Lack of Brand Awareness. What to Do About It

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, everybody.

And if it sounds vaguely familiar, like we're in a coffee shop, it's because Matt and I are. We're at a Buzz and Bytes here in Houston. Looks like this may be our new recording spot, Matt. I like it here. Coffee's good. We've got a little bit of ambience, easy to get to.

So if you're in the Houston area, go check them out. It's hidden. It's hidden, yeah. They're not a sponsor of ours. Actually, maybe we should talk to them about being a sponsor, at least giving us coffee, but absolutely give them a plug

because it's worth it. They do good work at a fair price and they let us record here, or they haven't kicked us out yet. Our topic. This is a good one, Matt. Lack of brand awareness.

That is something that will destroy a company over time. It will limit sales. It will reduce margins. You're not top of mind. It allows your competitors in the door, just all kinds of problems that you can avoid

if you concentrate on brand awareness. I wonder if people know what brand awareness is. I think a lot of people learn about brand awareness when they go from a bigger company that they're kind of tugging around a logo. And they go to work for a smaller company

with a more aggressive compensation package. I've done it myself. I went from a global 100-year-old company with tons of brand recognition to a startup early in my career. And the same companies and people that would gladly set means with me ignored me.

And I didn't know what it was, and I figured out it was lack of brand awareness. Nobody knew the company I worked for, as opposed to the original one, which everybody knew who it was. I've had multiple sales directors that I've worked with

that were working at a bigger company, come to a smaller company. And the things that they were needing from graphic design to content to XYZ it was like their tail was on fire kind of thing. It really changed the game of like,

we got to start pumping out content. And that's really what it's about, is finding a way to create content, high-quality content and mass. I think podcasting actually is one of the best forms to kind of take content creation

or high-quality content creation, then repurpose it into different areas from social media. It's easier from a programming standpoint. I don't know if that's really the goal of this podcast, but I wrote a book on it. Like, it's so powerful.

And I was actually meeting with the Boy Scouts of America, so they're one of my clients. And basically, that's what I pitched to them today, is like, y'all really need to start a podcast and you can create different programming on different merit badges, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, so that content is part of it. When I think of brand awareness, I think of how easy is it for the common public or a buyer to recognize who you are. So it's more than content. First company I think of is Coca-Cola.

You go anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world, and you show them the Coke icon, and they know immediately it's Coca-Cola. That's amazing brand awareness. The household logo, right? That's what everybody aspires to be,

so you have knowledge of it en masse. Yeah, and that does a lot of things. The biggest thing is, from a sales point of view, is it makes it easier for you to open the door. To open the door, yeah. I guarantee you, more people open the door

for Coke representative than from a soft drink manufacturer they'd never heard of before, right? Regardless of who has a better product or not or a better pricing. And I like that having a strong presence in the mind.

You know, OGGN in the only gas space has that brand awareness, has a strong presence of mind where people know who we are. It helps a lot. But you talked about content creation with brand awareness, and I do think that, and today in 2024,

I do think that if you're listening to this and you're trying to figure out a way to start developing strong brand awareness in the only gas space, I think you almost have to start with content. Well, creative ABM, like account-based marketing, here's the deal.

If you don't have a big budget, but you know who your target audience is with digital marketing and personalization, you can create like a cloud around that person where every direction they look is your stuff. When you're a smaller company,

you can't compete with the bigger companies. That just throw money everywhere. In mass, you have to be strategic about what you're doing and to create that in the mind of your target audience inside that sales cycle to convert them. And we're hit with so much noise every which way,

you have to have that personalized marketing that connects with those issues. And how do you do that? With high-quality content, that answers your question. Right. Yeah, I won't try to rephrase what Matt just said.

