Engineering Your Manufacturing Website for Your Buyer

Damon Pistulka  00:03

All right, everyone, welcome once again, it is Friday. And you know what that means? And no, it’s not the weekend. It is manufacturing ecommerce success and we’re off again. I’m Damon Pistulka, one of your co hosts. That pretty gentleman right over there as Curt Anderson. He is going to take it away from here. We’ve got a great guest today we’re going to be talking about engineering your manufacturing website for your buyer. Take it away, Mr. Anderson.

Curt Anderson  00:33

Damon, dude are you know, I know you didn’t get much sleep last night, right? Are you okay? today?

Damon Pistulka  00:39

I’m good.

Curt Anderson  00:40

You’re up. You’re up listening to Taylor Swift all night. I know for a fact right?

Damon Pistulka  00:44

I couldn’t believe it. I one came out. And then more. And

Curt Anderson  00:51

then more. Dude, are you feeling it? I’m thrilled. I’m going. I’m on live. Are you feeling Swifty Licious? Or what are you? How are you feeling?

Damon Pistulka  00:58

I’m getting there.

Curt Anderson  00:59

Are you getting there? Well, I hope you know that album has nothing on this guest that we have today. So Whoa, man. How about that for a little warm up? So hey, Paul Kiesche how are you? What’s going on dude?

Paul Kiesche  01:15

Well, I’m well thank you for having me. This is awesome. I love being on the show.

Curt Anderson  01:18

We love having you here. Hey, drop us a note listener out there. We’ve got a couple friends already. Damon eight. We’ve got Diane buyers analysis here. So Diane is here. Happy Friday. Dan, we’ve got a follow up. We’ve got a Happy Friday. We got Whitney Houston’s in this morning Damon. I’m at the gym like a five this morning. Who popped on Whitney Houston. So Whitney, I was thinking of you. I was hoping that you’d be here today. And yes. Swifty Licious. Diane Damon. Is Swifty Licious today’s feeling it can you just just it just looks like he’s got the glow. Polly. Let’s dive in. You are a repeat offender. We just dear friend of ours. We love having you on the show. You’re just doing spreading all sorts of just wonderfulness for manufacturers. But you know what? It’s been a little while it’s been? It’s been it’s been a hot minute since you’ve been on the show. Is that correct? It’s been a while. I don’t think I don’t feel like I asked you this before but if I did, I don’t care. I’m gonna ask you again. Yeah. In your your jersey guy through and through when your little guy growing up? Little guy growing up. Who was your hero? Who’s your little guy growing up?

Paul Kiesche  02:31

I don’t know. Good question. I wasn’t one for your traditional heroes. You know, I had I had an older brother that I probably looked up to a lot and I had a great dad that I looked up to a lot. So I think I’m more of that realistic notion. Family First probably. Oh, and I have an uncle that was just like this incredible story. My I have an uncle that that ended up creating a bird farm out in Washington. He he was an engineer for Boeing and created the the most like the most world renowned bird farm out in Washington became like, world known for it and stuff like that. So he was he was quite a hero himself there to a bird farm has ever seen. So it’s crazy story. He would fly from country to country all around the world because he was working with Boeing as an engineer in other countries how to use the Boeing planes. And he would pick up birds all over the world. So he had birds from like Antarctica all over the world. And he would have him in Washington and the state would donate land to him and have Boy Scouts and everybody would like take care of his property because he was such a it’s like, such a big phenomenon out there. Yeah, it’s just an incredible story. I want to write a book about him someday. Oh, that’s

Curt Anderson  03:50

awesome. What a great story man we I so we’re I live there’s like a big bird you know sanctuary thing. So we’ll talk about that offline but which which are uncle’s name

Paul Kiesche  04:00

while he’s passed already, but his name I was named? Not necessarily after him, but we share the same name. So it was Paul as well. So awesome.

Curt Anderson  04:09

What a great story. I would have liked that guy led

Paul Kiesche  04:12

flying all over the world. It goes way beyond that. And then started

Curt Anderson  04:17

a bird farm. Is it is that is it still in existence?

Paul Kiesche  04:22

It is his his wife that he left behind she she takes care of it with her husband and stuff like that. So yeah.

Curt Anderson  04:31

One more question. Damon, we don’t get many siblings on the show. The first person that came to mind was Big Brother. Just share a little bit why was Big Brother hero to you?

Paul Kiesche  04:41

I think it’s just one of those classic things you know, like he first off he’s 10 years older than me. I have a sister it’s 11 years old or two. She was definitely a hero to me as well. And I have an older sister it’s seven years older. So I came from a big family but like when they’re that much older they they’re practically like your uncle almost or something like that. They do look up to them a lot. But just you know, they they lead some really exciting lives. My brother, for example, he’s a actor, writer, producer, director. He’s been in stuff all all over the place. He was in Breaking Bad and a lot of other big stuff. So it just, he lives in an exciting life as well. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  05:18

Those handsome jeans run in the shade, man, just so you know, it’s hard being on stage with you, Paul Damon, we’ve got a number of friends here we do.

Damon Pistulka  05:26

Let’s let’s get let’s get some acne when you never know Dave Whitney.

Curt Anderson  05:30

can’t judge a book by its cover. Daymond is indeed a Swifty he Dan

Damon Pistulka  05:34

out there in a car somewhere. The technology’s incredible. West Virginia. All right. Yeah, we got Gary in the house today. Hey, Gary. What’s happening today?

Curt Anderson  05:44

Mr. Happy Friday to Harry blurs in the crowd today.

Damon Pistulka  05:47

There we go. Look, this is a big deal. Dan’s daughter is driving. Wow.

Curt Anderson  05:56

Toy. Good luck, dad. And hey, thank you to Harry dropped a great comment on LinkedIn this morning. Yep. Great. What a great story. That was we got to get Harry on the show. So yeah, thank you guys. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. keep the comments coming. We’ve got Patricia here. Today, we are going to do a deep dive into how to really maximize your website. And we have the authority here in the house to dive into this. So Paul, been on the show before we did a fun jam session last year. Boy, people are blown away. We’re doing some before and afters were when you were on the show last last time. We were doing some before and afters. But before we get there, give a little background into yourself. So why you know you’re a creative guy. You’re a professor, you’re an artist, why manufacturing? How did you evolve your firm to really target and help manufacturers?

