Marketing for Manufacturers

Hello! I start to see people joining. How’s everybody doing? Webinars are weird. I talked to myself.

Okay, let’s dive in. So first things first, thank you, everybody, for joining.

It is the middle of August. So I really appreciate that you are not playing hooky and going and hanging out, enjoying what’s hopefully beautiful weather where you are or not. You know, just doing regular work. You’re diving into this webinar with us. So I really appreciate that. My name is Jesse Linklater, I’m the marketing director here at Genius. We’re gonna keep the intro section really short because I added way more slides than I was supposed to.

And I better get to the presentation. Any questions, like I said, please put them in the QA button, and we’ll get to as many as we can at the end. Anything we don’t get to in the presentation, we will email. Whoever sends it will email you after and get you an answer to your question. And the presentation will be available for everybody as a video a couple of hours after. We’ll probably send it tomorrow or the next day.

So I’ll quickly mention if anybody has concerns. There are a couple of references in the images on the screen to tobacco and alcohol just in case anyone thinks we’re endorsing. We’re not. It’s just that the Mad Men image is impossible to find without a cigarette or a whiskey in it. So that’s the theme. And we’re sticking to it, regardless of the implications.

The presentation today is really focused around advice that we think can help manufacturers with their marketing. From what we’ve seen, looking at a whole bunch of companies that sort of look like our core group of customers. So you know, somewhere between 20 and 200 employees, that type of size. You know, what we’ve seen in those types of size companies. If you’re much, much bigger than that, we’re not gonna have a lot of advice here for you. If you’ve got 500 employees and you work there, or if you’re from John Deere, Bombardier, or something, nothing here for you. It’s really for small and medium-sized manufacturers. We. We looked at what we saw as the opportunities that were the quickest to implement, that needed the least overhaul or no overhaul of the resources, the people, the budgets you have.

Now, there’s a lot of things that you can do as an entry point or things that you can build on if you’re doing a little bit already.

Before you know I get going completely, and we take a look at the agenda, despite this Mad Men theme we’re really focused on multi-million-dollar advertising buys, not big flashy ad campaigns. It’s very practical stuff. So you know if you’re expecting me to be Don Draper, I’m not Don Draper. Much more whoever the guy was doing the spreadsheets on admin. So the agenda really quickly. We’re going to start with a really quick intro. We’ll look at the elements of the marketing ecosystem. Talk a bit about what we think would be good to measure and why it’s important to measure. Then we’ve got two bigger sections that are about really your website and what you could do with creating new content and blogging is one example. And the SEO, the search engine optimization that is integral to both of those things.

And then when we wrap it up, we’re really just wanted to give you some practical takeaways that you can, you know. Leave here with three things, pick and choose one of them, two of them, or three of them, that you could do right away as a kind of test.

And there are a couple of survey questions just to get a sense of who is where in the group we’re talking to today?

But we’ll dive into that a bit more as well. So the first question: do you really need to do marketing? One of the first things we all learn in marketing is companies are marketing themselves all the time, whether they like it or not, whether you mean to or not, whether you’re good at it or not marketing is communicating. Marketing is how you are presenting yourself. It’s all about how deep you go into it. So the signage on your building, that’s marketing, your Yellow Page ad, your website, your Google listing whether it has the correct info or not, your sales team, your customer relationship, all of that is marketing. The question is if you did a little bit more marketing than you might be doing now, could you get a couple more prospects a month who you can turn into customers?

Marketing at the level we’re gonna talk about is about incrementally increasing opportunities to sell, not turning you into like viral YouTube sensations, although if you can swing that by all means, go right ahead. Good idea.

