25:02
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
content, people, hubspot, buyers, kurt, blog post, create, topic, clients, writing, manufacturers, damon, inbound marketing, website, driving, josh, ebooks, pages, traffic, manufacturing company
SPEAKERS
Josh Curcio, Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson
Damon Pistulka 00:00
All right, Kurt. Take it away, man. Welcome everyone. Well, thank
Curt Anderson 00:04
you, Damon. So we have a very small crowd today. So thank you. I think we saw Jeffrey, thank you Jeffrey Vila, we saw Val IRA. So today this is an absolute thrill honor for me. So, I’ve been working with Josh Curcio Oh from protocol 80 for the past eight years or so. And the cool thing is I’ve watched he is a partner, Donnie, and he and Danny and when I first met them, I think they had maybe two or three employees up around on now. And I’ve watched them grow their company over years.
And it’s just been a true blessing privilege. We’ve taken him to work with multiple manufacturers over the years, we’ve shared with programs and partnerships. So this is a great program here today. So I want to turn it over to Josh, Josh, thank you for joining us today. Go ahead and take it from there, man.
Josh Curcio 00:57
Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate the the kind words, it’s been a pleasure working with you as well. And I appreciate that. I you and Damon have been putting these events together. It’s awesome to be a part of it. Thank you for inviting me and I gotta you know, give a plug to Kurt’s book that you can purchase now on Amazon. Be sure to check that out. So just a little bit about me, CEO and partner at protocol 80.
I’m a HubSpot certified trainer and I also lead the HubSpot user group in Rochester, New York. I’m also one of the HubSpot community champions. So the HubSpot community is a place where you can go and ask all of your inbound questions HubSpot questions. Unfortunately for right now I’m the number two top solution author. So check that out. And then outside of work, you can find me on Strava on peloton on untapped.
I was talking to Damon about untapped a little bit ago. And on Yelp. So if you care to know anything about me outside of work, just check me out there. So we have a short amount of time today a condensed amount of time to talk about a really big topics. So I thought I would just focus in on like if someone said you had to do just one thing to help your manufacturing company generate leads and sales just one thing. There would be content, hands down. Content is the number one thing that you could do. And you might be saying, well, gosh, what we do is so boring.
Nobody wants to read about it. Nobody wants to see this content, maybe. But people are searching for boring content every day, all day. And those people, those people are your customers and your prospects. They’re the people that are looking for solutions, they’re trying to solve their problems, it may be boring to you know, spend your time reading on the weekend. But if you’re helping someone that’s not boring. So here’s just some stats to prove that even though it’s boring, it’s effective.
So this is one of our clients. And you can see over time, this top green bar is organic traffic. These are the drivers of that organic traffic, blog posts, blog posts, blog post homepage is on there, which should be expected. Those are all blog posts that are driving traffic that these people aren’t paying for every time someone clicks like in paid. That’s driving traffic. here’s just another example. You know, almost 15,000 visits in one month from blog post blog post blog post, the homepage doesn’t even get enough traffic, in this case, to be up there in the top six traffic driving sources.
You might be saying all right, well, traffic doesn’t do anything. Well look at the new content sources. So this is the count of contacts, and where they’re coming from. And you can see here that the majority of those contacts, over the course of the year are coming from organic search, some from paid, and some from these other sources. But by far organic search, driven by content is driving new traffic. And it’s driving new conversions or people that are essentially raising their hand and say, yeah, I’m researching this.
So while it may be boring to someone, and you know, honestly, it’s probably boring for most people to read 99% of people, it’s helpful for some people to read because they’re looking for the information. And again, those people are your customers and your prospects. So why does content work? Why does it work so well? One, your website can only go so far. You have your website, which consists of your core pages, your homepage, your about page, your history page, your capabilities page, you know It’s pretty limited. Unless you’re a full blown ecommerce site, you maybe have 20 pages, right?
Those 20 pages can only go so far. As far as ranking in search, you’re only going to rank for so many topics, when we’re we’re sticking to those core pages. And also those pages that are just your website pages that aren’t article based or content focused, they’re really about you. They’re not so much about what your buyers are looking for. So if you want to get in front of new people, content is the way to go writing content for the symptoms, the problems, the opportunities that they have.
05:41
Content also allows for better types of targeting. So if you want to reach more engineers, you should produce content about what engineers care about. Or if you’re looking to get in touch with buyers or people with purchasing power, you need to find out what content they care about. That’s what you need to produce. And then again, content gets the readers to raise their hands.