Back to my Coca-Cola analogy, Coca-Cola has the budget to be on every billboard, on the side of every bus, on the side of every airplane, every TV ad, every radio ad, probably thousands of podcasts, right? Twitch, TikTok, Facebook,

they have the budget to do that. And yet how would you compete with them? To Matt's point, you figure out who your target buyers are and you make sure that your presence is in place in front of just those. Coke is doing more of maths

because they can afford to do it. However, if you were that independent soft drink manufacturer and you were able to put your content in front of the buyers, you'd be able to compete with Coca-Cola. Well, we can talk about, like, even social media, building a brand on social media,

but look at Prime, okay? Look at Celsius. Like, there's certain lifestyle brands that kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, if you even look at the case study on Red Bull, okay, they built their own market,

a $900 million probably more than that. You know, that's right. Actually, watching Netflix documentary on them, it was amazing. That was their strategy and they pulled it off. They literally built the market from zero.

Well, like Moundue, for example, is kind of in that niche as well, so you've got to figure out who that target persona is and go after it in a big way. You can't just spray and pray and you can't be on a bell curve

in the median standard deviation. You've got to pick a side and you've got to dig down deep and find that subnit. Yeah, and you made me think of something. One of the things I hear a lot from marketing people is the constant need to justify their spin, their budget.

And brand awareness, I know for a fact, is one of those things that's not that hard to measure. We actually do it not on this show, but some of our other podcasts where we ask the listeners, hey, I'll give you a perfect example. All in gas this week,

the largest podcast in the world. If you listen to that show, you hear us say, hey, if you answer this one question survey that will give you a link for the show notes, we will send you a laptop or hard hat sticker.

That one question survey says, did you know who API was before you listened to this podcast? Yes or no? And the more people that say yes as time goes on, the more that we're proving the metrics that that podcast is driving brand awareness for API.

It's a very simple thing to do, but it's a very easy thing to measure in that space. So for the marketing people that are trying to justify budget around brand awareness, it is one of those things that you can measure. In some ways, it's not that hard.

Not the vanity metrics, okay? And that was a big discussion early on, like enterprise-wise is the vanity metrics. But what were you going to say? Because there are really good ways to measure APIs. So measuring brand awareness,

like did you know who this company is, is really not that hard and it's an easy metric to prove that that is correct. Where it gets really gray, is when you're trying to measure things like loyalty or does it influence your buying decision?

That's when it gets harder to measure. But just did you know who this company was before you heard this? Very simple thing to measure. One question survey. To your marketing people,

there's a tool in your toolbox so that you can justify your budget. Now, Matt, but the other thing is I'm glad you brought up Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew was an independent soft drink for, I can't remember who ended up buying them.

But over the years, they've had hundreds of competitors. First one, I think it was Mellow Yellow. But there's hundreds of competitors. Everyone have disappeared. Why?

Because Mountain Dew had the best brand awareness in that kind of on the edge, high caffeinated lifestyle. And they're still the only one in that space right there. When you think about the oil and gas industry, let's pick the service companies

where they want their buyers, the operators to think of them first. How would you go about that? So if a head of marketing for a service company came to you and said, hey look, we have this tool.

When we want more people to think of us first and they need to buy or rent this tool, where would they start? You know where I would start, Mark? I mean, there's a lot of places. Well, that's why I'm asking you.

Well, look, if people are searching for a keyword in Google for whatever they're looking for, if they don't have that immediate referral or that connection, and you're one of the first people to pop up,

that starts generating trust and brand awareness that Google is saying, not in the paid ads, but in the organic space, that this is a top person in this space. Like if you search Oil and Gas Marketing Agency,

EWR Digital pops up usually first or second. That starts when someone's starting the search. So it depends where they're at in that. I mean, certainly a referral from your operations manager like to the CMO, where are you hearing this information from?

But you said one thing, if your hat's not even in the ring, you're definitely not going to get selected for the deal. People got to know who you are and know that you're a possible choice. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do that,

but it's usually like repetition, more than anything else. So if we're going to finish that conversation, I want to back you up, because you said something super valuable that some people may have missed.

If you search for what, your company comes up first, I'll be really clear here. Yeah, go search for it. Oil and Gas Marketing Agency. Right.