This is really about, can I do a couple of little things every week, every month that are gonna just get me a few more opportunities and build my website up, my search engine optimization, and blogging up? I mentioned that we did our homework for the webinar. We looked at, again, that kind of small and medium-sized manufacturers. What we found is that almost everybody doesn’t have even a single full-time employee that’s solely concentrated on nothing but marketing. So even when people, there’s some shared marketing jobs, or there’s some like website-related jobs, or maybe some, what we call sales development jobs where they people might have outbound calling attached to their sales team or something. That’s pretty rare. A little less than 10% have a dedicated marketing person spending what half their time on marketing, or half or more, and less than one in a hundred have two or more marketing people, which that’s correct, right? Like, that’s if you have 50 employees as a manufacturing company, zero is probably the right number of marketing people. That just is good common business sense. Nobody needs four people in marketing. You know, you don’t need 8% of your company in marketing if you are that size. We did find that a lot of the companies we looked at have partnered in the past with agencies either for their website or for some ongoing work, and we know that from our customer base as well. But a lot of the things that we’re gonna focus on are really about things that you can still do in-house. Yeah, you could bring in an agency for some of this short term to do part of it or all of it. But we’re not really diving into where that’s a necessity or something that we’re going to encourage with what we’re talking about today.

So moving forward, the central question I asked was, Do you need to do this? Honestly? The answer is, probably no, you’re not going to shrivel up and die. You don’t need to do marketing. The better question is, can marketing help? And there the answer is probably yes. Marketing can usually, in most situations, help again, incremental growth to your opportunities to sell. Is it difficult? Short answer: No, marketing is not difficult. Otherwise, a lot of marketers, me included, would probably be doing something else. You can absolutely do what we’re talking about today. It should help you. It should increase your SEO. It should increase your understanding of what you’re selling, how you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, which parts of your sales process and your marketing process are working the best. And ultimately, we hope it would get you some more opportunities to sell to more customers.

Next, if I go to the next slide, we’re gonna go to our first survey question. So I’ll launch that now, and sorry, there’s a little typo, but I will launch it. It should pop up on your screens. We’re just asking if you can rate the marketing level your company is at now. Are you pros? Do you have people doing this all the time? Are you more at a rookie level, where, you know, a lot of what I’m gonna be saying today is likely new to you or somewhere in the middle? So I’ll leave that out for a little bit, just to let everybody answer, and we’ll talk a little bit about the challenge that we’re gonna go through today. I think none of this, like we have customers, for example, who, before they got Genius, had coded their own manufacturing tool or built a massive excel spreadsheet. Nothing we’re talking about today is anything like that difficult marketing. Something like SEO can be quite fiddly, right? It can be time-consuming. It can involve multiple different people on your team. But everything we’re focused on is learnable and can be executed with a bit of focus and attention.

So I’ll close the poll. It’s a pretty good range. I’d say more people in the middle. No one’s saying they’re a full-on pro, and I guess I probably wouldn’t answer that question as a full-on pro either. But there’s more than half the audience above Rookie, which is fantastic. That means I can probably adjust some things later on. And in the questions, we can definitely get a bit deeper if there’s, you know, if it’s at a medium or on the lower side level. But that’s good. Thank you, everybody, for sharing the answers there. So let me close that poll. So it’s not in my way.

Next thing is the digital marketing, we call digital marketing ecosystem. It just means the world. This is all operating in, right? Digital marketing, meaning not that traditional world of billboards and radio and things like that. It’s what we’re talking about today is all centered around the Internet for, for lack of a better word. So digital marketing, to define it, is the practice of getting prospects to your business by doing the right activities in your online world of websites, email, search engine, social media, etc., etc., etc. And it all starts with this thing right here, Google. Yes, Bing, I don’t mean to leave Bing out, Bing, and Yahoo, if people have, I don’t know how to adjust their settings on their computer and their presets. Or they have a computer virus or something. They might use Yahoo. For everybody else, it’s Google. Google’s about 90% of the search engine traffic.

Everything starts with Google, the prospects and the customers all start there. And because everything starts with Google, that really means that search engine optimization or SEO is the real center of everything. Search engine optimization is the absolute center point of people finding you, people valuing what you’re saying online, and connecting with you. You could write a lot of great stuff. But if you don’t tell Google how to read it, it can be difficult. So we’re gonna talk a lot about search engine optimization because it’s at the center. It’s really how your website connects to Google.

So your website has its little ecosystem, which is like its keyword. It’s page content. The blogs, news that you put up, all of that is part of your site. But then there’s external things that you can do. Well, some of them hijack that SEO world a little bit.