So if we’re looking at just purely driving website traffic, you don’t know who those individuals are, when we look at content. That could be things like ebooks, downloadables, white papers, checklists, those are all types of things that get people to say, Hey, this is this is my email address. This is my name. This is where I work, and I’m researching something that you’re writing about. So it takes it to that next level. Content also gets you backlinks.
You know, when we think about manufacturing companies in the typical manufacturing company website, you know, how often is someone going to go in and create a backlink? meaning they’re linking to that manufacturers website from their own website? How many times are they just going to go out there and link to the History page, just because probably not very often, you know, you’ll get your homepage links here and there, but not those internal pages.
But if we’re creating content, Article based content that’s helpful for someone and it’s informative and valuable. Those types of content pieces will drive backlinks, which builds your domain authority, which helps every other aspect of your online marketing as far as traffic growth and that visibility in search engine that helps to drive that organically, which is what Google wants to see. And I can go on, there’s a ton of reasons why why content can help not only drive the traffic, drive the leads, build the domain authority and help close sales.
The list is huge. So again, there’s one thing I would tell you to do with content. So you might say, all right, how do I do it? You know, it’s easy to say that. The first thing I’ll say is, is do a buyer persona build. If you’re going to build a foundation, or a strategy, about like the types of content that you’re writing about, it needs to be geared all around those people that are your potential buyers or your current customers, and you need to understand the things that really resonate with them.
And my number one recommendation there for building your buyer persona is to interview actual buyers, because your sales team, your customer service people, your CEO, they can make all sorts of assumptions about what your buyers care about, without actually talking to the buyers themselves. That’s all they are. They’re just assumptions, interview them have conversations, and we’re going to uncover information that you would never have expected you would have uncovered from them. Then map the content that you’re going to be writing that strategy to the buyer and to their buying process.
And when I say buying process that might even be before they’re in the process of making a buying decision. That might be when they’re researching, you know, symptoms that they’re having or an opportunity that they might pursue, but they’re not necessarily purchasing at that point in time. So you need to take the buyer understand what they care about, then take that buying process and start to align topics, so that the content that you’re producing is relevant and speaking to them at the right time in the right places.
Along with that create the type of content that your buyers will consume. And what I mean by that is, you know if your buyers are the types of people that that would rather watch a video, create video, if they are the type of buyer that really needs the stats and the information, create white papers, create ebooks with that information. Make sure that as part of that understanding of the buyer find out where they consume their content and how They like to consume that content.
10:04
This is a big one and one that people fail at a lot. Create for value, not for volume. You know, I’ve been in the SEO world for 12 plus years now. And when I came into the SEO world, the phrase was content is king. And it’s still true. But it’s not King, if you’re just putting garbage content out there, we’re not trying to just create noise, we’re trying to create value. So if you can only create one blog post a month, and have it be valuable, create one blog post a month, don’t create for just for the fact that you’re creating four blog posts a month. Optimize. So when we look at content, you know, we’re making sure that what we’re writing is in line with our buyers.
But the verbiage that we might use may not be necessarily the verbiage that everyone use. So when we’re creating these content pieces, think about the topic and think about the buyer intent, start to align those things the topic and the intent with the article itself the copy, but then also look to say, Alright, well, if this is our topic, you know, I should make sure that the phrase that our buyers are using is in places like our title of the topic.
It’s in the headings, it’s used in the article. Now, I’m not telling you to stop a bunch of keywords in there, I’m just telling you to think about what that topic is. And the intent is when you’re producing the content, and making sure that they’re using the phrases that your buyers are searching for. If you don’t have time, invest, hire an agency doesn’t have to be my agency, it can be any agency. But if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, don’t don’t come in, create a plan.
And assume that you will eventually have the time because the truth is, is you’re not we see it day in and day out in the manufacturing world, people wear so many hats, that when something new comes about that’s like well, if I don’t get it done today, I can do it tomorrow or something that you don’t see immediate results. And it takes time, you know, it’s easy to push to the side and put on the back burner. And then when that happens, you never get done. So if you are serious about it, and you want to use it for growth, and you don’t have the time to do it yourself, hire an agency, there’s a ton of great agencies out there that can support you.
And along with that, using content to help grow your business, it works. But it’s not a sprint, you’re not going to write a blog post. And then the next day, you’re going to have, you know, hordes of new customers hordes of new leads, it doesn’t happen like that. But the impact of writing content in focusing on blog post production and ebooks and white papers, the impact is compounding. So all those blog posts that you’re creating, they continue to drive traffic month in and month out.
