Jam Session – with Wendy Covey

Curt Anderson  06:33

Pop on anything or if you want me just do a little shout out. We’ve got Julie from the Purdue MEP

13:05

Juliana Hi Guys, can you hear me? Okay?

Curt Anderson  13:08

We can hear you loud and clear. So Julie, how are you today? Happy Thursday.

13:13

I’m great. How are you guys?

Curt Anderson  13:15

We Gosh. If I was any better? I don’t know. You might have to call 911 If I was any better, but I am doing fantastic right this second so

13:23

awesome. Well, thanks for putting this on for us curtain. Wendy. We’re happy to have you guys. We love your guys’s programming and I put pretty MEPs website in the chat. If anybody has any questions or how pretty m&p can help just let us know.

Curt Anderson  13:37

Awesome. Well, Julie, thank you. Thank you. And so guys, if you if you have not engaged with the Purdue MEP boy, we strongly encourage you invite you welcome you to do so. They their team is amazing. They can help you with ISO, cyber, all sorts of great things. Today, we’re going to take a deep dive on in on marketing, we brought in a high level subject matter expert. I’m gonna introduce her in one second. And so again, I see a lot of friends who are dropping Heidi bread Tim, you’re dropping your website dropping your LinkedIn in the chat box we Kurt if you’re just coming in, I’m getting a couple more people in here and encourage you let us know where you’re coming from drop in the chat. So guys, let’s go ahead I’m going to do the intro and so first off, Wendy Covey. I have to say this I’m going to cut more people in Happy St. Patrick’s Eve. Okay, Happy St. Patrick’s Eve to everybody. It is March Madness. Now I know if our friends here coming at us from Purdue, they are super excited because like they’ve got bragging rights or a number one seed in the March Madness tournament for others other. If you’re rooting for somebody else, maybe you’re not so fortunate. But what I want to do is I want to give an intro Hang on. Let me let a couple more people in here. And we’ve got a good crowd going on. Let me see. That’s

Wendy Covey  14:51

awesome. Yeah, my my Aggies from Texas a&m are in it. So I have my bracket going

Curt Anderson  14:58

to Texas a&m. All right and I speaking of I just saw a W i m I’m assuming that’s women in manufacturing from Texas just joined us so somebody from Texas joined. So guys, if you’re coming to us from outside of the great state of Indiana, there is an M E P near you MEP is Manufacturing Extension Partnership. We encourage you I welcome you and strongly invite you to check out your local MEP. Let’s give an intro to our esteemed guest today. So my dear friend Wendy Covey is an I’m saying when you can plug your ears you’re very modest, humble woman but she is just a powerhouse is a word I’m going to put on Wendy Covey. If you have a chance ever see Wendy and live in person at an event as a keynote speaker, she is just, it’s multiple drop the mic moments and she’s amazing. And so we are very blessed, very fortunate to have her here with us today. She is the founder and CEO of true marketing, a great high level digital marketing firm out of Texas. And when you want to, I gotta say, say the Wall Street Journal’s 10 most innovative entrepreneurs in America boy, what an esteemed accomplishment. That is. I know you’re a contributor to Forbes, you have a book on the streets. It is content marketing engineered and you have a podcast by the same name. Guys, would that please give a big round of applause a warm welcome to our friend Wendy Covey. Wendy, how are you today?

Wendy Covey  16:24

I am doing wonderful. I’m so honored to be here and glad you guys can make it. So that should be a fun hour.

Curt Anderson  16:31

Awesome. Well, let’s you know what, let’s go ahead and get this started. And again, if you just start if you just came in, you’re just joining us again, please put your LinkedIn in the chat box, it’s a great opportunity to capture 30 New besties new good friends here it might be a customer might be a vendor might be a just hate somebody like a pen pal, right when he so when he’s going to dig into like some great high level strategies for you guys today. Make it interactive. Um, my name is Curt Anderson, I’ve dropped my LinkedIn, I’ve dropped one use LinkedIn in the chat. I’m going to be moderating, we strongly encourage you, we’re going to stick around for questions at the end. If you have questions in the middle, I’m going to be watching the chat, feel free to interrupt us stop us. But we want you to just fill in 10 times better about marketing than you did two minutes ago. So Wendy, my friend, take it away.