So things like, if you do email marketing or search engine marketing, which is paying to advertise on Google and LinkedIn and anywhere else that people are searching for things, or web ads, you know, on a broader scope. I know a lot of our customers do have pretty good business built around web ads. But it also includes things like YouTube, social media, and more. It’s a big soup, right? It’s a big interconnected soup that influences, or maybe a stew. I don’t know how you think of these things; they influence how successful your marketing is, how many people you could possibly reach, and doing that soup building a little bit better, a little bit more care, a little bit more attention will eventually have global, broader results. It’s kind of a baby steps world. So let’s look at why. We’re gonna go to measurement now and look at why this stuff is so important in the first place.

I’m just checking. We’re good. I just keep doing time check. So I don’t have to start talking faster than I’m already talking.

The place to start for us once we say, okay, digital marketing is important. Marketing is important. Marketing can help, for us as marketers, the important thing is always, what can I measure, and why am I measuring that? Because that’s gonna help us.

It’s gonna help us understand, okay, if I’m low in this category, something’s missing here. If I don’t measure it, I don’t even know I’m low. If I do measure it, the better I measure, the more likely I am to understand that a tweak to this element of it or, you know, a change in that part of it is what might help me. Marketing has some informed guesswork where you don’t know exactly. You have to kind of play around.

You have to test a little bit. Put a lot of things out there. The more you put out there, the more you publish, the better off you’re gonna be. But you can definitely get in this thing. So we measure so that we have clear numbers. Yes, we can make better, smarter, faster decisions because we’ve got numbers to back those things up.

What we’re discussing again today, really, we’re not gonna tell you to have this massive pile of analytics and data that you need to hire somebody full time to look at. Not, we’re talking about not necessary. We’re gonna keep it simple. We’re gonna keep it results-based.

So, you know, you can look at a couple things and build on that. These might be things from what I saw from the poll. You might be ahead of that already, or at least in the middle of that. That’s good. We can help you build on that, too. We’re also aiming at people who sell to. You know the way that manufacturers sell is much different than the way, you know, Genius markets ourselves. Or these different in some ways. You know.

A lot of manufacturers are selling to a core group of customers that you could add more to it, absolutely. But you’ve got a lot of customer sales, too. So we want to make sure that the solutions we offer are relevant to that.

We grouped it into two blocks. There’s the sales funnel. That is your leads, your quotes, your opportunities, however you want to call that, and your sales, and then the conversion rate metrics that go around that.

And then web metrics. So, you know, your website traffic. When we look at that, it’s kind of Google analytics. When, well, I was gonna say back in the madman days. But really, when I started marketing in the nineties up to about 2005, there was a joke. That was the joke: Half my marketing is working great. Half of my marketing is bringing in new customers every day, the other half sucks, and it’s a complete waste of money. I just wish I knew which half was which.

And that was real. That was our real life all the time. It was like 800 billboards and thousands of TV ads and all this stuff. But you had no idea of knowing what was capturing the most attention or the right attention, and what was converting well. With digital marketing, we have a better understanding. It’s not perfect. We have a better understanding.

So it’s kind of a little bit like Genius job costing, right? We now have broad, reliable metrics that we can apply. And we can say, okay, that’s bringing me a result. There’s a benefit to doing that. It’ll help you understand what maybe would be good to do next, what maybe you could do better.

If you add more dollars, what might happen. And more importantly, it’ll also tell you what’s not working at all, what you need to put a lot more effort into, or stop doing altogether. So again, if we track, if we test, we measure, we’re going to learn more.

So I’m gonna start with this what we call a marketing funnel or a sales funnel. You’ll have different terminologies, possibly. And we’ll try to make it relevant to you. And again, it’s this works if we’re talking about customer pool that you’re selling to and adding new potential customers into the top. Or if you’re always selling half of your business is selling to people you’d never met before, companies you’ve never met before.

So if we build the funnel, it should be called like a strainer more than a funnel, because a funnel, everything you pour into the top comes out the bottom. This thing is always leaking out the side, right? You’re only getting a smaller and smaller amount from the top to the bottom.

So prospects go in the top.

