The Kula Ring

Manufacturing marketers can face a lot of pressure to do more. Include more. Say more. Sometimes it seems like the favourite word in marketing is “and’... there’s always an excuse to add this, and that, and this thing too, and.. well, you get it. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman discuss why you should often choose to do less.

Understand your customers better by humanizing your marketing approach. This is what Cindy Deekitwong, the Global Head of Marketing, Incubator Business, at Henkel Adhesive Technologies believes. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Cindy talks about how she and her team use a customer-first marketing approach, which she calls B4E - Business for Everyone.

Agile Project Management is not something that typically comes to mind when discussing marketing. But, when clients discover that is how we manage marketing work at Kula Partners, Jeff and Carman often find themselves answering curious questions about it. In this episode of The Kula Ring, we discuss what Agile is and share how our experience can help manufacturing marketers weigh the benefits and barriers of implementing the project management style.

What does a marketing world look like where account-based marketing and privacy legislation can co-exist in harmony? We are not sure yet, but we can prepare by delivering high-quality content that target accounts will opt-in to receive. Of course, that is a simplification of the situation. Jeff White and Carman Pirie dive into the details of the imminent collision of these two trends on our 200th episode of The Kula Ring. From cookies to content-gating—learn how you can prepare when you listen to this podcast.

The stats around video consumption grow exponentially each year. To what extent should manufacturing marketers care about that? Everyone seems to agree that producing video content should happen and is easier than ever, but taking the plunge feels overwhelming to the point where it doesn’t get done. On this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff Long, Owner of True Focus Media, shares his approach to developing and distributing industrial marketing video content.

We don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we can foresee a wave of economic changes. From inflationary pressures and workforce shortages to living with COVID and a looming recession, these factors all have an impact on how manufacturing marketers are approaching their strategy. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman predict how marketers in the manufacturing industry will adapt.

Are personas too popular? In this edition of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman examine the evolution of buyer personas and their usefulness to B2B manufacturers. How helpful are they anyway? How could they be better? What other approaches might manufacturing marketers use instead? All this and more in Episode 197. We think you're going to love it.

Sustainability is a corporate-led initiative, but marketers are often the ones refining the messaging to resonate with customers. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman discuss the common pitfalls of sustainability messaging that will either get it lost in the competitive shuffle or be ignored by the sales team. We also explore how to overcome those challenges so that internal and external stakeholders understand how your sustainability initiatives impact them.

Almost everyone agrees that talking to customers is a good idea, but sometimes manufacturers find that one particular department seems to stand in the way: sales. Salespeople functioning as customer gatekeepers can be a real problem. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman explore how manufacturers can move past a culture of gatekeeper salespeople towards a future where serving customers is a team sport.

Thinking outside the box and getting weird is what today’s guest is all about. Eddie Saunders, Marketing Manager for FlexArm, a division of Flex Machine Tools, discusses his cutting-edge marketing strategies to get Flex Machine Tools noticed by the right people. He explains his cross-platform approach and discusses his use of video-based social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok. He dives deep into building relationships with influencers to add value to his products online presence.