Wendy Covey  17:15

All right, let’s do this. Well, I don’t feel like I titled this presentation very accurately. So yes, we’ll talk about how to reach engineers and technical buyers. But I think it’s as important to say, how do we reach and build trust with these technical buyers. So I’ll be touching on both of those things. And thank you for the introduction. So this is me, and you could see me so I can just skip right over this. True marketing is my agency, we only work with highly technical companies. And we do a host of digital marketing services. So I won’t belabor that. But I do want to let you know that in today’s presentation, I’ll be showing you quite a few research slides. And most of these come have come from my 2023 state of marketing to engineers report. So just to quickly touch on this report, and if you haven’t seen it yet, we conduct this annual report with global spec we’ve been doing so for the past five years. And prior to that we did this report with other partners. So we have a lot of data that we can compare and benchmark year over year, we had over 850 respondents that were engineers in engineering, either in r&d or manufacturing, so an audience that you’re looking to connect with. So very relevant today. So today, we’ll be touching on three main themes, how to develop a content strategy, how to meet your prospects, where they are, and how to become a trusted advisor, and how to do this utilizing content marketing strategies. So let’s dive into some research just to get us all in this mindset. You are probably not surprised to hear that much of the buying process happens online. So you can see here in orange, we asked a research question how much of the entire buying process happens online. And you can see that most respondents said that either 26 to 50% of the buying process or even more that 51 to 75% of the buying process is happening online before they choose to speak with sales. And then these great triangles, you can see the trends year over year. So you can see the biggest change was in this 51 to 75%. So more and more of this buying process is happening online. Now what engineers are doing is they’re going to Google and they’re searching, right and there’s some really unique behavior with technical audiences that don’t mimic the average b2b buyer. And that’s how deeply they’re willing to go in search before they start over. As you can see here, an engineer is more likely to go to page five or beyond rather than start Got that page one or two or even three. So if you’re despairing because you’re a small manufacturer, and you don’t get to your company until page three or page four, the engineers are digging, you know, why is this? They’re looking for credible sources. They’re looking for deeply technical content on applications that you just don’t find right away. They’re distrustful of ads. And you know, I thought that you know, how Google now has the snippets where they answer the short questions right up front, I thought that snippet behavior, you know, the behavior would have changed because of the snippets for people to stop sooner. But we see, as we compare this to the last time we asked this question, and 2019 engineers are even going deeper than they did a few years back. So the snippets really didn’t matter. Another research data point is why engineers want to interact with sales. So we asked, think about your most recent vendor purchase, what motivated you to interact with a salesperson for the first time, and there were two leading reasons, their desire to validate information gathered, were online, and then also the technical complexity of the solution. So this speaks to the type of interaction they want to have that salesperson, they’re expecting them to be technical, they’re expecting to help get some guidance on this purchase. And then of course, pricing and inventory, you know, if you can’t get that online, and that’s another reason why they’re calling. But imagine that’s kind of annoying, actually, that you have to talk to someone rather than just finding out online. So in summary, here, the technical buyer is feeling like they have the power, they want to do a lot of searching online. And they want to be independent until they shortlist and they’re ready to talk to your salesperson. So let’s think about your website. Your website, may, it may be fancy and sexy, like this car or, you know, a baby practical, it may get you from point A to point B and your website, how it looks and how you can navigate it says a lot about your company. So if you’re claiming that your company is, is advanced to technological and cutting edge, which website looks more like the Hugo, yeah, that may not be giving the best impression. So something to reflect on there. But your website, whether it’s the fancy keychain, or the practical kind, you know, without content, it’s it’s nothing more than an ornament is sitting in the driveway. So your web content is what fuels your website. And so we’re going to talk a lot here about content. And there’s a lot going on this slide. But I love this because you think about the progression of a story or you think about a buyer, and they’re going through their journey. And they have a problem, you know, they need to solve something, they need a product to design into something or they have a manufacturing process that’s broken, or whatever it is. And that problem gets amplified to the point that they need to be searching for a solution. And they do research. They finally shortlist they know they need a solution, then who are they going to go with, you know, when and who was that partner to help them they implement it. And then they see results. And all these little blue dots represent pieces of content that that buyer needs to get from one stage to the next. That’s a lot of content. But this is how it works right there. They’re looking there needing lots of content. And so that’s the burden placed on you, if you would like to be seen as a trusted resource, and you want to be there from the beginning to get that next design win or to help them solve this challenge, then you need to be there early and often. Now, a lot of manufacturers make the mistake of going right here to this search for solution. And I just talked with a company and I’m not gonna say who they are when I call them out. But yesterday I had this conversation and he said, We just redesigned our website. And I don’t understand why people aren’t going to it. They’re not staying on it long. It’s straightforward. It has all the specs on all my products. Everything’s there, they can easily find the product name and the specs. I’m like, Yeah, but by the time they’re to the point where they’re looking at specs that’s really late in their journey. And why should they trust you? You have no case studies, you have no application notes, you have no demonstrated expertise of what they do. And so you’re just you’re just what are you competing on here spec to spec? And any kind of started nodding. And so we talked about the idea of building trust and what that looks like. So this all sounds great. A lot of you know content marketing is important. I know any content but when the content is really hard to produce. It’s hard to figure out what to write about on how to write it, it needs to be really technical and need to be accurate. This is a heavy lift that you’re asking me to do. So I want to give you a few tools to help make this process easier. And I wish we had a full day for this, but we don’t. So I’m going to be moving pretty fast here. But I want to give you a two step approach to constant development. Of course, I’m here in Austin, Texas, I love to two steps. So you had to put up with a cowboy boots here. But we’ll be talking about how to identify content topics, and then touch briefly on some shortcuts for writing and publishing content. So what we had true marketing use to build a content strategy is something called a topic cluster. And this is essentially a mind map. And if you know that brainstorming tool, and within this think that you have a main theme, and this isn’t the name of your product, but it’s what are you trying to solve? What is that customer pain point? Or what is that application? And then what are all the topics that you can write about it? So here is an example of avoiding and managing obsolescence. So this is a product company that wanted to help address obsolescence issues. And you can see all the different topics that we brainstorm with them on. So system modularity costs, module options, addressing the entire product lifecycle, and so on and so forth. And what’s great is we’re trying to fully address this topic along different stages in the buyers journey. And this also is a great SEO tool. Because by fully addressing this theme, we’re going to do better in search as well. So when we’re brainstorming this, we want to go beyond topics and actually think about what is our opinion on this topic? What can we write about? What is our opinion, you know, what plays well to our solutions? And so you see here that next level of okay, system modularity, but then what about it? What will we be writing about? So then we want to think about, Okay, that’s great, but let’s make sure that we’re