Align Sales & Marketing, Earn Authority, Win Search

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Howdy, welcome back to the Oil and Gas Sales

and Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We're here at the CellWell conference. I've been having a lovely conversation with Travis from Momenta, and I decided, hey, why don't we turn on the mic

and share some of this with everyone else? We've had probably a 30 or 40-minute conversation up until this point. Travis, welcome to the show. Hey, good to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Well, everyone, we're going to kind of jump

into the conversation, but you were talking about VPs of marketing and VPs of sales that were, or what did you say, a VP? Yeah, so typically I serve the industrial industry. Yes. Kind of a down and gritty part of the Get Stuff built.

So pumps, compressors, raw steel, all that type of thing. And in that industry, you'll usually see a VP of sales and marketing, right? And what that means is VP of sales. Yes, yeah, yeah, but they're over. It's kind of like that CRO title is kind of trying to be there,

but everything leans towards sales, right? And rightfully so, right? I mean, as a business owner, if you have to choose between sales or marketing, you're going to pick sales as you should. You need to bring the revenue in the door.

What we like to do is work with these folks and really take that messaging that they're doing on the sales side and bring it into their marketing. Industrial in particular, it's not about image. It's not about sending like the different kinds of fonts and colors and schema, right?

Like no one cares about that. It's about what you're saying. What you're saying, what does that message look like? The trust factor, right? It's a high trust industry. You're not going to buy a pump because it's low cost.

That's probably never happened, right? In the industrial industry, you're going to build it because it has the right specs, it's built correctly. What we really focus on in Moment of Fire is taking that messaging and putting it online. So getting more visibility to these guys

who've been experts for 30 years but are used to doing it strictly through their network. And that's been a privilege of birth. Face-to-face sales and online sales, totally different game. You're still talking to people, but how you position,

I remember I used to do direct sales like in office, okay? And then I started doing phone sales. Right. It was like I was starting over completely. The strategy is to keep somebody on the phone to I was doing recruitment in the long ass.

And it was brand new. I thought it was like an extension or it was adjacent to it, completely different skill set. So to understand how to build your brand online, how to position online, how to keep that conversation going

after you meet them at a conference, if you're an executive, to know how the algorithm works that knows, okay, if you and I connect right now, you're going to see my posts on LinkedIn for the next 30 days.

If I know that and I'm talking not to you, like so I'm not indirectly sending you a message, but I'm indirectly talking like, I feel like most people are like having a conversation and there's like people lurking and they're like listening to that conversation.

You need to know you're talking to those people too. And I know one of the presentations earlier was talking about commenting and how many people also on social media are seeing it, but it doesn't mean that they're engaging with it, but they're still seeing it.

And you need to know that when you're producing content and you need high authority content, because if you say one wrong word to somebody, we did a podcast earlier and someone was like, you say you're an oil and gas expert. Everybody knows you're not an oil and gas expert,

but if you're a pump expert in the downstream and XYZ, now you're like, because oil and gas, no one's an expert in all of oil and gas. Because it's so massive. It's like, oh, I remember when I was recruiting, it's like, where are you?

Like what's your job title? Where does it fit? Okay, is this midstream, upstream, downstream? Is this land man? Where does it fit? So I have like a baseline knowledge

across the different areas, but as you start getting down technical in some of the stuff, I can't hang. And I don't think anybody could. Great point. And what you'll see is historically,

I remember as an engineer myself coming out. So 20 years ago, it's been a bit, I would look for information online, it simply did not exist. And there's still pockets there. There's still a lot of digital firsts,

engineers and technical people who are trying to find their way. And a lot of times that content's not available, whether it's search engine optimization or LinkedIn, like the opportunities are. That's what we were talking about is the LLMs

and Google's just one big LLM. And what is the LLM? It's a large language model. That's what chatGPT is for anybody just now tuning in. SEO search engine is about really tagging your information properly to feed that big LLM,

that the data and organizing, that's what Google's doing, organizing the data in a way. And the thing is all the generic content has been produced. And now you got AI generated content

being produced at scale that you need those unique stories. You need that real expertise. And a lot of engineers are not publishing content all the time. So a lot of the LLMs and the search engines are hungry for this kind of information.