A portion of those good prospects will turn into leads, you’re right. People. You can actually sell to. The bad ones, you might get to recycle later on, or they might just be lost, might not be good fits. A portion of the good leads move to the next stage. They become your quotes, opportunities. Some call them deals. That’s the terminology we use; it just means the people that you could or you are in negotiation with, right? You’ve given them something that says, “Here’s what we think this could be,” and you go from there.

Obviously, the last part is the simplest, or hopefully the biggest part: customers. So you go from leads to your quotes and opportunities, and then at the bottom, you have customers that you’ve sold. And a lot of your worlds, you’ll get to recycle and give a lot more quotes to your past sales. That’s excellent! We’ll cover a little bit about that forward and how to kind of boost that. But when you’re measuring and tracking, tracking your funnel, you have something that you can alter, you can make improvements to.

So we’re going to ask now, I’ll ask the survey at the end, actually, a survey at the end of this section. So really quickly, with leads, there’s a lot of different things I can measure. And the more information I have, the more flexible my problem solving can be at the end, and the more targeted I can be about how to get more of them. So you can count leads; that’s great, right? You gotta figure out they came on May first. You need to put a pin in them. We use that terminology. But you put a pin in them to say, “Okay, I got this lead on May first. Here’s where I got them from.”

So you can learn and learn and learn about your lead. The more you have, the better off you’re gonna be. So you can track their quality, their type, the prospect they were, the source they came from. Did they come from an existing relationship you had? Did they come from a customer referral or a partner? Did they come from the website? Did they come from a certain page on your website? The amount you can track there is really big. You don’t, again, it’s baby steps. If you’re doing a little bit now, try to do more. If you’re not doing any, you might, some people might only be tracking leads. Yet you might only be looking at quotes. So there’s a step to take, no matter where you are.

I wouldn’t recommend trying to do everything all at once. It’s neither necessary nor that valuable. It’s only, you know, if you build up a baseline or a base, then you can add to that rather than trying to get there and overhauling stuff all at once. It’s not that necessary. But again, the more you track, the more you’re gonna know.

In the middle of that funnel, then you get these opportunities or quotes, the leads that you have come to you or you’ve reached out to. Let’s say, “Okay, let’s build this.” You’re creating a deal with them. You’re creating an opportunity to sell, and once we’re tracking that, I’m sure most, if not all, of you are tracking this. It’s very rare for us to find somebody who wasn’t.

So if you’re tracking the opportunities or the quotes and you’re tracking leads, we now have the first conversion rate we can measure because the funnel is all about what’s happening, good and bad, between the lead stage, the quote stage, and the customer stage.

So really simple math, you just divide your opportunities by your leads, and you get this percentage, and that is your conversion rate. Conversion rates are a great tool to measure your sales team’s success, but also the health of your marketing, the health of your branding as a whole, the quality of your quoting process.

You’ll get a number. The number doesn’t tell you things; you have to read into the number. But for a lot of people, I think that lead to quote level might be close to a hundred percent, or even a hundred percent. You know, there might not be a lot of time that you’re not getting a chance to make a quote, but for others that we’ve looked at, that’s closer to 40 to 60 percent. So anything you can do to increase that obviously will increase hopefully the number of customers you sign at the end.

Which brings us to sales. So I guarantee, I think I can guarantee that everybody is using sales as the number of new customers as something they are tracking and measuring.

And obviously, there’s a lot to track with that that we’re not talking about here, dollars, you know, job cost, all of these things are important, too, if we’re just talking marketing. Really, what we’re looking at here is more conversion rates, the number of, we call an opportunity or a quote to sale conversion rate. So you just divide the number of sales by the number of opportunities.

And then, if you’re really wanting another deeper metric, you look at the number of your lead to sale conversion rate, the number of sales that turn into a number of leads. Sorry, that turn into sales. When you get that level of depth, you really have a full picture. It doesn’t take anything more than that to give you a full picture of your sales process. Yeah, there’s a, again, it’s good data in, good data out.