And they’ll do so for as long as they’re relevant. once they’re done being relevant, you can go back to that blog post and make it relevant, again, updated with the most up to date, content and accurate information. The same thing with the conversion opportunities, those white papers, those ebooks, they will start to build your library. As you build that library, you’re going to start seeing more and more conversion. So it’s a marathon something that you have to stick with. It’s not a sprint. So my key takeaway, if I was going to do one thing is content works. But only if you do it right.
If you’re jumping in just doing content to produce content, it’s not going to work. Guaranteed. So take your time, plan, strategize, invest if you have to do it, right. Alright, so just one more shameless plug before we turn it over for questions. Manufacturing marketing world is an event that that we’re having, it’s geared all around manufacturers, it’s 1029. So we’re a couple weeks out, not sure exactly how long roughly an all day event. Here are four of the speakers Dan tire, who’s like the number six employee at HubSpot, and I was telling Kurt Damon earlier, this guy is like a ball of energy more energy than I’ve ever
14:40
ever had anyone present at any point in time. I’ve talked to Dan at 8am our time he’s in Arizona or something. And it sounds like he’s already had about 35 cups of coffee. Awesome, great speaker full value. Kurt who’s on here today is going to be speaking and I’m sure most of you have are Hurt, hurts speak. So you know the value he provides all be there.
And then Holly McCauley, who is another employee here, another great speaker will be speaking as well as a few others from our team, it’s going to be a good event. If you have any questions, hit me up about those. Otherwise, go to MSG, marketing world.com. All right. I’m ready for questions. Damon and Kurt promise to throw a couple surprise curveballs. So
Curt Anderson 15:33
Josh, that was that was fantastic, man. And just again, I know we have a small group. And I think that was at the big bell in Andrew, both at the manufacturing marketing world last year, what a wonderful event that you guys put on. So thanks for all your energy, with your presentation on content. And Dave and I are constantly talking about content, what’s your take on?
So a lot of folks are doing a lot of video content with the video tree are having that transcribed into you know, getting the text and then using that Texas post blog posts, social media posts, linking to you know, critical pages and that type of thing. What are you and I know you guys have a great team with video and you’re doing a lot with video? What’s your take on transcribing? video that sucks?
16:22
Yeah, I love it, I think it’s a it’s a great way to produce multi forms of content that would, you know, again, resonate with multiple forms of people. The other thing that we look at with that is we work with some brands that have like one person at that brand, that’s a really strong voice, right? That they’re the voice of the brand, and they want that to come through. And outsource writer is almost never going to accomplish that when you’ve got one person that everyone knows.
So our approach to that is our say, well, let’s get this strong voice on camera, you know, have them be the voice. And then we can take that video, publish it right in the places it needs to go. But then, as you mentioned, Kurt, transcribe it or write a blog post around it, even if it’s not the actual transcription of what they’re saying. It’s awesome. and efficient way to get content produced.
Curt Anderson 17:12
Yep. Excellent. And then do you? Now you guys aren’t super heavy with social but are you? Are you seeing your clients? Like we’ll take bits and pieces of that and then populate it in different places? Yeah,
17:24
yeah. I mean, we do we do some some some on social most of our clients find the most value on LinkedIn, you know, there’s not a ton on on Facebook and Instagram in the the contract manufacturing world. But every once in a while,
Damon Pistulka 17:39
something will go pretty, pretty well. So when you talk about content, one of the things that I’ve been toying with is, is topic based videos. I mean, when you look at, I can write a blog about precision sheetmetal manufacturing or something like that, but I could also do a video about it, where I’m where I’m, you know, I just have a conversation like you and I having a conversation about it. And and then as, as Kurt said, you get to get that transcribed to do you think that that is in your clients? Do you see that that’s an easier way for them to do something topic based like that, that still gives you the rich keywords and everything you need?
18:20
It is Yeah, we actually have a client that’s doing something similar to that. And it’s outside of video. It’s actually with him, like a podcast, I think they might do a video first. But aside from that, it’s conversational. And it’s not that one topic. In this case, it’s about powder metal or something like yeah, you know, one powder metal podcast out there. And it’s probably there. Yeah.
Damon Pistulka 18:41
Yeah. But it is it’s an
18:42
efficient way to, to create that content. And the other cool thing is it allows those personalities of the people, the humans that are there at these businesses to shine through, as well. Which is really cool.
Damon Pistulka 18:56
Yeah. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it’s a, I take part feeble that right. I mean, I hate rain, right. I hate it. Same, but doing videos. That’s not bad. And I think there’s a lot of people like that, that in, you know, especially technical, like you go into manufacturing and it, you know, there’s a lot of people that can can talk for hours about you know, five axis CNC machining, talk about it, and on video, but to then write 500 words on it. And it happened,
19:27
right.
