Some manufacturing marketers need to help customers envision how to use their solution while also learning how customers use their products. This week on The Kula Ring, Fin Watterson, Director of Product Marketing at Stratasys, talks about the role of a product marketer in a manufacturing organization, translating product information from the engineers and builders for customers. Additionally, he discusses how Stratasys worked with one customer to develop marketing messaging around their application use case.

How can manufacturers use customer trends to inform their marketing decisions during critical changes in the marketplace? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Mike Kazmierczak, Vice President of Marketing, Digital Energy & Buildings End Market at Schneider Electric, shares how he’s using data and voice of the customer to optimize new marketing initiatives. Additionally, he discusses how Schneider Electric is changing roles across the company to cater to customer types and personas and how this structure impacts the marketing content they produce.

As trade shows and conferences continue in virtual forms for the foreseeable future, manufacturers must identify ways to optimize relationship selling. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Ryan Carley, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Mason Controls, talks about how relationship selling has changed for his team during the pandemic, how they are adapting the sales process with new remote tactics, and where he thinks relationship selling is going as virtual connections continue to be the norm.

During an ERP rollout, manufacturing marketers in small and medium- sized enterprises often find themselves on the outside looking in. Sam Gupta, Principal Consultant at ElevatIQ, says marketers should be integrated into ERP initiatives because of their unique ability to identify new products and new markets. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Sam talks about what marketers bring to the table that service personnel might miss, and how providing all team members with access to real-time ERP data can improve customer experience.

How can manufacturers leverage their distributor relationships through ecommerce? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff Bercume, Director of CX Marketing at Berry Global, shares how the company’s subsidiary brand, Laddawn.com, operates as an ecommerce site with a distributor-first model. He talks about how the website’s workflow is geared towards distributors, and how this ecommerce configuration can address capacity issues across manufacturing.