Creating a Complete Digital Strategy for a Leading B2B ManufacturerCreating a Complete Digital Strategy for a Leading B2B Manufacturer

Creating a Complete Digital Strategy for a Leading B2B Manufacturer Transcript:

Announcer: You are listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: Doing well and excited per normal for today’s conversation. I think it’s gonna be a good one. Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. And a nice opportunity to chat with a fellow Canadian as well, so that’s always fun. 

Jeff White: We don’t get to do that very often. No, it’s true. We are often interviewing folks from all over the world, mostly the U.S., but Canada doesn’t always come into play, and it is damn cold up here. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. Yeah, we can keep warm with good conversation, and talking about, this notion of, the transition into manufacturing marketing from more technical endeavours which is almost the reverse of how we normally beat up on this subject.

Because often we’ll talk about how, so much of the B2B marketing landscape is shaped by SaaS, which has very little to do with manufacturing. So we’ll kick on the technology angle from that side. But this is a different different approach. So I’m looking forward to it. 

Jeff White: Yeah, me as well. So joining us today is Andrew Penley. Andrew is the digital marketing director at Pack-Smart Automation. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Andrew. 

Andrew Penley: Thanks for having me guys. Very excited to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Andrew. Yeah, it’s awesome to have you on the show. First off, what is Pack-Smart? What do you do? Packaging automation.

Andrew Penley: Yeah. This, it’s a great question. I like to throw that question out to anybody I meet for the first time too, to see what they can pull out from Pack-Smart, but. At the end of the day, Pack-Smart specializes in designing, engineering, and manufacturing configurable end-to-end custom solutions for basically any brand or client in the world.

We focus a lot on intelligent premium packaging and print finishing. And we deal with industries from telecom, secure payments, specialty printed finishing and intelligent packaging technologies and big in the cosmetic and pharma as well. So yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. And Andrew, tell us about you. What did you do before and how did you end up at Pack-Smart? 

Andrew Penley: Oh, geez. Oh, I think my marketing journey to where I am now is. It’s shaped a little bit differently than I would say most people in the industry or who were sitting in my chair. I actually started out in the casino industry. So that’s where I started my marketing journey marketing tournaments, poker tournaments, blackjack tournaments and the internal scope of the casino to big players and the people who were coming in on a regular basis. That kind of sparked my interest in taking a product and running with it and delivering it to a mass. And then from there the 2008 kind of financial crisis came ahead and casinos were no longer hiring. It was okay, what do I do now? Casinos aren’t hiring. Nobody’s hiring at the moment. So I shifted and went back to school and that’s where I focused on, the marketing, the strategy, the web development the search engine optimization, and just encompassed everything that marketing had to throw at me from a digital perspective over the years, I worked at different agencies working like web development agencies, e-commerce agencies.

I moved into then SaaS-driven solutions, like software, and enterprise software. And I stayed there for probably a good 10, 12 years. And then, looking for a transition and, obviously things happen in business and that’s where I am now in the manufacturing world. So yeah, going from casino to agencies, to SaaS, to manufacturing is definitely a crazy scope for where I come from.

Jeff White: Yeah, you’ve definitely covered a lot of bases. It’s almost moving from one crease to the next. Oh, never mind. We’re not going to get into that today, but tell us a bit more about how you’ve come into Pack-Smart and what your sort of first work there has been. You’ve been there for about a year now?

Andrew Penley: Yeah, just about a year and four months now. But the journey of finding, a new career or a new pivot. It was interesting. There weren’t any manufacturing companies on my kind of board when I was initially looking for a change. And I came across Pack-Smart. I knew they were looking for, help in the digital world. They’d never really had a marketing department before. They’ve never had leaders in the marketing world or thought leadership. So I looked at the business, I looked at the product and as a marketer. Looking at the product is probably one of the most important things.

Because when you look at that product, you’re going to come up with your own thoughts and ideas and how you’re going to work that product. How you’re going to sell it, how you’re going to talk about it. And when I looked at the automation, like the robotics side of things. I was stumped. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to position it or market it or talk about it. So in my mind, I was like, this is something I just don’t know. I’ve never, I don’t know this product. I don’t know this company. I don’t know where this can, where this goes. So that was pretty much the main pivot that made me jump into Pack-Smart was that I actually don’t know how to market this and I want to learn how to market it with all my experience coming in, I thought I would be able to do a good job with it.

