This week, Bill sits down with Rena Ivory, Marketing Manager at Crescent Industries, Inc. to discuss her journey in B2B manufacturing marketing. Rena shares her insights on transitioning from a D2C background to a B2B role in a complex field, building an effective content strategy from scratch, and leveraging tools like video and HubSpot to increase engagement and lead quality. This episode is essential listening for anyone navigating the unique challenges of B2B marketing in manufacturing and looking for actionable strategies to enhance brand awareness, trade show impact, and content effectiveness.
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Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today I have a very special guest, Rena Ivory from Crescent Industries. Rena, thank you for joining us today.
Rena: Thank you for having me.
Bill: So Rena, Crescent Industries is a manufacturer in the plastic injection molding space. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Crescent Industries and your role there, how long you've been there, that type of thing?
Rena: Okay, so Crescent Industries is we're a custom injection molder. So we build the tools, we run the production and our market for specific market segments of medical, pharma, dental, and a little bit of industrial OEM. I am the marketing manager, which I and I've been here for 17 years.
Bill: Congratulations. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, that's, I want to get into your background here, Rena, because when we think about, I think a lot of marketing managers and marketing executives, one of the things that's missing is longevity. One of the things that's missing is experience in seeing the transition from where we were 17 years ago to where we are today and being able to kind of benchmark and measure and understand those transitions not only from a marketing standpoint, but from a organizational development and change management standpoint. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and how you arrived in this 17 year journey at Crescent Industries.
Rena: Well, my original job was in retail advertising. That's where I started out of college for Ollie's Bargain Outlet. And that was nine years. And I think I just got burned out on, this is Christmas season, again, selling Christmas trees again. And that starts way back in July, August.
Bill: Sure.
Rena: And patio furniture starts in January and it just kind of got a little, I don't know, not so meaningful for anything. Like what exactly, what am I doing? So I did want a little challenge and I went to manufacturing. I was working for an actual knife manufacturer for knife blades that go in machinery for a little while. And then I came to Crescent, who didn't have a marketing. We pretty much had a sales business development person and a just higher marketing. And so it was pretty much nothing. We started from scratch.
Bill: No, that's amazing. And I think, so I share some of those, early career experiences in retail. I did some retail marketing and that's a different game. that's a more immediate and it it's fast paced. think some of the best marketers that I've met have come from D to C because they, they can take on a pace that isn't as natural to those in the B2B space. If you've only been in that arena. So I can absolutely appreciate that journey. Whenever you look at your journey from D2C marketing to B2B, maybe you could talk about that adjustment and what do you see that's different between those two spaces in your career experience?
Rena: Oh my, well now I'm going to age myself. Well, some of it was the pace because retail is very fast. You had to work. There was always something. And then you came to manufacturing and it wasn't it slowed down. It definitely slowed down and deadlines were not as critical and things with more quality versus maybe quantity. And but the transition has been, I think some of my hardest things was the technical side of, everybody knew what a Christmas tree was. Everybody knows what a patio tree, you know, everybody, know, basic that kind of stuff. But when you're talking about the technical side of, okay, we're doing a custom injection molding and I don't even have a little, I went from, we're selling this to pretty much we're selling services.
Bill: Sure.
Rena: That was a transition, that was a little bit of a hard transition to kind of, what is the heck is it that we do here? And understanding that enough to be able to promote that.
Bill: Yeah, I agree that working with like subject matter experts and really technical niche information is a dramatic, like differentiation between D2C and B2B marketing. And especially everybody owns a home or has a place they live and, whatever holidays they celebrate, they know what a Christmas tree is. They know what, how to sit down on a piece of furniture, right? Those are natural things that we do. But whenever you're, let's say you're in your 20s or 30s and you're sitting at a party, plastic injection molding generally doesn't come up in cocktail conversations, right? It's not top of the mind. So how about those Steelers and what do you think about the changes in plastic injection molding procedure, right? It just isn't natural.
Rena: I would actually say that in generic manufacturing in general just does not come up in conversations. Nobody cares how things are made, but they should.
Bill: They just want them. That's right. So no, I think that's, that's a great recognition. One of the other things I think that's interesting in your story, and this is common in a lot of what we would call that mid-market manufacturing space is that we generally work with or find people who started as that department of one. And, know, prior to them, there was someone who looked over marketing, or it was kind of something that like nobody wanted to get their hands dirty with or take ownership of because it was a very volatile and controversial subject at the organization because nobody knew what to do. Could you maybe talk about that journey that started 17 years ago of department of one and where you guys are today?
Rena: Well, I would say our first thing was just a CRM, a database. You know, the Nat Excel spreadsheets, some kind of CRM that had kept track of certain things or at least our contacts for prospects customers. And that was a little bit of trial and error. Nothing worked out until, I mean, I don't give a shameless plug to HubSpot, but that's what we use. And then from that we jumped on HubSpot and started the blogging and the emailing out to the customers because there was a lot of subtracting and them themselves, where they were when we first started with them a long time ago and to where they are today really has helped us change as well as, you know, the things that we would done internally. They helped us because it was like there was one more person other than me. And now in this day and age, I would say that that is more even more so you're you're kind of getting another person.
Bill: Well and I think that that goes back to one thing that we're very passionate about and we're seeing evolve in the marketplace is we need to leverage additional resources to get the job done. So I started my career early as a marketing manager. And one of the things that I experienced, and this was in the early 2000s, is there was just not access to resources. There were not these third party applications like HubSpots that had significant educational resources. There weren't other specialists who were out there promoting their wares on the internet that you one click that click quick, you can hire them, that type of thing. And there wasn't the agency community that's available today, either generalists or specialists to help a marketing manager. And I think HubSpot is a great example of how marketing managers can leverage one resource and really not only pay for that service, but leverage support to get a bigger job done like they have an extra person on the team. So I think that's a great insight. And one of the things we do is we try to offer that hybrid agency support through our marketing company to do similar things in those areas. But when you look back at that journey with HubSpot, it appears that you guys were really early adopters of content. I mean, in 2024, content, yeah, everybody has content. But could you maybe take us back to when you started to really get into the blogs and you know, that was kind of revolutionary back then and really aggressive. And then how you've taken that approach and morphed it into other areas that you feel have helped you guys stay on the front edge of what's happening today.
