The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 12
Listen to this episode here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.
Episode show notes
What happens when your competitors are talking about themselves but you are producing resourceful content? You win!
So how can you write helpful technical content for manufacturers? First, it needs to come from the brains of subject matter experts. Second, you need to extract that knowledge from their brains and use their insights to fuel your marketing strategy.
Toby Wall, thinker and senior writer at Gorilla76, joined this episode of the podcast to discuss how to create great content in the manufacturing space.
Toby and I talk about:
- Where should content expertise originate?
- Why should subject matter experts expect to play a role in content creation?
- How do you extract expert knowledge and turn it into credible content?
Resources we talked about:
- They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Marketing
- How to extract expert knowledge from your team and turn it into incredible content
- “I need what’s in your brain” – Why we insist on interviewing subject matter experts
To ensure that you never miss an episode of The Manufacturing Show, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.
Transcript of episode
Joe Sullivan:
Welcome to another episode of The Manufacturing Executive Podcast. This show is being brought to you by our sponsor, CADENAS PARTsolutions. I’m Joe Sullivan, your host and a co-founder of the industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76.
Joe Sullivan:
So when we launched this podcast a few months ago, I wanted to sprinkle in a solo cast every four episodes or so, where instead of me interviewing someone else, I’d share some of my own insights on sales and marketing topics and specific to the industrial sector. But I’m one person and I co-own an agency of 19, who collectively possess deep expertise in a variety of things industrial marketing related.
Joe Sullivan:
So instead of me talking your ear off today, I’m going to put the spotlight on our senior copywriter, Toby Wall. And we’re going to have a conversation about content marketing. More specifically, we’re going to dive into a couple of things.
Joe Sullivan:
First, why effective content for manufacturing organizations really needs to come from the brains of your true subject matter experts. And second, how you can go about extracting the knowledge from the brains of those deep experts inside your company and use those insights to fuel your marketing strategy.
Joe Sullivan:
I’m excited about this conversation because content marketing is a personal passion of mine and it’s such an important topic for B2B manufacturers. When your competitors are talking all about themselves, but you on the other hand are producing resourceful content that helps, and guides, and earns the trust and attention of the people you’re trying to reach, you’re going to win.
Joe Sullivan:
So on that note, let me take a moment to introduce Toby Wall. Senior writer, Toby Wall, joined our agency Gorilla 76 almost four years ago. In his tenure, he’s developed special expertise in areas including industrial thermal processing, automation technology, industrial facility construction, and commodity dairy product trading.
Joe Sullivan:
In addition to producing written work, Toby produces a niche podcast for one of our clients that’s reached all but one US state, 68 countries around the world. Prior to joining the company, Toby was a newspaper reporter in Illinois. He covered breaking news and state and local government. Toby, welcome to the show.
Toby Wall:
Thanks Joe. Good to be here.
Joe Sullivan:
Well, let’s get right into it. Toby, you wrote an article in our learning center that immediately became one of my favorites, earlier this year. I use it all the time, I send it to clients and prospects because I think it really hammers home a really important point. The piece was about how to create effective content, and it’s titled, I Need What’s in Your Brain, Why We Insist on Interviewing Subject Matter Experts.
Joe Sullivan:
And from your experience as a writer, working specifically with manufacturers, who in those organizations have you found are those experts? Are they engineers, are they sales engineers? Sales people? I’m just curious what your take is on where that expertise needs to come from.
Toby Wall:
Generically, engineer is usually where it comes from, but there’s all kinds of engineers, project engineers, facility engineers, design engineers, corporate engineers, electrical engineers, production engineers. Think of an engineer of any kind, we have probably spoken with that persona.
Toby Wall:
But there’s other ones too, it’s not just engineers, sales folks are always very valuable to us. They’re the people talking to an audience pretty much every day. We found them to be a great conduit between us and what’s on the marketing side, and then whatever our intended goal is.
