Effective content marketing strategies and how they can support sales efforts

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. Hey welcome back and remember if you want to manage your oil-filled operations from anywhere with rigor online or offline whether it's scheduling and 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 invoice the same day and run powerful operation management dashboards on your desktop or phone no paper no errors no headaches learn more at rigor.us link is in the show notes what's up Matt hey what's going on it is time for another episode and folks I think Matt and I actually skipped one so

our apologies we both got so busy that we weren't able to get a show out so you know apologies for missing this but today's topic is something that is dear to your heart Matt I'm gonna let you go and introduce it and start the conversation. Well you and I were definitely talking about what we could do and we talked about content marking as a strategic approach to creating and sharing relevant content to support sales efforts. Content creation is

something that scares a lot of sales people but the truth is it's very easy to do isn't it and there's a bunch of different ways you could do it. Yeah I mean I think that many times marketing and sales are siloed and they don't talk to each other as well as much as they need to like we talked about in past episodes getting with your marketing team on that quote-unquote homemade content that you're making or sales pieces you would like to see

that's really what we're talking about is building those sales pieces but making them be maybe more interactive pushing out this content through social media channels is really really quite powerful I mean people talk about like magnetic marketing or attraction marketing something like that that is what content marketing is meant to do is to push out that high quality content to get that no like and trust and then to draw people to you because they see

value in what you're doing and they see the expertise you're producing and they want to work with you or find out more. So let's talk through this from basically beginning to end I'll let you sort of leave the conversation but you know if you're a company and you're looking at starting content marketing where do you start? Well developing a strategy is really most important and in that strategy you need to understand who are your target customers what's your

target persona who are you trying to reach and then that will help direct what kind of content you need to create so you got to think about like who are those target customers so Mark for you let's just like let's like role play it here right so if you want like what are some people that you're trying to reach if you are a salesperson for an oil and gas company like give me an example. I actually am a salesperson for OGG and so let's talk about some real-world stuff

so for me I am always trying to get in front of heads of sales for companies that want exposure to the oil and gas industry now I understand that my budget for podcast sponsorship ultimately comes out of marketing most of time but the sales people are an easy entry for me because they see the value of using the podcast to drive revenue really quickly so I'm always looking for VPs of sales chief revenue officers that's usually my target. Okay and so what the heads of

sales want what are their pain points what are they looking for they need to drive revenue they're measured on their ability to drive deals to retain existing clients to make sure they have healthy margins it's the moneymaker for the company and depending on how the company is set up it's sometimes it's weighted sometimes heads of sales are weighted heavier or asked to bring in new logos more than keep existing clients happy and in some other companies it's

the opposite heads of sales are asked to keep existing clients happy more than drive new sales but all of them have to worry about both of those things. Okay so one more talking about let me like restate it is customer retention on one side of things on maybe maintaining happy customers and developing those existing customers into bigger clients and then the other thing is if they're head of sales depending on the size of the organization and we're not speaking

really to a salesperson but they have a sales team under them is making their sales team more effective right so their ears might perk up if they could make all their sales people three to five percent more productive or 10% more productive or something to help them sell better is that 100% one of the day-to-day struggles of any sales leader is his sales team it's called a sales team but if you think about it Matt it's sort of not really a team because each

person each individual seller has their own number typically their own targets maybe even their own geographic or industry vertical and so it's a bunch of individual efforts that come together and the only way the sales manager gets their bonus of their commission is if all these individual players perform at that top level and everybody hits their number since the sales leader hits their number. Alright so let's start to break those two target personas up and go to

customer journey right so each person that each organization you're talking to each sales leader has basically the same goal but where they're at as far as their assets go or collateral or artifacts whatever you want to call it they have certain things that they're selling with so what you want to understand is okay what is their sales cycle what is the buying cycle what are the pieces of collateral they use at each step of the sales process and is

there an area in that funnel right that might be weaker that we want to amplify so could you maybe give me an example of that okay let's we'll just use podcast sponsorships example what are the maybe three to five steps that people go through for your ideal client when they're looking to buy. Yeah so ideally we have a client that has an established business that is either trying to enter the oil and gas industry for the first time or has a new

product or service they're offering to the oil and gas industry our clients tend to be large companies so a hundred million dollars in revenue and above is a good fit for us they're aware that they need some help and that's where the podcast comes in. Okay so there's two things that I heard from you that I want to key in on one is and this moves to like step two is creating high quality content but we got to know where we're targeting it one is the big pain point is