I see it all the time on YouTube. You would think like YouTube's already completely saturated. There's so many topics that I'm searching for an answer and there's like one video that sort of hits on it and nothing else. Like I should have mapped out all the different gaps

like when I'm looking for stuff and I can't find it. I wanna watch a video where I search for an article and it's just a bunch of rework content of like one article. The LLMs and the search engines are hungry for new information at an expert level. And what you were sharing that story before

of you're putting out this content with real expertise and engineering background and information based on a specific use case in that vertical, they eat it up. So it's about writing high quality content that is meaningful to the user. You don't need it to rank for everything.

You only need it to rank for terms that are associated with exactly who your ideal customer is. Right, and that's a great point. And I think that understanding where that journey starts on the buying cycle, right, is crucial here. So we're well beyond the days where you sit back

and just wait for the cold call to come in and make a purchase, right? So anyone in those roles, those purchasing roles are doing their searches early on and they're doing it specifically, right? Like they're gonna look at like a LM2500 control.

They're not looking at generic turbine controls, right? Like they're gonna be very specific and sometimes they may not have the resources available. It's exciting opportunity. Yeah, I mean, could you share some maybe success stories or use cases on creating high quality content?

We talked in a previous podcast about 30 different touch points that happens in the buying cycle now in these complex sales in oil and gas. I think it was by Forrester. That's 30 potential pieces of high quality content

at different steps in the customer journey. So you gotta identify who the target persona is and then you say, okay, what does this customer journey look like? And I have so many clients that I'll sit down with. I go, could you give me the customer journey?

Yeah. And it's not mapped out. Right. It happened more often than not. And a lot of times folks will know that they need to be found for the buying terms,

but they don't think about like the educational piece of it. That's where we've had some great success working with folks in that space to really do the seeding, the initial kind of long tail keywords, the search terms that are happening. And so even inside that context,

it's been an amazing shift in the last couple of years as you've seen, for instance, Google struck a deal with Reddit. Yeah, oh yeah. Right? And so to effectively train their AI models

and Google is now almost a Reddit search forum. And that wasn't the case a couple of years ago. That's an important thing to think when you're sitting in kind of that, particularly in the industrial market, which is maybe slow moving, is the algorithms constantly changing.

As you mentioned earlier, we see a scenario where we're kind of got that saturation point for generic type of articles and respawn articles. And the LLMs are hungry for this real life experience that really conveys expertise. 100%, the data that I saw from Moz,

Rand Fishkin, one of the leaders or pioneers in the SEO industry, he's now actually doing target persona identification through IP addresses, which we were, you and I were kind of talking about, of who your target persona is, where they might be searching,

what handles they might be following, what channels they might be looking at to build that out. But at a presentation, a conference that I was at, he showed a statistic that was 58.5 or 58.8%, whatever it is, over 50% across the board and publishers, traffic dropped.

And it dropped on that informational content. People are getting it or already know it elsewhere. They're getting it on Reddit. They're getting it on social media. I think LLMs is gonna be a big growth point. It will be.

So it's really interesting to watch this develop real time, right? As an agency owner, we've had to communicate that to several clients, the cold hard truth that, hey, the traffic game's not what it is. You've had a 10% traffic drop over the last quarter,

consider yourself blessed, right? Yeah, yeah, we gotta show you, compared to the average, this is how well you're actually doing. And if you've got any kind of growth in that, yeah, feel blessed. Yeah, but I really do feel like the appropriate response

is doubling down on the AI elements of it. Looking at what the human-centered content looks like, the storytelling aspect. And it's not that you're giving up the SEO fight. We still see with some of our clients, hey, we're still increasing in the amount of keywords

we're found for simultaneously while traffic's dropping. So it's just understanding the game you're playing is important. The framework, just I've talked about in previous podcasts, but I think it's good to mention here, eat expertise, authority, trust,

and now they've added that experience component. So if you're building content, you wanna build it in that framework. And you're looking, what you said is, seed the terms to these LLMs. And the thing that we were talking about in depth,

and that's why I'm really focusing on LLM visibility and LLM visibility certification and all that kind of stuff, is the brain. All these information are just nodes that have cross-sections of information. Every social media post is actually a link

that's created, right? Every time you like a post, that becomes a link. I'm gonna lose you salespeople on some of this marketing talk, I already know that. But think about like a spider web, okay? It's a giant spider web and there's different nodes.