covering each stage in the buyers journey. So a moment ago, I saw you this, I showed you this progression, and it was kind of from a buyer standpoint. But now I want to show you the same thing from your standpoint, right? You’re trying to attract leads, and nurture them, convert them to qualified leads, build trust, sales, closes them, and then you want to delight them, you want them to keep coming back and remembering you for that next purchase. And so there’s types of content that work really well for each stage of the buyers journey. So as we’re thinking about that topic cluster, we want to map those topics to different types of content to have coverage. Now, if you’re wondering, what What content do engineers actually like, you know, so So we asked that question, in our research, we said, you know, what forms of content do you find most valuable when researching to make a significant work related purchase? And data sheets, okay, data sheets are kind of the table sec, you have to have them, you need to have those specs about your product. But beyond that, what strikes me about this is the popularity of so many different types of content. So you see CAD drawings, and demo videos, product reviews, and testimonials and white papers and how to videos, and even more videos. printed catalog. Actually, I I’m kind of sad to say it made it higher on this list than I thought that really surprised me. And I think printed catalogs in particular speak to people who can’t be online, who need things, perhaps on a manufacturing floor, need something physical that they can get to fast. So lots of different types of content here. But I want to I want to further drill into this one. We asked in the 2022 report, how much time we asked what do you watch videos for work weekly, and 96% of engineer said yes. So we’re at I mean, 96% That’s so close to 100% weekly for work. And you can see how much time is spent on on watching video, more than five hours to that one to five hours is a tipping point over less than one hour. And we’re seeing the trend become more video longer video, especially for younger engineers. So if you are not yet creating video, this is something you definitely need to be looking at in your 2023 strategy. So when you go back going back to this topic cluster, you know, think about again, what types of content you want for each of these topics. And don’t forget that video should be a part of this decision to whether it’s repurposing a white paper into video or a case study for that matter, or creating video as as that first piece of content Okay, so the next step is to write. And I really do need, like six weeks to teach you how to write. And we have a writing course if you’re interested in that. But just a couple of points I wanted to touch on when, when we talk about writing. The first is who should be the published author of content. And I have authored in quotations because often ghost writers are used. But as you can see, an engineering expert at a vendor company is the number one person that technical buyers want to hear from followed by a technical product manager. So what we’ve found to be the most efficient is to have a subject matter expert paired with a writer that produces content, because that engineering expert, they didn’t get to, they didn’t get their degree necessarily to write content all day, they’re not maybe excited to do that. And they’re an expensive resource. So pair them with someone who is a great interviewer, who can take your notes from them take source material combined with that interview, and write solid pieces. Now, I have another shortcut for you. And this is getting a lot of attention right now. And it’s how do we use AI for content. And, and so we’ve been testing this out, we continue to test it, we have a guide on our website, that you can go find that that tells you about our testing, and what we found that’s good or bad. But I wanted to just touch on the landscape and give you some advice on how to use these tools. So we absolutely feel that they’re great for brainstorming and being a sidekick to you. So in particular chat GPT is a wonderful tool for brainstorming. So think that blank page syndrome or finding research with, you know, aggregating other sources, getting definitions, you know, things that aren’t proprietary to your company that are you know, what is the dynamometer? Well, dynamometers a dynamometer, you know, you’re not making up your own definition of what that is. That’s very different than your proprietary solution, which is going to be something that an AI Generated Content engine is not going to be good at writing. Grammarly been around a long time now a great AI writing tool to help you make sure that you have commas in the right place. And you’re using the right grammar and all that stuff. And then writer in Jasper, these are generative AI tools that help you write so chat GPT good for question and answer things like that. But when we’re getting into actually writing copy, writer and Jasper do better. However, this is what we’ve found in our tests. So far. Generative AI is great for ideation, somewhat good for research, the data it has is is older, at least with the 3.5 version. I’m not sure about 4.0. So that just came out, I think it’s still data limited, but and if you know otherwise, chat it to me. Find it brainstorming creative headlines, derivative social posts off of a piece of content you already wrote. definitions, grammar, branding rules, great. Okay, generative AI where it’s not working right now are emerging technical topics where there’s not a lot of information out there. You know, what it may find is a lot of your competitors information. It’s purposely not plagiarizing. So it won’t have your brand messaging and the words that you want to use and repeat to reinforce your brand language. Generative AI is not good for that. It is good for branding rules. Like we always call the product this and capitalize it this way, but not for brand tone and voice and the words that are used. Also, you need a human there editing for meaning and for flow. And we have just seen a lot of erroneous data coming from the long form technical content. And then finally, we’ve seen that most of the content is written on a sixth grade level. And that’s definitely not what you want to do when you’re writing a white paper for an engineer. So happy at the end of this talk today. If you guys want to dig in more on this subject, we’re watching it closely. It changes every week. And we have a lot more information on our website about it. But we’re gonna move on now and talk about okay, we’ve magically now written some content. Now what do we do with it? How do we attract people to our website? How are how do we go to where they are and build trust with our content? So let’s go back to the research we asked Where do you routinely seek information when researching a product or service for work related purchase? We have this every year it’s a very popular benchmarking study. And so you see here, that supplier and vendor websites is number one. So back to your website and the content on your website being the most important investment you can make. This is followed by another online source in trade publications, followed by another online source and industry directory websites and associations, another great place, and then we get into newsletters. So you know, the big takeaway here is your website. So important. down towards the bottom, you may be surprised to see conferences, trade shows, LinkedIn, podcasts, I have some other data and the following slides about that. It isn’t that people aren’t going there. It’s the routinely seeking information piece that puts these websites on top. Okay, so a website trends that I hope you guys are doing. And that I want you to consider are pillar pages. So this is a big trend, not only for SEO, but also to fully demonstrate your expertise in a topic to your potential next customer. So these are long scrolling pages on a subject and I picked one of the registered attendees. So I don’t know if Cindy’s with us. But Cindy, if you’re here, great job on this pillar page. And you can see you can go look at this page I have, it’s hard to put into PowerPoint so you guys can go navigate to it. But they have they employed a pillar page strategy for their industry pages. So I picked one of their industries aerospace and defense. And you can see right up at the top of the page here we have information about you know, trends and their products and their solutions for this space. You can dive in further, you can look at all their products. You can look at documents and certifications. It looks like a repeated some things. But that’s that’s my fault on my screengrab. They had a reference list associations, their different brands. So what a nice way to have an all in one place to get information about how they approach aerospace and defense. Often other things that are included here would be white papers, case studies, and FAQs are really popular, where you, you’re actually trying for that Google snippet where you have an answer that’s very short, and then links to a longer blog post. And you’re trying for that Google snippet where you can quickly be the resource

