Ending the Year Strong Part 2 of a 2 part series

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. Welcome back, everybody, to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast. This is part two of a two-part series, Ending the Year Strong, our first part we talked

through what are some ideas we had if you're a salesperson at the end of year strong. This time, we're going to talk about what you can do if you're in the marketing role to end the year strong, and Matt, I'm going to lean heavily on you on this. I do have a couple of things that I want to talk about that I understand, at least from large corporate marketing organizations. So one of the first things is, typically at the end of the year is when your management

team starts evaluating or planning to evaluate you for your performance review. How would you do in your job? You may have a 360, you may have a one-on-one meeting with your manager or whatever. Start thinking ahead of time about the things that you did well for the last year as a marketing professional. Write those things down, even if it's just in the note app on your phone, so that when

you have this discussion with your management, you actually have a list of things that you pulled off that were successful. Number one, I promise you, your management team or your manager doesn't want to spend all this time trying to think of all this stuff themselves. Number two, they're going to forget a lot of it, especially if they run a large marketing department, so you're actually helping them.

Number three, you've now handed them what they needed, and literally a lot of times they'll ask you if you can send it to them. What you're also doing is basically putting all the data in place so that you get a good performance review for your annual bonus or pay raise or whatever. So I see a lot of marketing people when this happens toward the end of the year, kind of have a deer in the headlights, like I don't know what to do.

Start early, start writing down all the things you did, and if you have metrics, that's even better. And data, start doing that for your career. So I think it's one of the first things that a lot of marketing people don't think of that actually would help you a lot at the end of the year to finish the year strong. The other thing is, if you work for a large marketing organization especially, you have

all this data, and it's probably in different silos, you probably have some marketing automation, you definitely have a CRM, I probably have an email automation. Go in and clean some of that stuff up. I will tell you this much, Matt, and I was actually shocked. So we used MailChimp for our email automation. We send out not a lot of emails, but our lists are pretty big.

We've been doing this for a long time, and my marketing team actually went and not my marketing team, actually one of my marketing people went in, and cleaned up all the inactive people, so the people that don't open our emails, and at first you go, well shoot, that means less people are on my list. Our open weight almost quadrupled. Even though it's going out to less people, the people that never open our email anyway

by removing them from the tool from MailChimp, it caused more people to open our emails. I don't know if that's an algorithm thing or it's a higher delivery rate. It does. Maybe that's what it was. But I was amazed at how much more eyeballs we had on our content by cleaning up our email lists, which in my head is kind of counterproductive, but I've seen the data, and it's legit.

Clean up those databases, clean up the CRM, remove inactive people, people that never open your emails. Now the next part of that is you probably, in this year, is a good time for you to start planning how to add people to those lists. I would also say that you can put those people on another list, and you could send them some time to offer or some kind of re-engagement to re-engagement.

That's a damn good idea, Matt. On a new list is really quite critical. And then just really quickly, what you were saying previously, I would tell you, if things don't go in our CRM, I won't even remember them in a quarter from now. So I say if it doesn't go into the CRM or the project management tool or whatever you're using, it didn't happen.

You look and sound good. Anyway, yeah, that's 100% correct. You're right. And if you're busy and if you run a company or if you run a marketing team or organization, you're not going to remember all the cool stuff each one of the individual people did. And there may be one golden nugget in there that the person remembers doing that you don't

and that's super important that you bring that up during your performance review. You should really do it as you go. You should do it at least quarterly. And you're going to be trained by your company for the job that you're in. You got to train yourself and create personal development for the job that you want. And you have to build the story just like when we do PR outreach or different things

like that. You got to make it easy for the person that we're giving the information to to do their job better. And if you're making your boss look good, if you're making your team look good, if you're making your company look good, that helps everybody else out and they want you around. And they're going to move you.

You're not going to be the redhead stepchild or whatever the term is. You want to be on the inside track. And if you can help people make their job look good and also you got to advocate for yourself because nobody else is necessarily going to do it and some organizations are very toxic. That's why I love agency work because I can go work with this company, help provide some

CMO insights. I can go over here. I can go over there and walking in and out of some of those offices. Some of them definitely are great places to work. Some of them it's different. Not so much.

Yeah. Depending on the environment you're in, certainly you want to have an influence to impact and change it. But you need to be advocating for yourself because you don't know what other conversations are happening. I mean, I think there's going to be regulatory clarity here for the next four years.

I think oil is going to be drill, baby drill hopefully. And I would just say though, if you're in a down market, you got to make sure that people remember all the wins that you had. And you want to remember them too if you need it for a move or something like that. So you want to be documenting all this stuff. And I think report cards are a really, really good thing.

