API, SEO and Thought Leadership

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! Everybody we're back and want to give a big shout out to Rigor. Manage your awful operations from anywhere with Rigor online and offline whether it's scheduling or dispatching jobs, tracking employee hours, managing equipment

rentals, or inspections and maintenance. You can create, review, approve, and upload all types of field tickets and agreements securely from any device. Plus, you can generate invoices same day and run powerful operation management dashboards on your desktop or even your phone. No paper, no errors, no headache. Learn more at rigor.us. Link is in the show notes. Matt, you know what we have for the first time? What do we have, Mark? A review. So we got a five-star review. It must listen

if you're in oil and gas sales. I've been a big fan of OGGN's various podcasts for years and as a salesperson they've been super useful. This shows even more valuable as it helps me with my day-to-day sales efforts. It gives me new tools and techniques that I would have never run across by myself. Although I originally disagreed with Mark and Matt's point of view that sales and marketing should be connected, after bringing my marketing peer on a sales

call I realized I was wrong. See, everybody? Grab your marketing person, bring them with you. If you're in oil and gas sales and marketing this show is meant for you. What a great review. Yeah, that's great. And we didn't even capture who the person that sent the review's name was. So whoever. Yeah, no. Okay, I thought I saw the person's name at the very bottom. I did too. Yeah, when I copied the review I must not copy the actual name. So whoever is sent to send, thank you very

much. And the next show that we record, we'll go back and find your name, give you a big shout out. So we appreciate it. Which by the way, audience, we'd love reviews if you like what we're doing this show. Leave us a five-star and if you have suggestions, leave us a four-star and let us know what you'd like us to cover. All right, Matt. So speaking of things that's never been done before, we also did something else that's never been done for. And it was just this week. You

want to talk about a little bit? The API meeting that you set up? Yeah, yeah, the API meeting. So what we did is, and APIs, the American Petroleum Institute, it's the second largest political lobby group in the U.S. representing the oligarchs industry of Congress. But it's also the group that sets all the standards. So if you've ever been offshore and you washed your hand with soap in the bathroom, that soap met some type of API standard, just like every pump,

fitting, connection, drill bit, everything. And the API Houston chapter, which I'm on the board of directors, we've started to do things differently. So instead of having, you know, a guy come up with a 30-slide PowerPoint deck and talk about well control, we started lecturing and bringing panels. And what we did is we put a panel together of some pure rock stars, including Matt, to talk about how marketing has changed in oil and gas. And so we had a head of oil and gas market

from Caterpillar on there. We had the head of marketing for TGS. We had you on the show, and then we had the vice president of marketing from National Oval Varku. And Matt, the audience, both the online audience and in-person audience loved it. Yeah, no, I thought it was great. I thought it was a great format. I think we covered some really good topics. The questions were great. I mean, the audience was engaged. I thought there was really a desire for more of

that type of content. I think it actually ended sooner than people wanted it to. Yeah, and it was nice to see all of y'all, all the panelists, you couldn't get away, right? As soon as you walked on the stage, people lined up to talk to you, which means they had an interest in the things that we discuss. Yeah, there was a line. It was good. And I said things we discuss. I wasn't part of the panel. All I did was

moderate the panel. But Matt, like, what do you think some of the key takeaways were? Well, the thing that was interesting to me is there was a predominant theme of SEO throughout what everybody was talking about. It was kind of like all roads lead to SEO, to a degree. And that's really what everybody built upon out of the gate. So I was talking about some IP targeting, some conference marketing,

but really from the inside, the companies in the industry, they're laser focused on SEO. I thought that was a really interesting takeaway for me. Yeah, and so probably most of the marketing people that are listening to us right now know exactly what SEO is. But some of the salespeople probably don't. You want to kind of break it down? What is it? And why is it important? Well, yeah. And I think that that's fair. And even Mark, you can touch on it.