Rena: Yeah, I mean we started doing blogs. And there was a lot of you need to do a blog once a week. And while in our industry we started, we decided that that was a little too much of an ask. But to do, I think we're down to honestly, we do a blog, probably a new one once or twice a month. Maybe a little more depending on what's going on. Just because we want the quality to be there, not the quantity. And some of at the beginning, it was a little bit of a mix, like just, it doesn't matter, send it out and you just have a bunch of whatever. And, you know, and some things we did, but we learned very quickly that, you know, you gotta take what are people reading, what do people care about? And then we started, went from blogs to, hey, we could do a guide, kind of condense everything. Oh hey, we could do this guide. And there are things that we did early on that we don't even use anymore because the world has taken over and it's all free now. Like it used to be gated and now everybody has it. So now we can like, okay, they took it. Let's not gate, we'll leave that. Now we do other things that are gated that's actually higher quality as things evolve.
Bill: Sure. No, that's great. And when you look at that educational content that you guys are basically giving away and you look at how your content strategy has evolved, what are other things that you're learning or things you thought were missing that really has impacted the way you're developing that content for Crescent?
Rena: Well, we tried to, I think early on, I mean, I didn't know anything much about injection molding. I could go out on the internet and I made some rough articles that I knew were not right, but I went to the people that I knew wouldn't write them, but they would be more than willing to tell me what was wrong and fix it. And in the end, they wrote it for me, they just didn't know it. And I think some of it was buy-in. I had a general, we had somebody, an engineer write an article on scientific injection molding. And he went on the web and saw his article and it was ranked up on the first page. And he was told the whole world in the company, like I did this article and that was great because people were like, so somebody's actually reading your blog articles. Well, yeah, yeah, I realized, you know, it's not content that your next door neighbor's reading, but it's content that our audience or somebody, our potential customers are reading and that's all we really care about. And so that started, I got a question, is anybody ever even really reading this? And I'm like, well, this one article had 15,000 views. Oh! You know, like, you know, and then they're like, so it kind of took a little bit to get that buy in and then we got other people going, oh, that works. Here's this. I have this idea. And then you kind of just embrace that and take the help where you can get it. But it takes a little bit because is anybody even reading this? I love that question. I had to answer that several times and I was ready for it every single time.
Bill: Rena, I think that's such a good point. I mean, one of the things that's amazing as we've seen in the market is whenever you develop something, whether it's a video or a piece of content, a social post or whatever, and it actually starts working, you're exactly right. Then people seem to rally around it and then everybody wants to get on board. Hey, maybe that other engineer now is more willing to write an article or maybe the CEO is willing to invest more resources because they actually see it working. And one of the things we really try to encourage our audience with and clients is the fact that getting tons of views isn't the goal. Getting people in your target market audience to read it is. So I would much rather have an article gets 200 views and read throughs or a video gets 200 full watches through, full views through of our target audience as opposed to 10,000 views of people who aren't going, you know, kids who are doing science projects or term papers and watching it or whatever the case may be, right? So I think that that's a great takeaway. Whenever you look at your content strategy, you guys have also leaned heavily and transitioned into more YouTube content, more videos. Could you maybe talk about how you guys went from blogging success to video success?
Rena: Well, I mean, some of and we still blog and we still have our content and the YouTube is definitely different. think we were and I will say this and I know this completely that we were in a great position because we had internal resources being that we were custom and this mold was being built and you, I mean, there had been times when I've literally been eating my lunch and they're like, this is running, you need to come now because nobody gives you any, if you want a picture of this and you leave it sit and you come back and try to take a picture or a video. Luckily, as we involved, and that was very difficult. I mean, I, at least I had somebody calling me, telling me you need to come now, but it was, you know, they, when you're custom, you need to kind of, it's very sometimes hard to get people in to take video, take footage. Once you have it, you can have somebody edit it and do the fabulous stuff. But we were lucky that we had that internal, we had an internal resource that was well skilled for that. So that helped us evolve quicker and better. And then fourth generation family, big into YouTube. He was already doing something on his own. So it was a natural transition. that's, mean, if you look on our videos, that's who you see, fourth generation, that's the face. And he does a fantastic job of these, and him and I, I mean, we work so well, he does a great job. So you know, very, I'm not naive to think that I am not fortunate to have that internal resource like that, that ability. I know that other people don't, but anymore this day and age, you know, take some video with your phone is better than nothing, I guess. You know, have somebody piece and edit together and you might be able to find a way to get a good decent video without all that big heavy lifting.
Bill: Rena, when you look at the impact of video and what it's done and how it's taken your content marketing to the next level, then we think about like 99% of other companies in manufacturing are not going to have an internal resource. They have to like contract out. They have to find out outside resources to help support that video capture, production, scripting, editing, distribution. Do you believe, so a lot of our marketing managers are faced with talking to their executive suite and putting together a plan and a budget and they don't have an internal resource and it's going to take some resources, time, money and energy. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is it the outcome of the video, whether you have internal resources or not, worth the investment to help drive your content marketing plan forward?