If you’re relatively new to it or, more importantly, if you don’t have hundreds of hours of time to spend on it, a whole bunch of Google Analytics is too deep. It’s got too much consequence and too much water under the bridge, kind of thing for you to really make a difference in. If you say, “My bounce rate is terrible. I really want to fix my bounce rate.” Okay, great thing to fix, but it takes a lot. It takes a lot of effort; it takes a lot of time. And even then, it’s hard to make a really big impact, especially in certain industries. Your bounce rate might just be a matter of the people that find your page.

So we’re going to show you some web metrics. We think you can put a little bit of effort in and shift the needle on pretty quickly by focusing on the search engine optimization side of your page. So the three things that you can track, and a lot of you, again, from what I’ve seen, a lot of you are probably further ahead than this already.

But if you track your organic traffic, that’s really measuring your search engine optimization. So if you’re going to start trying to improve your search engine optimization, the first thing you want to say is, “I had 1,000 visitors this month. 200 of them came from organic traffic,” meaning they didn’t go in and type, I’ll use one of our customers, they didn’t go in and type “Jennison Corporation” or “Jennison Manufacturing” into the search engine. They went in and typed, you know, “job shop manufacturing Pittsburgh” or “job shop manufacturing Western Pennsylvania.” Organic traffic is not free by any means. It’s not free, but it is something that you can build just through SEO, just through effort, just through intelligence. You don’t have to pay for it.

Ads, it’s not the traffic that’s coming through ads or any other way, and as your base grows, especially with what I see from manufacturers as a whole, you can get ahead of your competition because they’re not doing it that well yet. So if you’re already doing it well, you’re probably seeing good numbers there; effort there will pay off.

The second thing you want to track is overall traffic because there’s other things you’re going to do to bring people to your site. And you want to be able to say what percentage that organic traffic is making up at any given time.

And the next thing is just simple. You just want to know what your top 10 keywords are. That might change. Some of you might be top 50. Some of you might be top 5. But you want to know what keywords, and again, a keyword is the choice words that people are putting into Google.

For the vast majority of manufacturers, it’s often best to partner with an agency for SEO because it can be complex and time-consuming. Now, there’s an approach you might want to consider, which is more of a content-driven SEO approach. And this can be a really great fit for manufacturers.

So, what’s content-driven SEO? Well, it’s about creating valuable, relevant content that your target audience is searching for. It involves identifying the keywords and topics that matter most to your potential customers and then creating content around those keywords. This content can take various forms, such as blog posts, articles, videos, or infographics.

Now, the key is to consistently produce high-quality content that not only educates but also engages your audience. It should address their pain points, answer their questions, and provide solutions. The more valuable and relevant your content is, the more likely it is to rank well in search engine results.

So, let’s break down the steps involved in a content-driven SEO approach:

Keyword Research: Start by researching relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is using when searching for products or services like yours. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to find these keywords.

Content Creation: Develop high-quality content around these keywords. Your content should be informative, well-written, and visually appealing. Consider using a variety of content formats to cater to different preferences.

Optimize for SEO: Ensure that your content is optimized for search engines. This includes using the target keyword strategically in your content, optimizing meta tags, headers, and images, and ensuring fast page loading times.

Publish and Promote: Publish your content on your website and promote it through various channels, including social media, email marketing, and industry forums. The goal is to get your content in front of your target audience.

Measure and Analyze: Use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your content. Monitor your organic traffic, keyword rankings, and user engagement. Analyze what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments accordingly.

Consistency: Content-driven SEO is an ongoing effort. To see long-term results, you need to consistently produce high-quality content and refine your strategy based on data and feedback.

Now, content-driven SEO might sound like a lot of work, and it can be, but it’s also a highly effective approach for manufacturers. It positions you as an industry expert, builds trust with your audience, and can lead to more qualified leads and conversions.

So, consider whether this approach aligns with your goals and resources. It’s a strategy that can pay off in the long run and help you stand out in a competitive market.

I would encourage people to go local because of the SEO. It’s better if you can look people in the eye or have face-to-face interactions, know them, understand where they work, and be aware of their operations. There are many SEO companies out there without fixed physical addresses. Essentially, they just have a website, and who knows where they really are?

You might receive great service from such companies, or you might not. So the more connected and close you can be to your SEO service provider, the better off you’re going to be.

