man, we would love for this. I’ll be our stock portfolio, or 401, K or whatever, when you’re in the marketing side. We love looking at these. Do either one of you want to grab this and take just share a little bit of what’s going on on this

23:39

screen really quickly? I just want to say something that’s important is these are screenshots from our actual manufacturing clients over time doing the types of things that we’ve talked about today, right? So researching who their soulmate is, making efforts to target those soulmates through educational content resources, and then, like Zach, really astutely just mentioned, honing in on this traffic that you’re seeing, and making sure that those people are being nurtured into good leads. But the thing that’s really important to me is the secret here isn’t necessarily ped I would love to say it is. And I love our team, and I believe all of our clients are happy, and I am very proud of the way we work with them, but really the types of things that Curt has his guests on and talk about all the time, the SEO things that Zach was just talking about, the stuff that’s in the book, can really be accomplished by anybody and should. So I don’t want it to be intimidating and be like, I don’t necessarily. Right now is a great time for my company to partner with an agency. That’s okay, just get started doing some of the stuff we talk about. But yeah, so these screenshots are a representation of traffic over time, through the production of resources, and we generally see the leads and good leads charts go the same way as well. Zach, did you want to share anything, any insights or thoughts or fun stuff that seeing these beautiful green charts makes you think of whenever

Zachary Ware  24:56

I see these charts, regardless of who it’s for, I. Holly, I always think about something. I think it’s mentioned in your book, actually, that inbound works 100% of the time, yeah, and that’s what we see time and time and time again. Yeah, that does. Dude,

Curt Anderson  25:12

Zach dropped the mic, my friend. So that’s a powerful statement there. 100% and I and again, Holly, thank you for clarifying that. And again, that’s just, you know, my respect, admiration for the team at protocol 80. You know how you just, you’re so modest, so humble, you know, in the quest of not coming across, you know, salesy, per se, but the it’s really in the spirit of, you know, trying to encourage you to take on a process, to encourage you to introduce a, maybe potentially, a new system so you can see similar type results regard, like you’re saying, like, you’re saying, like, regardless of who you partner with, if we were what, you know, if we were the Food Channel, we’re trying, you know, we’re trying. You watch, why do you watch the Food Channel? We’re like, you know, I’m not going to be like the master chef, but maybe I can take a shot when I’m making my my bologna sandwich. Maybe it’ll be just as good as theirs on TV. Yeah? Damon, yeah,

25:57

I love that analogy. That’s really perfect. Curt, yeah.

Curt Anderson  26:00

Well, now if you ask my daughter, I’ve been fighting, you know, this is a true story. I’m not allowed to make grilled cheese because I don’t make them like mom, so that’s like when she was little. So, Zach, you’ll, you’ll find you’ll, trust me, you’ll find out. Yeah, hope you’re a better cook than me, so then you won’t find out. So I’m going to go back a slide here. Now, you, I don’t know. Zach, we’re talking about, like, social proof. We’re talking inbound. We’re talking SEO. I’m throwing a slide at you guys here. Can you just kind of share what’s going on here? What are we looking at? Or I’ll put it out to either one of you. Yeah, miss.

Zachary Ware  26:32

So what we’re seeing here is some of the I mentioned that works for everybody. Inbound works for everybody, right? There’s different parts for the content developments. There’s traditional blogs, articles, there’s case studies, there’s things to generate the social proof to show that you are capable of doing what you claim. And that’s what we see here. It’s not just small manufacturers, small b to b folk who are adopting inbound methodologies. It’s larger multinational brands too. So here we see the the example for cat creating the blog, seven ways to prevent on time, for equipment, directly telling you exactly what you need to do for either preventative maintenance or for reactive maintenance on any of your equipment, driving those specific users to the site, whether they’re not they’re going to buy a cat machine, they’re directly telling you what You need to know they’re helping their end user. They’ve got their success stories. They’ve got their maintenance and repair tips, tricks and everything else there.