Paul Kiesche  06:45

That’s a good question. So I’ve had my business for over 18 years, and I’ve been working in the industry since 1998. or so. I’ve been doing actually websites since 1998. So at the very dawn of the internet, and so forth, and my company Aava, creative. We were probably 10 years into business and everybody, everybody kept saying you got to niche down, you got to specialize. And when we finally took that advice, we looked at our clientele, and I’d say the majority was in manufacturing. So we had already been so experienced and and had such a portfolio of manufacturers for such a long time, it was a natural move for us. So we actually specialized in manufacturing and technology, which we find go hand in hand. And it’s just we’ve embraced it dove right in and just started to what we did what I like what we did was, well, we didn’t just assume we understand all manufacturers problems. What we did was we started interviewing them, writing articles about it, diving deep, and we joined a lot of organizations and learned a lot. So what was fascinating was is that manufacturers didn’t care about all the things that we thought maybe they did. And they had different problems than other companies do. And, you know, we tried to learn a lot about that and try to cater to that a little bit more.

Curt Anderson  08:07

Well, I love that 1998 Do that employee lives when you’re having fun, right? And, you know, and what I encourage everybody do check out ABA creative, it is a fantastic website. And so again, when we talk a lot about you know, sometimes as solopreneurs entrepreneurs, consultants, you know, we become the cobblers kids with no shoes, if you will. Paul has a fantastic website, all sorts of information, white papers, check out what he’s got going on. Tons of information help manufacturers really to better themselves better website stop being the best kept secret. Paul, let’s go here for folks that are new, curious minds would love to know, how does your team Aviate creative? How do you make the world a better place? Let’s dive into some of the menu items that you guys how you make manufacturers better?

Paul Kiesche  08:52

Sure you mean in terms of services and stuff like that? Yeah. All right. I’m not I’m not saving the world with this. But

Curt Anderson  09:00

are you are you’re my friend.

Paul Kiesche  09:02

That’s fun. So we’re a branding company. We have a couple of key areas. So we do a lot of work and branding from anything from positioning through logos to naming a company to the full branding, you know, vision, and that dives further into websites. So we do tons of websites, which we’re going to talk about mostly today, anything from an email all the way through giant ecommerce sites, we’ve even built social media platforms and all sorts of stuff before and then we do a lot of print. So a lot of lot of agencies have like run away from print, but we still embrace it. So we do a lot of catalogs a lot of direct mail and promotions and all sorts of flyers and case studies and all sorts of stuff there. Were writers were designers so we do a whole breadth of work all the way through help with trade shows and vehicle wraps. A wide variety of anything design, anything writing that kind of stuff.

Curt Anderson  09:57

Well, I love that and a few things that take away here You’re in. I’d like to backup one minute your entrepreneurial journey. What what encouraged you? Was there an aha moment? Was there an event? What what launched your entrepreneurial journey?

Paul Kiesche  10:11

Probably? Probably determination and anger.

Curt Anderson  10:18

termination, anger dude.

Paul Kiesche  10:23

fully honest, right? Like I was very, I have a interesting story and stuff. And I was very, very ambitious. So like, just to give you an understanding of that. I got my first job when I was a freshman in college. By the time I was a junior in college, I was already a senior designer, and I was already published 30 times as an illustrator. Wow. By the time I was, by the time I graduated college, I was already a creative director running an art department for a PR firm in New York. And that was already massively published in publications. And then I started running other divisions and stuff. So I ended up after 911, I ended up having to leave New York and back in New Jersey, I worked for an agency for a couple years, and they had a creative director. That was fine. But that they ended up letting go that creative director and I said to them, if you hire, I asked, basically, I said, you know, I’d like the job. And they said, You’re too young, you don’t know what you’re doing yet. And I was like, Okay. And I said, Well, if you hire somebody, I want to either learn from them, or they should be better than me, or I want to learn from them. And they hired them, they were terrible. And they fired them. So I said again, to them, like, Alright, um, you know, hoping to get the job now. And I said, if you hire somebody else, that’s not right. I’m gonna leave. So they hired somebody else that was bad again. So I made the move. And I started my own business. I mean, I it. I had already been freelancing for many years. So I was already basically like, set as a company, I already had clients already had lots of stuff. But I wanted to work there. So it was kind of fun. And then within like a year, that company was already like, upset that I was getting more clients than they were in everything else. So it was a pretty interesting start to the whole journey. Well,

Curt Anderson  12:24

what’s fascinating, Damon, you know, we’ve talked a lot about, we’d love asking that story like, hey, you know, what’s the what’s the origin story? You know, like, how did you start your entrepreneurial journey? We hear a lot of accidental entrepreneurs. Daymond. And this might be the first the

Damon Pistulka  12:37

angry, termination and anger. So hey, David budget.

Paul Kiesche  12:43

That’d be probably more stories like that, that people probably are just embarrassed to share. You know, I mean, ultimately, it was probably, you know, this drive that I was like, I don’t want to have a ceiling over my head. But it was also like, Okay, you’re gonna tell me I can’t be, you know, more successful? I’ll show you. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  13:03

yeah. Well, thanks, Schuster stopped and dropped a comment. Thanks for that. Dan says, Well, he was graduating college at 98. And then the other thing Dan said, that’s funny graduating college, and then seeing a bunch of this on your posts. So if anyone wants to learn more about Paul, that’s a great thing. Go back and take take a look at it. Look at his website, create work, this incredible work. And then Whitney, the termination and anger is so fired, going there going there and do want to say thanks to Matthew Hollingsworth for being here today. Stopping by again, Dan says something we all know there’s a lot of people leaving corporate America and starting their own companies. It’s it’s a different world for us. So good stuff. Thanks everyone. time

Paul Kiesche  13:46

ago for me, though, you know, a

Damon Pistulka  13:48

lot of Yeah. Yeah. I think about that. It’d be. And Curt’s a little different. He left his old company to do this. But I think about when leaving corporate America and you know, it was it was out of frustration for me, you know, and I feel what you’re saying you just there’s something better. I don’t know what it is. But there is something better. Yeah.