Curt Anderson  37:24

to answer a 1d real quick. So Cindy is here today. So Cindy, great job if you want to drop your website in the chat. And speaking of if you guys popped in a little bit late. Again, we have the esteemed wonderful 1d coffee here today. Thank you for joining us here at the Purdue MEP, drop your LinkedIn, drop your website, if you did pop in a little bit later. And again, when he’s going to be stick around. If you have any questions whatsoever, I’m keeping an eye in the chat. My name is Kurt. And I would love to one day and I would love to address any questions. So don’t be shy. Please drop those questions in the chat and Wendy, take it away.

Wendy Covey  37:56

Okay, great. Well, glad you’re here, Cindy, and good job and your pillar pages. Let’s move on to social. So we asked how valuable are the following social media platforms when seeking information on technologies, trends and products. And there’s a lot going on on this slide. So over on the left, you see extremely are very valuable in the green in the blue. And over on the right, sorry, light blue. Over on the right, you have either not valuable at all in the dark blue, or in the gray. I don’t use this platform at all. So another benchmarking question we ask every year. But we also add things and take them away as social media trends change. So as you can see here, YouTube, LinkedIn and GitHub are the most popular social channels that engineers are using. Tick tock was new this year. So we added in and you can see that 71% They’re just not using tick tock for work. So might be other reasons for them to go on to tick tock, not for work, really Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, not really going there as much either. So I used to have I had clubhouse on here, and no one even knew what it was. I took it off. And um, you know, I think that this next year, chat CI PT, and not that that’s social. But I think asking some questions around that will be really interesting. As just everything changes. We dug in a little further on YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub by age. So you can see just across the board, the use is highest for younger engineers, compared to older engineers. And LinkedIn and YouTube are the most popular. So probably no surprise there. So a lot of us are using LinkedIn quite heavily these days. And so I wanted to go one level deeper here. And if you ever have that, that thing, here’s one send you an invitation and you’re like, oh, okay, A is this a sales thing? What’s gonna happen? And then like, Okay, well, we’ll, they’re in Austin, I’m in Austin, maybe I’ll say Yes, sir. Oh, we’re both part of the same group. And then you say yes. And then you regret it. Because like, wow, within five minutes, you get that sales pitch. So we’ve all been there. We know how annoying this is. So this is my little public service announcement. And please, don’t do this. If there are salespeople listening, this just this breaks trust so fast. People don’t want to be sold to their own LinkedIn and network and to learn. And if you’re wondering what type of content they would like to see on LinkedIn, well, we asked about that. We said, Hey, engineer, when visiting LinkedIn, what makes you stop scrolling? And the top answers were research data, product and service information, believe it or not, industry news, and visual things and company news. So there’s a lot of diversity here. The things they didn’t like, and I found this so interesting, are memes. And employee shout outs, and industry polls. And you know, a lot of marketers love those polls. It’s like, oh, let’s get interactive on LinkedIn. But apparently, technical buyers find those kind of annoying, so interesting. And then job postings is kind of further down. And once upon a time, that was really why we were using LinkedIn, right, it was just to, to find jobs or find employees. So a lot of things have changed. So my advice to you on LinkedIn is one, people want to follow and interact with people over brands. And then if your salesperson, remember that slide earlier, they want a technical adviser, not a salesy kind of salesperson. So a best in class. And if you guys want to go go look at Michael Knight, and follow him, he’s in the electronics components industry, he does a masterful job at LinkedIn, what he does, is always have a point of view on something. And it might be content that his company has developed or, or musings, you know, an opinion that he has on something, and they’ll post on it with his point of view, and it’ll get a lot of interaction, or it’ll take somebody else’s content. And he’ll add his own point of view to it. And it’s great for that person, because he’s amplifying their reach, you know, getting in front of new audiences. But it’s also Michael helping to show his expertise is industry leadership. So I would encourage you to encourage if you’re a marketer, to encourage your employees to interact on LinkedIn, to use your content, but not just post it have a point of view about it. And it’s kind of this interesting thing, because younger people in a company are more apt to do this, they’re not as intimidated by the idea of sharing and that it would be there forever. They don’t overthink it, you know as much. But they may also leave you after two years. And so if you put all your eggs in the basket of the young engineer, or the young employee, that, you know, they may just leave take your audience. So I think it’s also important to identify who from the company is a long termer, that we want to make sure is interacting on LinkedIn, and let’s build up thought leadership with that person kind of like Michael Knight is doing for his company. It doesn’t have to be the president and the CEO, necessarily just somebody who has a point of view and is willing to get there and authentically Connect.

Curt Anderson  43:38

Hey, Wendy, we have a couple of questions in the chat box that we could hit right now that are fresh, what qualifies as research data? And or examples of research data? So qualifies, and how about examples?

Wendy Covey  43:52

Yeah, so you know, what qualifies, I would say is research that has some sort of credible source behind it. So whether that’s the the institution publishing it, like who does it look at Harvard Business Review stuff, right credible source, or with the research that I’m showing you I made sure to show you my in sample size to say look, this is a credible research report because the n samples really big. So So those are two types of of credibility a university you know, Purdue comes out with a study well, that’s a credible source. So it can be a variety of locations just

Curt Anderson  44:33

so like my my uncle did something on a weekend that doesn’t cut it one day is maybe so

Wendy Covey  44:39

I wouldn’t call it research, but it’s authentic, it is authentic.