Some of the things that I've dealt with with enterprise companies is they knew how to buy. And I know I'm not answering your question directly, but like, I want to frame it up a little bit more because I've dealt with this with industries for a long time, Mark, is we have SEO podcasts. We're known for SEO. I speak internationally about it. And on the enterprise side of things, it was always like this extra line item. And people weren't sure what it was because they

know how to buy print. They know how to buy billboards. They know how to buy paid ads really is the focus. And they, you know, I'm hearing so much how important SEO is. It's just interesting. That was the biggest takeaway. It was like, look at all these companies that are so laser focused on SEO. And for the last couple of years, it's always been having to explain what it is and get it on the line item and that sort of thing. But what is SEO to answer your question

directly? Search engine optimizations, basically, when you search in Google or any other search engine, or it could be a broader term on different, any kind of platform, there's an algorithm. And basically understanding on how that algorithm works to help your stuff show up better is maybe a really broad definition. So SEO in the general term is typically used with Google because that's most of the searches. And it's showing up at the top of the search

rankings, which has all kinds of benefits from trust to brand awareness to people that are directly looking for a service connecting them right in with how to buy it and who the best person is. So where you're ranked in that algorithm is one of the biggest drivers for most small businesses and enterprises. I'm starting to see a heavy trend there. They're starting to really understand that SEO is one of the biggest market drivers there is today. Yeah, in audience, this is one

of those tools that can help you compete with the big guys for little or even no money. So if you pulled Google out right now and you search for oil and gas sales experts, oil and gas sales experts, you would see my original company MotelPoint come up on that first page organically. I'm not paying for that. That's Google answering the question to the best of its ability. Hey, if you're looking for oil and gas sales experts, MotelPoint is one of the people you should talk to. So

think about that audience. Anybody in the world that's looking for oil and gas sales experts sees me first or sees MotelPoint first and they pick up the phone and they call or they fill out a form or they email. You could do the same thing if you were selling mud pumps, if you were renting heavy equipment like bulldozers, if you were somebody that was doing, you know, a lawn work, if you can rank for what your buyers search for organically. People see you and now you're

way ahead of your competition. And Matt, there's several ways to do it, but you know, in my opinion, one of the best ways is putting high quality content out there in a way that's easy for Google to understand what it is and being helpful and useful. Not trying to game the system, but actually putting good quality, useful content out there. And there's some parameters right that you followed to make easier for Google to understand it, but it's not that hard.

It takes a little bit of time, but it literally, you could do it yourself. It would cost you nothing. Yeah. So a couple of points that I wanted to hit on is certainly like the first way that people typically do business or look for a new service is they ask for referrals, right? So they ask for referrals. And if they don't get the answer they're looking for, if they're looking for a variety to select

from, they're going to go to Google Next. Google produces the most amount of traffic in that area. What is Google's goal? Google's goal is to index and organize. That's what's important. Organize all the information in the world. So when you're searching for a particular term, which you were speaking about in the industry, call it like long tail key phrases. And so a long tail key phrase might not be as competitive because it's very, very specific.

It's more lower. It's lower down in the funnel. So not as many people are writing about it or talking about it. And if you answer that question better than anybody else, or depending on how you answer that question, Google based on its algorithm is trying to provide the best possible answer to the user because that's why people will keep using their search engine. And so you're trying to provide for that specific question, the absolute best possible

answer. And if you map out your customer journey of your target persona, customer journey, I know we haven't gone through that yet on this podcast. But if you do that, Google is going to use all the different algorithms, all the different ranking factors to serve up that result. And depending on how good of a job you do, we'll show how, where you rank. The data says there's a bunch of studies out there. If you're not on the top, not first

page of Google, which they've now changed that to, I think it's called not unlimited scroll or continuous scroll, I think is what they call it now. But if you're not on the top five searches, okay, that's where all the traffic goes. It's actually top three searches, really. And then the top one search gets three times more traffic than the number three search. So when you make it to the first page, you're really not done until you rank in the