Toby Wall:
Other examples, project managers, supervisors, or superintendents and their construction projects, or contractors or subcontractors, that persona is really helpful to us when we can get a hold of them. Draftsmen, estimators, auditors, really any boring sounding… I hate to say it that way, but any boring sounding job title in a manufacturing organization is usually where we hit [inaudible 00:04:56].
Toby Wall:
Now, it’s not just about people, there’s physical things that I would consider subject matter experts to. This is the paper trail of all of these people. So we’ve had great success looking at RFIs, and RFPs, and RFQs. We’d like to see estimates. Sometimes I ask for invoices, drawings, CAD models, renderings, specs are great not only just from background technical information but something we can publish.
Toby Wall:
You look at a rendering or look at a CAD drawing and it’s way better most of the time, in my opinion, than a paragraph. But then, sales decks, training decks, trade show materials, compliance documents, audit reports, statutory reports. You got to file with the EPA in certain industries and then even lawsuits. If you were surprised at what you can learn about a company or its business by what they’re getting sued over. Obviously that’s not something our clients usually volunteer, we crack that down on our own. And I’m not out there snooping for lawsuits, but it’s useful, it’s all useful.
Joe Sullivan:
It’s an interesting way to answer that question because I hadn’t really thought about it from the perspective of… I was thinking about people, who are the brains we need to tap into? But in addition to that, there are so many resources and things that you’ve already created inside your company for one reason or another, and you created it for a reason.
Joe Sullivan:
And whether it’s that thing you created or something that’s stored in the brains of an engineer or some other technical professional or sales person, it all comes down to what are the things the customer cares about, what are the questions they’re trying to get answered, what are the things they’re trying to achieve? And you want to find that knowledge inside your company and figure out how to harness that knowledge and be able to deliver it to the client. Is that fair to say?
Toby Wall:
It’s fair. And I mentioned this exhaustive list of documentary evidence, if you will, of things that help us out. I don’t mean to understate how important those people still are to that. I do want that mountain of files, but if I don’t have someone to talk to about those, for me, it would be like trying to read a new language. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Toby Wall:
The subject matter experts are really important and what’s in their brains is really important. And even though technical documents are my favorite thing to read, that’s not going to matter to an audience that we’re trying to reach if I don’t also know how to stitch those things together and put it in a context or in the language that these people are going to respond to. So, like I said, all of it matters. The article says, I need what’s in your brain. I also want what’s in their hard drives. If I could get both, that’s perfect.
Joe Sullivan:
That’s a good answer. From my observations, it seems that a lot of B2B organizations who maybe haven’t done a lot of this, haven’t done a lot of content creation, maybe they’ve marketed more traditionally, trade shows, print ads, maybe pay-per-click or things, but maybe they haven’t really gotten into this idea of harnessing their expertise in publishing expert content.
Joe Sullivan:
A lot of them seem to expect that the marketer, whether that’s an internal person on their staff or an agency like Gorilla, or a freelance writer, or a marketer, or whatever it is, is the one who should be responsible for creating all the marketing content. And although marketing may own that task, you argue in your article that they can’t really do it effectively without tapping into the brains of the subject matter experts in some way.
Joe Sullivan:
So talk a little bit more for me about why you think it’s so important for those tactical professionals or deep subject matter experts for their expectation to be there, that they are going to play a role in this content creation process.
Toby Wall:
And forgive me if my cat enters to the frame.
Joe Sullivan:
This is the world we live in now. We’ve got kids running around in the background, we got cats jumping into the picture, dogs barking, that’s [inaudible 00:09:31], right?
Toby Wall:
Practically every meeting I’m in anymore, there’s a cat entering the frame. Cole, you want to be famous?
Joe Sullivan:
There he is.
Toby Wall:
So why is it important that these people are available, that we have access to them? To answer that, I think you got to look at the way niche B2B industrial marketing is a thing all unto itself, even though it also is a lot like every other kind of marketing.
Toby Wall:
So let’s presume that you agree, and that our listeners agree that engaging an audience where they are, demonstrating that you understand what their challenges are, that that is good marketing. Can we agree on that point first of all?
Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Toby Wall:
So if we agree, that is still true regardless of what you’re trying to market. Whether you’re trying to market cigarettes and iPhones, or trying to market the service lines for metal organic chemical vapor deposition tools, it’s the same.
Toby Wall:
But with that last one, how do you reach the people interested in it’s MOCVD is the abbreviation there. How do you reach them? And it’s not by telling them that they’re going to look cool in front of their friends. You got to tell them about, like we said, the things that they care about. Well, they care about double containment and passivation, and electro polishing, and orbital weld quality inspection. Those are all cares, those are all things that they’re interested in. Those address challenges that they face. Consumers care about looking cool in front of their friends.
Toby Wall:
So it’s the same principle from a marketing perspective. It’s just the knowledge comes from different places. Those are things that I mentioned that audience cares about. Well, why do they care? Because if they don’t do it right, you put air inside a siling line, it explodes. So it’s different orders of caring, but we approach that caring.
Toby Wall:
So I need to know those kinds of things. And unless I go study systems engineering, I’m not going to know it. So I need those experts to be involved. I need to have not free total access to them, but I need to know that they’re available to answer these questions and help me make heads or tails of some of topic that our marketing strategy indicated we need to talk about to get this audience of theirs engaged. So I’ll stop there. Hopefully that answers the first part of that.
Joe Sullivan:
I think it’s such a simple thing. It’s what the title of your article says, I Need What’s in Your Brain. You’re not the expert, they are. Your job is to harness it and figure out how to pull that insight out, right?
Toby Wall:
Yeah. And so, you asked about ownership too, and I agree. I think it’s essential that the marketing, whether it’s internal or outsourced owns that task, drives it. But in some ways it’s a two way street still. And I’ll give you an example of that because we had one fall into our laps this time last week, or maybe last Tuesday.
Toby Wall:
We’ve got a client who makes big ovens, industrial ovens. You put, you name it, can go through these. The carpeting that goes into the bottom of your car, you can do, or these ovens that make the foam that ends up being your yoga mat at home. And there was evidently some meeting they had internal with a prospect, we were not involved. And this prospect was discussing a oven design that they were interested in pursuing. And our client during that conversation was proposing alternatives to that, saying “What you’re proposing, in our experience doesn’t work, let’s do it a different way.”
Toby Wall:
And where we got involved in this, and it’s not like we helped in any way, they just clued us into this conversation. But the man who was talking about these alternative design features, let’s call him, decided he could explain himself better in writing in a followup email to his prospect.
Toby Wall:
Well, they forwarded that email to us too. And this was a 1300 word dissertation on why dew point is a better measurement inside an oven chamber compared to relative humidity, or why do you want to orient mass air flow in certain directions, or how do you position the sensors inside your oven to determine airflow, velocity, and humidity, and dew point, and all of these things?
Toby Wall:
So we wouldn’t have known that. That’s awesome. That’s an awesome narrative we got, but we would never have come up with that idea ourselves to talk about. And we proposed a content piece based on this guy’s dissertation about dew point. No matter how much ownership we have over the process and over the adventure of content ideation, there’s just some things that a marketer is not going to get, or isn’t going to think about, or ways that they don’t think that a subject matter expert thinks every day.
Toby Wall:
And this was an example where they said, “Hey, I think Gorilla might… See if they can turn this into something.” His comment was try not to fall asleep reading this, but if you manage to stay awake, see if you can do something with it. And then I told our strategist, “I think this is golden, absolutely golden.”
Toby Wall:
So yes, ownership is important. And if you have a good marketing partner, you’ll see what that ownership looks like and those partners will make it easy for you. But that doesn’t mean, don’t take an active role in it because there’s all kinds of great material that we’ve gotten from clients that came from them, that they started it, that they showed us, and we wouldn’t have known to even ask. [crosstalk 00:15:44].
Joe Sullivan:
I’m afraid it’s tangible example, and it’s straight from the customer. And there’s a quote I’m going to butcher it here, but it’s from Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask You Answer, which is arguably my favorite marketing book out there. And it just goes something like this, “Every time I get off a sales call, I think, what questions did I answer on that call, and have I answered that question in the form of content on my website yet?”