So can you imagine what that does, people? Anybody in the world that searches for Oil and Gas Marketing Agency sees Matt companies first. You know how much Matt's paying for that? Zero.

Now he put work into it. He created a lot of good content. He understands SEO, obviously, or he wouldn't be ranked on that first page. But imagine if his company did that for you. Imagine if somebody searched for that tool,

your company came up first every single time without you paying for it. Think about that, Mark. When we're talking about creative account-based selling, and you know what that customer journey looks like, and you pop up every time

they're searching for that problem along their customer journey, and you're at least one of those options, it continues to build. There's even data that surrounds. If people see it X number of times,

the weight starts to tilt towards you, that they're going to select you subconsciously, because people buy two things, and I think I've said this before, but people buy familiarity and novelty. Those are the two things you're actually trying to create online.

I know that's a little bit off topic of where we're going with this. People love that we get off topic. When I think of the companies I've seen in oil and gas space, try to do a job of creating that brand awareness. There's two mistakes I see a lot of companies make over and over again. I love your opinion.

The first mistake I see is they're inconsistent with their branding elements. And what I mean by that is logo over here is this color, logo over here is this color, this sales presentation as this font, this sales presentation as this font.

At this conference, you can portray yourself as this company, as this company. You're the same freaking company. And I think that consistency, if you're trying to build brand awareness is important. Am I right?

Recognition. I mean, think about all the fast food chains. You know exactly that fast food chain because of that logo. Also, if you look at what even Amazon Prime's done, they don't even put the word Amazon there. It's just the arrow.

Right? You know what I mean? You got all these people and here's the craziest thing. The brand equity and oh my gosh, I'm going to go way off topic here. Let's do it.

Okay. So I was at this innovation conference in Denver and I was hanging out with these Forbes 30 under 30 guys and they're on the cutting edge of culture. Mark, talking about why luxury brands tap into culture and how values accrued in logos and brands

and why people will pay X amount for a purse or that sort of thing and like, how is that done and what are the components of that? I mean, this is a whole separate podcast. No, no, this is great. I mean, think of Yeti coolers.

Folks, it's just a cooler. I'll give them props. It's a fantastic cooler. It's just a cooler. Matt, they have Yeti jewelry. They've become such a brand recognized.

They're selling jewelry based upon a cooler. That's a success brand story. All these derivatives, that's what gets me so excited is when you can consistently brand across multiple mediums and that could be swag, et cetera. But when you take that brand

and you create those derivatives off that brand to start to build communities and audience, that's where the power is. When you have, think about Elon Musk. Okay. Think about whether you like him or don't like him.

He has a community that supports him. Kanye West, same thing. Did you see his Super Bowl ad? Yes. He's so amazing. He's like, I spent $7 million on the Super Bowl ad.

So the whole point of this is just go to this side and buy my shoes. I think he made $19 million when he spent seven the next day or something like that. I mean, that's the power of audience. That's the power of brand. Yeah.

And that was to be my next mistake I see people. You segue me, perfect that. The next mistake I see companies make besides not having consistent branding elements is they don't have a consistent branding story. No, not at all.

This week, this and this week to do that. And people, you can't run paid campaigns. You can't do content marketing. You can't use social property unless you have a consistent branding story. I would tell you that that's probably where people fall flat the most is they're going, I got to create all this activity

but there's no thought or strategy behind how to create it. Think about it. If you're trying to build a house, you want to get an architect and have a blueprint. You're not just going to start building the house and that's what a lot of people are doing is

you need to be strategic and sit down and plan that out and do an internal workshop or whatever, bring in a consultant and figure out how to build that strategy, what those target personas on and how you're going to reach those personas

and then it becomes really clear what content you have, what to create and then you can map it out, create a calendar, find that it's all consistent and then you really actually got to do something that's not boring because what you said before is you've got to grab their attention because there's so much noise out there

but when you talk to copywriters, if you bring in a copywriter, you know where 80% of their time is spent if you hire a copywriter? Headline. I bet. If you don't get them in,

