Building a Manufacturing Brand Through Content, Storytelling, and Inbound MarketingBuilding a Manufacturing Brand Through Content, Storytelling, and Inbound Marketing

Building a Manufacturing Brand Through Content, Storytelling, and Inbound Marketing Transcript:

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 are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing about the same as everybody that’s, I think, anywhere like north of Kentucky or so, which is to say frozen… 

Jeff White: solid ice.

Carman Pirie: And today’s guest is joining us from upstate New York. Similarly, frozen. But other than that, I’m fine and happy to be here. 

Jeff White: Yeah. No, I don’t often find myself wishing for the end of winter. I actually enjoy winter, but this year is cooler and icier than normal. 

Carman Pirie: We’ve got enough winter hatred in my bones to deal with just extend across the podcast, but yeah, I’m, look, I’m really excited for today’s show.

I think, look, inbound marketing isn’t new. The idea of getting content out there, building out a content foundation, telling your story, and harnessing leads is, again, not new. But it’s new for an awful lot of manufacturers, right? And there’s an awful lot of people in this space writ large, that, could do a better job of telling their story. And I think that’s where today’s guest comes in, he’s taken the bull by the horns and has really brought a lot of their company’s story to life. And I think people can learn a lot from that. 

Jeff White: Yeah, and some interesting ways in creating some different types of content that a lot of people actually tend to experiment with. So yeah. So joining us today is Josh Gravelle. Josh is the Corporate Marketing Manager at Calvary Robotics. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Josh. 

Josh Gravelle: Jeff and Carman. It’s a real honor. And we’ve talked, I’ve hosted and produced many podcasts over the years, but this is my first time being a guest on one. So thank you so much for having me on The Kula Ring podcast. 

Carman Pirie: It’s awesome to have you on the show, mate. This is the thing. When you’re used to being the interviewer, now you’re just going to get peppered with questions, right? Like you’re losing all control. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, the tables have turned. 

Jeff White: This way you just get to sit back and, use your abundant knowledge and just, answer questions instead of coming up with new ones.

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, hopefully that translates well. 

Jeff White: That’s really great. 

Carman Pirie: Josh, let’s start off by learning a little bit more about you and Calvary Robotics. What are you all up to there? 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, so Calvary is a world leader in design and build of, custom turnkey automation solutions, robotic platforms, material handling systems, as well as we’re a predominant integrator of third party technology and equipment. We were founded in 1994 in Rochester, New York, which is in western New York, as we were just talking about the cold, so if you hear my teeth chattering, excuse me, it’s freezing here. Yeah, and our headquarters is now in Webster, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. We have a satellite location in Greenville, South Carolina. So together we have over 400,000 square feet of production space, which is great because then we can do large builds for our customers or we can do smaller things. And we’re agile cause we’re also a privately owned company and we have over 200 employees. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. And Josh, you’ve been there. How long now?

Josh Gravelle: I’m closing in on nine years. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Wow. And let’s tell us a little bit about how you ended up there. What’s your background? 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, so my background is, I have a communication degree. I went to SUNY Geneseo, which is in the western New York area here. I have my bachelor’s degree in communication. And prior to Calvary, I was in local television news doing production style things, technical directing, running studio camera, editing, all that kind of stuff, a lot of fun. It was the morning and noon news that I was part of for almost six years. And then from there, I took a jump over to, I worked at a large wine and liquor distributor, or store, you would say. And they were just implementing their online… Shop, if you want to call it that, for shipping wine and liquor to customers. So I was part of that and doing marketing for handling the website and social media for them. And then from there I went to Calvary. That was 2016. I was a marketing support representative, there is my title when I started. And then about 2021, I became the content marketing manager. And then today, as you already said, at the top, I’m now the marketing manager.

Jeff White: That TV experience though, that it’s a real jack of all trades kind of thing. Cause you, you really have to be able to do all kinds of stuff and you need to understand how to work within that team. I bet that’s come in handy in all of your roles as you’ve moved more into this manufacturing side of things, eh?

Josh Gravelle: Yeah. You really hit the nail on the head. I know first responders have the hardest jobs in the world, so I’m not trying to take any, hold a candle to that at all, but I think my training there at the television station was so fundamental for me because you sometimes have a 30 second commercial break and you got to run, edit, upload, you don’t have time to really think things through and you got to rely on your training.