Curt Anderson  44:43

So you know, I’m a John Maxwell fan for anybody that follows in he has a great line that ties in a certainty that is not tested cannot be trusted. A certainty that cannot that is not tested cannot be trusted. So great question there again, guys. We’re gonna stick around To the end, but you know, keep these coming. We have one more from our friend Cindy, who crushed it with her website. Did you say that customer testimonials aren’t something that engineers are interested in? I was thinking they would want to see testimonials to help validate solutions.

Wendy Covey  45:15

So great. Great, Cindy? Great question. So I think it doesn’t. So what this is saying is it’s not stopping them from scrolling as often as some of these other things. However, if we go back, let’s see go back in time to what type of content engineers like to see where was that? No, I was in it. Is a test test my order here? Where do we have product review? And testimonial was what? 1234? Down? Right. So it’s all in the context of where they want to see that information?

Curt Anderson  45:53

Yeah, I think that’s a great clarification, sending a wonderful question. So think about somebody lands on your site is we you know, you want that social proof. You’re creating social trust, right? If I tell you how wonderful I am, and you’re like, alright, Kurt, knock it off. But when I tell you how wonderful Wendy is, you know, like, I’m social proof of saying how wonderful she is. So getting those testimonials on your website. Phenomenal. And I think one day, as you pointed out, it’s just like, it’s not so exciting to see it on LinkedIn. And I think that

Wendy Covey  46:20

you’re Yeah, and it didn’t do terrible. You know, I mean, it 3653 plus 13. What are we 60? You know, 66% said always or sometimes so it didn’t tank is just relative to these other things. So great questions in the point. Okay, let’s talk about podcasts. So this one may surprise you. We are now up to 73% of engineers will listen to a work related podcast weekly 73%. This is up from the 50s 50 ish percent a year ago, which was up from in the 30s, two years ago. Now, I think this adoption has to do with a couple of things. One, there’s more podcasts out there that are work related, you know, a lot of our technical publications are creating them, companies are creating them, these engineers are finding them valuable. And also, I think, probably in their personal lives, just more and more people are adopting podcasts. They’re not listening for super long. So you can see most are listening. 45%, say less than one hour, but the growing trend is between one and five hours. So my advice here is not to run off and start a podcast, especially if you are not yet have your website in a good place where you’re publishing content in a steady cadence you blogging, things are up to date, like definitely, that’s the place to focus. But what you can do, we just spoke about a company spokesperson is seed that person on other people’s podcast and get in front of their communities. It’s good practice for that person. And then maybe when you’re ready, you can start a podcast just know, as a person who hosts a podcast, there’s a lot of work involved in, you know, what, the editorial calendar and are we bringing on guests? Are we speaking ourselves? What are we speaking about the production, you know, there’s just a lot that goes into it. So anyway, good to keep in your mix, and start small with other people’s communities. Okay, couple more research slides. We asked, okay, I plan to attend Blanc in person industry events in 2023, in comparison to what I did in 2019. And you see that most say that they’re going to about the same events or 2019 or more. So I think that this is a good sign that trade shows are coming back. We asked a couple other questions that you can see in the research report about what makes them choose one show over another and that sort of thing. But I also found it interesting, the Content Marketing Institute has a manufacturing Content Marketing Report. And they said that 55% of manufacturing marketers are planning to increase their in person event investment in 2023. So definitely events are coming back. Okay, another thing we asked is, will you complete a form? And and in exchange for information? And if so, what type of information will most likely get you to fill that form? So I love this statistic. A lot of engineer business owners just don’t think anyone will fill out a form and I’d like to debunk that. So 83% will. And these are the types of content that they’re most likely to fill out that form for. So you can see the more technical the better when it comes to that. All right, so for all of the salespeople here, after the engineer fills out that form it does not mean, they’re qualified lead, and they’re ready to talk to you unnecessarily. So let us let us marketing people nurture those leads, and let them show buying signs before you call them so that you don’t break trust. So I love this, I found this, we have to defrost those leads, like they’re too cold that they just come on download that white paper. And that’s it. And a great way to do this is through email marketing, and specifically newsletters. So people abused email marketing over COVID, like it was bad. And that’s why I have this data that I show 2021 2223, there was a bit of a slide on the number of newsletters that engineers subscribe to, I’m happy to say it’s now leveled out. So it used to be that, you know, it was three to five, even even the six plus group was pretty high. And now we’re seeing most engineers are in the one to five range somewhere in there, and how many ended up the news literacy subscribed to. So when you’re thinking about your newsletter, it’s really important to look at the metrics of how many people are opening this thing, how many people are clicking through to my website, and the more engaged they are in, meaning, the higher those percentages are, that’s permission to email more often, it’s showing that you’re doing the right things with your content you’re engaging them, you might want to go from quarterly to monthly or monthly to bi weekly. However, the converse is also true. If you have low open rates and low click through then something’s wrong, you need to consider customizing that information to that audience, or thinking about how to do something that’s more educational and less promotional. So we’re gonna talk about engaging with sales once again. So I already showed you this, that okay, it’s I want to validate what I gathered online. But that other one, the tie for number one is the technical complexity, the solution. So I want to talk to sales, because I need some help. So I you know, oftentimes I think, well, gosh, maybe we need it, I’ll change our sales titles to something that sounds more consultative. But if there’s nothing behind that right, then then we’re gonna lose trust pretty fast. So just reflect on, you know, who your sales force is, what their level of expertise is, and how they handle and excuse me, I have an era conference logo here. I just presented this two weeks ago, era prep, take that off. But, you know, you may need to, do they say, I don’t know, but I’ll find the answer. Are they making stuff up? Like what, you know, what does that look like, when you have a consultative sales cycle? And, you know, making sure that it’s it’s not all flash and no substance? No, when people first interact, what is that method of communication and engineers prefer? This is something we ask almost every year and benchmark this and it’s always been okay, email, email, email. And we added LinkedIn direct messages to this. And you can see how well that did at a whopping 1%. It did even worse than online text chat, which is that 3% And that’s a drop from 5% last year. And I think guys that speaks to when they want to interact, it’s not a quick question. It’s a complex interaction, you know, it isn’t a sales support. So, like a support question, ensure customer support, let me just get on tax, Hey, where’s my shipment, stuff like that. And this is really I want to, I want to get on email, and then later by phone and hash things through. Um, you can see this by age to see that it really didn’t differ all that much. The 35 and under was more open to a virtual meeting and a video call. But even they want to start with email, and phone still edged out the virtual meeting. So there you go. Now, I hope that with this consultative approach, that when you finally close the sale, it looks something like this, right? It’s your customer and your salesperson, and they’re both embracing because they were on this journey together. They looked at all the content, they had this wonderful set of conversations that push them to buy. And we’re just all happy. We’re in a trusted place, which will set up repeat sales later on. And please, salespeople, like make sure to update the CRM, because we want to know that that close and why it flows and all the information about that persona that we can use to make smarter decisions. Full circle back to the next marketing campaign. So I love this. So in conclusion, if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed I have a just six steps to getting started with content marketing. So if you’re new to all of this, I know it’s a lot, I do have the book and the podcast. So definitely check that out. But here’s the six steps, and I wasn’t able to talk about all of them. But I just wanted to touch on one, make sure that you have your core brand messaging, your value proposition, your points of differentiation down, because all of your content starts with this. Who are you as a company? Who are you serving? How are you truly different? How are you unique, and then everything else should just, you know, resonate, you know, repeat those same things and further, provide evidence to those points of differentiation. The second one is evaluate your marketing foundation and short app. So if your website looks like the Hugo, might be time for redesign, if you don’t have a CRM in place, if you don’t have marketing automation, and you can’t tell what’s happening with email marketing, that’s a big problem. So make sure that you have a sound marketing foundation, and know that Google has changed their algorithm drastically over the past two years. So if you haven’t run your website through a grater and looked at how it’s performing, you may be in for a nasty surprise. Also, while I’m touching on Google and metrics, Google is moving to a new platform for metrics. So it’s called GTA four, and it’s replacing the old Universal Analytics platform. So everything that you’re reporting on now is going to change. It’s apples and oranges. So even what they’re calling a visitor is going to change. All of this is happening in July. So now is the time to move to that platform. So you can start figuring out your baseline and what you’re moving to. So I can talk more about that if you guys have questions. But those are those marketing foundational things to do. And then build campaigns with these themes, specific topic clusters. And let’s start with one, you know, what is that topic? What does that theme? What persona Are you dressing with that theme? So who’s your target audience? What can you talk about, create that content along the buyers journey, publish and promote that content, use that to build trust, and then please nurture and engage those prospects before you have sales reach out? So that’s it. That’s all I have. I have I have resources, tons of resources on tree marketing that you can find, but I wanted or is there plenty of time to answer questions? So let’s see where we’re at. Yes, good. Good amount of time. So guys, let’s, let’s get into what questions do