Paul Kiesche  14:10

I think I think if people are honest with themselves, frustration is a big key factor. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  14:16

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Was so for being with anger and determination. You know, was there any nervousness was an excitement? Was it just pure determination, like, a

Paul Kiesche  14:27

big ego back then I still have a big ego, but I had, I was not nervous at all. I thought I could conquer the world back then. I’ve learned a lot of lessons and I’ve been humbled a lot since then. But back then I go, Yeah,

Curt Anderson  14:42

time keeps us keeps us humble. So again, guys, we’re here with Paul, drop a note in the chat box. Bring your questions. He’s a branding guru. We’re going to show some before an example before and after examples with websites. I saw you just put up a great example on LinkedIn. I think maybe yesterday or the past couple of days, Paul. Let’s dive in. Let’s, let’s start going there on some brand new things with manufacturers website. That’s what I want to start here. What are some? Are there some common traits that you see with manufacturers that kind of make your make you cringe a little bit? You’re like, Boy, I wish manufacturers could get out of this pattern. What are some of the bad habits that you see that are common that you’d like to correct?

Paul Kiesche  15:23

Specifically for the websites, you’re kind of hitting that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, in general, a lot of manufacturers are, they’ve been around for a long time, at some point or another in the beginning, or some point, they might have cared about their marketing more and their branding more, and then all of a sudden, they just kind of were not all of a sudden, over time, they just kind of let it go. It became outdated, irrelevant. And I think that’s very dangerous. So you have manufacturers that are still selling stuff that’s super relevant for today, right? Like, I’ll talk to manufacturers and they’re like, oh, this will be on a spaceship, or this will be in a computer and all this like modern stuff. And yet, they’re often their branding. And their website is so dated that it looks like it’s from the 70s. And I’m like that doesn’t add up, right. So if someone’s going to your site, they’re qualifying you. They’re deciding whether or not they want to work with you. And if if they’re going, they’re going to also look at your competitors. So if they look at you, and that your competitors, and you look like you’re a dying company that’s going to potentially, you know, fall apart tomorrow or that you’re irrelevant. They’re going to move on, you know, so that’s a big one, right? There is just the outdated look of it, right. And I think a lot of them are, which makes perfect sense. They’re run by engineers. Some of them were actually run by accountants and stuff like that, right? Where they’re like business people first. And they don’t necessarily think about the marketing end of things. So often, the engineer might put the specifications and the materials and the and the, the equipment on their website first. And I’m like, That’s not actually what your buyers care about. Right? Your buyers might care about solving their problem, their buyers might care about the problems that they’ve had in the past, and that, you know, their pain points and concerns. So addressing the right kind of content. Makes a lot of sense. So those are, I guess, two big ones that I would I would point to right off the bat. Yeah, I

Curt Anderson  17:20

love it. In India, we just had a conversation with guests on Monday, they were saying how they did a big research project, and it was windy CAVI 66%. And this was their interviewing engineers, and 66% of the buyers journey is done online. So you know, Paul, as you say, you know, like, you’ve got one chance to make that great first impression, right? Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  17:43

not only that, but probably within one to three seconds. 123. Exactly. You got no time somebody comes onto your site, they glance at it. And they might flip right off the bat, right. So like, right off the bat, you have what’s called What’s it called above the fold. You guys are web guys. But what above the fold means above the scroll, right? It comes from like those old newspaper days. So basically, before they even scroll, you need to know that you’re in the right place, that they’re legit, that they’re quality, that they’re professional, you know that because of what they do, just, I can’t believe how many sites that come to that that might even look nice. But then you get there. And you’re like, what do you do? Like, yeah, read that description six times, and I still don’t know what the hell this company does, you know? And I’ll talk to them and be like, Yeah, we don’t really know what it means either. Some writer wrote it for us. And I’m like, okay, that’s the first thing we need to fix. Right?

Curt Anderson  18:35

Yeah. And I love you know, over your career, if you go connect with PA on LinkedIn, do yourself a favor puts out great content, a lot of valuable posts. And some of the companies I had done, you’ve worked with Disney craft the street.com. The novo, you gave a great example, we’ll talk about with Hayden with like a client that you just did some before and afters with how you work with everything in between how what types of clients, you know, like manufacturers, what are like those ideal clients that you love working with, that you see the best results with?

Paul Kiesche  19:06

I mean, honestly, it’s, it’s I don’t know if people liked this answer, but it’s the full spectrum. Like, we we work with individuals that are one person companies, and then we work all the way up to like Lenovo, who’s like one of the top 100 companies in the world. Yep. So And the funny thing is, is that it always comes down to who values what we do, and the results we get, because I might work with somebody in a huge company, and they might not value me. And they might just be they might be trying to get every little cent out of it and, and try to knock down the price everything else. And then you work with an individual, they’re like, no problem. I totally get it. That makes sense. You know, so size doesn’t matter. 10 We tend to work with companies that have one person to five people marketing teams, but honestly that doesn’t matter either. We work with companies that don’t have any In marketing, we work with companies that have huge marketing departments. So that doesn’t seem to make much difference to us either. But in general, they need to have a budget for it right? Not only for the site, but they also need to have a budget to, to promote and market their stuff. So like one of my favorite things to say is like a company might come to us for an E commerce site. And I don’t know, maybe they have this huge site, right? So say that I’m not I’m not gonna say all this expensive, but maybe this site’s just a huge site. It’s like 50, grand or something, right? They have this big site. And I’ll say to them, do you have 50,000 hours now to promote it as well? Do you have 50,000, to market it? Because if you are creating a $50,000 site, but then you just let it sit there, and you don’t actually tell anybody about it, it just fail anyway. Right. So like, it’s, it’s not just about that. So it has to be somebody that understands that marketing and understands that there’s value in that and that it’s going to work, I’ll tell you, what I’ll qualify right out is if someone gets on, and I have to, like, argue with them about the value of marketing, I’m like, if I have to argue with you that there’s even value to this, then I’m wasting my time. Because yeah, you know, what are we even doing on this call kind of thing, you know? So, but it’s, it’s interesting, it’s also about what they value. So what what you remember earlier in the conversation, I said, that we learned a lot about what manufacturers actually care about. And what fascinated me was, we automatically assume that most of them needed to generate leads, and a lot of them do want to generate leads and generate sales, right. But I actually found that a lot of them were like, No, I’m plenty busy. I don’t need more sales right now, when I need his employees. I was like, okay, and I realized over time that that website is just as important for generating recruitment and attracting employees as it is for getting those sales and leads. So there’s, it depends on the goals of that company. And what they’re trying to do. Some of them only want to do is appeal to the stockholders, you know, and that’s a whole different thing, too. So it all depends on what it is. But ultimately, like I said, you only have a couple of seconds for someone to qualify you. And then after that, you want to build that trust and reliability or credibility, and, and make sure that they understand your, you know, the details of your products and all that stuff, which we can dive into that deeper as well.