first position for that keyword. That's where you're going to get the lion share of the traffic. And you can start to see, depending on how big the search terms are and what the phrases people are searching for and how ready they are to buy, how powerful this is. Right. The other thing I want to warn the audience is that if you're a company and you're trying to rank for something that you sell and it's pretty well

known and it's big, the odds are another company, whether intentionally or unintentionally, probably already own that first page. And sometimes it's not even worth your time trying to capture that first page. I give you a perfect example. Internet of things, which was a big catchphrase in all the guys the last couple of years, there's no way I could ever rank for that because Google knows that Microsoft is much more of an expert. Microsoft has way more content

out there around Internet of Things than I could ever crank out and I would just be beating my head against the wall. However, if I accidentally misspelled it on purpose and called it Internet of Thing, then I could rank for that and I would capture the attention of the people that keep punched it wrong. So there's a technique back this behind all of this that's actually, in some ways, it's very easy to understand. In other ways, you'll never understand it

because Google's constantly changing the algorithms. Let me add a few points to that. Like, I think that that's super interesting. There are third-party tools out there that you can see where the searches are and even search. So again, a search term, if you put, like, whatever, drill pumps, you know, balkan versus and put balkan at the front versus the end or something like that or Marsalis or whatever. But if you change where that

word goes in the organization, even if it's the same words, it's actually a completely different search and people might be searching a different way in that area and your location plays into this. Where I thought you were going with it, Mark, for, like, Internet of Things, you've got to look at that and you've got to go, how much search volume is there for that term and how valuable is that term to me to understand, do you want to SEO strategy for

that? Or if there's not a lot of search volume, but it's a super valuable term, you might want to just buy the AdWords or the placement for that because an SEO campaign to rank for a very difficult term might not be worth it. Also, what I've seen, I was looking at this actually today, a term like Web Design Agency versus Web Design Services, the keyword difficulty to rank for, or I actually know is analytics, analytic services versus analytic agencies. It was four

times harder to rank for analytic services over analytic agency. Four times harder and the search volume difference per month in the US was 100. There was only 100 more people searching for it and then globally, everyone searches for agency and then people are spending 20 bucks a click for services and they're spending four bucks a click for agency. So when you look at that and you're trying to figure out a strategy, it's like 100 more searches, but four times

more difficult, how long are we going to take to rank it? And then from a scalability standpoint, there's much more searches and the volume trend is much more towards agency over services. Then you're making a strategic decision on which keyword you want to go after and rank for. And even though they're the same and you're going to probably rank for both, if you're focused on a particular keyword and there's more density of that keyword and whatever

you're doing, you're going to probably do better in that area and you want to like lean that way. And so that's again, I think where strategy comes in, but it's important to understand, is this a keyword we want to do SEO for or we want to do something different or is it a keyword that people misspell a lot? Because that happens a lot. This is a little bit random, but you know, when you used to call into the phone companies mark, when it was paid calling

cards and you would say, just give me whatever company or I don't care or whatever, companies out there DBA'd all those different names because they don't know how to select. So based on what people would say more often, people put DBAs and then that business flow, those leads or that business went to them. It's similar. That's what it reminds me of what you're talking about. Yeah, in audience, I'm going to apologize for both me and Matt's ADD because

we're all over the place, but I want to go back to something he mentioned. Remember how he mentioned earlier that where you put the words in the search to actually make a difference. Well, now you know, one of OGGN secrets. If you notice all of our podcasts start off with the word oil and gas. I'm not doing that because I don't think you don't understand these oil and gas podcasts. We're putting oil and gas in the name of all our podcasts so that we

rank higher for those podcasts. There's a simple thing that we do that is pure SEO that drives results for us. All right. So let's come back to the API media kind of down the route, which by the way, everybody, if you want to go deep with this SEO stuff, reach out to Matt. He has, besides being a CMO of OGGN, he has his own company that does just his sort of stuff with oil and gas companies, and they can really help you pull out of your competitors.