Joe Sullivan:
And the example you gave from that particular manufacturer is a perfect example of that. They had this question, they had written a 1300 word email, they’ve probably written a similar email five other times on the same topic to a similar type of customer. What if you just had that out there? What if you had written that already, it was published on your website, it’s optimized in the search engines, every time you get that question, as opposed to starting from scratch and re-inventing the wheel and typing an email, it probably takes you an hour to write. By the time you’re done editing it, you say, “Hey, you know what? We covered this topic actually in an article we published last year, and I’m going to send that to you after we get off the call,” or just reply to the email with that.
Joe Sullivan:
And what it shows is, well, first of all, the work’s done. You did the work already. You might add a few notes onto it to apply it to that particular situation. But it also shows if you think about what impact that has on the recipient’s end, it’s oh, geez, these guys have thought about this before, and they’ve thought about it enough that they actually wrote a 1500 word article that breaks it down. These guys are experts, they know what they’re talking about and what a great confidence builder, right?
Toby Wall:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). This isn’t a dig at Marcus answering questions about swimming pools. The challenge there is how do you find a way to apply the specific? [Stailman 00:17:48] was talking about this alternative design to X, Y, Z type of thermal process. How do you make that readable, and digestible, and relevant to an audience greater than one? But it can be done. I think that’s partly why we were involved, why they hired us, and why they sent it to us because they know something’s there, they just got to get on the right way to wrap it up.
Joe Sullivan:
My take on that is it’s all about pattern matching. If enough people have asked this question, and if 80% of the response to that question can be covered in a piece of content, you publish it because it’s enough to demonstrate to somebody that you get this topic. And your piece of content is not meant to play the whole role of salesperson, not at all. The human-to-human conversation is where that happens.
Joe Sullivan:
It needs to be enough to peak their interest, to demonstrate that, oh, you’ve thought about this kind of thing before, you’d be the one to answer my questions about it. And now you can have a much more qualified conversation with somebody around that topic. I think if you can accomplish that with a piece of content, it’s done its job.
Toby Wall:
I didn’t even estimate that you don’t have to answer 80% of their questions. You could answer one of their questions and the rest of it is irrelevant. But if it’s good and if it shows… And I wish we had another half hour, I’d just read this email that he sent. And you would see, you wouldn’t even have to be interested in dew point at all. And you would know you’d qualify these guys right away because they know their stuff.
Joe Sullivan:
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Joe Sullivan:
I want to just jump over to another great article you wrote this time back in 2019, and we’re going to get a little more tactical here now, but this one was titled, How To Extract Expert Knowledge From Your Team And Turn it Into Incredible Content. This is a little more of a how to, and I’d love for you to be able to share some actionable advice with listeners about how they can approach this sometimes really intimidating topic of content creation.
Joe Sullivan:
And keep in mind here, as you answer this question that a lot of our clients have the luxury of working with you or one of our super-talented writers, but a lot of times manufacturers, they need to be able to create this stuff internally. And maybe it’s a marketing person internally, maybe they don’t even have a marketing person on staff, but how can they go about, first of all, generating ideas for content that would actually resonate with their audience?
Toby Wall:
So the first step that I noted in that piece is that you need a framework around the entire thing just from the beginning. You need to have strategy of some kind, because recognizing that you would benefit from a library of content and then deciding, “Okay, I’m going to do some content,” you leave a whole lot on the table that you could maximize if you thought about it a little more.
Toby Wall:
So you got to have a framework that can get you to something you’ve identified, some goal. We don’t need to talk about how do you do a strategy, I would say, subscribe to this podcast and you’ll probably figure out how to do a strategy. But once you’ve got that, in my opinion, I think you got to get buy-in next.
Toby Wall:
You can’t do this alone, or if maybe you’re a part of a internal team or an external team, but regardless, you need buy-in from subject matter experts or anyone, decision makers on your clients and/or on the organization’s end. They need to know what you’re doing, ideally, they agree with what you’re doing and will help you. So that’s how you build sources.
