The Kula Ring podcast is essential listening for manufacturing marketers who want to grow their digital presence and compete online.
Sponsored by Kula Partners—an agency committed to helping leading B2B manufacturers craft digital experiences that transform how they engage buyers, serve customers, and outpace their competition—The Kula Ring podcast features conversations about marketing, sales, and technology with top manufacturing executives from across North America.
The Kula Ring podcast is co-hosted by Kula Partners principals, Carman Pirie and Jeff W. White, both of whom are frequently sought after for their digitally-focused B2B expertise. They regularly share their insights with audiences including conferences like B2B Online and HubSpot’s INBOUND, the Gardner Manufacturing Marketer blog, and other podcasts focused on B2B marketing and technology.
Episode 76
How to Be a Future-Focused Manufacturing Marketer During COVID-19
Kula Ring hosts Jeff and Carman discuss how manufacturers can repurpose current marketing efforts into digital opportunities during COVID-19.
With trade shows and conventions postponed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19), what can manufacturers do to showcase new products and services they had lined up for 2020? In this special episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman talk about how manufacturing marketers and other internal stakeholders can adapt to this new reality by moving parts of their business online and serving customers digitally.
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Episode 75
Creating a Sustainability Marketing Campaign That Buyers Can Relate To
Featuring Sam Prudhomme, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Mission Critical Environments at Senneca Holdings
With data consumption rates doubling every year, and regulations becoming an industry trend, the data center industry needs to increase its reporting of power consumption. How can companies square their offerings with the global reality, and evolve their positioning and their messaging? Sam Prudhomme is Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Mission Critical Environments for Senneca Holdings, a company with a sub-division called Subzero Engineering that creates products that reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. Sam talks to Carman and Jeff about harmonizing campaign messaging around corporate responsibility and sustainability in order to help customers see the financial benefit of offsetting carbon emissions.
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Episode 74
Building a B2B Marketplace Using Blockchain
Featuring Lisa Butters, General Manager for GoDirect Trade at Honeywell
Building trust on an e-commerce platform is about more than just posting pictures and prices. How can manufacturers digitize the $4-billion per year used aerospace parts industry while ensuring transparency? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Lisa Butters, General Manager for GoDirect Trade at Honeywell, talks to Jeff and Carman about how blockchain technology is key to winning over sellers to use the GoDirect Trade marketplace, how they’re drawing on the intuitive design of B2C platforms, and why a legacy manufacturer like Honeywell is driving this innovation.
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Episode 73
How to Evolve Your B2B Brand Message After an Acquisition
Featuring Cathy Dodd, Vice President of Marketing at PolyOne
Any time a manufacturer acquires new assets, the brand evolves along with their customer base. How do you manage your communications strategy to keep pace with mergers and acquisitions? Cathy Dodd, Vice President of Marketing for PolyOne, talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring about how PolyOne created a campaign called “Challenge Accepted” to bring clarity to their brand messaging across a broad range of industries using customer feedback, buyer persona work, and through consolidating their website to better serve as a solutions-driver for their customers.
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Episode 72
How B2B Manufacturers Can Harness Emotional Connections in Marketing Campaigns
Featuring Luke Schoenbeck, Marketing Director at Mark VII Equipment
Emotional marketing campaigns are compelling, but where do they fit into a B2B manufacturer’s content strategy? Luke Schoenbeck, Marketing Director at Mark VII Equipment, created a year-long campaign showcasing car wash equipment factory workers and the team atmosphere at the company. He talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring podcast about how a focus on people (versus products or services) dramatically impacted engagement rates and conversions, and how Mark VII Equipment will approach its “people” campaign next year.
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Episode 71
Lessons from a Successful B2B Manufacturing Website Redesign
Featuring Christina Wegner, Vice President of Marketing at The Vollrath Company
Before diving headfirst into a website redesign project, what are the moving parts a B2B marketer or other internal stakeholders should consider? Christina Wegner, Vice President of Marketing for The Vollrath Company, joins Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring to talk about building the right foundation for your manufacturing company’s website redesign. She talks about developing a “listen-first” approach by assembling a stakeholder team early on in order to identify redesign objectives from feedback across departments.
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Episode 70
Maximize Your Resources by Consolidating Your Tech Stack
Featuring Jon Sujecki, Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing at Enerpac
With a small centralized marketing team tasked with digital transformation, step one for Jon Sujecki, Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing at Enerpac, was to evaluate the company’s websites. On The Kula Ring, Jon discusses with Jeff and Carman the challenges and benefits of consolidating their tech stack, including sacrificing flexibility to be able to do more for less.
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Episode 69
How to Humanize B2B With Design Thinking
Featuring Jas Kaur, Marketing & Digital Experience Manager at Ellsworth Adhesives
In this episode of The Kula Ring, Ellsworth Adhesives Marketing & Digital Experience Manager Jas Kaur talks about how her background in design thinking has helped her lead her organization toward a more human-centric approach to B2B. Her “business to everything” philosophy is guiding a tightly integrated marketing and digital team’s efforts in making their customers’ buying process fast, efficient, and intuitive.
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Episode 68
Troubleshooting + Time: Tips For Manufacturing Content Success
Featuring David Holliday, Director of Product Marketing at ProMach and founder of LabelingNews.com
In this episode of The Kula Ring, manufacturing content veteran David Holliday, Director of Product Marketing at ProMach and founder at LabelingNews.com, shares his experience creating successful, problem-solving B2B content. Among his top tips: own your platform, build your personal brand, think long-term, and don’t try too hard to rank—be a problem-solver instead.
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Episode 67
Creating a Unified Content Strategy Across a Global Marketplace
Featuring Courtney Sperlich, Marketing Director at The Duha Group
In this episode of The Kula Ring, Courtney Sperlich—Marketing Director at The Duha Group, an international manufacturer of colour marketing tools—discusses her organization’s challenges in scaling and interpreting marketing content for global and local customers. Colour has universal impact, but its appeal can vary dramatically between geographical regions. Courtney talks with Jeff and Carman about her 16-year career at The Duha Group and how they approach digital transformation, content distribution, and marketing their expertise to a diverse range of buyers.
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