understanding and access within the oil and gas industry and then maybe content creation collateral relationship building to identify or to let other people know to raise that awareness that other people know that they're working with oil and gas and they're part of the you know we could call a good old boy network but that's probably not the right term but let's say they're part of the community they're poor the oil and gas community that's what they're looking

at at you for is is relationships getting plugged in getting an understanding of the landscape and then they need to have content that showcases their knowledge and experience so testimonials case studies within that area right so then it's assessing do they have that type of content first and then how do you get them involved and then of course podcasts are a great way to build that connection I could think of one business in the HSC space in mind of exactly how

they're looking to do that maybe you could add something more to that but we're looking at companies typically that are trying to penetrate the oil and gas space and then creating some high quality content to build trust in that area so you have some ideas of topics that you've used in the past or things that have worked well for that that might be able to be applied to other industries that want to enter oil and gas yeah so you're right on Matt in the

benefit of a sales leader working with us as we get to educate the oil and gas industry and what they do which then naturally drives sales for them and being able to tell that story to the sales leaders is paramount and being able to do it in a very short amount of time so luckily for us we have a bunch of client success stories and we've had some clients that allowed us to shoot some videos so right smack on our website on the pricing page is customer testimonial

videos which helps show a prospective client of ours a sales leader that other sales leaders have benefited from working with us okay so there's two more steps here just to give everybody a little bit of roadmap but the thing that you hinted at there is okay podcasts that I've certainly found are the number one way to create high quality content for the data people out there that like data it's seven hours seven hours of someone consuming your content to produce

that no like and trust trusted advisor effect but people buy from people they know like and trust and the magic number is seven hours so think about sales leaders out there think about your marketing teams marketing teams think about it do you have enough content to inundate prospects if they're looking for more information top of the funnel or more information about you that they can research your company because a lot of times before they raise their hand

you don't even know that they're a prospect so you know you need to have a lot of different formats of content and you can use podcasts at top of the funnel and then repurpose that content into social media shorts you could turn the podcast into blogs you can make it infographic you could reuse the videos or little snapshots in different ways you can incorporate it into other marketing material but you need to have multiple formats to be on multiple

channels to be able to communicate that message and really how I like to look at is the smaller pieces of content try to get them to the podcast and then the podcast you want them to binge listen to the podcast so all of you that listen to this podcast you probably wish we had more episodes because we're early in this we think that and that's where the number even says seven to ten podcast if you start producing podcasts is the number that you need to hit because you

need to have a rich base of content that you can repurpose on multiple platforms to reach the people in the way in which they like to consume there's different types of people that want data relationship some people like to read some people like to watch videos so you're trying to hit on all fronts yeah it's and I want to make sure the audience understands it sounds like we're trying to sell you podcast sponsorships we're not it's just this is the path

that the conversation started because as a salesperson at OGG and this is the exact same stuff I have to deal with every day to make sure that our prospects are turned into customers and that our existing customers are happy you know that's kind of why I was asking you to pretend to be a saleperson at the beginning so we can make it a little bit more that way but I think you're absolutely right the target persona and customer journey can be applied to any

business right like you just pick podcasting so we adapted it to that hopefully people can connect the dots and connect this for them on what are the steps they need to go through internally with their marketing team or working with a consultant like us you know you know Matt we have time so let's flip this around let's all of a sudden in this role play let's forget podcasting all stuff let's say I sell pipe in the oil and gas industry which is a

commodity okay so if I'm selling pipe there's a million people also selling pipe and most of the buyers buy on price so whoever has the cheapest pipe usually wins well that low price leader is not a happy camper even when they win the deal because all it takes is one mistake and all of a sudden there's no margin left they're upside down so if I have a pipe salesman I want to do the opposite I want to educate my buyers on why they should buy for me even though my prices

are higher and the reason that you might want to buy for me is because I could do things that are important to your business such as maybe I can give you just in time delivery when you're running a rig something like just in time delivery is worth a fortune because you're not taking up valuable space with pipe laying on the ground that's not being used and vice versa the job isn't waiting on pipe to be delivered so if I was a pipe salesman to separate myself from the

commoditized pipe people I would have something different in this case I would say I could do just in time delivery which people will pay a premium for so in that scenario we would want to create content on explaining what just in time delivery is we want to create content on why it helps drive projects to be completed on time and on budget and which also means we would create content on why we charge a little bit more but it allows the clients the buyers to

