The Manufacturing Marketer

Today, we’re talking about the metrics that matter for your marketing strategy, across the entire funnel. What should we be thinking about? And what might be a distraction? Brendon and Nihal dig in.

In this episode of IMC Live, we sit down with Josh Rozman — the one-person marketing team at Oberlin Filter Company — to unpack how creativity and tech are reshaping industrial marketing.

Josh shares how he tackled one of manufacturing’s biggest challenges: marketing attribution. From “ghost hunting” lead sources to rolling out call tracking via CallRail, Josh talks us through the tools and tactics helping him earn internal buy-in and optimize spend.

But that’s just half the story.

We also meet Phil — an AI-powered chatbot and animated brand mascot that handles weekend calls, screens leads and helps humanize Oberlin’s technical offerings. Phil isn’t just a gimmick — he’s a scalable, brand-owned asset helping bridge the gap between web traffic and sales conversations.

In Part 2 of our series of conversations about positioning, Brendon and Nihal talk about how we handle positioning deliverables and what exactly the final product should look like. And, we talk a lot more about B2B marketing guru April Dunford.

Most manufacturers don't know how to quantify marketing success, so they default to asking "What's the ROI?” after three or six months. But when you're selling CapEx equipment through a longer, complex and consultative sales cycle, answering the ROI question can get messy.

In this show, we welcome Gorilla 76 co-founder Joe Sullivan to the stage to examine both the leading signals and trailing metrics to know if your marketing program is positioning you for business growth and how to talk to your executive team about its progress.

All about positioning. Podcast co-host Brendon has been doing a lot of work on positioning and how it’s handled at Gorilla over the past couple of months, and co-host Nihal has some questions.

On this episode of IMC Live, Peyton and Allen sit down with Gorillas James Boeckmann, Randall Zaitz, and Jenny Wang. The topic? All about making marketing more fun — and why that’s more than just a nice-to-have. When energy is high, people are engaged and positive, and the work tends to be better. So we’re asking: How do you bring energy to the work, especially when it’s repetitive or feels like a grind?

In this episode, our host Brendon talks with Matthew Sciannella, senior director of demand generation at Refine Labs and former strategy director at Gorilla 76, about how industrial marketers can think differently about building and engaging communities.

Along with Peyton, they explore:

- What community looks like in a B2B manufacturing context

- How webinars have evolved into more interactive, audience-first experiences

- The interplay between thought leadership, performance marketing and the Four P’s

- Practical takeaways from real marketing efforts — and where we're going next

Whether you’re testing new tactics or refining what already works, this conversation offers a grounded look at how community can bolster your brand.

In this special episode, we look back on five years of IMC Live. After 100 shows and nearly $3 million in influenced revenue, Peyton, Allen and Brendon break down what it really takes to build a content program with staying power. You’ll hear what worked, what didn’t and what’s next for the Industrial Marketing Collective.

It's Gorilla Week at Gorilla 76, our annual company-wide get together. To celebrate, Nihal and Brendon wrangle their largest panel to date. Tune in to hear our hosts quiz a handful of strategists, content creators and performance marketers about recent projects they've been tackling for manufacturing clients.

Brendon, Nihal and Peyton sit down with Kevin McClary, who you might have caught on last week’s IMC: Live – and some previous episodes of this very podcast. He’s bringing us some more insights on AI, paid search, ads inside of LLMs and a whole lot more. Let’s dig in.

LINKS

Learn more about Industrial Marketing Summit at https://industrialmarketingsummit.com

Learn more about Gorilla 76 at https://gorilla76.com