Rena: I would say definitely. I mean, you're going to be left behind if you don't do video. That's just the way it's going. I think in, and even we do that, even though I have an internal person, you still, I mean, it still takes time, effort, resources, challenges. So you make long forms or you make a video, you can a lot of times you can tweak and edit and bring those down and make multiples. So now you're sending out little, little pieces and there's ways that, you know, if you want to have a big video and you have video, you have bring somebody in, then you can probably piecemeal those clips and make them fast, quickly fast. And, that's your trade show video because you don't have, you know, like just figure out, I mean, we do that when we plant. Here's a long form. We already knew we did a case study with a long form. We knew going in that it was going to be broken out and also be short. Before it even even started, we said we're going to break these down and we're going to use. So when he was doing that, you can break each of those into shorts. So now one video, you want to say, we have one video and case study, which by the way, one video, too many times I repurposed my video and it still gets used. You can, like it's not once and done. You use them over and over and over again. But like that one video is actually eight. We've actually made eight videos out of this one. So, you know, just figure out how to get the most bang for your buck. But I definitely think you know you cut them into shorts, use them on whatever Reels, YouTube shorts, things like that, and get your bang for your buck because, you know, I do realize that it's expensive, but there's ways to do it that you're going to be able to keep using this over and over over and over again, opposed to like a trade show booth where you would put the trade show booth up and you can only use it for trade shows. A video is, you can constantly be used over on your website on social all over the place so.
Bill: Yeah, we've developed a program where we call it a content create session where we'll work with the company, go in, help them script, and come up with the ideas. Then we go in for one day, shoot B-roll, and do a ton of interviews. And generally, we can get anywhere from 8 to 12 long form videos from that day, as well as tons and tons of cut downs, shorts, reels, moon shots, other video cuts that are very topical. So I think we're seeing the industry move towards more of like that influencer model where, you know, a lot of these influencers do that for their content. And we're seeing that same rapid and efficient method to bringing video to the market, specifically manufacturing. So I think you're right on. And I agree. I think you're unique in the fact that you guys have an internal resource, someone who gets that and understands it. I think a lot of other companies have to look outside, but what we're seeing is that it is worth the investment and effort because if you're only relying in 2025 on written content, you are going to be left like in the tracks of dust because there's just everybody wants video. LinkedIn is now moving to shorts. Right. So that's going to be a whole other explosion on LinkedIn. So let's, you mentioned something when we were talking about video and I want to talk about this as well. When you look at trade shows, you guys do some trade shows, trade shows are big part of the manufacturing industry. What, what is your opinion? You've been in this position for 17 years. You've seen trade shows change tremendously because of digital, because of the pandemic because of all those things. Could you maybe just talk us through what you've seen in trade shows over the past several years?
Rena: Well, I definitely, almost every booth has a video. I'm not gonna lie, our booth is pretty basic with two big screen TVs like that, like with videos running, two separate videos running. It doesn't confuse anybody, believe it or not. They're short, quick. Nobody's speaking, obviously, because you're not gonna hear it when you're on a trade show floor. I think one of my, I have two pet peeves that I see out when I go out. You have these huge, not everybody, but people have spent huge, and some people do it well. They spend enormous money on their booth and they also have a great video. But there is people who have these great booths, a small TV with like a glorified PowerPoint. But that booth is only there for that booth, you know, like that small amount of time. So, you know, there's your video could still be part of your branding. You can, you know, bring that booth down and spend a little bit of money on that video. Come on, people, you know, just, you know, if you're going to have this nice booth, maybe you could bring it down and still be nice, but also have an equivalent looking video. If you're going to have this nice booth, then the video should be equivalent. And I we've been told that our video it's by several people that our videos, like we they're like some of these boost need to take lessons. Just skill, I mean because the video you can use over and like back to, that could be cuts from another video and you can use it over and over quick and the other. I think there was another one that bothered me with the the big booths with the little videos or just a little TVs or not anything like not like yeah. I mean, I just like nothing like you have this like nice twirly round sign and but we're what do you do? And I see your parts but what is it? So I just kind of you know, and even trade shows have changed a lot. I mean, there's now, and I love these, I'm jealous of these people. I mean, their pretty much booth is just one big monitor with video running and those are very cool and I'm jealous. But, you know, I mean, they understand. I mean, it's flashy and people look and see and get it. The video also has, because we can stop it. We can pause it if somebody's talking and they're like, we have this here and pause and we can talk a little bit more about whatever question they had. Where if you don't have that, how do you do that? Cause you're not bringing, I mean, we can't bring every single, we can't bring a tool. We can't bring a big part or whatever. can't possibly when you're custom bring everything or bring a piece of automation to explain that we can automate. So it's done through the video.
Bill: No, I love that. And I think when we look at video and trade shows and we talk about, everybody's got limited resources, budget, bandwidth time. So we have to prioritize. And we look at video, video can be an investment that is evergreen, that is reusable, that is repurposable, that is, can be distributed consistently throughout the year. And we can take, I think, trade show budget specifically for these large booths for a lot of these other investments and reallocate that to video capture that can be used for the trade show, but that can also be used for so many other things. And I think we're starting to see a transition away from the three story skyscrapers, the two, three, four, $500,000 booths, because unless you're just there to make a statement as that industry leader, and every industry has them, they have the four or five companies that are the multinationals, Fortune 500, huge companies that it doesn't matter if they spend five million on the trade show. That's kind of the expectation. But for everybody else, we need to be nimble with our marketing dollars and do things that make sense, that are not about the ego of the company, but are about the return on investment and driving results.
Rena: And those people usually do have a really good video too because of all those reasons, but when you're when you're when you don't have unlimited budget like most of us and you have to squeeze everything out you know really look at your booths and say what is it that we definitely need? What's gonna get us the bang for our buck? And I would say some form of video would be on the forefront of that anymore. And I even us, I'm trying to figure out the next, the next version of that for even us. Not just spinning like, I can see you do this, you do this, but like more tangible, but you can't speak. You can't, the video like then that was my second pet peeve. People who do videos where somebody's talking, but you can't hear them when you're at a trade show. So it absolutely means nothing. You see somebody walking, you know they're talking, but you have no idea what they're saying. So it's that kind of, either you have to put that on iPad and let them look at that if they're interested, or you have to figure out, that's the ticket, I guess. But if it would be easy, everybody would be able to do it. We would all be not have this conversation.