I would say that investing something like $10,000 into SEO will yield a ton of value. Even with $5,000, you’ll still get significant value. The return on investment is evident, regardless of your budget. Of course, it can go up from there.

I’m putting this information up on the page for your reference. It’s here for when you go back to it, or we’ll include it in the email we send to you.

Now, there are steps that you can follow to build optimization on your website. If you choose the do-it-yourself (DIY) route, you’ll receive more than just a starting point. The following is a basic outline of what you can do. It’s sequential, meaning each step helps the previous one. Some aspects are mandatory, while others serve as building blocks. The more you can accomplish, the better your results will be.

One important thing to note about SEO is that while it’s aimed at machines, it’s essential to consider human readers first. The people who read the content on your website are much more important than Google or other search engines. You must provide valuable content that engages your visitors and compels them to do business with you. We often encounter websites that prioritize SEO over user experience, but it’s crucial to think about people first.

This brings us to the topic of blogging, or more broadly, creating different types of content. Blogging is one of the easiest and most condensed ways to create content. You can also explore options like ebooks, webinars, or podcasts. Blogging is an excellent choice because it’s easy to publish regularly, and it doesn’t require extensive resources.

While your website’s SEO capabilities are limited by the number of pages, blogs allow you to target new keywords with every post. If you notice that your competitors are ranking highly for specific keywords, you can attempt to compete by creating a blog post targeting those keywords. Google favors blogs due to their freshness, and if executed correctly, they can greatly improve your search rankings. Moreover, quality blogs keep visitors on your site longer if they find engaging and informative content.

Blogging provides numerous benefits for your marketing strategy without requiring a complete overhaul of your website.

Now, let’s explore some blog topic ideas. It’s not enough to suggest that you should start blogging; you need ideas to get started:

Follow a Job from Start to Finish: Show prospective customers how a job flows through your shop. You can present it as a step-by-step process, helping readers understand the journey from inception to the finished product.

Customer Profiles: Share stories from satisfied customers. People enjoy hearing what others have to say about your products or services, and these profiles build trust.

Year in Review: Reflect on the past year, particularly relevant if you’re in an industry like pressure vessel manufacturing. Summarize key developments, milestones, and achievements.

Trade Show Diary: If you attend trade shows, create a day-by-day diary of your experience. Share insights, discoveries, and noteworthy interactions.

Interviews: Feature specialists from your team discussing their roles, expertise, or industry-related topics. Interviews can cover a wide range of subjects.

When it comes to writing and finding someone to create content, keep in mind that they don’t necessarily need a journalism degree. Grammar and writing style are less critical; the key is to engage your audience and provide valuable information. Publishing content regularly is more important, so get your content out there and in front of both your audience and search engines like Google.

Gonna close the blog section on this. Somebody has to do the writing, right? Like you, you’ve got a, you gotta publish. But if you put out three, or let’s say, one article a quarter, right, for a year, that’s four pieces of content that weren’t there before.

You can write a blog in an hour. You can write a blog in four hours. If you’re putting eight to twelve to sixteen hours, that’s probably too much.

You know, it’s a limited place. You can go get agencies to do this for you, 30, maybe 50 cents a word, a dollar a word for stuff that’s really, really good. You can pay for it as well, right, as long as they know what they’re talking about.

A blog can be 500 words. Google likes about 1,200. But you get value starting at about 500, 700. So it’s worth doing that sort of point. If you’re at a 200-word blog, Google almost doesn’t read it.

Photos and videos help. The more you know, it gives you more to engage within your story as well. And then that optimization side. So if you’re going to publish a blog, you’ve got to do these SEO steps that SEMRush or Moz will tell you exactly in detail, and we’re going to share those links with you. But it’ll tell you exactly in detail. First, you do this, then you do this, then you do the metadata, then you, you know, tag the photos. There’s a lot of steps. About six to seven steps. Takes about five minutes. Maybe the first time, it’ll take you ten. But then, later on, it’s just really easy to do.

Okay, that’s it for the core of what we’re going to do. That’s new. And I feel like I flew through it. But I ended seven minutes after I wanted to. So there are three things that we think we can leave you with today that if you pick one of them, if it’s going to help, you know, you can move forward.