Not trying to sell them. I'm just saying it's easier. We have a podcast. Sorry, I totally went way too deep on this, but bestseopodcast.com. We've been doing a podcast for over 10 years, and I just love this stuff. So I got a little bit carried away and passionate about it, but bestseopodcast.com. We have 500 plus something episodes about this topic. If you want to go deeper, but yeah, let's get back to the API event.

So one of the things I thought was interesting is that Jackie from Caterpillar brought up about position yourself as the thought leader and have an educational content, which I 100% agree with. That's actually, that's the reason we're doing this podcast. We're positioning ourselves as the thought leaders and we're trying to put out content that's educational. That sort of stuff goes a long way too, and it's not very expensive.

Yeah. I mean, thought leadership, I think is where content marketing is going, or like inbound marketing is generated or push marketing. Like basically you're pushing out content, attraction marketing. There's a lot of different terms for it, but position yourself as a thought leader because Google is looking for no like and trust and experience. And one of the things that you do, if you are a thought leader in the space,

is you talk about it, you speak about it, you have books about it, you have podcasts about it, you write about it, you talk about it. But yeah, they were taking a lot of the content from what I remember she was saying and taking that long form premium content like a podcast, chopping that up, repurposing that on different platforms, syndicating it out, putting some ad dollars behind it.

They were using people on their team to build kind of product champions to create user generated content. It's a really beautiful strategy where you can leverage the whole team. If you're a small marketing agency, you can leverage all other people at the company to help create this great content and get it out there and reach people and share your message. Yeah. And it's, I hear a lot of people go, but Mark, if we're putting out

how we do stuff, we're giving away the secret sauce for free. And let me tell you, you are a little bit, but there's nobody else out there that can do it like you. And even if your competitors hear how you torque down bolts and a pipeline flange, it's not that it's, that's top secret. Really. Everybody knows more or less how to do it, but by you being up front and putting that content out there, that's useful.

Oh, that's how you tighten. That's the sequence that you go through the bolts with a torque wrench. Then people start seeing you as that thought leader. And from a sales point of view, I know this from experience, you're treated totally different than a vendor. When you're seen as a thought leader, you're not a vendor. You're an asset to the buyer's team.

So much so that for modal point, when somebody engages with modal point and wants to see if we can help with a project and they want to meet with me, when I fly out there, they pay not only for my travel, they pay half of my day rate. So think about that. I'm really a sales person, but they see me as a thought leader, which I am in the right circumstance. And so instead of me having to eat the cost of trying to beg to get a sales meeting,

they want to meet with me and they're paying me to come out there. That's a totally different world of sales than being seen and treated as a vendor. And it also carries a lot of responsibility. It also means that when I engage with a prospect with modal point, they fly me out there, they pay half my day rate and I understand what they're trying to accomplish. If I can't help them, I don't try to sell them.

I literally stop and say, we can't help you. Here's another company that can. And you'll hear a lot of sales leader goes, no, no, no, we take every deal that should come in the door. No, you should never take every deal that should come in the door. You should only take the deals and where you can help your client. And that further helps you be seen as a thought leader. And when you tell somebody you can't help them and introduce them to a different

company, trust me, they remember that. And the next time they need help, they reach out to you, not anybody else. Wow. Okay. So there was two things that you said that I think are absolutely like, I mean, they're dead on for sure. Like everything that you said, dead on two things that want to, I guess, expound upon is we've had this conversation with a lot of enterprise level brands outside of the oil and gas

industry done for you, right? Or do it yourself, right? So there's like done for you services or there's do it yourself. And then there's like the do it with you consulting workshops, that sort of thing. But what I can say about that is we have a really big client, 300 locations across multiple states, and they don't want to create content, do it yourself content, because they want people coming to them and buying.