And having reviews and understanding where you're at and what competency looks like. Those things are good for you individually and the end of the year. If you have additional time, work on some personal development or growing a new skill or doing something like that, I mean, I think it's incredibly important to use that time effectively to get an edge for your company or for yourself when everybody might be distracted. But keep going.

I know you had a third point, Mark. So great idea. Well, the other thing is I wanted to real briefly touch on what you mentioned. We didn't do it, but it's super powerful. I didn't even think of it. But man, if you're cleaning up your email list and you put that on a separate list,

you can then treat them differently. And you can still use it as a resource. You may not get the same return on investment like you do with your active people on your email list, but what a great idea to put them on an inactive list and have a special campaign just for that inactive list. That's genius.

I'm so glad you're on this show. You need the right subject line. Who you're engaging should always be actually on different lists. So you should be doing lean scoring and you should have people on different lists. And then basically you treat all those people differently to speak to them. And if you don't have the right subject line, they're not going to open the email.

And if they don't open the email, they're not going to do anything. I mean, copyrights spend 80% of the time just on the subject line. They test all these different subject lines with the same body. Well, once they get the subject line works, then that's what we do. I like to do like ABCD all the way through Z. I like to do like 26 different headlines, test them all, and then let's see who wins.

And it's like a bracket and you like compete. And then once we get the subject line figured out with all the same body, then we'll retest the body like on the outreach that we're doing. And you can set up all kinds of automations and triggers and you can really create the experience that as a salesperson, you want to create through marketing. Marketing makes a good salesperson, a great salesperson.

And if you're already great, it scales you to the point that you're like, I just look at like a MechWarrior or something like you're in a body suit that just crushing it from a B2B standpoint or account based selling. If you can start leveraging marketing and marketing team. And I would even say that's the first thing I would do is go set up a meeting with your marketing department or someone.

Well, remember, we're talking to our marketing team right now. Our salespeople are listening as well. Vice versa. You need to go be with your salespeople because now is a time for collateral. Now is a time to enhance your collateral, get those stories from the salespeople, do some of the videos, do some of the testimonials.

Like if you have any of this downtime where it's not conference, conference, conference or go, go, go or whatever it is. Now is the time to perfect what you currently have and uptick it. I see a lot of decks that could be improved, but it's good enough and people are moving. Now is the time to do that. Yeah, it really is a good time to drive more alignment between sales and marketing.

It really truly is. I mean, that should be your number one priority as a marketer is what can you do to drive more alignment with your sales organization? You mentioned B2B and that's actually a good segue, what I was going to say next. So as a marketing person this time of year, what is the new marketing channels that you can explore, right?

Besides LinkedIn and Facebook and email. What's some other B2B marketing channels? Just a few years ago, I would have said TikTok was new. Well, now TikTok's been very capitalized on. There's some big brands spending with some money out there on TikTok, but there's a lot of new stuff out there that you could experiment with it.

And this is a good time of year to explore or experiment with new B2B marketing channels. I saw and I cannot remember the term, Matt, and you probably know it, but it's all of these TV shows that are not aired on a regular broadcast. Yeah, yeah, CTV or CTV. That's it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I saw some data on that just recently and it's amazing.

The results people are getting and the cost is not much actually. It's really cool. Matt and I've talked about podcasting. I still think it's a great marketing channel to be able to explore that. Just going back to CTV and OTT, I would tell you right now, if you want to hit people on ESPN, ESPN is now PPC.

You can just log into it and spend same thing with Disney. There's a lot of opportunity for streaming TV, even streaming radio. I would just tell you the big tip I would tell you is put a QR code on your ad. So people can use their phone to scan it and you can track conversions because right now you can only track impressions, but there is a lot of new innovation coming out in Mar-Tec right now.

And I mean, you can even advertise on Netflix. And if you go look at the history of Netflix, how good their AI is to reach the right type of people based on the kind of movies they watch, it will blow your mind. Netflix is really the data company. They're not a content creation company.

They use content to get the data. They were a data company when they were mailing out CDs or DVDs. If you don't know this about Netflix, they create content specifically for certain demographics that they want to target. If it's crazy sci-fi with showing a little bit of good looking females on it, they're targeting the 20 to 27 year old young male.

I can tell you exactly who they're targeting. And if you watch the ads, my favorite is the GMC ad, where it's a GMC one ton four wheel drive truck pulling two US Army troop carriers. And then later they're pulling a big boat. Like, if that's not aimed exactly at men, I mean, a hundred percent. But Netflix is showing it on the movies that they create just for their younger male audience.