And over the year and a half, I think we’ve made some good strides. We’ve implemented a lot of, digital marketing activities and initiatives that have never existed here at Pack-Smart before. So not only is there an implementation phase of this, there’s also an educational phase of this as well, because, the company is about 50, 60 people and everybody kind of deserves to know what’s going on. So implementing the things while we’re implementing them and then educating people while we implement them is also very important. From our blogs to our advertising to our CRM lead gen campaigns and all the dynamic content that we’re pushing. None of this has existed before.

I think we’ve made really great headway in pushing kind of our thought leadership product out there. We’ve definitely made huge strides in kind of brand awareness and getting our name out there. We see that in the organic traffic. We see that in the sales cycles that we have going on right now. So it’s just, putting in more work and then looking at the data and the analytics and, just striving to make it all better. 

Carman Pirie: So many aspects of this that I want to touch on, but I guess first things first, I’m wondering, what was, what’s been the lowest hanging fruit that you’ve discovered here in this first year and a half? Like you said, it happens a lot, people come into an organization that hasn’t had a strong marketing bent in the past and there’s a lot of net new things being implemented. If you had to point to what’s driven the most immediate benefit, what would you say? 

Andrew Penley: Honestly, I would say it’s the one thing that most marketers and most departments and most companies overlook. And that’s the technical components of all of your marketing strategies and anything that goes into that. And what I mean by that is it’s very basic. Your website your CRM, things like that. There was no kind of, no technical understanding of how things worked, how a website could connect to a CRM, or how an email could connect to a personalization or a person. There was just almost no technical understanding of how analytics worked, and how to extract data to make good decisions and data-driven decisions. So I think outside of all the other basic marketing things from adding a blog to a website. Advertising account-based marketing. The biggest thing was the technology and implementing the technology and making people understand how the technology all works, not just marketing, but from procurement to sales and how they all tie in together and how they should be talking together, honestly, that has basically changed the kind of thought process of how the executives do things here, department heads do things here because now we have data to help drive our decision making that never existed before. And nobody ever thought about it in that way. 

Jeff White: What’s been, the main challenge in terms of obviously they’ve brought you in and are interested in your perspective and want you to bring about change within the organization? What would you say is the thing that has been the most difficult to communicate the importance of to the executive at the company? 

Andrew Penley: I would say thought leadership because everybody has something to say. Everybody has an opinion on a trend or a topic that’s happening in the industry. And this is, here’s a little snippet and I’m every marketer who’s listening to this will just be wowed. The company has been around since 1995. They’ve done a good job positioning themselves and staying relevant in the market. Their only lead gen tool for, I would say the last decade-plus, has been YouTube. So just imagine you’re pulling in all of your clientele. You’re staying relevant. You’re staying within the top 10. With robotics providers or many packaging automation providers in the world Solely by YouTube videos, right? And that was the lead mainly gen bucket. 

Before I came in, from 1995 basically the whole way up till now And so when I talk about that, people are just floored when I say they don’t have any SEO. They don’t have any optimization techniques coming in. The only thing driving any type of lead acquisition is their YouTube videos, which have actually kept them at the forefront of the industry. So bringing in all of the new tactics on how to optimize websites, content, and thought leadership was the big one because Pack-Smart, we know we want to be one of the only people in the industry that do the turnkey solutions from the machinery to the software and the connection between the two.

So we do both. We do have the machinery here. We have a software team that builds the software. So because we have, the turnkey solution, we need to be a thought leader in the industry. We have to stay on top of all the trends and what people are talking about. And I find it’s, and I was expelling that through the executive team very often because when in the industry, people aren’t necessarily attaching themselves to an authority figure when something happens in the industry, as like an example, Walmart’s RFID push that happened recently you can’t sell anything on the Walmart shelves without having an RFID sticker tag within your packaging.

A lot of people didn’t know that when people would read a blog. Oh, okay I should look into that or maybe we should call somebody about that nobody was saying look you need to do this. You must do this because if you don’t do this then these are the consequences of falling behind by not implementing this trend or these thoughts so that’s one thing I’ve really implemented here at Pack-Smart was when we do prevent, put out any type of content. We want to be at the forefront of thought leadership. We want people to come to Pack-Smart and be like, these guys know what they’re talking about. They’re at the front, they’re driving all of the right information to the right people. And they’re correct. 