So the first thing is, wherever you’re at with your keywords today. Let’s say you’re at the basic point of your keywords.

Get a free trial of SEMRush or Moz. There are a lot of different tools you can use.

Get a free trial and take a look at your keywords. Take a look at how your keywords rank. You can use Google Analytics for this a bit as well, which you’ll likely have installed. But take a look at what those keywords are, and just like a starting point. Then you can go from there, go to Google and say, ‘What do I think my customers are searching for?’ See where you show up. See where your competitors show up. That’s going to give you a bit of a roadmap. So that’s number one, start with keywords, and sorry, I forgot to change the slide. But that’s just like what SEMRush’s keyword tool looks like in the end. It’ll give you some help there to pick three things that you can write blogs on.

Commit to writing as many of those as you think feasible.

Maybe, then subtract one, so you don’t push yourself like crazy. But let’s say you picked three, and you thought you could write one in September, one in October, one in November.

Make it a plan. Come up with the keywords that could possibly fit in there.

And then assign people. Write them yourself, whatever it is, but try to get some blogs published for your site. I’ll say some of your sites that we’ve looked at, and I don’t know everybody who’s on here, but like that we’ve looked at. So we looked at like a hundred.

Some of them had blogs that are in the backend. We can see that they’re there waiting to get turned on, others don’t. But normally, with your paid structure, if you do your website in-house or your agency, it’s really quick and easy to set up a blog and turn it on.

And again, we’re just saying baby steps, right? Come up with three ideas, write three blogs, publish them on the website. The last thing is to measure what you can measure. So because you’re all at different levels, the goal here is to go one step further than you are now with how you understand and measure that sales funnel. So if you have, say, let’s say you just have quotes and quotes and customers. Now, you’re not tracking leads yet.

You’re not tracking leads. Add that in. That’s the first thing to do. How do you track leads? How do I put a pin in them? How do I get that done? If you have them all and you don’t have your conversion rates, then start doing the math on the conversion rates and start tracking those. Like, depending on how much you sell, usually every month is more than enough, every quarter, for some companies, is going to be enough as well. It’s not daily. Those metrics aren’t changing that much daily. You want to track them over a longer period of time. But go one step further than you are now. Measure more. Let’s say you feel like, ‘I’m measuring a lot.’

Then it’s okay. How do I dig into those numbers more and get more results back from them?

That was a lot, like, for me talking nonstop to myself in my office. It’s a weird experience.

But I have time for questions, where we have time together for questions. So if anybody has a question, and there’s some that are in here already, I will get to those. I’m just going to read through. But if you have more questions, please, by all means, put your hand up and ask or just submit them through the Q&A. And then we’ll have them there if we don’t get a chance to get to them today. So the first question I can answer off the top of my head is:

Why does Google like blogs so much? Okay, so Google loves blogs. So three reasons. I touched on a little bit about time on site. Google really values what human beings do. So time on site is really, if you go from a minute and five seconds to a minute and thirty-five seconds, the reward for that is quite big.

Second, blogs are always keyword-rich if they’ve been SEO’d, even remotely. Well, they’re keyword-rich. So Google likes that. A lot of home pages, especially, cannot be keyword-rich. Even feature pages or product pages, whatever they are, it’s tough to make them keyword-rich.

And then freshness. Google just likes new content. Google likes whatever is most recent. Google values that. And that is growing and growing. Like Google promised in 2015 that that was going to be reduced, reverse that decision right away, and it’s gotten more and more all the time. You’ll see people that blog a lot. They’ll rewrite a blog that they wrote last year. They’ll rewrite it the year after, and just continue to rewrite it because Google likes things that are published in the last twelve months. And that’s because readers like things that were published in the last twelve months. You don’t need to be that wild. Google just likes blogs in general is the thing to take away there.

This one I think I can do. We got the SEO on our site done by an outside company. How can we know if they did a good job? Good question. We… We did this exact thing. So if you’re a true beginner, the best way is to get an SEO audit done by a professional company. SEO audits, again. Hire somebody local, hire somebody that is in your, you know, tri-state area that you kind of get a referral for, you know, hire who your companies you’re friendly with have used. That’s a good idea.

