The Kula Ring

More than most industries, manufacturers know that innovation is key to survival. But what value is placed on marketing efforts during this transition? James Soto, Founder & CEO of Industrial Strength Marketing, talks to Jeff and Carman about how B2B industrial marketers are leading the digital transformation charge and why they need to bring executive leadership on side to foster innovation and explore different brand positions in order to evolve legacy businesses.

COVID-19 has created a huge disruption in marketing, one we haven’t seen since the recession in 2008, says Ryan Carlson, Head of Market Development for Healthjump. He shares insights on how to evolve your brand marketing when your customer base is facing a new reality.

When it comes to creating account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, more companies are stuck in strategy mode versus putting a program into practice. Fabio Luz, Latin America Media Team Leader and North America Digital Media Strategist at Schneider Electric, shares his account-based marketing pilot process, which helped the company identify target accounts and move them down the sales pipeline.

Should B2B manufacturers step into the already-crowded podcasting arena? Iris Weeden, Director of Marketing at MacroFab, says the MacroFab Engineering Podcast is the company’s content engine with the added bonus of generating leads and revenue. She shares how the podcast drives traffic and conversions to the website, how they’ve grown to 5,000 downloads per week, and how they choose topics for the podcast and blog.

More manufacturers are moving their business online than ever before and the pandemic has accelerated that timeline. Jeff and Carman present eight different ideas on how you can stand up an ecommerce platform relatively quickly without a large budget and use of resources.

Many manufacturers have not stopped working during the pandemic and they have continued to buy and sell from other manufacturers. So how does the sales team close a B2B sale without having the factory tour as a successful “club in the bag” when prospects are social distancing? Jeff and Carman discuss ways to harness technology and knowledgeable staff to make a virtual factory tour a personalized, meaningful experience for each prospect.

Why do marketers avoid website accessibility considerations? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff W. White talks about where marketers fall short when building websites and web content for all users, and how accessibility features and conversion goals can work together to build a good user experience.

Websites that marketers and other stakeholders are being asked to create are more and more complex, and at the same time, generic templates are on the rise. On The Kula Ring, Jeff White talks to Carman Pirie about how marketers can move beyond the aesthetics of the web build to thinking holistically, considering how information is organized and ensuring it meets accessibility requirements.

The inbound marketing sales funnel suggests there’s an unlimited amount of traffic and leads, but how does that strategy scale when you’re a manufacturer with a limited number of prospects? On The Kula Ring, Carman Pirie and Jeff W. White discuss why the funnel doesn’t work in a B2B context and how manufacturers can shift to a more human-centered approach that focuses on a small number of target accounts using a blend of campaign tactics including inbound and account-based marketing strategies.

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.