then they're not going to read the rest. I want to talk some more about that. When I look at companies in our space and on your space and they have budget to spend and they're trying to build name recognition which is what brand awareness is

and they make several mistakes that we just talked about. One of the things that I don't think they understand is that if they don't have a strategy, not only are they going to continue to make different mistakes and sometimes the same mistakes, they're going to waste time and money

and they're never going to get across the finish line. You have to have a plan and I love you to death sales leaders and marketing leaders but sometimes you need a strategist to help you with a plan, not a sales person or not a marketing person, somebody that understands the strategy

of building that name recognition and that's one of the things that y'all are really good at. Yeah, I did cold calling sales for 15 years, something like that and then I just saw that it was a better mass trap to do marketing

and the one to many marketing where you can create that personalized experience for multiple people but I would say mostly what people are doing is they try something out for a second. Like, go start a podcast, okay?

Like, go start a podcast. Most podcasts don't get past seven podcasts. People give up too easily and then they start something else and then you look over the course of, okay, the year, what did you do?

We did these five objectives but we didn't really pull through any of them. It takes a while to start to build that foundation but what I think we said at the beginning of this podcast is what are your KPIs and what are the analytics you're measuring

because if we're talking top line revenue growth, how many people are clicking to your website? How to how many clicks? How many people fell out of form? How many forms? How many appointments do you get?

How many appointments do you get? How many proposals do you put out? When you put out the proposals, how many people close? There's activity and in sales, a lot of sales managers know this.

You got to do those activities and you know that that's going to be the end result. There's nothing different in marketing or account based selling. Yeah, and on the sales side, it's the exact same thing. How many outreaches did your sales person make

to set meetings? How many meetings did they set? So what is that percentage? How many of those meetings actually turned into a real lead? And then how many of those leads actually closed?

And let me tell you, if you're running a sales team right now and you don't like those numbers because you all either officially or unofficially watch those numbers, the way you change those metrics,

the way you increase the number of meetings set with an outreach, the way you increase the number of leads generated from those meetings is making sure that you have solid brand awareness. Why?

Number one, not only do people know who you are, so it's easy for sales team to set meetings, but they know what you do. They're halfway down the buying cycle and understanding you're not educating. You're just trying to figure out

if financially the deal makes sense why you're helping them. And if you want to really increase your sales metrics, that brand awareness is probably the most important thing you could possibly do for your sales team. And I would say one of the things when you were talking

made me think that if sales managers are not talking to marketing like... Like we did say it for the beginning? Yeah, yeah. And they're not training the sales people to put in that data properly in the CRM

for the marketing team to be able to utilize it. Not really effective. If you're a sales person, you're just going to do whatever you need to do. And if you don't understand why you need to do it or how it could benefit you in the future,

we're like water. We could do a whole episode on that. If your sales team is not putting in the right information into your CRM, it's your fault, not theirs. The reason they're not putting in the right information is it doesn't provide value to them.

They need to understand how this is going to help them close deals faster. Or you need to get up off the fact that your management wants data, it's not important. I don't know how many sales team I've helped. And all I did, Matt, was go into their CRM

and make them remove 50% of the fields that the sales team have to enter every time they engage a new client. And they go, well, I want to know what this person's title was. Yes, that's important.

Would you rather know if the deals are closing out with a reasonable degree of certainty? If you make the sales team put a lot of information in the CRM that's not valuable to them, they're going to pencil with it. And you're not going to get good data.

Reduce the amount of time your sales team has to spend in CRM. You'll see the quality of that data go up. I promise you. So the online data that is kind of the other side of the coin with this

is if you reduce fields online with lead captures. Oh yeah, it's the same thing. Every field you reduce, 15% more conversions. Yep. Okay, and I have seen this. Me too.

Over and over again. I would tell you one of the things that we do a lot of is people spend a ton of money on MarTech, whatever, and they are not using it effectively. So we go in and kind of try to help bring

that together and leverage more of the technology because they usually have a really good tech stack and it's just not being executed in the right way potentially. We could do 20 shows. Yeah, we could.