And you wanna be strengthening those nodes. And there's this massive like global brain that everybody's kinda heard that concept about the internet. The LLMs, as people start to use more LLMs, those brain patterns are gonna be run over.

And I've talked about this a few times, but I've gone by Matt and I've gone by Matthew. And the entity online has viewing that as a different person, okay? So now I'm having to disambigotize that and overlap those terminologies

and link those nodes together so the LLMs can have enough trust to say, this is the same person. So it's Matt, guys. It's Matthew, it's Matthew. Well, Matthew?

It's Matthew. But yeah. You gotta fix the name badges. Yeah, the name badges. Do you see how that's an issue, right? LLM visibility today, this is urgent.

So you listening to this, what I'm seeing is it's urgent because, okay, you looked at my name badge, you started calling me Matt. If I said, I want you to start calling me Matthew, it's gonna be harder to do that. That's what's going on with the LLMs.

That's why you need to get your branding in place. You need to get your positioning in place. And then you need to start sending those signals across all the channels that the LLMs are picking up to get it seated that you're the right person. And the best way to do that is write high quality,

technical contract that hasn't been put out there because think about it like this. If there's a topic that you're an expert in that you start talking about, there's a index of all the people that are talking about this thing.

If there's less search terms to showcase or to show, I actually was doing a work for a client in Costa Rica and I started publishing a lot of content about Costa Rica. We started ranking in like two weeks. Well, guess what? There was like two other people at all

that were actively producing any kind of content about Costa Rica. Any search you made inventory wise, Google wanted to show the best possible thing and there wasn't a lot to choose from. So you get surface.

So if you're in a highly technical industry and you start putting out those thought leadership pieces, those high quality white papers and articles and talk about things that other people haven't talked about beyond the basics, you're gonna start to own that space.

That's a great point. And one thing taking kind of a step back from it though, sometimes you hear a lot about AI, right? And you hear a lot of, I'll call it kind of knee-jerk reactions to that. Like, is it gonna take us over?

Is it gonna kill us? I mean, you know, maybe so, right? At some point, maybe. Let's see what happens. Please say, you know. But for the current point in time,

those kind of academic kind of conversations are less practical. What we always counsel clients to think about is like, what story are you telling the market? Ultimately, where are you trying to be? Producing technical content, getting traffic numbers,

that's one thing. But like, the red thread narrative that runs through your entire marketing and sales organization, it should feel completely seamless. So we always encourage clients to start with that first.

Absolutely. You and I have already had a 30 minute discussion. We need to probably do another one of these. Is there anything to the discussion that we've had where we've recorded it that you think would be valuable to add?

While you're thinking about that, let me ask you, LinkedIn tipper fail of the week, okay? We do this on every podcast. Is there anything that you've seen on LinkedIn, good or bad, that's really stood out to you? Okay, so I'll say this.

We know most of the time when you're riding with AI, they were not impressed. Okay, so whenever you start trodding out the checklist with the emojis that we've seen a hundred times and it doesn't sound like you've lived it, no one wants to read that.

And the um-dashes, oh my gosh, those are like watermarks. Yes, I actually use the um-dashes and now I feel like I can't. I know, I was like, I'm like, yeah. It's like, settle down with that. So I love seeing authentic content,

struggles that people have gone through and what's beautiful about that, I've had the opportunity, just recently we made a key hire because I was grumbling about Gen Z not wanting to drive in two days a week

for a 30 minute commute and the applicant read the post and sent me a DM and it was exactly kind of the persona and personality that would be a great fit in our company. So being authentic in LinkedIn has led to so many opportunities for myself

and that would be my number one piece of advice. It's don't worry about it, don't overthink it. Maybe don't go too crazy, but don't try to polish something up that sounds mundane and boring because it will be mundane and boring, so.

Awesome, Travis, how do people find out more about what you do and what your company does? Well, I'm the only Travis Debrow around, so you can use the old fashioned Google or you can jump into your LLM a choice and look me up, that's Z-I-E-B-R-O or go to TravisDebrow.com.

So happy to chat more. Awesome. Well, everyone, my name is Matt Bertram. This is the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast. Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Thanks for listening to OGGN,

the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to OGGN.com to learn about all our other shows and don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production

of the Oil and Gas Global Network.