Curt Anderson  57:42

you have? Randy? Here’s so a couple of fun comments. So our dear friend Karen says preach Wendy preach. Tim says this is great stuff. My company makes heavy use of website presence and website forums to generate sales leads. This is eye opening. He loved your I think it was the DeVito we’d loved all your slides. Whitney, our dear friend Whitney drops a question. How about this one? What if the powers that be won’t get on board with a CRM? Boy, Wendy, I can’t imagine you’ve ever encountered that one before. Right?

Wendy Covey  58:13

Right. Yes. So what I find that is compelling. So if you have a company that sort of in that I’ll call it old school sales mentality, showing them how the CRM gives you data that a salesperson can use, like behavioral data. So for instance, showing them the contact record in HubSpot and how I can see how many times Curt Anderson visited my website, which pages he’s going to what he’s downloaded. And it tells me all these behavioral cues that he’s a warm lead rather than a cold lead. And that usually to me, seems to be the first tipping point. And then I’ll say something like and we can save lots of money by having this one platform that I can measure everything off of I know what’s working, what’s not so we’re not guessing and wasting marketing dollars on things that aren’t producing results.

Curt Anderson  59:08

Perfect, guys. Okay, so again, if you have any questions, we’ve got a few minutes here. How important is it today to have a platform online? Like a customer portal, where customers can place orders directly on line?

Wendy Covey  59:23

Yeah, Kurt, I’m gonna I’m gonna have both of us answer this one because that’s, that’s your expertise. So I’ll give my take first and I’d love to hear your so specifically for ordering products online. It depends on the complexity of the products and the price point. So the more complex and the higher price point, the more difficult that is to have someone complete a purchase like they would you know, the lower price stuff now configurators where you go in and configurator a system for instance, or play around with something Those are great thing at that that system level purchase. So I think you don’t invest in E commerce. First you invest in your website and your content and building trust and making sure all of that is built out. And then look at ways to add interactivity, whether that’s, you know, that store or some other way where people can get further faster looking up inventory, for instance, all great ways to use modern web features to help take friction out of the buying buyers process. What do you think, Kurt?