But when you’re working with people on an SEO audit, they’re going to tell you, okay, the company you hired did a good job. Here’s the things that are great, here’s the things that need work. They’ll also be able to really quickly identify if the job was bad, right? Like if it was really bad. An audit will tell you really, really quickly, and audits are relatively inexpensive.

You can even, again, use SEMrush. If you’re not a pure noob to it, you can use SEMrush or Moz to do your own SEO audit, and you’ll get red light, yellow light, green light all the way through and kind of know. But if you’re talking about fixing it, finding true gaps that you can adjust, depends on your level of skill. But an agency can help.

If everybody’s okay, I think it’s still, yeah, there’s about five minutes left, so I’ll try one more.

Everybody still with me? Great!

This one is probably the no here, so it’s a numbers question. So speaking directly to my spreadsheet brain, we have a clear idea of our conversion rates and our sales numbers. Anything else we can measure that goes a bit deeper? Oh, okay, I got it. So is there anything else we can measure that goes a bit deeper? Okay, if we stick to the sales side of the conversation and just think about it from a sales perspective.

You’re going to get pointed to areas of opportunity, or whatever you want to call them. You’re going to get red flags and green flags. So if you’re measuring a lot and you have good conversion rates already, you’ll get rep-by-rep numbers. Let’s say you have five sales reps. Conversion rates, well, you know, salespeople hate when I say this, but it gives you a batting order or a lineup of who’s converting the best, who’s maybe not.

You’ll also be able to compare that. Okay, this type of rep sells better to this type of customer.

This type, this rep sells better to, you know, leads that come through the web. You’ll be able to identify. The more you know again, the more you’ll be able to identify.

This is one where I worry that I could take up another hour talking about this. I’ll try not to.

We really find like… I’ll give an example from our perspective. So, if we look at lead to open deal, meaning lead to opportunity, we had one guy say last, ‘I don’t care, right? That’s not what you care about. You care about customers.’ But what we were able to show is that we did have just a bit of a gap there, especially with one or two people, and it wasn’t them. It wasn’t the salesperson. It was the type of lead source. They were getting a certain type of web lead as a bigger part of their lead mix, and that was hurting their overall results. So it saved… I mean, we were able to make an adjustment that saved us a lot of money, saved us a lot of time, saved the salespeople that were getting these leads a ton of time. And it didn’t cost us any customers at the end. It made us much more efficient, much more effective. So, there… the deeper that you can go, right? If you want to dig deeper and you already have that strong base, I’d look at those conversion rates to start. See, ‘Okay, this one’s low or lower than I think it should be.’

Here we go, I wanna go after this. And then it’s a matter of digging into your own data. That’s how to really go deeper. Right? Those numbers are, especially if they’re new. If you’re just putting them in place.

40% versus 50%. How do you know if you only see it’s 40? Now, how do you know if you need to make it up to 50, or if you’re doing great, that really should be 30, and you’re just outperforming everything by 25.

There’s a… there’s a way for you to measure and make changes, but it’s not inside the number itself. It’s inside what created the number? The number just gives you the flag to go after it. For us, probably tracking over one year or two years is the… the starting point to get where you’re comfortable with what your number should be.

But I, you know, from what we look at for manufacturing, you’re… you’re doing a lot more volume than a company like us selling the software we sell. Some of you are, you know, doing about the same as us. So if you are, it’s about a year, even two years, and you’d be really confident. But you can also benchmark. I think it should be this. So this is gonna be the starting point. If I’m over, good. I’ll reset the number. If under, I’ll say, ‘What can we do to get up to that number as a first step?’

So that’s all the time that we have. I want to thank everybody for taking time out to be with us and listen to me for an hour talking. I have to go have a nap now.

Every question that came in we will get back to. We will send you the deck as well, and some links to… you know, some of the tools we’ve talked about, so that you’ll have those as well.

Really appreciate it. I hope everybody has a great rest of your week and a great rest of your summer, and take care. Thanks very much for joining. Have a great rest of your day. Bye, bye.