And so I think the fast-paced nature and handling so many different people. Things, simultaneously, where I am even now today, have made me be able to act quickly and balance and prioritize well. 

Carman Pirie: Man, I’ll add another shout out to local TV, because I got my start pretty early on in the northern Maine, in the WAGM television, the CBS affiliate in northern Maine. And my goodness, I was selling television advertising for them. But you ended up around the station a lot and exposed to that. And it was, I don’t know, if I could put anybody that has an interest in marketing, if I could put them in that environment for a while, I would. And of course, trying to sell television advertising to people who can’t afford it. It was in and of itself a pretty good training ground because I learned that I couldn’t sell TV ads, but what I could sell was marketing plans that had TV ads in them. And here I am, however many dozens of years later working in an agency environment. So there you have it. That’s I love that local TV angle, Josh. That’s awesome. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I loved it. It was also a CBS affiliate, actually.

Carman Pirie: Look, let’s begin to unpack what you’ve been up to here. Because you, sounds like, nine years is a long time, so you obviously understood and knew the company when they weren’t doing anything particularly aggressive from an inbound marketing perspective. So take us through that evolution. What have been the key pillars of the strategy, if you will? 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, and as anybody will tell you, and you guys don’t need me to tell you, it’s a marathon, right? It’s not a sprint. So it’s been a long time building. It started off more just doing, as I call it, gun for hire type marketing, right? You’re, somebody needs a brochure, a presentation, we’re going to trade shows, or whatever. And I do believe in the inbound marketing strategy, right? And I think we have just evolved past the billboards or the advertising on TV, or hoping people are going to see you cast that wide net, hopefully catch a fish, where you want to bring in the people, right? You want them to seek you out. So we have been trying to build our content to be thought leaders in the industry. And we’ve been doing that really are the two big things I think have led us to that were some speaking events that some of our senior engineers have been able to be part of, because, at a trade show or guests on a podcast, things such as that, it’s a quick way to get your name out there, but also reassures that these people, because we have such big brains at our company, right? These engineers and it just puts a lot of faith in what you’re doing. And it helps with the buyer’s journey, right? How you can attract them and then, engage with them, and you delight them, hopefully, right? So we’ve been doing all of these sort of things, the blogs, the podcasts, all of that, to try to build our content throughout.

Carman Pirie: And Josh, when you talk about the engineers and getting them out there and speaking and I’m assuming maybe even contributing to content more broadly, you mentioned podcast interviews as well. How much of that has been the business of finding those engineers in the firm that are comfortable doing that, have a bit of a gift of the gab, if you will, or decent communicators, and how much of it has been coaching them or trying to nurture that out of them?

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think one of the gifts, I think, of marketing, the marketing position is that if you touch, I would say literally every aspect of the company from the top to anywhere, anybody. So you get to know people is what I’m getting at, right? So you just, people find out and you start to know who really is the, I like the engineering joke.

They say, how do you tell if somebody is an engineer? Either outgoing or in, not, and if you say hi to them and they say hi to you while looking at their shoes, they’re introverts. If they say hi to you while looking up, they’re extroverts. So you just learn how people are, willing to talk to you and willing. So somebody might be more of an extrovert and they’ll be able to get on camera, at least be on a podcast, and some are more introverted and they’re gonna they’ll help you write a blog, right? Or at least give you some bullet points, and then we’ll take, the team takes it and writes it from there and gets all the keywords and worries about SEO and that kind of thing. So really it’s just learning people and seeing what their comfort level is. And then from there you’re going to learn what their expertise is because somebody might be a vision engineer. Somebody is a robotic engineer, controls, mechanical, whatever it might be. You want to make sure you’re putting them into the right kind of, I guess you might say, bucket. And then even from there, it’s what is their past, right? What is their upbringing? How, what schooling did they go to? And I think that’s also. One of the biggest things we’re seeing right now is that there are some branding aspects where people there’s, depending what you read nowadays and what you believe, but they’re saying, the brand is outgoing where more people, the people are coming in, like brand ambassadors of sorts, where people want to buy from people is old saying, right? 