excel at their jobs yeah so these are actually great lead-ins here on kind of two points so what you're talking about is your unique selling proposition so everyone should have a unique selling proposition of what makes you different we're talking about creating additional value beyond the price what are the things that you do above and beyond how do you differentiate yourself think about it like this like brand building elevating your brand is super critical I

mean if you think about what Nike actually makes a tennis shoes for and what they sell for or even like think about all these bottled water companies okay they're bottling water they're all trying to find a unique selling proposition of why their waters different and how they're marketing it up like a thousand percent they're selling the brand right Fiji's like hey we get water from you know volcanoes and Fiji and we ship it to you and this water tastes

better and everybody else has their angle I can know like the Sonny's owned by Pepsi I believe and all they're doing is bottling municipal water and they're selling the brand it's actually cheaper than even putting the carbonate and the flavoring in it they're just selling brand and they're selling distribution channels and they're pushing that so you got to think if you're commoditized how do you break out of that and how do you highlight what you do better or

different maybe you have a better distribution channel maybe you know all the things that you shared but also you need to identify with your sales people in the sales funnel there's you know awareness action decision like steps like the sales fun maybe I'm missing a step there's four steps but essentially like people are in the awareness phase or the evaluation phase their consideration phase and then the purchase phase right and so in those four steps where are

your sales people struggling and where can you help build content on the marketing side of things to give them pieces to show like I'll give you one quick example right getting maybe your CEO or someone well respected on the technical side to do a byline article and get it published in oil and gas investor magazine or you know for us we do a lot of things with business companies so I have articles in Forbes and entrepreneur and ink and all that sort

of thing and being able to have my sales people take that article on how long does SEO take for example and they can show a peer review vetted article in Forbes that's a very strong sales piece for them to be able to point to and have to support that step in the conversion process of do y'all know how to do SEO right like so it's figuring out that sales funnel that customer journey and then plugging in those unique selling propositions in those pieces to open up

that channel to get them to that next step does that make sense that makes total sense before we end this discussion I want to do come back to the correlation between content creation SEO but let's stay on the route of I'm a pipe salesman and I'm differentiating myself so some of the content that I could create as a pipe salesman could be simple video shot on my iPhone right Matt talking about how we're different and why people want to work with us yeah

I mean again you got legal depending on the size of your company to deal with and you certainly the marketing team like wants to see that stuff and you might want to ask like record it and then ask for permission to see if it works where they can maybe clean it up they could clean up the sound they could put bumpers on the front and end of it and then they might even be able to use that for other sales people across that channel but as a sales manager you want

that kind of information that homegrown information on your phone here's a data point for you versus a really nice professionally done video there's three times more trust and three times more engagement on posts that are original people want to see the behind the scenes like action shots and what's going on and they want to get to know who you are I've worked with a number of sales teams that we actually roll that up and then it becomes a bigger idea for the

marketing team to help even support you better than what you're doing and build a campaign in that area but you can use your phone if there's good articles in the newspaper you want to share that with your marketing team anything that you're using the cell that's not the company approved stuff if you can bring that into your marketing team if it rolls up to the sales directors and then they share it there's a good chance that the marketing team can find a way to

roll out a objective or a strategy or a campaign to better support you with company collateral we did this in the farm industry a lot we would take like a white paper that was a peer review published journal and then we would make the sales material real glossy make good infographics that popped out that was easier to explain the storytelling that you're doing with the customer on a one to one level yeah and so I wasn't very clear what I should have said is when

working with your marketing team don't think that you have to have high-end budget videos you literally by working the marketing you could shoot videos on your iPhone make sure you have decent lighting decent audio and that's valuable content because a lot of people out there think content creation means hired a bunch of writers and professional videographers and everything and that's not true and then you could take that same video working with your

marketing have it transcribed and now you have a blog post yeah so the last thing that I'll say there's two quick points one is what people are looking for is really just an answer to their question right and if you define that customer journey and you can help get them from point A point B point B to point C point C to point D point D to like whatever buying from you that's what sales collateral that's what content marketing is meant to do to just support

you and build content where you're weak so you really want to map it out we all know promotion there's all kinds of ways paid ads social media email marketing you know SEO any there's all those ways to promote that but what you want to do is analyze after you push that out there okay to see what's working and having those listening tools and those analytics when we worked with pharma companies okay they would have a iPad and they would click around the sales activity

and we would see heat mapping where people were focused on what areas what infographics they were using what pages they stayed the most time on and then that data certainly you can do it online like you can do it even from a one-to-one sales strategy collecting that data to help inform the marketing team on what more material that they need because you're just trying to tell a better story to explain that situation to get them to the next point to ultimately

getting them to buy and close them so marketing is absolutely your friend data is absolutely your friend and it just helps you speed up the sales cycle content marketing can be ways to bring you new leads move them through the process close them and then even keep them more and it's just other touchpoints we didn't even talk about last thing promise retargeting retargeting people is like pens and pads we all you know want to get all our swag

and in front of clients and have it laying around there well display ads and ads on different social media platforms if they've engaged with your website or engage with your sales material if you've got them to a page then your marketing team can help be those digital pens and pads and billboards to continue us to remind them about your product to hopefully get them to take action call you by or whatever your steps are yeah and it's really interesting