Bill: That's right. When I think one of the things we have to recognize with trade show booths is if people are walking by and don't know us, if they aren't brand aware, we need to really lean into our unique value proposition and our brand and the brand promise. What are we solving for that client? Because they don't know us. I think sometimes we get so enamored as manufacturers with low funnel communication, technical details that don't matter. For instance, if you're at a trade show, and a lot of the folks are in governmental purchasing, you better show that you're ISO 9,000 right away. You're ISO cert, right? Because if not, they can't buy from you. Or if it's those clarification points that they need to recognize to consider you, that needs to be presented broadcast so that they're willing to walk in and have that conversation and take it to the next level. So I think when we look at those, the other thing I think that I've seen used really, really well, and this is like so old school, but title slides, like slides that come across the screen or part of the video that just have like one or two or three words that kind of frame exactly what we're about. Custom plastic injection molding four words, like we're not reinventing, like this isn't David Ogilvy reinventing marketing, right? But this is, yeah, I need some custom injection plastic molding or I need whatever. Okay, yeah, that's a booth that is of interest to me. And if not, please keep moving along so you don't waste my time because the next person walking on the aisle may be important and may have an actual need and wants to talk to me.
Rena: And I would say I would agree with that because our videos at the trade show do have words on them. And it has our certs and big, big screen of like FDA ISO 1340, you know, all of those. Because again, what does your audience, the bottom line, what does your audience care about? And then that's all you need to worry about. All the other stuff matters. Nothing matters. Because if that's not your audience walking by then it doesn't matter and they'll be like, they'll move on and that's fine because I'm a big, we're a big fan of quality versus quantity for anything. For anything.
Bill: Well, and I think that goes into our next topic. Let's talk about measuring success in B2B marketing. I mean, when we talk about quality and quantity and we talk about some of the vanity metrics, like the number of impressions, there's a lot of, there's so much data. There's so many things we measure now on every platform. What do you guys really look at Crescent as far as measuring success? What are some of your core, maybe KPIs or metrics that you're tracking that give you an indication that you're moving the needle?
Rena: Well, I mean obviously traffic is important, but it's not our traffic might, traffic has taken sometimes take dips, but our form submissions are opportunities to quote have increased which tells me that I'm doing a better job of reaching my target audience versus oh, I have because nobody here honestly my boss did the president from the nobody cares if our traffic has 50,000, whatever it is, nobody cares. They care about quotable. I mean, when we say this, especially as marketers, everything, yes, of course you want new business, you but I don't have control over what sales does. I do not, the best thing I can do is to get quotable leads for them that they feel like they can reach out to. And that's your end goal. That's my end goal. If we got a quote, I did my job. Hopefully, and then yes, there is some feedback. I mean I usually know we do a little bit of, I see the form submissions. I'll do a little bit of like, I don't know, sometimes you're in that sales enablement window where you're looking and you're going this and I'll send that and say, hey, this is, and I delete the junk. And they won't see that or they'll ignore it. So what they're seeing is what I'm saying, hey, this company is mid-range, this is the design engineer, he's looking for a new diagnostic, which is right in our wheelhouse, so that would be like, A, boom, boom, boom, for them, go. And then they'll reach out. Sometimes it's not as glamorous. I'm really not sure what they're looking for. It is a medical company. I’m a little confused. Maybe they're just student, start off. I'm not sure. But they'll have an idea a little bit right out of the gate before they see the lead. So a little bit of feedback from them is always good. But if you give them too much of the stuff that you know is junk, then you'll be like, you're not giving me anything good. So we just kind of, I measure a lot of our stuff on contact, form submissions are great, but if they are not, we delete them if they're junk. So if they don't become an official contact, so we look at that, if they're still on the database as a contact, which means we felt like they deserve to be nurtured, you know, that they're deserved to be, you know, that they fit within our core. You know, that we could service them, that we keep nurturing them. And if, and I do quote, quote, like deals, anything that has opportunity to quote, that's where I, you know, that's kind of where we draw the line.
Bill: No, that's great. Whenever you look at quotable leads and you look at that, trying to set the expectations with leadership, set the expectations with sales and have a healthy conversation around, okay, if you want this to continue, we need budget for this. If we have a downturn, well, maybe it's because of that. How do you have those conversations and what have you learned over the past 17 years, Rena, in that space?
Rena: Well, I mean, there are things we've done that I don't do today just because of a tracking sense. You know, I do tracking codes on everything. Obviously, you're tracking if we have a partner that like a magazine or a trade publication where you're running like a digital news ad and then they give you some leads. And you know, I might, and we literally had this where we've got a hundred leads and I worked down through them and I've passed one or two to sales. And when you go through that and the time and the effort, you realize maybe they're not quite where I want to be. And that's, don't need to spend our money there or our time and our effort to get to like, how much time are we spending? How much effort are we spending? This might not be quite the market. And we've gotten rid of things. We've gotten rid of different partners or stop doing things or limited based on that. And then there's other ones where you're like, hey, this is off the rails. I’ve maybe I've literally gotten like a 10 person list and nine of them was quoted. You know, like, so now you're going, well, that people, they're our audience. They're actionable. They're ready to go. Like, so you kind of just met, measure those, like where they came in from in the system and then where did, what's, you know, what's happening and it's, you know, content marketing is a long game. It is a marathon game. It is not fast. There's some other things like newsletters or digital that might be a little faster. Like you run it and it's a hit. You've got all these crazy, you know, this it's going on or you just hit the right time. Finally, all the stars align. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's just. Tracking and reviewing and assessing because things change all the time. Where things were great before, you can slowly see the decline, where you didn't think you would do, now you're doing because you've seen the uptick. Now, especially with this crazy AI and Google overviews and all sorts of things that's happening out there, you just really have to be able to change and adapt and say just because I don't ever say just because we always do doesn't mean we can, doesn't mean we should continue to do. It depends on what's working and it's a changing game. It's changing all the time.