So I think getting More people out there to talk, and who they are, right? Not just, oh, I know about robots, but what my background is, can you trust me? Can you like, what I’m saying matters and, smart things to say. 

Jeff White: How did you settle on a podcast as a vehicle for content creation? It’s typically a little bit more difficult. Obviously your background lends itself to understanding the technical side of it. But, what made you interested in using that, say, as opposed to like, other types of content creation. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah. Personally for me, I’ve always been a fan of audio since I was a little kid, so it was really exciting when the VP of sales and marketing kind of came to me and he wanted to do two podcasts, as you might want to call it, a video podcast, and then an audio only, and the audio only one is the one I was hosting the advanced automation podcast and it really, I don’t, it’s a good question. I wish I had an exact answer to why he wanted to start it, but it’s, it really is just the brand awareness aspect. Getting yourself out there, having content and really, it just I was looking at the numbers, our social media for LinkedIn is our biggest one, right?

And back in 2018, we were just over 2000 followers and we started the podcast around 2020, and we were up almost double right away, kind of thing. And it’s not all that, of course, the speaking engagements. One of our big ones I remember was at a trade show at Automate. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with it.

One of the big trade shows in the industry and a shout out to Mike Marsiglia, one of our. Prominent engineers at Calvary. He did a speaking engagement about automation, and to this day he still gets people talking. So I’m going a long way around of saying that, really it’s the content and I think podcasts are, they were just they’re still, I think they’re on a rise, rocket meteor rocket takeoff right now, back a few years ago, it was still an unproven thing. And I think you just take a little bit of a leap and hopefully you’re on the right side of things. 

Carman Pirie: And I think there’s a nugget in there in the first words in your answer when you’re like, I’ve always been a bit of an audio guy. I’ve always liked it. And I think, there’s, I think marketers would do well to listen to that voice in the back of their head sometimes, because if you like it, if it’s a type of content that is interesting to you, then it will be easier to create. Long term, you’ll have some stick-to-itiveness, and frankly, it really doesn’t, in some ways, not matter if you’ve got a video series, a podcast, a series of white papers, or research docs, or what have you. You can find ways to use all of it for marketing purposes, and use all of it to try to build awareness. But you can’t use it if you don’t create it, and you won’t create it if you don’t find it fun and entertaining. At least on some, at some level. 

Josh Gravelle: I remember a manager at Calvary I had, basically, I would just post here and there on social media. And she just said, you just got to do it. Because I was like, I don’t have content, that sort of thing. And she’s you just got to do it. And for some reason, that really shook me to the core. And I just started, even if it was sharing more industry knowledge, but I was showing up every day, posting multiple times a week, and trying to curate things that are going on at Calvary. And I think that’s, you’re right, Carman, is that it’s just It’s showing up, it’s doing it, and then having multiple, because you don’t know if person A wants to read, person B wants to listen, person C wants to watch, and having all different kind of outlets to meet those needs of whatever the buyer wants along where they are in their kind of journey, right?

Carman Pirie: Josh, I wonder, look I don’t know if you’d agree with this or not, but sometimes it seems to me like the inbound has done a pretty good job of almost being a bit like religion, people really believe in it, and and, they go to conferences and things.

Jeff White: If you’ve been to the inbound conference, you will get the religion reference going on. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and I guess maybe not to make too direct a parallel to religion, because I don’t want to upset any listeners, but then, but more in anything that you believe, there are some parts of it that you wonder or you question. I wonder, because you said before, you’re a pretty big believer in inbound, and this methodology. Is there any part of it that you’d tend to question a little bit, or you’re like, there’s a lot of the disciples out there saying that you should do X, Y, or Z, and I’m just not so sure. I’m just wondering. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, that’s a good question. The one thing, sometimes I do wonder about just creating content just for people to read. I really do want there to be, I think there needs to be passion and real people behind the content, not just going on AI or just repurposing, say that the podcast we record and just making it, you know, text based so people can read it. I do think creating an accurate or a real piece of content rather than just having content to have it just see so for somebody searches you on Google, you come up, right? I think having that real content that speaks shows your thought leadership or your position in the industry is and I’m not saying inbound is against that, but that’s where I guess I land is that it should come from, I don’t know if the heart is the right version of to say, but does that make sense?