Carman Pirie: Andrew, the YouTube videos that have been powering the league gen to date that obviously hard to argue with that success, 

Jeff White: If you had to pick a channel 20 years ago to get on board with. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: I guess my question is most of that content, is it more like capabilities driven or like this is how the stuff actually works, showing it in action, case study type stuff? 

Andrew Penley: I’d say that’s the videos, that’s where they did a lot of back of the day. So they would do a double-edged sword of here’s the capabilities. This is what it looks like when it’s running. This is the final product that could come through. And then they layer a different video with, some commentary onto it. Not just showing the system, but actually putting a pain point or how to solve a certain particular thing within that industry was really important for Pack-Smart at the beginning as well.

Those videos don’t necessarily hit hard or hit home today so becoming a thought leader and really telling people how it is. This is the system that helps you. This is what’s going on in the industry this is the final result. I think those are the new videos that we’re pushing ourselves. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah that’s why I was trying to draw the distinction about the pivot that you’re seeing so that’s it’s helpful to understand that you’re telling these folks you have really amazing capabilities. They build amazing systems. They’re smart as hell. You know what they’re talking about. And then you’re saying, okay, cool. Now give me your opinion about where this is going, and where this is best used. Having a point of view. Yeah. 

Andrew Penley: I have a point of view and I think it’s especially and that kind of position to the transition from software to manufacturing, where when I look at trying to sell a machine, if I look at kind of one of our basic machines and I’m like, who’s my target audience, who am I pushing this towards? Who do I want to buy this? It’s not just putting it out there, having people come and look, oh yeah, I’m going to buy that. You have to, in my opinion, you have to add value to it. You have to add a pain point to it. Or what are those FOMO components to show this system does better than most out there. And this is why you need it. Not just a capability, not just a technology video, but a technology video layered with, pain point commentary that helps the user actually see oh, yeah, I’m experiencing that’s the outcome that this machine. Oh, I need that I need to talk to somebody about that.

Jeff White: Are you seeing? That content often being the place where people get the news, like we have a number of packaging clients and we’ve had a number of packaging manufacturers on the show and there are regulations that are happening in the U.S. and in Canada and other things around recyclability and all of that. And oftentimes it’s the marketer at the manufacturing organization that creates the packaging or creates the machines that create the packaging, who are the ones who are saying, Hey guys, are you aware of this thing that’s coming? And you need to watch out for it. Are you the bearer of that news for a lot of these folks?

Andrew Penley: That’s what I’m trying. That’s how I’m trying to position Pack-Smart. I want us to be, I put it on myself to at least two to three times a week, push out a thought leadership article that, cements Pack-Smart as one of those publication models that, people want to come to. To get their news from, to make sure that they’re making the right decisions when it comes to picking the right materials, picking the right machinery, picking the right machine for the application. We want, I want to be the main spot for people to go to, for sure. 

Carman Pirie: You mentioned earlier how the company is one of the few that kind of blends the expertise on the equipment side and the robotic side, et cetera, with the software. And that’s certainly not a low-tech organization from the sounds of things. How much is that kind of higher technology bent of the organization? How much do you think that’s helped create the till the soil, if you will, prep the ground for you and your work?

Andrew Penley: I think that’s obviously, that’s one of the main reasons why I came into Pack-Smart is I had that software experience. So they wanted my kind of expertise and the enterprise understanding of how to bring this to market in a more robust fashion. And I think Pack-Smart having the machinery and the software side of things, puts them in a better place than I would say most companies who don’t have the software component because it allows us to make changes dynamically on the fly to meet certain regulations, certain industry changes. If the customer has a different product or new product, they need to make changes through the software. There’s no third party you have to go to, to manage that software. There’s no, so I find when people come and use Pack-Smart’s machinery when we have that conversation, we have the software to help you track and trace, create campaigns and the site central to manage your entire production lines.