Bill: So one of the things we try to do in the Missing Half podcast is discover what's missing. And I think your perspective here could be really valuable to some of our maybe folks who are just new to their marketing positions, right? And they're starting at a company that didn't have marketing before. One of the things I think that's a big challenge, and you just hit on it, you'll try something, you'll get 100 MQLs, marketing qualified leads, and only one of them is a sales qualified lead. You'll do something else where you'll get 10 marketing qualified leads and nine of them are sales qualified leads. Well, I've sat in those rooms as a marketing manager before with leadership and they always say things like, well, let's do more of that bit that got the 90% conversion of marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead and less of that other thing. The reality is though, and I don't know if this is true for you, I suspect it is, we don't know going into these efforts which one is going to be the one out of 101% right or the 90% because if we did, we would only do the 90% things, right? I mean, we're not dumb. Like we like to get promoted. We like raises. We like to move forward as marketing managers. So how do you, with your years of experience, how do you navigate those waters with sales, with leadership to communicate that this is a long game, like you said, number two, it is a lot of trial and error. There's a lot of experimentation. We have hypotheses. We test them. Some work out well. Some fail miserably. How do you manage that?
Rena: 38:33.803 Well, I think a lot of the things we do, like what I do, I just had a conversation there's because obviously budgeting and planning and things are coming up and I, we walk before we run. So we test the water because you're going to know, you know, you will always get, well, if you spend more, you know, Google, as soon as you do Google ads. It's never enough. Just so anybody knows, Google will always tell you, you need to spend more. If you don't know that already, then it will never be enough.
Bill: Rena, think we're gonna be canceled. So like the missing half podcast just got canceled. Cause Google is gonna wipe us out because you just let everybody behind the curtain. Oh my word. All this effort we put into this show is over. No, but that's true. And I don't care if it's Google. I don't care if it's LinkedIn ads. I don't care if...
Rena: It doesn't matter what it is. I flat out said, we are going to walk before we run. That way I can say, I would like to do this. This is what this is gonna get me. And then, know, there is, well, it depends on your message. It depends on, I understand all that. You know, like we know that. But if you are telling me that this is my audience, I have had places where I've done that, where it's been small and I've had reaped. You can see it and you think, gosh darn it, I wish I would have had more money for that, because I could have done this again and again. And so the next year, I have a company who this year, they got twice as much as they did last year. Why? Because I had a list of 25 and 15 of those went through to sales to be quoted and nurtured and were dead on. And so that's why they, and then that was a couple of times. And so they, got more money this year. So if you're telling me and you're promising me that you're in my audience, then you should be able to deliver something flat out that I should be able to at least see. And then I can say, because then that's what I said to her today, if I can prove, then it's easy to get more money. Because that's, you know, you, if you're starting new or you're starting something, you, you know, if there's a proof, then there was no question when I doubled that. And I mean, in our world, in our world, it's still not a lot, but from short other people, but for, know, many for us, but there was no question. Nobody even said, nobody even questioned it. Why? Because the proof was, I, we already had the proof. The proof was in what we did. And I think that that's start small, you know, and you have to fight that sometimes. Smart small. If you say you can do what you can do or you say you have my audience, I've learned I don't need to do this once a month. I don't need to. You can put me in on the times that count the most. You know, this is the expectation. If you prove you will get more next year, bottom line. So that's where I usually start and it's amazing when you start giving that, it's amazing what people say, I'll work something out for you. And sometimes they work out and you go, And sometimes you're like, well, I only spat some out so that one didn't pan out the way we had hoped. You gotta learn to take those too. I mean, those, we've had some, this is gonna be great. Not so great. And you just brush it off and you move on and say, wasn't it. You know, maybe it wasn't the right time too. Like sometimes that's things are going on, elections going on now. I mean, whatever. And it's just wasn't the right time. So don't give up on that piece of content after one time. Is, was there something else happening? Was there, you know, we have a big trade show events where somebody consumed NPE for that year, and they just didn't try it again. Maybe try it a different time of year. Was it the summer or 2B2B? Those types of things. Try again before you give up. Always try again.
Bill: I think that's one of the challenges we as marketing managers face and that is kind of a detriment to some of the marketing agency community is in order to get sales, marketing agencies have to say, yes, I have this figured out. I did this for somebody. Yes, I can get this exact result for you. And the reality is in the manufacturing space, especially when we're dealing with niche manufacturers, there is a probability that they can generate significant results and similar results. But there is also a probability that it is not going to work out for your company because you have a different target audience. You have a different target market with different care abouts. You have a different offer. You have a different buying cycle. We try to, you know, really educate people and talk through the concept that these are theories. These are things that we've done and proven for other people. And we will work very, very hard to toggle them and optimize them so that they work for you. But when we're in the marketing agency space, you're in the market management space, there's a lot of trial and error. I do agree with you though, that if someone has a publication or a vehicle that they're charging money for and making the claim, hey, we have a thousand buying professionals that buy your product every day and it's going to cost $10,000 to send this communication out or be in this promotion. That has to deliver like that because if not, their brand promise is not being met, right? And that's a buy, not a marketing campaign or a marketing initiative. So I think that makes a lot of sense. I love the way you talk about it being a long game. One of the challenges I think we also face as marketing managers in the manufacturing space is that we have slower moving businesses that are, you they have huge capital investments. There's a lot of time. The buying cycle is really long. Supply chain is really long and takes a lot of time to build up those infrastructures. And then you have on the other side, you have marketing moving at the speed of light, trying to embrace all these changes. it's, it's, you know, marrying those two things together. When you look at that, try things and then next year you'll add more to them, how do you deal with also the fact that in some cases, what worked a little bit this year is out of date next year and won't even be considered part of it because this isn't 1990, this isn't the 2000s where like year over year you could kind of build a program. And you mentioned AI, AI is coming so fast that it's going to change even more quickly. How do you deal with like marrying those two worlds together?