Curt Anderson  1:00:31

Well, man, so thank you for asking that question. That’s like, and I would take all day on this. So that’s my jam right there. So first off, you want to buy Wendy’s book content marketing engineered, it’s on Amazon. And what you can do is you can bundle it with my mom’s favorite book, my mother’s favorite son wrote a book, it’s called stop being the best kept secret, and it’s a manufacturing ecommerce Resource Guide. There isn’t a manufacturer on the planet that I don’t think shouldn’t be in E commerce. I’m a little bit biased. So yeah, I am, I think it is. So here’s the funny thing Monday. So I have a little LinkedIn live show that I do a couple of days a week, a number, I think a number of you have caught it or been guests or whatever. When he was just my guest this Friday. There’s a woman. She’s a CEO of Gen Alpha technologies, re e commerce firm in Milwaukee. And she was a guest of ours. And she goes on this little diatribe. And it’s hysterical, because I just I just cut the clip the other day. She says, your customer loves you wants a relationship with you. But they don’t want a relationship with you over the O ring. They don’t want a relationship with you over tracking information. They don’t want a relationship with you over where your customer is in a pipeline is hysterical. I love it. I echo that you’re that. And so you know, you’re in when he just hit it repeatedly, they want to come to you they want a relationship for high level needs. But what close customer service, it’s called digital self serve, man. Yes. customers deserve it. You deserve it. And if you want a competitive edge, if you want to separate yourself from the competitive competition, man, I could go on, I could go on and on. So when we’re exactly on the same page, so yeah,

Wendy Covey  1:02:11

I mean, pricing an inventory. You shouldn’t have to talk to sales for that. You know, so we hear I want to do everything I can online. And then what but the thing to call for inventory? No, no. Let’s solve that. Well,

Curt Anderson  1:02:25

we have an I love this comment. And Dan, I am totally guilty of this. I’ll eat up the whole hour. So I love dandruff. No, I love that a marketing person delivered their presentation in 45 minutes, and is actually not running over and allowing time for questions. Dan dropped the mic. Dude. That was like my favorite comment of the week. Our dear friend says Wendy is such a powerhouse, guys, us and he’s asked about the book and Wendy has rate on here content marketing engineered. I encourage you invite you welcome you. First off, check out her podcast. She she she invites wonderful folks on her podcast high level and when do you even talk about like, you’ll invite competitors, right?

Wendy Covey  1:03:05

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a big ocean of we’re all in this together trying to get better and plenty of plenty of companies and agencies to go around. So absolutely.

Curt Anderson  1:03:19

So Cindy said Know Your mom’s favorite book. So my mom’s favorite book is called stop being the best kept secret stop being the best kept secret. And so yeah, my mom. And she loves that book. So anyway, you guys any other comments and see Wendy Whitney’s here today. Whitney, thank you for being here. She wants to see the QR code. Whitney, check the book. Guys. Any other questions in here and I want to share this real quick. There’s a QR code. I want to say this about Wendy, when you can plug your ears and every time you’re on my live show. I say this. You know, there’s marketers out there that are cobblers, kids with no shoes, you know, they kind of go to their website and they’re like, Man, I’m so busy working on clients that my website’s not the best. Wendy’s website is phenomenal. She has courses, she has guides. She has her podcast, she has her book, she totally walks the walk. She is purely dedicated to helping her manufacturer she’s been around since 2008 15 years is you know her success is not by accident. So please go to true marketing t r e w go to true marketing. And you absolutely want to check this out. Will you drop the PowerPoint to attendees? When did you pass your PowerPoint along? Or what do you do? Yes,

Wendy Covey  1:04:30

I would be happy to. If you guys send I have an email of all the registrants today. So old, we’ll just send an email out with it.

Curt Anderson  1:04:39

Yeah, when what we’ll do is we’ll connect guys I’m recording this. This is this is on my Zoom account. And what I’ll do is I’m recording this. I’m going to drop it on Vimeo. And when he won’t unite, connect, and we could just make that one email and not to bog down everybody’s email.

Wendy Covey  1:04:53

Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. I wanted to show real fast. Cuz you mentioned my website. Writing guides, we’re talking about pillar pages and pages behind a form. But one other trend, since we have just a little bit of time I want to touch on is the idea of so like, like the research report, we used to put the whole thing like, here’s what we, you know, bullet, bullet bullet, download it. Now we’re moving to this guide format, where about 80% of the content is freely available, and the other 20% is behind a form. And, and we did that it’s a bit of an SEO play, and it lowers the bar, you know. So I just wanted to mention that, you know, I’m trying to now I’m trying to find, here we go. So like, here’s the research page, as an example, you know, 80% of the research right here. But if you want to download this research past research, oh, then you have to fill out a form. So this is something for you guys to consider. Another trend is having one login for all of your gated content. So you see Siemens and others, I think a couple of you actually, when I was looking at websites of the attendees, a couple of you are doing that. So consider playing with this. Now I will say your lead count will go down when you have more of it free, obviously. But it’s kind of that that balance that tension between SEO and and you know, what’s freely available versus what’s behind the forum. So, things to think about?

Curt Anderson  1:06:28

One another quick question from our friend, Karen. How do you keep the powers that be? That’s a popular term today, the powers that be focused? So they can actually answer this question. The questions about personas, man is like herding cats. What do you think about that question?

Wendy Covey  1:06:43

Yeah, yeah. So I think you have to have strategy sessions over this, right? Get everybody in a room. If your virtual, you know, maybe it’s a series of virtual meetings, but ideally, in one room with sales and executives and marketing. It’s great, you know, and have a structured discussion over it. So yeah, that’s how we do it works. Well, you can see we have an e book on brand positioning and messaging, and it has some of that information. One of the things I mentioned is customer interviews are very, very powerful. So you’re not just having that institutional knowledge of what we think about this persona, and what we think their perceptions are of our brand, but we’re giving their voice. And so that’s a very powerful thing to have in the mix. And it makes people want to attend because they want to hear the customer feedback, so they’re less likely to blow it off or deprioritize it