Toby Wall:
It’s going to take time to do this program if you’re going to do it the right way. So you need people who would be able to stand behind you and agree that what you’re doing is worthwhile and agree to help you if you need their help. So get buy-in, definitely get buy-in.
Toby Wall:
Now, in terms of actually generating ideas, the first thing on my list is, you’ve mentioned already, do what Marcus Sheridan does and just record every question he sees or answers and try to answer it. And whether you answer it or find someone else who can, log that down.
Toby Wall:
Another way you can do it is just brainstorming here. Have a conversation with a really loyal customer or even somebody in your industry who’s not a customer, but someone that you can talk to and just get the lay of the land.
Toby Wall:
Another one could be, find out where your audience hangs out online, find groups, join groups. And back in my reporting days, that’s what we would do. If there was something you wanted to find out, there was a certain group of people might’ve had your answers, join their group and just say, “Hey, I’m here. I’m who I am. This is why I’m here, anyone want to help?” 21st century version of following the cops to the bar after their shift ends and building sources that way.
Toby Wall:
Another thing you might try is, might seem silly, but select a couple of people in your organization and buy them pizza twice a year, and say, “Sit with me for an hour, have some free pizza, answer my questions.” You’d be surprised at what you can learn just by getting someone in a room. And we’ve done this before with one of our clients. We bribed their entire sales team with a free lunch and we learned so much more about how that business works. And it had to have come from those sales team members, because that was a missing link that we needed.
Toby Wall:
So if I was going to wrap a bow around this, how do you generate content ideas, is try to be aware of all of the people who would be sharing those ideas and then make inroads with them.
Joe Sullivan:
Those are all really great ideas. So many different ways to get to it. The insights are there. The ideas, they’re right there, they’re at your fingertips, you just have to put yourself out there and talk to the right people, they’re going to come up.
Toby Wall:
And people like to talk about what they do. Like I said, the combination of free pizza and “Hey, tell me about your job,” you will get people talking. And once they’re comfortable because they don’t always start out being comfortable, and they’re like, “Why the hell are you asking me this stuff?” But once they’re comfortable, they’ll go on, and on, and on. And that’s pay dirt, it’s just as good as any RFP or any lawsuit that I find online.
Joe Sullivan:
Well, we’ve talked here about why content matters, we’ve talked about why you need to get into the brains of the experts, we’ve talked about how to generate ideas. The last thing I really want to cover here is, can you open up your process a little bit? Once somebody has gotten that far, what does the creation process actually look like? And you’re a writer, there’s video content, there’s audio content, there’s a lot of ways to do content and it’s not that one is better than the next, but from your perspective as a writer, how can you start making some of this stuff, turning it into something tangible?
Toby Wall:
How do you make it? You got to read. Because what you create has to come from a position of authority, and that’s true, whatever you’re marketing. But if you’re going to market an industrial B2B, like I said before, you’ve got those MOCVD service lines. You need to come from a position of authority. And let me tell you, the people who you are trying to reach are authorities.
Toby Wall:
So research is absolutely paramount here. You need to understand the context of a topic, you need to know what the vocabulary words were, you need to know what all the vocab words that make up a vocab word mean. You need to know if you’re talking about a process, well, what comes before the process? What comes after the process? What does this process make? Why does it make it this way?
Toby Wall:
Go watch YouTube videos, see how something is done. Google image search something, what does this look like? What are the dissenting opinions? What are the commonly held opinions of a thing? The way I characterize it is researching around the topic. You need to know more than what you’re going to say. A lot of this stuff never sees the light of day, but you need to do your research and you will thank yourself for it later. And your audience will probably thank you for it too. And I need to get on a soap box about research because in grade school they were telling us, “Don’t use Wikipedia, Wikipedia is bad.”
Joe Sullivan:
You actually had Wikipedia in grade school, unlike me, I had Encyclopedia Britannica books and stuff.
Toby Wall:
Maybe aside from Encyclopedia Britannica, I can’t think of an online resource that gives more editorial scrutiny over its content than Wikipedia, maybe with the exception of an encyclopedia like Britannica or like The New York Times or something. And they cite their sources too. Opinion time here, anyone who thinks Wikipedia is bad, I disagree, it is very good and can lead you to other really great places.