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I hear you saying in some ways it became a bit of a volume play and quality suffered, and part of what you’re saying here is that to create real content, you need to look at it a bit maybe the other way in some instances. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, and so when I, like for the podcast for example, I like to find somebody and even just finding things that aren’t, we did one where we’re talking to people who do deal with the extrusion of, the framing of the actual machines and things. And that might not be that is exciting to some people as a robot manufacturer, end of arm tooling company, but everybody plays a part and I think getting those out there to, that’s to me and I can, I don’t know if that’s part of the journalism background that I have as well, the kind of digging down deep and trying to get stories and I almost think of it as talking to the individual rather than somebody at a company.

So I feel getting to know somebody and talking to them and with that you get their own journey, their expertise and that sort of thing. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day, telling those stories is always probably going to be more interesting than just talking about the technology or things like that. But part of going all in on this content creation journey, you’ve also recently. begun implementing HubSpot as a platform. And I just like to understand a little bit about what you’ve learned, what you’ve been doing there, and what’s your experience been?

Josh Gravelle: It’s been great. That’s, that almost might be that, that religion aspect to me almost more than that… They’re very inbound oriented, right? But to go back to Carman’s analogy that’s been a game changer for me and I think for our company to be able to just. We were at zero, right? To be able to quantify and even just say good, bad, or indifferent, what these numbers, this is what they’re doing now. And we weren’t doing a good job for many years. So being able to just say we have this many, you could, yes, Google analytics and that stuff and being able to look at your website. But I believe at least in my experience with HubSpot and how it’s been. How it’s used, how it’s formulated to be able to do the inbound style marketing. It’s been a game changer for us, and to be able to know where to put call to actions, where to have forms, how to make those better. And it just, it’s so much more user friendly. Then, at least that’s what our website’s built on is through HubSpot, and I’ve used WordPress, I’ve used some, other formats and things, and it’s just been the most user friendly for me personally and I think being able to also search whatever you need to find out, it’s right there, it’s user friendly, tons of tutorials and things to help you learn more about whatever kind of marketing roles you want or things you want. And I don’t want to turn this into a HubSpot, the sales pitch or commercial, but I do believe in it, and I do think it’s been such a huge help for us. 

Carman Pirie: I think that I’m not looking to turn into a HubSpot ad either, but I think what you’re experiencing there, we’re pretty tech agnostic overall, I think as an agency we’ve probably seen well over, we’re in the double digits at least in terms of number of marketing automation platforms and things of that nature that we’ve worked with, but we often get asked, um, what’s the right platform for our situation?

And, it’s not always a clear cut answer for that question, but I think for most marketing organizations, particularly those that are just really getting their feet under them, building that foundation that the user friendliness of HubSpot as a tool has tended to, even though it’s gotten more complex over the years somewhat recently, has tended to be what wins it out. If you look at like G2 Crowd and other rating sites, there is a, there’s a usability there that does impact its adoption, which I think is the thing, the key, because if there’s something that’s hard to use, it doesn’t matter if it’s cheaper. You’re not, you’re never using it. It doesn’t matter, right?The tool has to get used in order to be effective. 

So I think that I think that was a helpful kind of a synopsis there, Josh, because I think people listening that are struggling with that decision, it’s a helpful lens. 

Josh Gravelle: I do believe it is what works best for you and your company. Don’t let some guy on a podcast tell you to go do that, but I do think do your research, talk to experts, talk to. Talk to people like you guys to really help zero in, and what’s your budget too, right? Just because you might want the Cadillac or whatever version, you might be at a different pace place. So I, it’s, do you need a new website, right? What are you doing on social media? What is your plan really? That’s the other thing, right? And you want to have that sales and marketing alignment, which I would be lying and say, is even a struggle for us today. We still strive to do that.

And our sales team uses Salesforce. We have those in the integration of the two, but there’s, there is a breach there too. So it’s really just marketing for HubSpot. 

Carman Pirie: Josh, I wonder if you’re a number of years into this now. You’ve got the TV series as well, the Cal, what’s it called? Is it CalTV? Is that the YouTube series that you have? 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, CalvaryTV or CalTV. 

Carman Pirie: And that’s in addition to the podcast, yes? 