Curt Anderson  1:07:38

right. Karen says if I hear depends one more time, so we’re coming to the top of the hour, guys, any other questions? We’re gonna stick around? I want to I have a question for you. Let’s take the you know, man, we have so many friends out here, guys, if you’re cutting out first off, thank you. Thank you, thank you, you know, if you need to cut off about before you leave, if you’ve been sitting for the past 15 minutes or so, have I invite you encourage you welcome you want to give stand up give a little stretch. And how about a big standing ovation here for our dear friend the amazing the incredible Wendy Covey for just absolutely crushing it today. She’s just an absolute Rockstar. Hey, we got fingers napping, we got clapping. So guys, lots of Virtual hugs. And high fives, check out Wendy’s website go to true marketing. When he before we cut out let’s take you know, like we’ve got my friend Phyllis, we had Marsha, Laura Swanson here today, a lot of wonderful folks that I’ve worked with in the past great manufacturers. And guys, when he and I both, you know, you are the heroes of our economy man, as manufacturers. It’s such an honor and privilege to work with you guys. You truly are the backbone of our economy here in the great United States of America. Wendy, small manufacturer 2030. Folks, you know, they’re trying to get this whole content marketing thing, you had a great suggestion like, man get the engineer would like, you know, we need a journalist major on board. If they like say like, Man, I just I don’t I don’t have that journalist. What’s like any suggestions on like, where do we align ourselves to, like, just get off the runway of like creating content, we can find that person that could interview the internal subject matter expert, or the engineer. Any suggestions? Advice?

Wendy Covey  1:09:16

Yeah, I mean, that’s what agencies are here for, and there are freelancers that do that as well. So what I look for in that person is ask for some writing samples and find out you know, what they’ve written about, Have they written highly technical content, Have they written for things that relate to applications that you solve or products you manufacture so that you know they’re going to get it more quickly the closer they are to your industry? They don’t necessarily need to have an engineering degree to do this, but they need to show that they have high aptitude for writing to technical audiences. So for instance, my writers, I have one that has her engineering undergrad and her she has an Master’s in writing, and journalism and then the rest of mine are all journalism majors. And they all do a great job. They’re very methodical, very detail oriented. It just takes someone who’s willing to put in the sweat equity to get it. Right. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  1:10:15

And that’s so critical because that you can’t have your nephew typing about some type of, you know, a technical wire harness that goes in, you know, you know, it has to be authentic. You talked about chat, GBT and AI. Like it has to be true and authentic. And again, like when these put together is rare. In fact, we just had one of your team members on our live show a couple of weeks ago. She is Morgan Norris is absolutely amazing. Incredible. very dedicated, passionate again, helping manufacturers figure out this whole thing, guys, before we wind down any other parting thoughts, questions? Comment from Karen again? The curtain Wendy, the dynamic duel, you didn’t disappoint. Looking forward to the next one. So hey, you know, when we might take this on the road are having so much fun. Yeah, let’s do it. Absolutely. So any other before I know it’s March Madness. People are like, probably I don’t. I’m not sure what time basketball starts if it already started, but Purdue doesn’t play till tomorrow I checked in. So guys, I know. We’ve got a little time. How would you advise someone that wears both a marketing and sales hat? That’s a great question. Josh. Wendy, what are your thoughts there?

Wendy Covey  1:11:20

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, one, if you wear that sales hat that helps your marketing hat, right? Because that means you’re close to the customer. You’re hearing what their concerns are their objections there, you’re getting in their head. So as you put on your marketing hat, think about how you can create content to address those frequently asked questions. And imagine as a salesperson, how much shortcut you can have. If you’re not having to answer the same thing over and over your website, your web content is doing it for you. So I think that’s actually a very powerful combo.

Curt Anderson  1:11:56

Perfect. Excellent. Yeah. And we talked about that a lot. I know our dear. Our mutual friend, my business partner, Nicole Donnelly, she calls it smarketing. Right? Like how can we get into like, marketing so guys, I know man, Wendy, what did an amazing job right smack at the top of the hour you just delivered a just priceless gems, a wealth of information, guys, for you to just really separate yourself from the pack. make your company more competitive. Stop being the best kept secret get out there. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn, check out her website, get she has guide. She has webinars, she has podcasts, her book, all sorts of valuable information just for you to win the game. Drop her note her or somebody on her team would love to talk to you guys about how they can help you win any parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share with our dean, esteemed friends, of course, I want to give a little round of applause of Purdue before we round it. I know people are cutting out. Fellas, thank you for joining us, my friend and man we had a great chat the other day. Wendy any words of wisdom parting thoughts to share with everybody before we close it out for today?

Wendy Covey  1:12:57

Yeah, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, start with one persona one application area one thing and use that as your model, create that pillar page, prove it out. And then you can repeat that success with other areas in the future.

1:13:14

Great, man,

Curt Anderson  1:13:15

what a great way to end so Hey guys, we’ve got a couple of folks, my friend Julie’s here I think I saw a couple other friends from Purdue MEP. If you’re not engaged with your local MEP, if you’re in Indiana, obviously reach out to the Purdue MEP. They can help you with just about anything. They are just incredible, an incredible resource for manufacturers. Our country is so blessed to have the manufacturing extension partnerships. If you’re coming to us, we had some friends from Texas, or coming to us or we had friends in Chicago for coming to us from another state man reach out to your local MEP. They are here to serve. They are dedicated and passionate of helping manufacturers win the day. So guys, we’re gonna cut it down. And so we will send out the the replay, we will send out the slides. And boy, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking your time. And again, one last round of applause for our dear friend Wendy Wendy. It is such an honor collaborating with you my friend. Thank you for sharing your passion expertise with us today. So we appreciate

Wendy Covey  1:14:14

you. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Curt Anderson  1:14:17

Alright guys, so hey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone. Stay safe throwing your green for tomorrow. Everybody’s everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. So have a great, wonderful weekend. Enjoy March Madness. And so we’ll talk to you guys soon. Have a great day.

1:14:40

Okay, great job, Wendy. Thank you.

Curt Anderson  1:14:43

Thank you. Thank you guys. Phyllis

1:14:45

is still here. Thank

Curt Anderson  1:14:46

you, Phyllis. Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Alan. So hey, that was awesome. Great job.

Wendy Covey  1:14:51

All right. Well, I’m happy to send out the recording in addition to