It's genius. And you could do the same thing. You should be testing stuff. That's what we've been doing pretty heavily. We're running ads on all channels for a lot of clients. We've been able to set baselines and it's really helping if you're trying to get a certain number of touches.

The attribution is kind of a spread over all these channels. Like I wouldn't go with first touch or last touch attribution, but man, I'm telling you versus terrestrial radio, you can repurpose some of this cash. Or if you're running TV ads, you can repurpose some of this. And we're getting phenomenal results across the board. Certainly Facebook is something that's a staple, but also YouTube.

People are not utilizing YouTube the way YouTube is the highest viewed platform than any other channel. I know videos are tough, but guess what? Videos convert when you get into the OTT and CTV stuff. That's where you need to go, but you can do it now. We have a whole team that does it. You should be doing that.

You should be doing shorts. There are things that you should be doing and the reach. There are some other platforms that I'm not even going to mention that we're testing that are producing outstanding results. And we're in a testing phase right now, but we're able to get millions of impressions. So the return on investment of the reach, way better than anything you could

do with like a press release or something like that. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. I have a whole list of stuff actually that we can talk about, Mark, when you're ready of stuff that we could go through, that I would recommend doing during the holidays from a marketing standpoint. But OTT and CTV, as well as like streaming radio, you can even advertise on podcasts.

You can target different types of podcasts. You can target people listening to different types of music. Okay. You can target demographics. You can reach people anywhere now. I love it.

I love it. So those are all great new B2B marketing channels for you to explore. It's a good time of year to do that. Next thing is we keep preaching about being aligned and connected to your sales team. Set a time with the sales management team to find out what their Q1 objectives are for 2025, find out exactly what it is and then build your marketing strategy,

your marketing calendar, even your content calendar around those strategies. So you're in alignment. It sounds like it's common sense. I don't know how many very large companies that I deal with. Don't do this. And marketing has their own strategy.

If the Q1 of 2025 sales has its own strategy and they're not matched up. So go grab your marketing, your sales leadership, sit down, have them tell you what their goals are for the first quarter of next year and then align your marketing calendar around that. It's a simple thing, but it'll drop amazing results. I would say not only that, you want to review your performance metrics.

You want to cut underperforming campaigns. And like you said, this is the time to do A.B. testing like you wouldn't believe. This is a great time. Again, I think Wednesday lunch through the weekend on also Sunday afternoon, run and add Sunday afternoon does really quite well.

Monday, Tuesday, if we're working with, we're trying to stretch budgets. I won't run ads on Monday, Tuesday, because people are in work mode. Now, holidays, it stretches a little bit more, but now is a great time that people are on their devices that you can test how the response rates are on ads. And you should actually be doing that and looking at how to optimize your campaigns. That's half of my job is new clients come in and they're wasting a bunch of money

and it's like, okay, let's just repurpose all this and we can get way more bang for your buck. Yeah, and I can give you a real life example. You hear us talk or hear me talk all the time about our Sunday update. Let me break you down what that actually is. So first thing, it's a newsletter.

Second thing, newsletter is not mentioned in the name of it at all on purpose because a lot of people in the oil and gas space, when they hear newsletter, they think spam, it comes out on Sunday, late morning, around nine or 10 o'clock in the morning on purpose. Why? Because we know that a lot of senior people in the oil and gas space, that's their one time of the week to actually chill and just catch up on stuff.

And so they consume our content. Now, if you subscribe to the Sunday update, you're going to notice it's a bunch of small blocks of content. We have a little short update on commodity prices, the price of crude natural gas, where we think it's going. It's a little short update on some marketing strategies.

It's a little short recipe. If you want to make something or just read about some of the recipes that have been in the oilfield for a hundred years, it's a little short update on something fun. That's our queso advisory committee. By the way, that doesn't really exist. We made that up and now people are wanting to join the queso advisory committee.

It's a little short read a homeless animal looking for a forever home. What that is, is that content is intentionally created in short form. It's intentionally pushed out on Sunday, late morning, and that we have a huge percentage of business leaders in oil and gas space that can not only consume that Sunday update, but love it. If you read the reviews of it, they go 10, 15 minute read.

What that really is a way for me to keep my company in front of senior leaders in the industry in a way they see it's beneficial. See how that works? It's a very simple thing to do, but you got to think through it, which we did. I say we did, my marketing team did it. It's a very good way to stay in front of people and using conventional tools.

We can see who opened, see how long they read, see where it got delivered, all that sort of stuff. So it's just a great tool for staying in front of your clients. It's something that anybody can do that, whether you're a small company or a large company. Mark, I want to just say capitalize on trends.