Damon Pistulka  22:23

Yeah, yeah. We got some comments here. I want to hit real quick because that, Dan, always great comments. So you’re saying manufacturing are using cave drawings to market themselves? And he says sounds about right. And then he follows up with another one says, I can’t read cave drawings. So that’s great. Matthew says, you know, I see typically see a big gap in marketing manufacturers or revenue up to 50 million and beyond. And I think that’s totally right. And then this is real poignant to is that many don’t even see it from Matthew, again, may don’t even see the need for a marketing budget. And thankfully, though, I think people are getting more used to marketing, just because it is it. I mean, I don’t know what company. I don’t know. I don’t know who can be successful anymore long term without having more

Paul Kiesche  23:15

wild to me how many companies seem to operate with no marketing, it blows my mind. But the funniest thing to me is like when I’ll get a company for a catalog, or for a website, and I’ll give them a price, whatever. And they’re like, well, we only have a budget of like, whatever, like a couple $1,000. And I’m like, How much money are you going to earn from this website? Or from this catalog? Right? Yeah. Are you going to earn 100,000 hours? 200,000 hours, are you going to earn 1,000,002 million 10 million, then be like, Oh, we expect to at least earn 10 million from this catalog. And yet, you only want to spend $100, or five bucks, don’t you? Like take the second to do the math there of you know, that it might be worth more to you to do it right to sell $10 million for the product. You know, you guys deal with E commerce all the time. I mean, the amount of product that goes through those sites, there’s value there, you know, and I’m amazed, like I said, some really small companies, five people, companies, whatever, they’ll understand it, they’ll be like, oh, man, I’ll pour money into this because I’m getting X out of it. Yeah. And then you get huge companies that somehow just don’t see it. And they they’re counting every dime, you know.

Damon Pistulka  24:30

Yep. Yep. And that’s you bring up an awesome thing and I’m not going to diverge on this much but the state of marketing now is is such that understanding your attribution in your marketing is so important for the owners you know, you can see a website you can see before and after you can see you know, using ADS before and after, you can see print advertising that you guys do and the before and after of that. It’s it’s really interesting that people don’t understand how this all has to work together with as much as there is out there explaining and talking about it. Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  25:08

it really is. Yeah, I mean, not to get too far into that direction. But there’s there’s like, putting a value on, on that perception and on the, how you create that impression that’s very difficult to do. Right. So for a while, I would say, I would say it started in the early 2000s. Up till now, some companies went so deep into data, they went the opposite direction, where they were like, We need proof, we need data, that they actually started neglecting some of the things that don’t provide data, but that still provide a result. So there’s like a balance there, right? Where it’s like, they need to understand that there’s a value there. And I like to use the word attribution, I think it was where you need to know where those leads are coming in from and why they’re coming in. But that doesn’t necessarily mean like, what happened is a lot of companies started to just just put money into SEO, or just put money into AdWords, because that was the only thing that could provide that data. And I’m like, but that’s only one part of the story, you know, and to set to be able to put a number towards a logo or website is a very challenging thing, because there’s so much that impacts you’re never going to know. And it’s it’s part of a bigger puzzle, you know, so it doesn’t it’s not just a one piece thing that you can attribute all of your success to, you know, but it’s a tough thing to convince people of.

Damon Pistulka  26:27

Yeah, we got some more great comments here, Whitney, first of all, love that you brought up the digital presence for recruitment, that is huge. It is huge across the board and companies now manufacturing and other companies. It’s, that is such a big thing is because people want to be able to see who they were, where they would be going to work, who the people are there, there’s just so many simple things that companies can do to really help their recruiters by doing that. And then and then Harry brought a great question to you. Besides needing redesigns how often do you find manufacturing sites needing updates with SEO as well with keyword content description, titles? Etc? Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  27:07

so I mean, if we’re talking about SEO and stuff, it really depends on the company. So some companies that are more maybe commodity based or, or selling more direct to consumer or direct to like a bigger audience, whatever SEO is, is huge. If you have a b2b company, and they have a small amount of buyers, and, you know, there, it takes a lot of education to get somebody to buy, or maybe people don’t even know that it even exists, then SEO is not that important, because people don’t even know what the search kind of thing. So it all depends on what that is. I would say that in general, most manufacturing sites that we touch, SEO is a very, very under utilized thing, in the sense that some of the ones that really know what they’re doing, yeah, they’re gonna have SEO as part of their integrated plan. A lot of them just are so behind. You know, I’ve worked with technology companies and manufacturing companies and technology companies, they’re so advanced that you have to kind of take them back a little bit and be like, well, your audience isn’t quite there yet. Right? But manufacturing companies are so behind. Yeah, sometimes you can only bring them up like three steps, but they still have seven more steps to go. So sometimes we’re just like, Listen, you got to start with the basics before you run with the SEO and stuff like that. But in general, SEO it’s it’s great if you can integrate it in when I don’t like it is when you if it’s not essential for that company. Some companies will sacrifice aesthetic and the sound and the reading of their site in order to have good SEO and I think that’s a mistake. I think you need to have good integrated SEO that still shows quality reads as quality, that kind of stuff. Which a lot of people went way too far the wrong direction. And you look at these sites and you’re like, This just looks like junk. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  29:04

