Author: Show Runner

When you hear the words “Manufacturing” or “Industrial,” it probably conjures up pictures of smoke-billowing factories somewhere in the American rust belt in the mid-20th century. Those hay days are long gone, that sector’s jobs, which used to account for half of all jobs in the 1950s, had slid to less than 10% by 2009. 

The last dozen years though, have brought something of a renewal to manufacturing. Thanks to the Internet of Things, specifically the Industrial IOT movement, many companies are now making ‘smart’  products that scoop up data about their own health and how they’re being used, a real  goldmine for the products’ makers. Thanks to Moore’s law, they are designing things faster and cheaper, 3D printing takes the minimum number you need to fabricate from huge lots down to single units. The outlook for manufacturing jobs in the 2020’s in places like the US is rosy, with 13 Million workers, producing a total of  $2.00 trillion in goods, or a fifth of the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product).  It’s not only a good time for manufacturing production people, it’s good for the marketers that work there too.  

My guest today is someone who embodies this upbeat outlook. Caine Ruckstuhl is Head of Marketing, North America for CAREL. He has worked with clients in highly engineered products in Manufacturing businesses, much of it in the HVAC & Humidification space. He knows what it’s like to be in an environment dominated by engineers, who are  notoriously numbers driven, and who aren’t easily impressed by marketing. 

He also has experience marketing consumer products, as his wife perceived young women demanding better hygiene in public washrooms, He and his wife created a brand of  paper toilet seat covers in 2008, doing everything from designing, sourcing, distributing and of course marketing it. When Caine isn’t flying around North America, South America and Europe, he can be found at home with his wife and a lot of very small dogs.

Listen to some excellent insights about this tough, quirky environment of marketing manufactured products. Hear what has worked for him, so you’ll come away appreciating what it’s like to be an industrial marketer.  

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Glenn’s blog post on lessening importance of specs in marketing

Episode Reboot.

For another episode on marketing engineered products, check out Episode 55. 

If you have been a marketer for a while, odds are you have been helped by a mentor.  The use of the word Mentor to mean someone who shares knowledge with a less-experienced colleague is relatively new in English. But the concept of a mentor can be found in cultures all over the world, Going back millennia. 

If you have been helped by a mentor, a good question to ask yourself is, “should I start mentoring others?” 

There are great benefits to doing this, provided you’re well-matched with the person you’re mentoring. One person who’s been at both ends of the mentoring spectrum is Anu Adegbola, Director of Paid Search at Marin Software. Originally from Nigeria, Anu moved to the UK and got a bachelor’s of computer science, with a master’s in marketing. She is also one of PPC Hero’s 25 Top Influencers for 2021. 

Listen to her as she describes what internal traits to look for in a mentee you’re considering working with, how senior marketers should balance advice on technical expertise with general professional advice, how to balance managing others and getting your job done, and how much you should open up about your own personal struggles to your mentee. 

Enjoy the episode. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• How the archetype of Mentor began with a story in Homer’s Odyssey
• Anu’s profile on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Anu’s #PPCChat Roundup Podcast

Episode Reboot. 

When you’re asked to mentor someone, know that what you are saying yes to is primarily asking them questions. That’s the best way you can help them.

There’s a counter-intuitive saying that goes: good fences make good neighbours. Nobody does marketing today completely by themselves. Whether we are in-house or are on the vendor-side,  we always have partners in the mix, and most of us approach them in a neighbourly way. But there’s one task in the relationship-forming process that makes most of us squirm – contracting

They contain what’s important to both sides, so instead of springing them on the other party at the last minute, their contents should be shared early on, to help everyone get a feel for what they are getting into.

Our guest,  Julie Bacchini, is a professional speaker and has been in the PPC space for over a decade and has been helping businesses grow online in one way shape or form for two decades, through her own consultancy, Neptune Moon. 

Julie has been named on “top influencer” lists, including PPC Hero’s Top 25 list perennially, making the list again this year, 2021. 

She is also the Managing Director of PPC Chat, where paid search professionals gather weekly on Twitter to talk shop. She’s known for her practical, rubber-meets-the-road outlook so who better to talk to about contracts. She says contracts lay the foundation for good Vendor-Client relationships and argues that we shouldn’t shy away from talking about them. 

Learn how to make contracts that are a win-win, with Julie Bacchini.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

According to Kirk Williams “contracts define and preserve the intent of the relationship.”

Agreement subtopics covered:

• Service levels and days/times for communications responses, including timezones
• Upfront work such as discovery, setup of marketing creative/content/campaigns
• Expectations of both the vendor and the client
• Price structure, extra charges, frequency of invoicing and payment terms
• Legal protections for Intellectual property and force majeure interruptions.
• Termination and dispute resolution clauses

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

As cliche as it sounds, Content is king. Digital marketing demands that we write, record, edit, and layout content. This precious material is used in prospect research or in client interactions, and it’s up to us to anticipate their every content need. We rack our brains to imagine what questions they might have, and most of us have done everything we can think of to make the answers available. But there’s one thing most marketers haven’t done – that is structuring their site’s content using Schemas. 

These pieces of code matter enough to marketers that, even if we’re not too technical, we should understand the basics of what they do. So I’ve brought someone who’s so confident in the positive ROI schemas can bring companies, she and her cofounder built a business around it.  

Martha van Berkel is the CoFounder and CEO of Schema App, an application that looks at your site and helps tag your content so search engine bots can crawl and read it. 

Before starting this company, she earned a degree in Applied Math and Engineering, a certificate for Innovation and Strategy at MIT and managed technical services on a global scale at Cisco Systems. Whenever she gets the chance to speak or write, Martha takes the chance to encourage site owners to use proper, connected schema markup. Martha does all this, plus being a Mom and a rower, from her home in Guelph Ontario. 

Get ready for an interview that will energize you to markup your site’s content in order to stand out in search

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Fantastic video on how the properties of content can be separated from the content itself using markup: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
• Google Search Console
• Using Structured Data in Paid Search through Google Ad Extensions, Google Ad customizers
• Google’s Guide on How Structured Data Works
• Industry-standard dictionary at Schema.org 
• Google’s guide on how to Add structured data to your web pages
• Websites with tutorials on JSON-LD and XML
• Google’s Search Gallery and Rich Results
• Martha van Berkelon LinkedIn
• SEO Yoast plugin for WordPress

Episode Reboot. Check out the resources Martha’s company provides on using and getting ROI out of this: https://www.schemaapp.com/