Rena: Well, that's a good question. think it comes down to, the bottom line comes down to no matter what's happening, your customer needs answers to questions. They need, they're coming in, they have a job to do, you provide a service, and you just need to constantly educate them, especially when you do have, I mean, we… we constantly try to say, somebody signed up for a guide and it might be lower level start of a design. And then you kind of do a lead nurturing and you kind of build them up and you kind of slow. I mean, we, you know, there's insanities where you need to email this, you need to do that. And it, I think it doesn't need to be that extreme when nobody wants to. I mean, I'm frankly, if somebody sends me another text message asking me who I'm gonna vote for every day, we were like, what if we did that? Like, what if we did that? You would wanna kill someone. Like I like, so, you it's slow, like you wanna stay there and.
Bill: This is the second moment in the podcast we're going to get canceled. I think I'm to tell the team that the thumbnail for this episode, and we're going to go viral, Rena, this is a viral moment, is going to be how Bill almost got canceled twice in one episode. We've offended Google, LinkedIn, both political parties.
Rena: We didn't offend, I did not offend LinkedIn.
Bill: But I loop them in and they always spend more, right? So let's just, let's go for it. I think Facebook always wants more money. Twitter always wants, let's just keep Reddit. They all want more money. So we're gonna make this the most cancelable episode ever. I love it.
Rena: But I'm saying, well, you know, like I said, just try to remember to stay out there in front of your people until they need you. Try to be helpful. Don't say, oh we're here. This is Crescent and we're doing an injection. just kind of keep, you got this guy, you got this. Here's another guide. Here's a video. Maybe this will help you. Then maybe you throw in a piece of like hey, look at our case study or hey, don't forget we're here, we do that, we have a clean room, we have our new clean room, know, something like that. And then just kind of stay there till hopefully, you know, we've deemed them as a good contact and we deemed them in the right place that when they do need you, they call us, you know, and that's all, I mean, that's the bottom line of all of this is when they need you, they call or they fill out a contact form. And unfortunately for us, mean, you can't just order something online. Somebody has to have a person-to-person conversation because you just, these parts are medical devices and there's, you know, it's complex and there's, you know, there is email and there's Zoom and all those fun things, but there's still gotta be a conversation because of that. But you can try to get them that by the time they're like those people. I believe can handle my project. then you've done everything that you can. If you kind of kept nurturing them and hoped for the best.
Bill: I think that's so true. When we look at what is our job as a marketing manager, what's our job in the marketing space, it is to create brand awareness, identify our clients' pain points, help provide that we are an authority in solving those pain points. And if collectively all the things we try are moving that forward, that's the goal. And like you said, I think sometimes we have, yes.
Rena: And adapt, job... You sometimes you're like, that's not, nobody cares about this anymore. And we have, I've switched even in manufacturing. You know I don't dig out my contact. I don't do my content calendar for a year because I do not know and you will not know what's gonna happen next September. I don't know what I need to be doing because COVID. We, I mean, I just got a lesson myself. there was a, we used to do a supply chain during COVID because it was a nightmare for people. And you're like, you need to get orders in. You have to get them in early. This was just a notification out there for the world. This, this resin's running behind, it is like 27 weeks. Like just, if you're going to use it, you might, are you thinking about it? Maybe you want to try this because this is only 10 or, and I was running, I, we kind of stopped. Because the supply chain came back and we have gotten people going, where is that? We want that update still. You're the only one that gave it to us. You're the only one that we got that information from. Can you start doing that again? I'm like, crap, okay. You know, we've got to get back to that. So it was just that. That wasn't all my, my content calendar did not have, let's give supply chain updates like, once a month here during COVID and job back in punt. Adapt, you know.
Bill: Sure. So I think that makes that makes a ton of sense. What we generally recommend in the market is have a baseline content calendar, have like kind of like have, okay, these are the things we have to cover, but then have that availability for some resources held back that if all of a sudden you have to develop this supply chain communication or whatever it is that's going to address the immediate needs in the market. That then you can do that. You don't want to have 110% allocated of the budget going into the year and then you have no ability to pivot. So no, I think that that makes a ton of sense. When you look, Rena, when you look at AI, I mean, everybody's talking about it. Everybody's using it. What are you guys doing at Crescent to embrace AI, deal with it, test it, try it, use it? What can you offer as advice to other marketing managers in this space around AI?
Rena: I definitely say embrace it. You have to. I even feel like I'm not embracing it the way I would like to. It's still a learning curve, still doing it, but I've, you know, protect yourself. It is kind of the wild, wild west, think. Everybody out there with what do you put out? What's the whole world gonna see? But I mean, we did a customer survey. I took all the customer information. I took all of us out. You just had the responses. I uploaded the spreadsheet and AI gave me a, these are the build points from here, which was kind of nice. Instead of me going down through and trying to figure that out, it kind of gave me a summary of that customer survey that I'm like, good, I can use that. To just think, yes, it can generate content. I think I would be careful. It's generating content for everybody and everybody that does what you do. So just remember that. Also be aware that I think, and I think that's where I'm working on is how do I get into those AI searches now? When somebody's looking for me, like how do you get into those? I think if you're not, mean, again, I think it's answering questions and pain points and things, but you know, there was some SEO protocols. There’s nothing right now. And so it's just kind of feeling your way and seeing where all of this is going to land, but don't ignore it. Or you won't be I think you can't ignore it. You have to embrace it. You have to use it. mean, there's I mean, for us, the AI generated photos aren't the best. AI still doesn’t know what injection molding is. You know, manufacturing, we're behind the times a little bit, it's very obvious to us what an AI-generated photo is versus an actual. If it's really that obvious to me, I would say it's probably obvious to your customer too. So just think about how you're using it, make sure you're getting in there and personalizing it and tweaking it. And I mean, there's so many things out there. I'm learning day to day. But I think also, you know, if you're, I contract people, if they're using it to help make their life better and they're personalizing things for you, whatever. Just, I would say, I mean, like HubSpot has all sorts of AI integrations that are coming. mean, they actually have these things called agents that are coming up. They're actually saying person, person, agent. Which is an AI, like it's a staff member. That's their goal. And that, I mean, that's all this stuff's been crazy. And I think just be aware, see what's coming around, be safe, protect your company, protect yourself as best as you can and realize that it's like the wild, it is like a wild, wild west out in there and be careful what you put out.