I was looking at one yesterday. Hey,

Curt Anderson  29:07

Whitney says Mike Dr. Mike drop Mont we did Paul. I knew there gonna be tons of money coming at us today. And in I’ve grabbed this one here. Daymond Yeah, crawl Walk Run Whitney Houston. I couldn’t agree with you more. And Diane says yeah, that’s the goal get US manufacturing up to date we cannot be left behind. Matthew was in a session yesterday where a business had SEO expert design their website they were quickly the first company to come up with a conversion did not change the SEO was great. But the design clothes art and storytelling was bad. And what’s

Paul Kiesche  29:41

the point then right now you’re getting people to your site because SEO, but then they’re not going to convert because they’re not going to be convinced of anything. So you can’t just do that. That’s a unless you literally are the lowest price if you’re the lowest price and you just want to get people in trouble, lowest price, that’s fine. But how many of these come nobody’s ever talking to you right now our lowest price probably not. Right? Yeah, very your lowest price you don’t care about.

Damon Pistulka  30:05

Yeah, Whitney says the same thing. And no company just did excellent with SEO but terrible and user experience. And it’s, you said this a few minutes ago, Paul, you gotta consider the whole thing, you got to consider where you’re at, you got to consider that that the buyer, as we’re our title says, Today, you’ve got to build your website for your buyer, not for SEO or you just to be for them. I

Paul Kiesche  30:28

mean, think about it, someone’s coming in from search engine optimization, which means they’d Googled you, they’re taking the time to find you. They come in, and then all sudden, they’re confused. They don’t know what to do. They can’t find what they’re looking for. Yeah, they, you know, they’re looking at it going this looks like my, you know, nephew did it in college, like just a terrible bad experience. And that feels like just low quality. Now you’re doing destruction to your company more than you know, and you’re wasting money to do that. So it just doesn’t make any sense to do that. You know.

Curt Anderson  31:00

Let’s go here, Paul. So I love it. So again, if you’re just joining us, I know we’re over the top of the hour, we’re here with Paul Keshava, founder of Aviate creative, go to his website. And so Paul, you have a great process you met, you’ve talked about research, you’re extremely thorough in like, a lot of things that you’ve said, Man, I’ve, if you’re just joining us, but you go back and hit the replay, because there’s been a lot of gold that’s been dropped a lot of mic drop moments so far. But Paul, let’s take us through a little bit of the process of how do you win, I know you’re big on research, you’re gonna go, you know, you’ve got a process that you do. Let’s dive into that a little bit.

Paul Kiesche  31:33

Yeah, so let’s talk about a couple different things that we do within that process. So I tell you, what’s shocking to me is how many companies that are in our industry that don’t communicate to their clients. So number one, good communication. So making sure that you’re having face to face time, even if it’s Doom or whatever, making sure that you having good conversations, understanding their goals, understanding their market, their buyer, really diving deep into that and making sure that you’re clear all that before we even get started. And then let me show you a pull up a quick little presentation of these two diagrams, so that maybe you’ll walk people through it just for one.

Curt Anderson  32:18

While you’re grabbing that game. I’m gonna grab here, he’s got a comment. Thank you, Paul, for the education. And Matthew says another small firm redesign the site and conversion increase increased by four times. That’s that, Hey, that’s my job right there. Right.

Paul Kiesche  32:37

Got? All right. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this slide. But can you see that? There we go. Yep. All right. So we talked a bit about, so we’re not going to ask them lots of questions and stuff, we’re gonna have a kickoff meeting to make sure everybody’s on the same page, we’re going to do some research. Information Architecture is our first phase. Now, what blows my mind, we’ve been doing Information Architecture since the early 2000s. And what blows my mind is how many companies have never even heard of it before. And now we have to educate so many people on it, I’m not just talking about our clients, I’m talking about a lot of our competition, don’t even know what that means. Basically, to make it even a little simpler. It’s a wireframe, and a sitemap for your website. It’s to kind of plan out the information. So one of the ways I like to describe it is like, if you go to a, you know, Construction Company, say build me a house, they’re gonna go back to you and say, Where’s the blueprint? Get us the blueprint. Yeah, so the wireframe and the information architecture is like the blueprint to your house, right. So are the blueprints your website, so you want to make sure that that’s done correctly. So that way, it maps out all the content, it sets up a hierarchy of information for what’s the most important, secondary, tertiary, it sets up how you cross reference and cross sell content, how you build trust, credibility throughout the site. So it maps out the content of that site. After that, we get into writing, interviewing and designing. So we’ll walk people through that you’re part of the journey when you’re working on this project. So you’ll actually get to see designs as we go, there’s no big like, reveal at the end, it’s, you know, it’s it’s as you kind of go through it. So that way, you have the chance to kind of give us feedback and stuff as you go. We build our sites personal our company builds most of them in WordPress. So we’re going to build that to make sure it functions right. The last thing you want is a pretty site that just doesn’t work. So we want to make sure that it’s actually built properly. We test it, and then we launch it. And when we test it, we want to make sure we tested it multiple times multiple browsers, multiple devices, that kind of stuff. So that’s a quick glance at our general process there.

Curt Anderson  34:50

A couple of things that I want to I want to touch on so you know, great, you know, maybe something to exercise this weekend or you know, next week as you’re taking a look here, you know, maybe we should all do it. You know, Damon, you and I included, right? We should take a look at our websites and just you know, can you look at it from an objective set of eyes, you know, maybe get a family member, your kids or spouse or whoever have them take a look at it. Paul’s made a great point. Now, you know, are your buyers looking at their desktop laptop? Or they are majority of them on your cell phone? And I would encourage you don’t assume right? on their desktop, man, I can’t tell how many clients they’re at 5050, sometimes or a 60%.