And what the data is shown is there's two types of people. There's people that are going to be do it yourself, people, no matter what. And you're not going to influence those people. Okay. And then there's the done, I want it done for me type people. And they want you to prove to them that you can do it and show them that you can do it. And that's what that content creates.

And then they're going to hire you because you've proven to them, you've shown them those expertise and you're not trying to market to the do it yourself people. There's actually more data on that regarding SEO and paid ads and who those target audiences are. And then the second thing that you said is absolutely true is to be viewed as a thought leader versus viewed as a salesperson.

And really a salesperson is not professionally helping people buy, but the better salespeople, you always see it have a deeper breath of knowledge and are viewed as a resource to the company. Well, how do you get viewed in those eyes for your client? Well, it's by the body of work that you have out there. And that's where that transition to consultant comes from, from salesperson

as you, you move through your career and you have a published body of work of what you do or what you've done or how people are introduced to you. Right? Like if you're introduced by somebody, it's much more valuable and they view you in a higher sub-steam. If, you know, maybe they just found you online and it just said services and they call and they're talking to it, go and quote salesperson. So.

Yeah. You know, one of the things that you brought up the API, I mean, that the whole crowd collectively went, is when you start talking about how, if you were Halliburton, you could actually do IP targeting to one of your clients like Chevron and serve your ads for your tools, your parts and pieces that Chevron buys anyway to everybody that worked at Chevron.

The whole crowd like took a collective breath, like you could do that. You want to talk a little bit about that? Because that was really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly we were on the panel and it was interesting to see where the conversation was going. Something that I've found super useful is called geofencing, geoframing, IP targeting.

They're all in kind of the same bucket. But if you think about it now with their phones, with their phones having addressed to them just like our house, if they have their location settings on, you know where they're at. Or bigger companies to answer your question specifically, utilize the same IP network, right?

They want to secure everyone on their same servers, their same network, and the bigger companies have these networks that everybody's jumping on, just like if people are at their houses, they have a home network, right? Well, if the network's big enough, you can actually target that IP address. So anybody on that IP address, you can serve them up ads.

And then you can even over time go, OK, these people are consistently on this IP address, but they're also on this other IP address, maybe at their home. You can actually serve those ads on the main server, but you can also you can track who's signed on and then serve it to their through machine learning, through their home address. That's like called in venue replay.

And so any network that that IP address is on, you can follow it and you can see through consistency who's been in what area. And then you can take that to universities for hiring. You can take it to conferences for marketing. But yeah, you can go, hey, if they jump on this network, let's show them an ad. Just talking to United Airline about that, to think about it.

You can show ads to everybody that gets on United Airline Airway and where they're going in a particular city on the IP. They jump on and show them an ad. So it's a very personalized marketing, which is, I believe, the trend where everything's going. Yeah. Yeah.

And the thing I like about the personalized marketing as somebody that is marketed to constantly online is quite honestly, it's more useful to me. The older, broad based spam type marketing that maybe or maybe not had anything relevance for mind was aggravating, right? It just filled up my inbox and my Facebook and Twitter and everything else. But, you know, there's several things I like to do.

One is I like to shoot, right? Well, when people start serving me ads on different sites for pistols, that's actually useful to me. And I'm not going to lie. I have bought quite a few things that I did not even know existed because that personalized ad showed me something that was valuable to me.

So don't just think of this as a way to market and advertise. You're actually providing value when you get that personalized because you're giving people stuff that they have an interest in, not just some generic marketing spiel. I mean, the thing that I would relate it to more than anything else to kind of bring it down because we're starting to get a little bit

in the ether with some of this stuff is the mediums change. But the goal of what you're trying to do doesn't. So the most effective, like Chatsky that I've seen is pens and pads, right? And going around to offices or getting people to have your pens and pads to stay top of mind, right? I actually have some oil and gas pens from Nate, you know,

and that's what a display ad is, right? A display ad that's I is targeting your IP is targeting you or retargeting, remarking, retargeting, that's a little bit different of a concept. But you've gone to a website, you've seen something or you're at a website and there's a product that's similar to a product you've looked at in the past because there's an audience built around you and it's showing you, hey,

remember me or, hey, this might be something you like. It's just like pens and pads or what you're trying to do is you're trying to get your name out there in front of people. And I might be mixing up a little bit, some different strategies here, but it's all kind of the same basic concept because no one typically buys immediately, they need to see your stuff a number of times.