Bill: So one of the things I think we're seeing with AI is everybody's using it and you gave some great use cases. Reduce administrative work, do research, speed things up. I think the question that we have to ask and you talked about it is as marketers, how are we going to be preparing our clients to be more effective in talking to AI? Because there is going to be an intermediary between us and our purchasing target audience. That that purchasing director, especially the younger generations, which are what greater than 50% of the workforce. Now they hold the purchasing director, the purchasing admin, the specifier job title right now. They're going to go to whatever AI tool they use and they're going to type in, please review the top 10 plastic injection molding companies in the United States that have these certifications and this type of information, and they're going to get a report. And that is going to replace a lot of the search functionality with Google. And we have to prepare our companies, our clients for that eventuality because we don't want to go and go backwards. You've done a lot of great work over the past 17 years in SEO, in content, and building up that digital asset. But we have to make sure, like you said, that transitions over into the AI generation and the agents or whatever it is are able to interact and provide that information to their buying committees or their buying personnel. So I love that answer. And also, think something you said is very important. We have to be careful. We have to, I think as a community of marketers, develop more policies to help each other learn from mistakes or things that could be detrimental. And I think you relayed one of those like we can't just go to ChatGPT and have it write all of our blogs and put them out there. This is not we don't sell pizza and ice cream. We sell very technical products that in some cases you guys are selling a lot of you're supporting the medical device community. We're talking about life and death. It's not about whether the pizza tastes good or you know, someone's doing a review of that. So all right changing gears once again. Rena, this has been amazing. Great conversation. I love your perspective. One of the things we ask all of our guests about is some of the pain points that are experienced by manufacturing marketers. And we've looked at a lot of the surveys out there and everybody's struggling with time, resources and budget. It's just a reality of how to stretch what we have to get done, what we need to do to generate those leads, to get the content built. When you think about those pain points, and maybe about what's missing from your marketing and what you're planning on moving forward, like what do you see is… Without giving away company secrets or anything major, what do you see that would be valuable for other marketing managers to think about as the next phases of your marketing plan and what you're trying to get done?
Rena: I really think that we're gonna try to focus a little bit more on, because of AI, the top level funnel content, which we did for years, is maybe not gonna be as important, or the way for somebody to find us anymore, because AI will answer those, because all, you know, I've been putting, we've been putting content out, our competitors have been cutting content out, and AI now knows some of those answers without answering. And with all the AI tools in manufacturing, it's gonna start to know, understand what the injection molding process is, so it will be able to answer that even better. So I think some of that top level, so we're really trying to focus a little more on mid-level, more, yes, we say we do this, but like more of we said it. Now I'm going to show you why we said we can do this. I'm going show you how I'm going to show you. This is the person. These are the people that get this job done. This is what they're going to do. This is how, and now, now people will have maybe a face, a thing. Oh, so you, you say you build a tool and you can take it into production, but now you're actually saying, showing us a little bit. That process. So you're actually seeing that now. Just don't take my word for it. Here are the people that are doing it. I think some of that personal, personal experience. And just stay, I think still answer those questions. And I think those questions are ever changing all the time. And so you can never, I mean, I think so I'm still thinking that there's questions out there that nobody's answering that's in our industry that I want to answer. But I don't know what those are, but we're gonna work on that. That's the goal. You know what I mean? That we've got to answer some of those and maybe we're working on that. That's kind of the goal to constantly say, to keep us as that thought leader like we did when we came out of the gate with the articles, blogging, and we've got a lot of stuff and then everybody kind of tagged on. Now everybody's doing content now and here I am still. Kind of a small team, how do you compete with that? And there's tools, but just again, you have to be careful with those AI tools and hopefully the integrations into your other things will help make those more secure and better fitting that you can put in your parameters for your audience and understand what your company specifically needs.
Bill: I think that's a great idea. That's a great strategy to look at that middle of the funnel storytelling and answering questions. One of the things we see with the Missing Half podcast is we interview a lot of people and some folks are where you were 17 years ago. They've just been hired as a marketing manager at a manufacturing company who has, let's just be honest, neglected the marketing function. They have not invested that they have a website that's probably been updated in the past five to seven years. It is not accurate. It is not updated. Like, I mean, you're getting the picture of where they are. If you were going to give that person who's just starting out in that seat, and maybe we go back to the word hope. I mean, maybe we're going to have to go to adjectives as opposed to like tactical recommendations, but do you believe that with effort and budget and like prioritization, that younger companies or younger to the marketing game can catch up if they work really hard and are really smart with the way they do it?