Paul Kiesche  35:26

You can find out real fast, right? So if you have your site set up on analytics, or if you have your site set up on Google AdWords, I thought they do provide how many people are coming in on mobile or desktop. And I know that for me, I always assume people are on desktop, because that’s how I work. And that’s not the case at all. Right? So it depends on the week, but we see typically 50 to 60% on on mobile devices of some sort or another, you know, mostly phone, sometimes tablet. So it’s definitely tricky. And you do need to make sure you’re adhering to that. Because if you’re losing 60% of your business, or audience because of the fact that they’re on some kind of mobile device, and you haven’t even considered that. That’s a big mistake, you know,

Curt Anderson  36:11

expect at this stage. So Paul, I’m going to I’d like to go here, I’m going to be a little bit of Captain Obvious, and I know we’ve covered some of this, but I’d like to take a little bit deeper dive, understanding your buyer. Okay, how important it is. And sometimes we get is, you know, for manufacturers, or our own business, you know, I’ve been on calls, we’re Damon, you know, we’re notorious, you know, everybody has their their language, their lingo, their acronyms, right. Hey, well, we’re gonna do SEO, and you need to do PPC and you need to do you know what if you’re a marketer, you might know those. But if you’re a manufacturer, you’re like, I don’t know what SEO is. I don’t know what PPC stands for, you know, so as as owners of our property, we want to make sure that we’re speaking their language. Paul, how do you take us there? Walk us through a little bit. How do you help your clients to speak the buyers language? Or how do you help them conquer those challenges? Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  36:59

that’s a great question. Ultimately, they’re doing the same thing, right, is what you’re saying. So they might be talking in their in their engineering lingo. And honestly, it’s more than that. It’s like, a lot of people were talking in a language that’s only in that company, because they’re so working on their products. And they use an acronyms that no one’s ever heard of before. Yes. So understanding how your customer talks about it is important. I tell you, the easiest way to do it is to ask, right, like, and I know that sounds difficult at first, but it’s really simple, right? So what I recommend is trying to set up discussions with three to five key kinds of clients. And, um, the mistake I think a lot of people do is they’ll just ask the clients that love them, because that’s the easy answer. But the clients that love you don’t usually have the challenges and the concerns as much because they’re already in love with it. So I would ask them, but I would also ask maybe clients that feel like they’re on their way out, like that are kind of unhappy and find out what they’re doing, right. Sometimes I’ll ask prospects to companies that they’re they’re interested in working with, and they might be talking to, and finding out what they care about, right? So we’ll ask them, you know, what are your pain points? What do you you know, what do you care about? What don’t you care about? What do you want, and they start using different language, and they care about totally different stuff, right? I’ve had, it’s interesting, I’ve had these conversations for companies, because we do positioning and interview these companies sometimes. And they’ll say, you know, we were thinking about leaving, but because you called us and because you care about our opinion. Now, you know, we’re going to reconsider this and so forth. So it, it matters a lot to them, what you care about, and what they care about is so different often than what you think. Right? So I’ve had whatever it is maybe like a metal manufacturing company, so proud of their product. And then I call up the company, like we don’t care at all about the product, we care about Brian, the sales guy, because he’s the connection to us. And we care about the fact that you delivered on time, we care about the fact that, you know, we don’t have a hassle, and we have one place to pay this and one place to do whatever it is right. Like, all of a sudden you find out like their goals are totally different than what you thought You thought it was all about the product, no it at all to do with the customer service, or whatever else it is, you know. So assuming you know what the buyer cares about was a big mistake, I think getting on a call with them, and really understanding what they care about what matters to them, and so forth. Like I said earlier, like maybe, you know, attracting employees might be more important to my clients than selling products, whatever. So it all depends on what that client cares about. So that’s the straight up easy answer is to ask them, and a lot of people were afraid to do that. But most people I wouldn’t say most, but if you reach out to whatever, 12 companies, you know, maybe six of them will say yes, you know, so I think that it’s not as hard as as people think it’s going to be and And you don’t even have to make it like official, you could just say, hey, I want to chat. Can we go out for coffee? Can we do whatever? Don’t scare him with like some, I’m going to interview you for an hour type of thing and keep it simple and easy. So I guess that would be the biggest easy answer to that question. You know, yeah.

Damon Pistulka  40:16

We got some great questions or a great comments here, Diane, the assumption, poison to the process, as for sure. And this is the other thing is sometimes internally, we speak marsh and compared to what the industry speaks, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Without

Paul Kiesche  40:32

a doubt, like, I’m talking so much so that you could just alienate your entire customer base that way, because you assume they know certain terminologies and they don’t use those words at all, you know, completely, you know,

Curt Anderson  40:46

in real quick, I mean, just interject super fast. I love what you’re seeing in, you know, kind of, you know, when we’re seeing like he to question the customer, not that, you know, hey, let’s send out a survey. Nobody fills out a survey.

Paul Kiesche  40:57

Oh, no, no, no. It has to be a personal conversation. Yeah, making it

Curt Anderson  41:01

a personal conversation in really in asking that buyer. Hey, what can we do to make your job better? What can we do to make you more successful? you’re accomplishing the same thing with that with a survey type question. But you’re you’re showing that you have their back, you know, and I just, I couldn’t love your advice. More. This is just a any of all the golden nuggets you’ve dropped today, which are plenty. That might be the biggest right? Yeah.

Paul Kiesche  41:28

Honestly, sometimes it’s third party too. So sometimes they’ll they’ll prefer to talk to a third party because they feel like they don’t, they might be more honest with the third party sometimes because they’re afraid to be negative with their actual contact there and stuff. So that’s part of it as well. But and then what I’ll do sometimes I’ll actually include a salesperson on the call sometimes, because all of a sudden sales opportunities open up, because they’re like, Oh, I didn’t know you did that. I didn’t, you know, and we need that, too. So I’ll record it and provide that to sales teams or whatever else to make sure that they get those opportunities as well. So it’s an interesting sales opportunity. At the same time.