They like they might view you as an expert, but the timing might not be right. So you're trying to stay in their buying period and all these tools help you do those sorts of things. Yeah, man, what a perfect segue and Matt and I plan nothing. But if anybody is on modal points, oil and gas events newsletter, and if you're not, go sign up for it.

We take all the oil and gas events that are going on, put them in your inbox once a month, typically we have discount coupons or whatever. Let me tell you what that really is. That's a sales tool. That's a top of mind sales tool. So when modal point engages with the client and we decide that there's no

reason to go further, I asked him, Hey, can I add you to this? All I guess events newsletter? And they always say yes, because it's valuable. They don't have to go search for conferences next because they see it. But what that's really doing Matt is each month, it's put in modal point back in front of these people that didn't buy for me.

Right. And I promise you we've had thousands of sales that came back later because we were top of mind when all of a sudden something changed and they needed modal points help. We haven't quite got to the point where we're doing that with OGG and the podcast, because it's a different medium and the listeners listen because they

want to, but from a sales point of view, what Matt talked about is a beautiful tool that once again is useful. It's useful to the client or they wouldn't sign up for it. And it keeps you top of mind, which only helps you with your sales efforts. And it's a very simple thing to do. Fortune's in the follow up.

I love it. And speaking of love, it's time to start winding down the show. You want to connect with matter. We have all our social links in the show notes. Just scroll up or left, depending if you're on iOS or Android. We have an insider's group we're putting together.

So this is going to be all the rock stars from the only guys sales and marketing world, get together in person, do some really cool stuff, some learning stuff. We're going to build a community. It's going to be incredible. So stay tuned.

We'll get you more details on that. And then last week, Matt did the LinkedIn tip of the week. So it's my turn to do the LinkedIn fail of the week. So I'm not going to tell you who this person is, but basically, hey, Mark, I'm reaching out to you because I know that you might need some help with your wellhead monitoring.

We have wellhead monitoring tools on top of our industrial IoT platform that actually creates a new revenue stream. Would you like to meet us and explore synergies like this one? And I replied back, you do realize we were podcasting company, right? And they went silent. So let me tell you what this is.

This is using automation because I have oil and gas in the name of my LinkedIn profile. This company is searching for oil and gas, but instead of making sure that I actually had a company that could buy wellheads as a podcast company. We have no need for wellheads people. They flubbed this one.

If they would have spent 30 seconds reviewing their automation and realizing that we didn't have any need to buy wellheads, however, maybe we could have one of their experts talking about wellheads on our podcast. It would have been a completely different conversation. That separate conversation would have been valuable to me. It would have been valuable to them.

They would have gotten free exposure, but they flubbed it by using automation on LinkedIn and not checking to make sure that the message fit who they're sending it to. So if you're that company that's doing that, stop it. Not only does it not work, it's a come around and bite you in the butt. And speaking of bite you in the butt, we didn't talk about a product review

because you're still reviewing it, but if you're a company out there and you have some products, some, we like gadgets, you know, please don't send us an air compressor, but if you have some product you want us to review, send it to us, we'll use it and we're going to give an honest review. If it's awesome, we'll tell you it's awesome and we'll give you links on how to buy it.

If it sucks, we're going to say it sucks. Oh, that was a lot. We're at our time limit. Ready to get out of here, Matt? Let's do it. Remember, folks, make a difference, not a sale.

Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast. A production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. Learn more at OGGN.com.