Curt Anderson  27:28

Absolutely love it. Holly, what do you want to chime in? Sometimes

Holly P. Jobe  27:31

we hear in the sales process or just out in the world, networking and hobnobbing about marketing, the idea that it’s like too late, or that it doesn’t work anymore, or even, like my favorite phrase of all time, that organic is dead. Love it. But I think that this is a really strong example of giant companies like cat wouldn’t be investing in the production of these resources if it wasn’t working right. So if it’s working for them, it’ll work for you, and it’s just proof that these types of attraction based resources, instead of that, like, I’m just going to dump a bunch of money into advertising and spam people does really have an ROI or people like Kat wouldn’t do it so and I like this also as an inspiration slide. There’s a lot of really great and different examples here of ways that you can present content that can be helpful to different people in the journey. So we talk about the buyer’s journey in terms of awareness, consideration, decisions. So before someone maybe knows they have a problem, slash, they’re trying to diagnose their problem, into they know what their problem is, they’re learning more about it, into their deciding who and how they want to solve their problem. So there’s a lot of awesome examples here, all the way into even post sale resources that are really helpful, right? So you’ve got someone realizing they have a problem with equipment downtime. They might read the blog on the left, they’re going to be like, Oh, okay, that’s interesting. Does cats equipment have less downtime than other brands? Let me read about their customer stories. Oh, interesting. I guess I really do have a problem with downtime, and it seems like something cat could solve. And then after they’ve made the purchase, they have lots of resources on maintenance and repair, so they’re continuing to educate their customer and produce these good faith resources long after that person has already been attracted to them. So I think that also really shows that inbound can go the distance in terms of the full life cycle of your customer as well, which is a whole nother piano worms we could talk about all day long. Yeah, I decided to touch on that super briefly. Well,

Curt Anderson  29:20

thank you, Holly. I have phenomenal point there. I want to jump ahead a little bit to this. Damon. This is a company very true to my heart, and so I love this. This is an example here called dastrom roll form. Do you Holly, while you’re Do you want to continue on? Just what are we looking at here for dawstrom, great manufacturer, Made in USA, been around for 100 you know, I think since like 1900 whatever. What do you want to share here?

Holly P. Jobe  29:46

So really quickly, Muhammad had a question in the chat. It says, I have a quick question, how can we effectively increase organic traffic for our website? And I think this was serendipitously the perfect slide to show to answer this question. So this is Dahlstrom. They have been blogging for a handful of years. They’ve been a client of ours, I think, for 13 years, if I remember correctly, and they’ve been producing resources like the examples shown on the left that entire time. And of course, those resources have molded and changed and hit different parts of the buyer’s journey. We certainly have videos. We’ve got, you know, gifts, and they’re on social media, and all of that beautiful stuff. But when you look at the traffic and leads chart on the right, that’s how you do it, because the wider you spread your net with the topics that you’re covering, how you’re appealing to those soulmates. The more soulmates you add to the list, the wider you’re going to pull people in and up that organic traffic. So for a common inbound marketing client who’s been producing resources for somewhere between two and two and a half years, about 80 to 85% of their website traffic comes to their blog, and then, like 90% of that blog traffic comes from organic so that is really one of the best ways to do it. And of course, we are seeing that traffic split now between maybe it blog and YouTube producing some of those long form resources. But at the end of the day, these educational resources are, and continue to be, the number one way to grow your organic traffic. Zach, did you want to add anything there? I don’t

Zachary Ware  31:10

know how I could that was, that was just about perfect.

Curt Anderson  31:15

Well, that was a per so hopefully Mohamed, that was a great answer, and Damon, shamelessly. So here’s my personal connection my grandfather, Grandpa Anderson, worked at Dawson. He started working at 15 years old. Wow at Dawson’s for 50 years. He retired his entire career. Retired at dawstroms About as Holly said a dozen years ago. I started working with them. They wanted to go deep dive in SEO. Who do I turn to my dear friends at protocol 80. They’ve absolutely crushed it. I’m friend buddies with the CEO president. He just loves and adores, worships the team at protocol 80, and he’s come and when you run into, if you talk to the the owner, he’s like, why would I not? Why would I not do inbound marketing? He was like, this has been like, the greatest thing ever. So again, if, if you know, when you say it about yourself, it’s like, it’s kind of like you’re tooting your own horn. I’m bragging on protocol 80, just what a great job they’ve done at this company. And again, this place has a special place in my heart. So Damon, if you ever go through the Empire State Building and you ride an elevator to the top, my grandfather would always say, when you ride that elevator right there, it says, Dahlstrom, he was like, so proud of the elevators in the Empire State Building. That was our dear friends. Dahlstroms nice, probably back in the 1930s So, Holly, anything else that you want to chime in here to help out our friend Muhammad, or any other points here?