Curt Anderson  42:06

Absolutely. So I want to be, too, we could keep you here all day. I want to be mindful of time. A couple more questions. I’d love to ask I want to get into and again. So I might be Captain Obvious before you did. That was just an awesome, a really simple question. And you gave a really nice, concise, easy response. Right? Like, communicate, let’s talk with our customers. Let’s dive into results. Okay, obviously, you know, sometimes as manufacturers, it’s just a, you know, it’s kind of as entrepreneurs, it’s like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we just want sales, right? Yeah. If you so over here are thinking is that close a sale? close a sale? But are we really getting intentional? On the website? Are there any tips any, like golden nuggets that you can drop? As far as like, you know, being intentional as a manufacturer? Do we want a drawing? Are we trying to get a request for a quote, you know, turn that request for quote? Do we want ecommerce? Can you talk a little bit about like goals and results for the website? Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  43:01

absolutely. So there’s a lot of different opportunities to sell on the website, I, in general, I would say, don’t be too salesy on the website, but also sell when appropriate. So one big mistake would be is that some people go too heavy on the sale part, and you should be educating a little bit more beforehand, you should kind of be very informative, be very easy to use, and so forth, a lot of people want super simple access to things. So having good navigational opportunity to basically get exactly where you need to find things, if they have to search for a while, that’s going to hurt a lot of that. One thing a lot of companies don’t do is cross reference or cross sell stuff. So if you’re on a page talking about the process of the milling of this product, whatever, you can also cross sell certain products that help that process and so forth. So or, you know, say you’re selling safety products and you’re selling goggles, you can sell, you know, whatever it is the the bands that go that connect behind the goggles, and maybe maybe there’s hearing protection that go with that or whatever else. So that’s a huge missed opportunity. A lot of times that you can you can upsell or upsell through packaging of not packaging, but like packaging things together, kind of like a bundle. Yeah, exactly. That kind of mindset as well or I

Damon Pistulka  44:29

mean, in manufacturing, a lot of times it’s a it’s a maintenance set, if you’re an OEM and you have you know, you have to change the hydraulics blah, blah, blah and this and you get everything to do it all at once and, and again,

Paul Kiesche  44:41

and then a lot of lot of mistakes I see is they forget to have a call to action at all. So they have lots of information but there’s no actual call to action, right? So if you want someone to call you or you want someone to take that action, whatever make sure you’re asking it. So every blog you write ever We, you know, content page that you’re writing about it, make sure that there’s something that’s pointing towards where you want them to go next kind of thing, you know, and ask for the sale right and don’t be too salesy, but make sure you’re asking for the sale at the same time. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  45:13

drop the mic. Damon, you know what we might take a moment of silence right there for that. So Paul, it’s been a while we do our mic drops. But then when you really would then we do our moments of silence where they’re really think about that guys out there. And Damon, I learned that from you years ago, and Paul, I’m not great at it is, how to not be too salesy is what you’re saying great takeaway, however, man have the courage to ask for the sale, I want your business, I want to earn your business, I deserve the opportunity. There’s nobody better that’s going to do this job than our company. So I love the balance of what you’re saying. I’m going to put you on the spot. And I don’t know if you’ve had access to it. I think you had a great tip or a great little before and after with Hayden. Was that a recent post? Do you have? Do you have access? Like, would that be a quick thing that you could pull up?

Paul Kiesche  46:00

Yeah, Hayden went into their site. So I wasn’t ready to show that Well, I could definitely show some before and afters and stuff. If anybody’s interested, posted it on our social media, even

Curt Anderson  46:11

if you’re that quick video that you just posted that you just Sure, I’d love for you to show that because they’ve got I love their tagline.

Paul Kiesche  46:19

Let’s see if we can find it fast enough here. So while

Curt Anderson  46:24

he while he’s pulling that up, you know, great things to think about is on your website is, you know, speaking their language, not your internal language. How to have a nice, you know, modern design doesn’t have to be you don’t have to break the bank. But you know, putting that investment, you know, if you’re if you’re potentially, you know, if your client is a five figure six figure client, Damon, you know, can we send out a look at got to spend a few dollars on the website, right. Yeah.

Paul Kiesche  46:52

I don’t know if you’ll hear the audio or not. Should we play this now? Yeah, go ahead.

47:02

We’ll see the before. Yep. There’s

Curt Anderson  47:04

a before get struck done. Don’t you love that? Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  47:21

The cards the catalog? Yeah. A simple one page, line card kind of thing.

Paul Kiesche  47:28

Yeah. So that was one of my favorite tag lines we ever wrote.

Curt Anderson  47:34

Down how now how would you how’d you come up with that way?

Paul Kiesche  47:37

I mean, to give. So it was a magical moment in a. So we were just talking about doing like positioning and interviews and stuff like that. So I’m in a positioning meeting with Hayden. And I’m asking them about, you know, their business and what, what, what’s their differentiation? And some woman in the back, you know, she was one of the board members or something, screams out, get shit, we just get shit done. And I’m like, that’s your tagline? I literally heard it and was like, that’s your tag. Like that. That’s awesome. And she’s like, What are you talking about? I’m, like, get stuff done. And everybody’s like, Oh,

Curt Anderson  48:14

yeah, just like, did you do like to drop the pen? And like, just walk out of the room? Or like, how did you? I

Paul Kiesche  48:22

should have I should have pulled like, what was that like? George Costanza where he just like leave.

Curt Anderson  48:28

You should have just you should just dropped in, why get struck down and you should just walk after him for good. That was awesome. Last thing I’d like to really use this word multiple times in this great conversation today is educate. You know, just being that fierce educator, as a manufacturer, and we talked about assume, here if you want to, if you’re adamant about assuming something, let’s assume that your customer knows nothing. Assume that your customer knows nothing, and just get as much information on a website as humanly possible. Paulie will start winding down any last words of wisdom, parting thoughts that you want to share as far as like, great takeaways for folks kind of getting their brand on fire getting that juice back up?