Josh Gravelle: Yes. And sometimes we’ll do that switcheroo where we just take the audio from the Call TV, if it runs it, or do an edit, so it’s an episode of the podcast, but predominantly they’re two separate entities.

Carman Pirie: Cool. I’m curious, what, in your couple of years of doing this and creating lots of diverse types of content, and trying to drive the lead flow in a very sophisticated industry, what surprised you the most? What’s been the most surprising thing to you? 

Josh Gravelle: That’s a really good question. What didn’t I see coming? I guess I didn’t see, I really didn’t see just posting consistently on social media, just seeing that rise and building the content and seeing people come in for an interview or at a trade show and come up to myself or to other people in the organization and say, Oh, hey, we love your content. And to me, that’s, I’m sure you guys get that all the time, right? But it’s still, every time, I gotta imagine it warms your heart a little bit to know people are listening and that it’s making an impact. And I know that, I talked about Mike Marsiglia earlier, and he was talking to a partner, and they said they’ll watch some of our episodes or listen to stuff with their team there all together and, if we’re talking about cameras, vision system or something, they’ll listen to the episodes. So I think those sort of impacts were one of the biggest things and the most heartwarming things for me to hear. And then, of course, that ties to your brand awareness, right? That Calvary’s name is getting to people. But it’s not just that. I think it’s trying to know that what you’re doing is making an impact and we’re not doing it’s really besides some of the production and pricing with that when we haven’t done a lot with Google ads we’ve done some but most of this is all organic especially for the social media aspect. So it’s been really neat to see that organically get its reach 

Jeff White: What’s been the, you mentioned the sales team is on Salesforce and the marketing team on HubSpot. It’s like a Mac PC thing from the nineties. Have they heard these comments as well about the, we were listening to this thing about the, the cameras and all of that. And it’s played into our interest in working with your firm. Has that come up? Have the salespeople come to you and said, it’s really cool that we’re seeing this. 

Josh Gravelle: I try to make sure they’ve heard that. I don’t think I can ever say it enough. I suppose we’d have to ask them to get their complete honest answer, but I do try to, that’s, it’s marketing,  right?

You’re like, hey guys, people are actually paying attention. We have a name. And even those, some of those newer sales. Account managers have come on and they said in an interview, oh, we love, we see you all over social media, that kind of thing. So whether or not they want to say, or they’ve heard it and you say that they know they’ve lived it too. So it’s not just. It’s not just our people in the house that are, part of it. It’s people outside of and, that’s the greatest thing about social media, right? You never know who it’s going to reach and what it’s going to affect. And I think that I think that they, I need to keep hammering at home no matter what. That’s my answer. 

Jeff White: That makes sense. As we come towards the end of the show here, you’re on this journey of content creation and getting things out there organically. What’s next? Where are you going in 2025? 

Josh Gravelle: Another good question. We want to keep building, we want to ramp it up and I don’t want to just go back to what we talked about earlier that it’s going to be watered down content, but I do want to keep building. I want, we want to be able to have, content that kind of goes along throughout the, if you’re just attracting people or they’re getting further along down the, sales cycle that you have the content, more ebooks, more white papers. Keep going with just what we’re doing already, not letting the foot off the gas, if you will, because that’s where you get into a problem. And you guys have done what, hundreds and hundreds of episodes, right? It’s, but you don’t stop, right? You keep going. And I think that’s showing up every day doing the work. And I know that sounds like a sort of a simple answer, but I want to increase. I want to play more in the social ads. Doing better with SEO, Google ads, that kind of thing. And increase our, just our brand awareness and letting people know that we’re here and we’re ready to help you out with any engineering kind of problems that you might have. 

Carman Pirie: That’s good advice Josh. There’s, um, there’s no point in creating a bit of a content advantage if you’re not going to keep it. And I think that’s the message that you’re giving there is, you’ve been investing in this over a past number of years. It’s paying off. It doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it now. You need to keep going.

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, that’s well said. 

Carman Pirie: Josh, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It’s been awesome. 

Josh Gravelle: Yeah, it’s been awesome for me. Like I said, being the first time guest on a podcast, it’s just really neat to be able to check that off my bucket list. So I really appreciate your time and having me on.

Jeff White: Yeah. Thanks for joining us, Josh.