19:28
Yeah. And you know, what’s other another interesting thing about that, like, if I were to try to read 500 words about CNC machining, I don’t know that it would make it through the entire article. Yeah, but the passion that some people have about their capabilities and their machinery. Yeah, is its immense. And you can’t get that on paper.
Damon Pistulka 19:47
That’s true. That’s true. Yeah.
Curt Anderson 19:50
Cool. Josh wood. I’m sorry. What do you guys do is um, so you guys work primarily with manufacturers when you have a manufacturer just doesn’t really that doesn’t have that internal champion. That’s really coming out with a lot of the information. How does your team approach that? Like, in a Damon, they have an awesome crew, Holly, Molly Ryan, the whole, the whole crew are just phenomenal. How do you guys help kind of push that company that manufacturer long, where it’s kind of like pulling teeth, or it’s really a struggle getting that content from them.
20:22
So we hire writers, you know, in the past, we would be looking to hire web developers or people in Napa
Damon Pistulka 20:29
a good portion of our workforce, now,
20:32
they have a writing background. So they’re really good at taking the information that you know, maybe an engineer spits out and making it non engineering language making marketing friendly, so people actually enjoy consuming it. Yeah. The other thing that I think is helpful is planning in advance. So we don’t just come to a content meeting and say, Hey, what do you want to write about this week?
Or what do you want us to talk about this week? Yeah, we have the strategy, align the topics and the contents of the strategy. And then it’s a lot easier to come to the table and have that conversation about, Alright, here’s, here’s exactly what we’re writing about. And you can bring the right person to the table, to speak on that topic. So when the content is actually published, you know, the most valuable information is there.
Curt Anderson 21:25
That’s, that’s perfect. And you know, what’s super helpful is when you have, um, like, you were saying, even if you have the person that’s passed in, it’s almost like playing the reporter. You know what I mean? Where you guys are playing the reporter, one thing that I wanted to, if you want to share with a few people, you guys have a fascinating story.
Again, when I met you, you just sit down had that you guys were web designers and did some different aspects. You kind of had that tipping point, or that aha moment, where you guys really made that shift to inbound marketing. And it really, I saw it firsthand, watch your company explode. And you guys have never looked back? Can you just kind of share a little bit of that transformation that you guys had?
22:07
Yeah, so started as web development back in 2002. And our first client was demo, which is, you know, why we kind of got in the manufacturing space. And in over that time we had seen, or the people that were here at the time that seen the needs, right, so like, I came on board in 2008. And there was a need for, hey, we can’t just have a website, we need
22:30
to have traffic.
22:32
We need to have things like paid and need to be able to get that that additional thing as opposed to just having a website. So then, you know, that worked for a while. And then it was like, Alright, well, we need social. So we need to bring someone in that does social and then eventually is like, well, something else has to happen to break through the crowd and the noise because everyone had a website at that point. Yeah.
And we had been drinking the HubSpot Kool Aid, you know, for quite a while before jumping into the HubSpot world. And then in 2015, when we said, you know, we just have to do it, because just creating websites isn’t getting results. It’s just putting something out there, you might as well create a brochure. So let’s take it to the next level, which filled a gap of what manufacturers in our area need, which was content. And just go from there. And we did it. And you know, since 2015, I think, Kurt, as you mentioned that we had maybe three employees at that time.
Curt Anderson 23:32
Yeah. And that was what a leap of faith and what courage it took for you guys to make that, you know, and it’s not like you’re you know, you’re making major capital expenditures or laying out a ton of money to make that transition. However, it was a cultural shift. It was a strategic shift. And so you know, and again, I watched it firsthand, and you guys have just exploded, sense. And what’s great when I talk with these guys Damon like they’re just so laser focused on what they do best. They stay right in their strike zone.
You know, I’ll call up Josh be like, hey, I’ve got a client looking for this. He’s very clear, like, Nope, that’s not us. Just the other day. It was a couple days ago, I said, Hey, do you guys do anything with Magento? No, we don’t do anything with Magento. So they do a great job of just saying right in their lane. They hire accordingly. They fit accordingly. It goes with their culture, they eat it, drink it, breathe it, sleep it. And you know, they are the inbound marketing, you know, really authorities for manufacturers, you know, far and wide. So they do they do great work. So
Damon Pistulka 24:36
good. Good stuff. Yeah, really good. Well, it’s 11 o’clock. Now we’ll get off the chair. And if anybody wants to talk, we’ll jump on table and we’ll do that. But Awesome. Thanks so much, Josh for stopping by Joshua protocol ad here talking about inbound marketing and the importance of content. I loved it. Thank you.
24:57
Thanks. Thanks, Josh. All right.