Toby Wall:
Now, what comes next? Because it is a process and you can download this, we’ve got this on our website, but one of the first things you need to do is devote the proper time to this. If you need to block off half a day, or block off a day, or block off a week, doing this the right way, in my opinion is not something you can hurry through, give it its time.
Toby Wall:
I think you should then, as you consider the idea that you’re about to create content around, how does that align with the strategy we talked about making? Is it going to work? If it does, okay, go ahead. If it doesn’t, maybe rethink it.
Toby Wall:
Obviously, interviewing could be a big part of the content if you need to talk to an expert. And so you’re going to need questions to ask this person. Sit down and make your list of questions. A word to the wise, do not try to edit this question list right now, just every question that comes to mind, put it down.
Toby Wall:
I have noticed, as you write these questions, the need for more research is going to come up. So it’s not like you do 40 minutes of reading and then your reading is done and you move on to whatever is next. You’ll need to read some more, probably. Do more.
Toby Wall:
Try to answer the questions that you’ve posed. If you can answer a question for yourself that you don’t need to ask, great, you’ve saved your subject some time, or what happens more often in my case anyway, is when I try to answer my own question, I find a different way to ask the question or a more detailed way to ask it, or a more relevant way within the context of the audience we’re trying to reach, a way to ask that question.
Toby Wall:
So it’s like a feedback loop, interview, questions, research, interview, questions, research. Just keep going. Then at the end of the process, go ahead and give it a look, edit your questions, see if something doesn’t make sense, see if you’re being repetitive. A very important part of “editing a question list” is sharing those with the subject matter.
Toby Wall:
Let this person see it. They know about this stuff more than you do, they are the experts. Not only are they going to know if you’re on the right track or not, but they can put you on the right track. “Hey, I noticed this question you’re asking about X, Y, Z. We’ll actually, L, M, N, O, P is the more relevant direction to go down, ask it this way because that’s relevant.” And then it unfolds from there. They can set you on the right track, or they can tell you, “You’re totally wrong. Here’s some more reading to do, go do some more reading.”
Toby Wall:
And I don’t know whether this needs to be said or not, but I’ve had someone ask in a presentation, and you might remember this, Joe, we did this presentation together. But ask whether it’s okay to send interview questions in advance of a call. In marketing, yeah, absolutely. If you’re in a newsroom, no, never do that.
Toby Wall:
But in this case, not only is it okay, I think it should be the norm, is to get those in front of your subject matter expert in advance of the call. Well, what about when you’re doing the interview? Maybe this is the part that makes people nervous. It makes me nervous and I do it every day. Here’s some interview tips that will… It’s not going to guarantee you’re going to get everything you need, but it’ll put you in position for it.
Toby Wall:
If you’re not getting what you need, just ask the question again, or rephrase the question, put it in a different way, push gently, but push your interviewee. These people, like I said a moment ago, they might be uncomfortable, they might not have ever done this before. They might be reluctant. They might think they don’t want to say something too complex.
Toby Wall:
So part of our job as interviewers is to put them at ease and say it the way you need to say it and I will stop you if this is too complicated, or if I need you to explain it, I’ll tell you that you need to explain it. But we don’t want them to censor themselves.
Toby Wall:
Another thing I’ve found useful is to be upfront with these folks about what I don’t know. I think it’s tempting for an interviewer to censor themselves. They’re afraid to look stupid in front of someone who’s smarter than them. Well, in this world, if I’m talking about me, everybody is smarter than me. I don’t know a lot of stuff. It’s my job not to know, but to find out. So don’t censor yourself, ask rookie questions if you have to ask rookie questions, but get the information that you need.
Toby Wall:
One tactic I find that helps there is to post theoreticals or make assumptions with your interview subject, even if you think or you know that you might be way off on that. If you want someone to explain a topic in a way that matters or in a way that makes sense to your audience, it’s almost like roleplay. Say I am someone in your audience and this is a problem I’m having, or this is a process I might need to implement and just start throwing variables out there. “What would happen if I did this? What would happen if I did that?”