Paul Kiesche  49:17

So much pressure on that question. I’m not sure. You know, ultimately, you know, if you don’t have a good website these days, that’s your storefront. Right? Like, that’s like, basically like you don’t even exist if it’s not online, or, or if it’s so outdated, right. So having that and if you’re investing in it, you’re investing in some good money. So if you’re doing it right the first time, it can last a while, but more importantly, it’s going to get the results that you’re looking to do. So, you know, I think ultimately, a lot of companies, it’s like a painful thing for them to do and stuff like that. But if you’re doing it right, it’s gonna be very effective. And it can be a fun process. So, you know, I encourage them to really think about doing it. Just the right way the first time, instead of trying to hack it together, the amount of times that we’ve had to come in and redo something that they tried to do three times and failed, it’s always it’s sad and then they run out of budget because they’ve tried it to do too many times. So you know, try and do it right the first time and, and understand that buyer don’t just don’t just get suckered into pretty pictures and don’t just get suckered into things like SEO, you know, understand the bigger picture of it kind of thing.

Curt Anderson  50:28

Well, I absolutely love it. Paul, best place to find you. We’ve got you here on LinkedIn, ABA creative.com. Any other any other small social

Paul Kiesche  50:37

media, we’re a via creative, easy to find. And they can certainly look me up as well. Not too many people with my last name. So look me up on internet. And you’ll find lots of information about his baby a creative.com will get you to everywhere you need to go.

Damon Pistulka  50:53

Nice. Awesome,

Curt Anderson  50:54

Paul. Well, how about this theme? And I have one last question. But you know, before we about everybody, if you’ve been hanging out with us for man, we’re at 50 minute mark, you know, it’s a great time and you’ve been sitting down you can stand up and stretch it. How about giving Paul a huge round of applause for just multiple mic drops. We had a moment of silence tons of gold here. Go back and hit the replay button. But Damon before we close out, we got to do I do have a question for Paul. And I’m pretty sure we didn’t ask him Paul. I think I’ve one more. But we’ve got a couple of comments here.

Damon Pistulka  51:27

We got Fei Fei in here right now. Thanks for stopping by. Well done. Paul, from Whitney so much wonderful nuggets in this conversation. We had Harry’s not my good strut, Paul. Thank you and Gary. And Gary not by so we had Harry and Gary stopped by Harry’s Gary says thanks, guys. Hey, thanks, everyone. But

Curt Anderson  51:50

I got one more question. But you know what, I don’t know if I can hang out with Harry. Does that make sense? I can’t hang out with the guy. Maybe

Paul Kiesche  51:56

it’s the perfect combination. Well, we could be right.

Curt Anderson  52:00

I’ll be curly. So anyway, Paul, I have one last question for you. And so this a friend of mine wanted me to ask you this. So you’re ready. I’m sitting down for this one. Okay. Your Jersey guy, New York guy are you Yankees or

52:13

Mets? Yankees

Curt Anderson  52:15

Yankee. Alright. Love you, brother. Okay, Yankees. Let’s say the Yankees are playing the Red Sox. Just a pure hypothetical. Let’s say the Yankees are playing the Red Sox. They’re in the Bronx. It’s bottom of the ninth it’s tied score. There’s somebody on second judge Aaron judges on second base. Or bio the night two outs out the big green the dreaded hated Boston Red Sox. You with me? You’re good? Yeah,

Paul Kiesche  52:39

but I gotta warn you. I’m not much of a sports guy. So okay, so hang

Curt Anderson  52:43

tight, hang tight. By One Night Two outs guy on second tie score like we need the winning run. Okay, Aaron Boone, the manager of the Yankees looks down the bench says hey, kiss che. Get up there. Grab your bag, grab your helmet hit in the winning run. Okay. You stormed out of the dugout. You grab your bag you throw on the helmet as you’re walking to the plate to hit in that winning run. What’s your walk up song?

Paul Kiesche  53:09

Oh god.

Curt Anderson  53:16

What is your walk up song and you’re in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium? What is your walkup song? The hidden choice right there.

Paul Kiesche  53:24

Yeah, I have no idea.

Curt Anderson  53:27

I so I will

Paul Kiesche  53:28

say something from Greta Van Fleet. That’s better than

Curt Anderson  53:32

fleet. Oh, good. Greta Van Fleet. So that’s a great answer. Damon, I was at the gym this morning. It would be a good one. You and I were old enough to remember the monkeys. We all remember that. I’m a believer. How about that the Nationals version of I’m a believer. That would be a good workout. Yeah. All right. So Paul, thank you for joining us today. David. A couple more comments coming in. We’ve got Oh yeah. Matthew chapter content.

Damon Pistulka  53:55

Matthew. Thanks,

Curt Anderson  54:00

Diane. Thank you, Cindy. When

Damon Pistulka  54:02

by Diane, thanks, Finn and

Curt Anderson  54:04

I ate thank you everybody for joining us. We appreciate you. We know how busy you are. We just We love it’s an honor for Daymond if we bring in just all stars of like paws is bringing in tons of value. Lots of information, connect with Paul on LinkedIn, go to his website, tons of great information. Get him on a call, have a conversation on how he can help you your brand to win the day. Paul, I want to thank you my friend, thank you for your friendship, your support everything you do for the manufacturing community. God bless you guys. Have a great weekend. Damon closes out, will

Damon Pistulka  54:36

you please. All right. Well, thanks everyone for being here today. Thanks so much, Paul. Just so much wonderful information. And like Kurt said, if you did not hear this from the beginning, go back to the beginning. Start over listen to Paul. He’s gonna give you some good nuggets about getting your website set up and in our discussion today around engineering your manufacturing website for your buyer. There’s so much good stuff in there. I want to thank everyone who dropped the comments in there today. I want to thank everyone who was watching and didn’t drop the comments in today. And Kurt and I are so happy because we’re gonna be back again on Monday.

Curt Anderson  55:17

So David, like we always, we’d love to say just go out and be someone’s inspiration, just like our dear friend Paul. So thank you guys. We’ll see you here on Monday.

Paul Kiesche  55:27

Thanks. Thanks curtain, Dan. Yeah, appreciate it.