Holly P. Jobe  32:32

I don’t think so. I think that’s, that’s what I had for this one

Curt Anderson  32:36

awesome. Okay, hey and Diane. Diane’s got a couple great comments here. Identifying your ideal customer is so important, it’s not enough to know your soulmate. We must help your soulmate. After all, that’s what we’re in business to do. H, y, s, Diane, thank you. She’s did actually she’s taking our course. Holly So Dan taking our little stop being the best kept secret course. And so, man, you’re getting an A plus for that one. Diane. So we’re going to start winding down. These guys are super busy helping manufacturers all over the place. Your takeaway so far, thoughts, comments, what do you what’s going through your that, that brilliant mind of yours? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  33:12

okay, that’s a stretch. But the the things that are going through my mind always when we talk about SEO and inbound marketing, is just really knowing your soulmate and creating content that helps them. I mean, that’s that’s the thing. And I said here, I’ve written a whole bunch of notes again, about about what, what we do, what I do, and the different things. So, so more ideas about that. What are some other ways? And if you’re a solo marketer out there, and you’ve got a blog post and you’re trying to do this for a manufacturing company. Just think of that. Just sit down and think about that. And think about what would somebody search if they wanted to know more about what something that we do? You know, it could be designing an injection molded part. It could be getting something machined. It could be, you know, servo drives. It doesn’t really matter. But just keep educating and helping those people, because that will what, that will help you get. They will associate your brand with helping, and that ultimately drives, drives revenue. As as you guys are, protocol, 80, no, well, with your clients now

Curt Anderson  34:19

and Damon, it’s, it’s all about what? It’s all about the Google. What was that? Again?

Damon Pistulka  34:23

Fill in that Google bucket of love. Google eats bucket of love.

Curt Anderson  34:27

Google eats bucket of love. I tell you, protocol 80 knows how to fill that Google eats bucket of love. So yeah, let’s start winding down, guys, thoughts, comments, any parting words of wisdom, last strategies that you want to share for folks out there really wanting to start crushing it with their inbound strategy. Holly, what do

34:45

you have? Oh, goodness, um,

Curt Anderson  34:49

by her book, by the way, that’s, that’s my, that’s my,

Holly P. Jobe  34:52

I’m going to piggyback off of what Damon said and say. And also talking to your sales people can be a really great place to start to. Figure out what those customer are, and also identifying like the current soulmates that you have, that you would love to clone and just work with 100 of them. One of the persona questions that we asked during interviews is, Okay, God forbid you know this business ever went out of business. What would you put into Google to find a vendor similar to us? That’s a really helpful place to start and again, there’s no data there. There’s no keywords. That’s just anecdotal, but in some ways, that’s better than the best you know programs can tell you, because it’s coming right from the mouths of those ideal soul mates. So between that and between going to your sales team and saying, Hey, what are the questions you get a lot in the sales process, if nothing else, start by creating resources for your sales team that you can share, because if they’re in the sales process asking that, they’re out there on the internet asking it too. So those can be some really quick ways, like literally, you can do today to shortcut some of the scarier SEO, you know, content work, not saying it’s not important to do down the line, but if right now isn’t the time to prioritize resources into becoming an SEO expert, just start by talking to your sales team, talking to your experts, and getting those types of resources produced, because over time, they will work, I promise. Well,

Curt Anderson  36:08

I tell you, what’s the best time to grow a tree 20 years ago? What’s the second best time today? Right? So if you, if you, I’ll tell you, especially for our friends in A, B to B industrial space, if you feel a little bit behind, you are absolutely not behind whatsoever. I think Holly, we were just on a call with a wonderful manufacturer not too long ago, and I think I dropped that line. You know, it’s like, it’s you are not too late to the game whatsoever. Zach, as we wind down, any parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share for any of our friends starting out their SEO or inbound strategy?