Toby Wall:
It’s almost like exploratory surgery, if you will, but assumptions, even wrong ones are going to end up solidifying your understanding of a topic, which is besides the point. The point is it’ll make you able to translate that topic in a way that if you only got just the textbook definition of a thing, wouldn’t have been as good at doing.
Toby Wall:
Another consideration is to not treat your interview document like a stone tablet. If you need to go off script, chase something down, you should go for it. We talk about this all the time, the other writers and I, is if we had a dollar for every time we had to do that and skip questions or depart from the question list or just delete the entire document altogether, we could retire.
Toby Wall:
It happens, and I think interviewers shouldn’t feel chained, even though the prep work is important, don’t feel chained to it because the conversation is going to go where it’s going to go. Don’t limit yourself to just the questions you were asking. And what do you do after that? Well, as Grace, my colleague would say is you write the dang thing. I don’t really want to get into, how do you write a blog post, but an important aspect of your relationship with a subject matter expert here is make sure that they can see it. Let them review it.
Toby Wall:
And I can’t think of a client we’ve had where we did not have a subject matter expert available to do these edits. And tell it to us blunt, track changes, “No, you’re wrong, here’s what’s right.” It’s almost like, why do we talk to salespeople? Because they speak the language, right? These people are going to know not only factually what needs to be in a piece or where you’ve aired and where to put you back on track, but then they can say it the way that it needs to be said in that industry.
Toby Wall:
All through junior high, they were telling us jargon is bad. Well, once you graduate and join a B2B industrial marketing agency, jargon is good. And you’re going to need those people to tell you what that is. And there’s all kinds of other ways you can branch off of that in terms of getting feedback from somebody.
Toby Wall:
And I would encourage folks to read, Grace wrote a piece fairly recently about how to give that feedback to a writing partner. But if this conversation is a little galaxy, that’s part of the wider universe that I think almost is a natural extension of the rest of this process.
Joe Sullivan:
That’s great. Well, Toby, you covered a ton here. So many valuable insights. Any parting words before we wrap this up?
Toby Wall:
Don’t guess. I had to etch it onto my tombstone, Toby’s number one rule of industrial B2B copywriting is don’t guess. Make friends with your engineers, bribe them with pizza.
Joe Sullivan:
Love it, love it. There’s the quote of the episode right there. Make friends with your engineers and bribe them with pizza. Well, Toby, you and I, among many others at Gorilla have had countless conversations and debates about these topics we’ve covered today. And I love that we got to do it publicly this time, because I think your experiences over the last four years or so in the industrial sector have revealed a lot about what works, and what doesn’t, and how to do content effectively. So thanks a ton for doing this with me today.
Toby Wall:
Glad to do it. Thank you.
Joe Sullivan:
Can you tell our listeners how they can connect with you if they want to learn more?
Toby Wall:
Sure. I’m never on LinkedIn.
Joe Sullivan:
That’s fair.
Toby Wall:
So I might reply like four weeks after you’ve messaged me. But really, if you want to email me, it’s real easy. It’s toby@gorilla76.com. That’s T-O-B-Y@gorilla76.com. And I will answer that. I’ll probably answer in 30 seconds-
Joe Sullivan:
Awesome.
Toby Wall:
… [Crosstalk 00:38:36] email.
Joe Sullivan:
Perfect. Well, that’s simple enough. Well, before we wrap it up, I want to say a big thank you to our sponsor, CADENAS PARTsolutions for helping make this show possible. Well, again, thanks for joining Toby. And for the rest of you, I hope to catch you on the next episode of The Manufacturing Executive.
Joe Sullivan:
You’ve been listening to The Manufacturing Executive Podcast. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. If you’d like to learn more about industrial marketing and sales strategy, you’ll find an ever expanding collection of articles, videos, guides, and tools specifically for B2B manufacturers at gorilla76.com/learn. Thank you so much for listening, until next time.