Matt so you touched on something that I accidentally ran across years ago when I started modal point so if anybody follows me on LinkedIn you on Thursdays I throw up an old video I call it throwback Thursday the videos are so old I still had hair and those videos were simple what they were is I wrote down every reoccurring question I got with modal point from prospects and clients and then I would shoot a video

answering that question and I have hundreds and hundreds of videos going back 15 years and there's a lot of those are still valued today and those short videos drove so much business that content that I created drove so much business toward modal point that we started ranking when people search for things like oil and gas sales experts so before we get out of here I do want to touch on the fact that

if you you can combine an SEO strategy with your content creation because your content can be structured a certain way that allows you to rank for certain either key phrases or key words but it's still your original content so it's almost like being able to use this content you're creating to accomplish multiple things yeah I mean FAQs frequently ask questions even on Google my business profiles

if you're a local business or someone's coming into your brick and mortar really really important but also those long tail key phrases of those specific questions that you get asked over and over again what Google's trying to do is show the best possible answer to solve the problem for that person so people come back and use Google again so if you write content and you really answer that question well where they're

going to get their question answered and move to move on to the next whatever questions in their head that's what Google wants and so if you can structure your content in that way and speak to it with again the authoritative eat is expertise authoritativeness and trust you're going to win the search rankings are going to go up and you're going to help convert people

but those are even the same questions that you should be pushing out on social media those are the same questions on your podcast like if those are commonly asked questions and you know people are going to get that why not get them further down the funnel before you talk to them right like I think that that's the goal of content marketing is to support the sales conversation to move

them closer to buying faster right yeah 100% all right so we got to start winding things down we don't have a product to review which by the way people if you have a product think of something gaggy like Matt and I'd review let us know we're happy to use it and then tell the audience whether we loved it or didn't love it if you want to connect with us and any of our social channels all of our links

are in the show notes so either scroll up or left depending if you're on android or irs we have our insiders group we're still working on so stay tuned for that and then it's time for our linkedin fail or tip of the week I think last time you had a tip this time I actually have a fail so we've all gotten the linkedin in-mails where it's obviously it's boilerplate where people are just

using technology to send the same email to thousands of people I got one mat that was even funnier than that so I got a boilerplate inbound on linkedin and it said hey open parentheses first name close parentheses like whatever technology they were using they didn't take the time to map the first name to my first name so instead of saying hey mark it had said hey first name

well that's obviously not a real individualized reach out right so people if you're using technology on linkedin to do mass amounts of context make sure at least you understand how to use the technology so you don't have that type of obvious fail right smack in your face I would just add to that mark is a lot of companies out there are kind of the spray and pray like spamming people

aspect I believe it hurts your overall brand this is really the equivalent of the guy that goes to the networking event that just pushes business cards on people without even finding how they can help the other person people don't care what you know until they know how much you care or something like that like you need to connect with them first you don't just spray and pray

with this like it sometimes works but it really is a degradation to your brand you want to send a very well researched well thought out emails to build a good relationship with somebody to foster a business connection right like this is just not the right approach in my opinion we just get so much noise these days you know linkedin is certainly noisy but I think if more people will use linkedin in the right way

it'll become a great platform 100% oh you know we didn't even talk about our mixer so we had our industry mixer where our proceeds goes to fight human sex trafficking this past Thursday and we had a phenomenal turnout and Matt you were generous enough to show up with your videographer and your photographer our next one is going to be April 27th Thursday April 27th

right here in Houston we'll make sure there's a link in the show notes it's a few dollars to come I think it's 20 bucks but we give you food and alcohol we do it this really cool venue that has drilling simulation equipment in it it's just a safe place for everybody to get together so if you want to join us our next industry mixer we will add the link in the show note and if you come come find Matt and I because we'll be there

yeah absolutely we'd love to talk with you all right remember folks make a difference and 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