Rena: Oh my gosh, think anybody coming off could catch up in two seconds if they did it right. I mean, again, I think if you're coming in off the street, you're new, know, really learn your audience, really learn your pain points and then the creativity of how to answer those, whether who's your audience and make sure you don't go to Facebook if they're not there. My audience is not on Facebook. I had a conversation with a manufacturer and he's like, I'm trying to grow my Facebook audience, blah, blah, blah. What are you guys doing? I'm like, I don't do anything. My audience isn't there. I mean, we post on Facebook, we post the feel-goods because our employees like it. We have school tours, know, any of those like, we have company picnic, we give, like, because that stuff, and it does go very well, but it's not, if somebody is looking, to, you know, they might see it on LinkedIn or something, say, that's nice. But, you know, we're not targeting Facebook. I'm like, is that where your audience is? And he couldn't answer me. So I think you’re leaps and bounds ahead of that person, if you know where your audience is, or you think you know where you're, you're gonna have to do a little bit of digging. Sometimes it's a, I learned a little bit of hard way that my audience is in that Facebook. Not that I was spending a lot of money or doing anything with that, but it's just not there. I get a lot of, if you do it right, understand, like look at Google traffic on the Google Analytics it’s free. You can find out all sorts of information. Like I get non-stop told, you got to worry about mobile. No, I don't. Why? Because my people are still on their desktop. Why? Because they're designing parts. You're not designing a part on your mobile device. My audience is still 70% desktop and people will argue with me. Agencies will argue with me. And I'm like, no, I'm not making it go. You want to give me Google? Here's my Google account. I'll prove it to you. Now it's been, I mean, it used to be 95 to five. So now we're down to like, you know, 70, 30. So, you know, tablets and things like that, but it's still very high. I'm not in that industry standard. So, and I know that. So know your audience and when you do that, then it's just all like, what can we do? I'm sure, no, I'm not gonna say that because I know I have one. I have a younger person working for me and I will guarantee that their creativity would top over me in a red hot minute. So.
Bill: Sure. They grew up in this. I mean, they grew up in this, so it's more natural.
Rena: Yeah. Yeah. So they'll go, you know, somebody don't be scared. Figure these few, mean, they're very basic marketing things and then go try. Do I, you know, do. Try everything we say, throw it up the wall and see if it sticks. Really? That's, you know, that's really what it that's, that's our saying here. We literally say that. Let's see throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks like you know so that's kind of that's in that was for our video guy he's like.
Bill: I love that. But I think what you said there about know your audience and know their pain points, if you can dial those two things in, and then know where your audience hangs out. If you can dial those three things in, then theoretically, any content or any campaign or any activity that you do will have some impact. Will create...
Rena: It will have some success, regardless.
Bill: Yeah, so that if you're new and you're starting out and you're like, okay, I have to know those three things and then start testing activities within the construct of those, the answers to those three questions, then you'll start to find things that work better. So I think, I think that's a great piece of advice because sometimes as a marketer who's been doing this for a long, long time, I get so stuck in the weeds and I can't offer that like succinct sage advice that would like be a guiding light, like, cause it's like, well, you need to do a strategic analysis and then you need to look at your brand strategy. And then, you know, what, who are your videos messaging to and what type of part of the funnel top middle, like, you you get stuck into all that detail, but maybe, you know, the real answer is provide that guiding light of those succinct and simple and straightforward frameworks. And then from there, everything else works itself out because in life, whether there's new technology or not, those truths often ring true consistently.
Rena: Well, does. And I think like when you get into the weeds like that and think, I need to have a, an analysis and then you lose. Why am I doing it? Like I, of course I do a blog analysis. I look and say this traffic, you know what traffic gets a lot of views, but no interaction, but they're good topics because they're solving some problem and that's okay. They're like, I would say very, very top of the, so I'm not going to get rid of them, but I know they're not lead generating. They might be down the road. And with new tools and things, I mean, I'm really getting a good picture. You're starting to get even more picture of like, well I'm looking at blog articles of contacts and this is their industry and I can't believe like I really thought I can't believe military is looking at that versus I thought I didn't think they would. So you just be open to using those analytics, but being careful and not going, oh everybody says you need to do this. You know what I mean? You might love Instagram, but if your audience isn’t on Instagram, don't waste your time. think that's, I think when you, especially when you're small, you gotta focus on the things that work and leave the rest of that crap go. That way you can have success. And that way when you do go to your budget and somebody says you have a monetary thing, they might say, okay, why? Because I know that if it doesn't work out, you're not gonna spend it again. Like I have that now. Like they know. I'm not just gonna spend because we did that last year.
Bill: Sure. No, there's too much information. know too much now. It's got to earn its keep. Rena, this has been a fascinating conversation. I think when we look at your experience of building a marketing department from a headcount of zero to the amount of marketing and impact you've had at Crescent over the past 17 years is amazing. I really appreciate your perspective because we rarely see people stay in positions over long periods of time to actually have good, like the ability to reflect and understand like the life cycle of things. So, really appreciate, your feedback and your perspective. if someone wants to get ahold of Crescent industries, learn more about your company and get in touch with you, how would they get in touch with Crescent industries?
Rena: Well, I would say go on the web. If they want, for Crescent, do www.crescentind.com. I mean, we're also on LinkedIn, obviously. That would be the way it's going. And for me, I'm on LinkedIn. You know, me, I would love to talk to anybody, especially manufacturing, because it's tough. And it's tough in a good way. I mean, I like it because it does change, you know, but. You know, I love that, you know, I'm in marketing conference and I go there and I meet other people that are in my shoes and we, there's just the pain points and some of the issues and just what, do you handle it? How do I handle it? And somewhere you learn something, you always learn something new. I don't care if I've been doing this for 17, if you could check back with me in 10 years, maybe, hopefully I'll be close to retirement and I'll be doing my stuff. You have to be able to learn all the time. If you've decided that you don't want to learn or can't learn or if you say you know everything, it's probably time for you to go.
Bill: No, absolutely. If you want to be in a career that is the same for years and years to come, do not apply to the marketing field because it changes every day. And that's what's exciting about it. It's what's frustrating about it, but it can be fun as well. Well, Rena, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experience. And really, if you got us canceled, we'll thank you for that.
Rena: Ha, I'm sorry about that.
Bill: We'll go, we'll figure that out later. But no, thank you so much. And just really appreciate you having you on the show.
Rena: All right. Thank you. enjoyed it. I always like talking marketing.
Bill: Love it. Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Subscribe, like, comment. Have a great day.