We should. Not using your current tools appropriately. All right, we're getting kind of close to why now. There's two other things I want to talk about though that's new. So I think a brand awareness in oil and gas,

and I talked about it, having a good story, being consistent in your materials, I think that's super important. Content marketing to tell your brand story, super important. But let me tell you a couple of new things.

Online community and influencer marketing. So while you're building your brand and you're driving brand awareness to drive higher margins, more deals, and all the stuff that comes along with that brand awareness, don't forget online communities.

Right now, if I go and I'm gonna pick Facebook, although I'm just picking Facebook for this conversation, I have actually went on Facebook and found groups built around nothing but expandable packers. Now, if you're listening, you don't know what that is. It's basically a tool that's used

in the upstream side of the industry. It's a very unique tool, very specialized. Very few people know about it. A handful of companies make it. But there's a whole community just for online packers. If your company sells that,

and you're building brand awareness, why are you not in that pre-built community that talks about exactly what you're doing? Adding value, not spamming, but being part of the community and adding value to sponsoring it.

Not trying to sell anything, bring your experts in and go, hey, this is why you're having that problem. You need to increase your PSI 17 to 20 more and you'll be fine. Or if it's stuck, this is why, be a part of the community.

I guess engagement, right? Engagement community provide value, an unbelievable, inexpensive, almost free way to help build that brand awareness with groups of people that either will buy your product or will influence the buying decision.

To that point, you have to be genuine, transparent. You have to be a help. Reach out to those online communities. LinkedIn is another place where there's very specialized online guys, online communities.

Make sure you look at that when you're looking at building your brand awareness. A lot of marketing people, all guests skip that. And then the newest one, and I kind of hate this word a little bit, but is really influencer marketing.

Technically, I am an influencer because somebody paid me to tweet. I still can't believe I got to tweet. Isn't it in the category of experimental marketing? But going back to my downhole tools example, who is known as the expert?

Who gets paid to speak about downhole tools? Or who gets paid to speak about pipeline pigging? Or who gets paid to speak about crackers or ethylene crackers? Or who are those people? Make sure you bring them on board

in some fashion to help build your brand. This is something that the medical industry, the pharma industry, the medical device industry does really, really well. They bring in a speaker that has some authority and influence in the space to talk about it.

And if you're building a brand in a space, it needs to be part of your strategy because guess what people don't have these days as time? I forget what the exact word is, but reviews, testimonials. I talk to a lot of companies that don't have these.

I know it's sometimes in a long gas, it's harder to get some of these things, but man, if you can, people are looking to defer the research component of what they're doing with time with shortcuts to if I know who this influencer is

and this person says, that's where spokesperson's been around for forever, reviews, testimonials, those sort of things that I can rely on this person's experience to build my decision-making process and help shortcut the time

that I'm gonna have to do in-depth research because I'm out of time. That's where I think there's an opportunity, there's a gap in the industry right now is one of the things we have talked about multiple times is the customer journey is online.

It's before they pick up the phone. It's before they connect with the salespeople. It's setting the stage. It's building the foundation for how they're gonna view your brand once they engage with your salespeople.

Yeah, you made me think of something else even though I thought it was finished, which was industry events, conference and trade shows. Oh, yeah. Don't put a booth up, although the booth can be a part of your branding strategy.

Participate in those events. Get on the speaking circuit so you're seen as the subject matter expert around where it's another fantastic, free or inexpensive way to build your brand. We gotta do a whole podcast on selling from the stage.

You know what, done. Done. Done. All right, people, look forward to that. We actually know what meant. Let's really put our necks out there.

Let's look at doing this live in front of a real oil-filled service audience. Okay. It won't be you and me sitting at a coffee shop. We're either going to kill it or we're going to fail in public

in front of a bunch of sales and marketing people. So, audience, stay tuned. That's going to be fun. We'll get it in the works and get it figured out. All right, as you can tell, it's time to wind this thing down.

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Let's do it. Remember, 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.

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