I think capitalizing on trends, certainly right now, short form video content. And we've talked about that in previous podcasts. And this one is absolutely important. Think about creating some personality around your brand, seasonality for your team. It's a great seasonality is great.

Yep. Also user generated content, getting clients involved, engaging them, doing something fun. Again, it's about getting FaceTime in front of them in a way that's not just, I'm here to sell. I mean, we just adopted two dogs.

You can connect with people that are dog lovers. You want to build multiple forms of connections with your clients and also different stakeholders. I had a meeting, check this out. I had a meeting with a client set up for a lunch for the following week. And it was a VP of sales.

And I was going to meet him or like, I opened up my email the day of meeting with him, the head of marketing emailed me said, we need to reschedule. That person just left the company. It's good that I had this relationship over here. Cause if that was my only relationship and the only point, then everything might be a little bit in a tailspin.

I think that this is a great time to even double down on the relationships you have and the companies that you have to fortify them as well as to maybe develop them. There's probably a lot of other areas that you can help them out. And I mean, we're looking at a number of clients we have of, okay, we're working with this business here, we're working with that business unit.

How do we open up more doors or get introduced to more people? The holidays are a great excuse and a great reason to do that as well as like nobody wants to be sold right now. No one's in necessarily the business mode. They're brain somewhere else. Building those connections based on something else are super important.

I think. Yeah. The other thing, and Matt mentioned this way earlier, and I intentionally didn't comment on it because I wanted to save it till now. But you know, if you're a marketing professional in this space, this is a great time to learn something new.

Matt rattled off a hundred things. Do you don't know what pay per click is? Go take a online course on it. You don't understand how to judge leads. Go take a course and there's a bunch of really cool stuff out there. This is a great time to add value to what you bring to your company and also

your personal career, because things are slowing down a little bit and you have a little bit more time. Look at things that you would like to learn. And by the way, it actually works so much better if it's something that you want to learn that you're kind of passionate or curious about, then something that you think you should learn.

So don't focus on the stuff that you don't want to learn. You're not going to be very good at it. Focus on stuff that's cool. That's new. If you work for a company and they're all a little bit scared of video, take a videography course, take a video editing course.

Matt, some of the new video editing software out there is amazing, the quality you can do with literally in 10 minutes of learning. Unlike some of the older stuff that took years to learn all the features and functionality of it. So this is the time of year for your marketing professional to kind of up your game, get some education, learn some new skills, which then just makes you

more valuable to your company, but also to the market as a whole. I just think it's a great time of year to just up your game a little bit. I do have a question to ask you, Matt, because the next thing I wanted to bring up and I'm not sure what your thoughts are on this, I think this is also a good time of year for a company to start showing their personal side. If you work for an awful service company or a technology company, some

long answer or whatever, people think you as that company. This is a time of year, maybe to show some goofy pictures from your company's Christmas party, right? Or kind of show behind the scenes that somebody loves to barbecue or works with animals or whatever. I think this is a great time to personalize your company, because no

matter what, when you're a marketing to the general public out there, at some point, Matt says all the time, they want to know that you're a real person. They don't want to know that you're a brand. They want to know you're a real person. I just think this time of year is a good time to do that. Part of it is the holiday season.

Part of it is you have the time to do it, but I just think you already show off a little bit the people side of your company this time of year. People do business with people. People forget that. People do business with people. I see it over and over again and you want to humanize your brand and you want

to humanize your department and you want to humanize yourself. And what is this saying? It's something like people don't want to know what you know until they know how much you care or something like that. I think that again, the user generated content, creating maybe some short form videos, I think it's okay to drop handles a little bit.

And also look, if you're not going to push it out publicly, because maybe, maybe there's a line there or maybe there's some legal or whatever, but you can send it to people. I used to when I was heavy sales. And again, I was the person that was always reading the marketing stuff. So I got pulled to marketing because it was really where my passion was.

It's what I went to school for. I would always send like a goofy cartoons. I love reading goofy cartoons and I would go look through a bunch of goofy cartoons and I would send those to people. Some of them, maybe I would send to everybody, but then there are some I would send to certain people.

I'd personalize that message. Now you could like send a little video, whatever. There's a lot of things that you can do, but know that it doesn't have to be mass done. Like if you have a set of clients or you're an account manager that you're managing, you should be looking at, okay, how is this account doing

business wise? How is your personal relationship doing and measure that? Like I even think about life almost like a video game. Like how's my health doing? Am I eating right? Am I in good shape spiritually?