It doesn’t matter if you have five different manufacturing plants. You can control them all in one spot. So when we have those conversations with people, I think it’s that extra level of value that we bring to the table. We obviously implement that with those, conversations at the very beginning of our sales conversation. So that people are aware that if they are looking for those track and trace capabilities, those site central capabilities, or whatever software components are that they’re looking for that we have them, or if they want something, we can build it. We do pride ourselves on being the full custom kind of provider from technology to systems to software, especially with the track and trace kind of software methodologies coming out now, track and trace, especially in e-commerce with smart labels is becoming a bigger and bigger thing. And we’re at the forefront of that because we have the software to help drive those initiatives. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. It was just, it seemed to me, that kind of environment would be more accepting of more digital marketing initiatives. They would get it a little bit more than somebody that’s just pure industrial if you will.

Andrew Penley: It’s easier to tell a story too if you think about it, telling a story about a product, not Nike shoes or some clothing, it’s pretty easy to connect a person, an emotion with a person and a thing and tell that story from beginning to end. But with a machine, how do you tell a story about a machine? And I think the software really helps us tell that story because we can connect the beginning, the manufacturing and the supply chain level, we can connect that conversation, that story with the machine and the operators on the floor who are dealing with the machine. And then we can connect the consumer level thing at the end of that conversation about this is how it was produced and manufactured through procurement. This is how it was done on the floor. And then once it’s shipped out, we have the ability to track, the consumer side of things, the consumer engagement side of things. So we can tell the story right from, the concept through manufacturing right to the end consumer. I think that really helps us tell our story as well.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I like the idea that the fact that the solution has a software layer allows you to talk about a lot of the other pain points that the overall solution solves that otherwise may be a bit invisible to most people other than say the operator of a piece of equipment or whatever.

Andrew Penley: Exactly. So just imagine you have a machine being built, you have your operators and your machinist building the machine, but our software guys can go down, plug into it boom, make changes, right? And so we can really optimize our entire workflow and processes just by having that software component here.

Jeff White: Do you find that your background on the software side of things allowed you to get your head around that quicker than potentially some other marketers? 

Andrew Penley: I would say around the marketers and some sales guys too. Yeah, because I have, the software, understanding software becomes quite easy for me, I’ve been in the industry quite a while. So understanding how the software was built, how it’s maintained, and how it implements and interacts with the machinery was pretty simple on my end. And I think that’s one of the reasons that the team wanted to be here to help deliver that education of the software side because if you don’t have that software mindset, or if you don’t have the documentation in place, or if you don’t have the right person you know, help educate people on this is the software. This is what it does, and this is how you do it. Then a lot of things could just get lost in translation. People don’t care. So I came in, I understood the software completely and really helped sales actually understand the software even further. And how it connected to all of these different components of the machine.

As an example, we just went to PackExpo last year and to help not only sales understand our own technology, but also the people who are coming to our booth and seeing our machinery, we built these three screen kiosks, these big kiosks where you can come in and we can load up a fake job or an example job showing how the software is running through a real-time example, and this allowed sales to walk potential customers through the entire software cycle. Upping their own game, increasing their own conversation. And then, it ended up working out really well at the end with, 137 leads acquired through that demo. So.

Carman Pirie: Really cool. I have this odd question in the back of my head. I know that it’s, it’s pretty easy to imagine, especially if the organization hasn’t done a lot of marketing in the past, and there’s a lot of kind of foundational elements that need to be put in place, it’s easy to probably see how your experience from the world of web dev and SaaS or whatever how the manufacturing world can benefit. I’m wondering about the reverse, however. Now that you’ve been in the manufacturing space for a year and a bit, do you look back at some of the previous gigs or previous organizations and say, you know what, they could have learned a thing or two about, I’m wondering what lessons the manufacturing organizations can teach software.

Andrew Penley: Oh, that’s an excellent question. And honestly, there are so many things. The biggest thing, I think the transition from software to manufacturing was, definitely a pivot in not only how we talk about a product, the sales cycles are much longer, but also the intricacies of how we research, the intricacies of the data we extract from all of our campaigns. And the research that we put into identifying a very niche set of targets. I think the whole process of dealing with, manufacturing C suite executives, understanding how the industry actually works, understanding how the sales cycle works and the buying process, actually made me look at how I used to structure my campaigns back in the day and growth marketing strategies. And when I look back at the software or simple products I would skip steps or, I wouldn’t necessarily skip steps, but it would be, I find it in the manufacturing and your weight, you have to get a lot more deeper into who the buyers are, who the intended audience is.