Zachary Ware  36:38

Yeah. So I’m sure I could come up with a laundry list of technical tips and tricks for people getting started in SEO and inbound marketing in general, and happy to discuss those at length at any point, but I want to take a step back and make it just a little bit more general and applicable across the board. And that’s seeing all this laid out, hearing all this. It might seem overwhelming, not knowing where to start, but my biggest recommendation would be find a point in starts. That’s the charts that you were sharing earlier. Kurt, that’s exactly where we saw everybody started from zero, essentially. And we see the exponential growth over time as long as you get started and don’t expect overnight results. It’s not something that you can do one time. SEO is not just you know, a little checkbox to say, Yep, I did that. It’s something you have to keep hammering over time to see those kind of results. But you have to get started.

Curt Anderson  37:28

Yep, it’s, you know, it’s so many things in life, right? You know, becoming healthier, right? Changing eating habits, maybe going to the gym for the first time, you know, takes that first step, you know. So please don’t be overwhelmed. Don’t be intimidated. You know, check out podcasts, live streams like this, webinars, check out protocol 80. They have just a wealth of information. As Zach said, he’s now the fierce educator. Zach, I just, I couldn’t love your new title more. That’s fantastic. Guys, we’ll start closing things down. Damon, anything you want to share any last thoughts? No. Good

Damon Pistulka  38:01

stuff.

Curt Anderson  38:01

Good stuff. Man is up. Holly just never ceases to amaze does I think? And then I didn’t. I think I butchered that last I remember when we were together at Weber nap, and I go, she never ceases and i What did? I said, something wrong. And I’m like, Hey, Holly, I’m old. I can’t help it. Sorry. So

Holly P. Jobe  38:16

I think you said I never have failed to disappoint. I said.

Curt Anderson  38:23

And I do you remember that you know what I’m talking about, right? She never fails to disappoint, I think is what I said. So hopefully I’ve been practicing that all weekend. She never she never ceases to amaze. So I hopefully I called your mom and I said I just rehearsed it a few times with your mom and just made sure I got that right. So, all right, guys, I first off Damon, everybody out there in the chat box. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you. Appreciate your comments. Appreciate everybody didn’t drop a comment. How about a big, roaring round of applause for our two amazing guests today, for Holly, for Zach at protocol 80. You guys have any questions? Man, reach out to Damon. Reach out to myself, but reach out to these guys, because they really know what they’re talking about. So we will be back here. We have another amazing guest coming up. Or, you know what, Damon, I think you and I are going to go live on Wednesday. You know, we’re going to geek out. We’re going to talk about LinkedIn live on Wednesday. You know, Holly, we might have to, you know, we just want to crank up those numbers. We might have to have you back. We’re starting to do a little Wednesday thing. We might have to have you join us. What do you think? Yeah, I

Holly P. Jobe  39:22

love a Wednesday. Whatever works. Thank you guys for having us. Round of applause for you guys for always providing all these awesome resources to you know, everyone out there, like all of those channels are great. HubSpot has a lot of great resources too. If you’re not sure, to get started, there’s so many good places to get started. And thank you guys for having us. We, we love this. We’ll come on any Wednesday, any Monday, any Thursday, Friday or Saturday, whatever you guys need. You’re

Curt Anderson  39:45

you’re all in well, Holly, we appreciate, we value your you know, we goof around a lot, but a man, I just cannot express my thanks for your friendship, your support. You. Zach, again, we’re sending positive vibes to you. Your wonderful, beautiful daughter, she has a quick little recovery on. Her surgery this morning. So alright, guys, go out there. Have an amazing, incredible rest of your week. And just like Damon, I love to share, just be someone’s inspiration, just like Zach and Holly are, and you’re just going to keep crushing it make the world a better place, like these guys are doing on a daily basis. So Zach Holly, hang out with us for one second. We will see you guys soon.

Holly P. Jobe  40:20

Thanks, everyone. Bye.