Where am I at? How am I doing with my kids? How am I doing with my family? I look at all these factors and I try to get in realignment with some work like balance, taking self-care. Your mental state, which I think we've talked about a little bit, but I don't

know how much we've hidden home. At one point we're going to do an episode just like that. But I can tell you your mindset, I'm going to have a good day. I'm going to have a bad day and both are true, depending on what I believe. Some people had a great year and they're up on a high horse and other people are gunning for like, I want to be the top salesperson, whatever.

And then some people are like, man, I had a horrible year. I need to reevaluate it. What can you do better? How can you change that? And positive affirmation, just go research it if you don't believe it. I'm telling you right now, there is value in your mind and what's going on in

your head and look around, look what a great life we have. Now's the time to embody that positive spirit and share that with people. And I think it's infectious. It's so funny. Matt and I do zero prep people, but he segued my last little comment perfectly. The last thing I think you should do if you're a marketing professional in the

year strong is go to your executive leadership team, go to your CEO, your president, your SCPs and go, look, let's talk about the company vision and let's talk about how you care. And let's maybe shoot a little video, not for external use. This is just for the company. It's not going anywhere else.

It's just for our people, our team, so that you can help your senior leadership communicate their vision to the entire company. Couple of things. First thing, most companies don't do that. And when you do that, people from the front lines all the way to the top and everybody in the middle, all of a sudden go, wow, even our leaders are real people

and they're trying to accomplish something. Number two, imagine if your CEO now knows your name, because it was you who came up with this idea, you who shot the video. You think that's good for your career? I'm telling you now it is. So in the year strong, one of the last things I suggest you do is go to your

executive leadership team and help them communicate their company vision and their goals to the company. Make this an internal project. Video would probably be best short, like Matt said, but you also do an internal podcast. You could just do one, an audio only version, but go to your senior leadership team and see if you can help them.

And this inspires the whole company. It's just a good thing to do. And this is a good time of year to do it. That was my kind of my last comment on what I think marketing teams should do to end the year strong Matt. Anything else?

I think that's a great place to end it on care. Okay. I think care, that's a huge trend right now. Companies that care people, and especially if you're doing hiring of younger generations, they want to make sure that the company mission is in alignment with theirs and they're working around people that they want to be around.

And I don't think that there's anything bad that you could do by investing some time in your team. Don't take them for granted and appreciate them and company parties. And these things, especially if people are working remote in some capacity, like if they're not even in the office every day of the week, you need to establish the connection because if they're just in their bubble at home doing

their job, they could do that for anyone and that person could be critical for you and marketing and even internal podcast. We've talked about the larger organizations, internal podcast, but to communicate things up and down the chain. I mean, that was something I even did in college. I built a newsletter for the core cadets at Texas A&M to be able to communicate

from the leadership why changes were happening and to push that information out and then have an opinion article in there to push that information up because if people can feel heard and people know that you care, that's where it all starts. Yep. We need to close this thing down. Y'all know the drill.

The two newsletters, the links are in the show notes. All our Matt and I social channels in the show notes as well. Our insider group is coming. I actually have a LinkedIn success tip of the week that I accidentally discovered. You mentioned earlier about A.B. testing and if you ever comment on anybody's post on LinkedIn, you noticed

that you can like, celebrate, laugh. I can't remember what the other one is. For the last month, I have been clicking celebrate instead of like Matt. It has doubled the traffic for some reason. Algorithms at least today in November of 2024, give more weight to somebody clicking the celebrate icon than the like icon.

So take that as you wish. Matt, this is great. This is absolutely wonderful. So very powerful stuff here. The last thing I'll add to just piggyback on what you said, short comments or even emojis in the comments, there's a point system that linked the news for the algorithm

and then long comments and then comments that are responded to all our factors in the algorithm if you're trying to boost your reach on LinkedIn. And this is one of the like masterclasses I think we'll be doing. I have so much I can share on LinkedIn and case studies that really work even from things that I've done with the LinkedIn actual team. We've even talked about with podcasts, aligning what their goals are, what

LinkedIn's goals are and what they're trying to promote with what you're trying to do. There's all these different factors that go into ranking and visibility. And really, the more attention you get, the higher chance people know who you are. And to be considering your product or service. And the more times they see it, there's a trust factor there.

So certainly LinkedIn is something you should become a specialist in. And seeing people as soon as we open up our insider's group for sales and marketing professionals is why you better frickin' join. Matt teaching you that is worth whatever good charge we're just right there. We got to get out here. Remember, folks, make a difference and not a sale.

Thanks for listening to OGGM. 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.