With software, you have such a more global audience selection that, yeah I’ve just like my research, my understanding of audiences my segmentation sets, instead of two or three layers, I go five or six layers deep just to make sure I’m hitting the right targets. And then I’m creating personas around those targets to make sure that they meet the goals that we have to, for these machines that we’re trying to sell or the software that we’re trying to sell.

So I’ve definitely slowed down. I’ve taken a more kind of holistic approach to how I even talk about just a piece of technology versus how I would talk about, a screen or a component of a piece of software. Just because it’s software. You assume that most people already know what a certain thing does, whether it’s a bar chart, whether it’s a filter, or whether it’s some input fields, a lot of the time software is easily understood. So it’s easy to talk about and market those here. It’s not as an example, when we go from the food industry to the finance industry when we do with food, we have these clamshell containers. So you probably see them in the grocery store. They open up like a clamshell. So we call them clamshell containers here at Pack-Smart. And some of the people we work with, but my sales guy told me literally a few weeks ago that he was dealing with a customer in the States and they call it Top down connector closer thing. I couldn’t even remember what the name was. It’s marketing scenarios that don’t exist. A shoe’s a shoe, a shirt’s a shirt, a toy’s a toy. But here there are so many different naming conventions for what people are looking for that, yeah, that research and that data really has to go super deep, six layers, just to understand what that person is looking for. And then, so you’re targeting that right term for, keyword or whatever that is.

Jeff White: Man, that makes your content strategy so complex, it almost makes you feel like keyword stuffing back in the early 2000s. 

Andrew Penley: It honestly does. I honestly put a post out on my LinkedIn the other day where people were talking about old SEO versus new SEO, and they were talking about keyword stuffing. And that kind of gave me some PTSD. 

Jeff White: Yeah. You have to make sure you get the Flugal Binder 5,000. And there’s nobody will ever find it. 

Carman Pirie: But it’s interesting though, because of course we do, I’ve seen that even in software firms that I’ve interacted with. On behalf of manufacturing clients, as an example, there sometimes is a level of complexity in the world of manufacturing that we almost will gloss over. And I think it’s just, yeah, I’m not, I don’t think the world is simpler. It’s just, it’s different. And I do think you’re really hitting on something in this, with the additional nicheness of the marketing that you’re doing at Pack-Smart. But then also the technical complexity is quite a bit different.

This has been a very fascinating conversation, Andrew. I just really enjoyed having you on the show. I wonder what advice would you give to, a marketer who’s maybe thinking about making a significant pivot as you have done in your career. 

Andrew Penley: We all know the manufacturing industry and this is just for me trying to hire some members of my own team. It’s hurting for good quality, and top talent here. It’s, finding good quality writers in the manufacturing industry or marketing coordinators, and videographers it’s a stretch. It’s definitely difficult. So I would say, don’t let something that, you’re unsure of, or just don’t know of stop you from learning take my advice. I had looked at the automation and robotics industry and I was just like, Oh my, I have nothing about this. I couldn’t even come into a conversation and offer anything insightful. But I wanted to learn more. I had not only, wanted to learn more for myself. I knew coming here would make me a better marketer. It would make me a better leader. It would make me a better writer and everything else I do from development to writing, to just strategizing. And it has, I look at the clock every day and I feel like I’ve only been here four hours when I’ve been doing nine hours of research. It’s just. I could spend so much more time doing what I do and learning so much more. And I just, anybody who’s looking to switch from any part of marketing where you’re in now, honestly, look at the manufacturing world, whether it’s robotics, whether it’s an actual manufacturer making a product, you will be very surprised about what you learn, how the industry works. And I’ll tell you one thing. I didn’t even know how much packaging automation touches each individual person’s life from every product you open or unbox through your lifetime. You know what I mean? We all, are at the forefront to make your life easier to open that box easier or, open this piece of mail easier, whatever that case is. It’s just nice to see your work being impactful at the human level and not just at someone’s bottom line. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. Andrew, all the best. Thanks for joining us today. 

Andrew Penley: Guys, it’s been a pleasure. I thank you so much for having me on the show. I hope we can do this again and all the best luck. 

Jeff White: Yeah, it’d be awesome to follow up with you in a couple of months.

Andrew Penley: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Kula Ring with Carman Pirie and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at kulapartners.com/thekularing. That’s K U L A Partners dot com slash The Kula Ring.