Let’s get Marketing out of 1995

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. Good to have you back again, Matt, for another episode.

Good to be here. Still cold. Still cold. The rest of the world making fun of us because it's below 50, we're freezing. But speaking of not freezing, a big shout out to Rigger for sponsoring this show. If you have an issue with paper field tickets, if you want to get paid quicker, if you want

to just track your assets real-time on yourself, go check them out. They're friends of the show. Tell them we sent them your way. The link will be in the show notes. Then, Matt, our last episode where we're talking about why sales and marketing needs to come together, you mentioned something, which was a CTA, which is a call to action, so I learned

from you. Here's our call to action. Folks, if you like the show, leave us a review. We have a new tool. We go to the show. We don't care if you're on Android, iOS, Linux, Microsoft, or whatever.

It's going to allow you to quickly and easily leave us a review. If you love the show, we'd love to see a five-star. If you're not a fan or you see some areas of improvement, let us know what you'd like to see us change. It's a lot. Topic for this week, Matt.

Why does the oil and gas industry need to modernize its marketing and what would happen if they did? Let me kind of rift a little bit on what I've seen in the past 25 years with the marketing oil and gas. So what's traditionally happened is trade shows are huge. Some of the multinational trade shows, oil and gas companies spend millions and millions

of dollars on new booth every year, booth staff, hauling equipment around the world. Don't get me wrong. I love going to a trade show because it's so easy to learn. That's traditionally one of the big ways. Another way was print. This industry loved print.

There's still print publications out there. I actually remember when Baker Hughes and Technique FMC had on staff wonderful writers and photographers and editors and they made their own print magazines, which were beautiful. I actually have some copies of it and they distributed that to their customers, the Exxons and the Chevrons, the Shells and the World to show them the new tools and processes they have in place.

And you go, Mark, that was 50 years ago. No, it wasn't. It was like just a few years ago. They quit doing that. So print has always been big in this industry, in-person type of stuff. So we joked last episode about the playing golf, but that's always been a good way to

market is on the golf course, on the shooting range, the sporting clays, lunch and learns. So traditionally, marketing and oil and gas has been a lot of stuff that's in-person, a lot of stuff that other industries would say is antiquated. And what's happening is it doesn't drive the same results it used to. I have had in the last five years conversations with multiple chief marketing officers about things like trade shows.

Mark, what is your opinion? Should we keep spending money? And I tell them all, no, unless it's super-nitched, the value isn't there. And Matt, I remember with Bell, I would go to OTC and I'd spend 80 grand on my company's money. And I'd make that back four or five times over.

I'd do three to $500,000 for the sales, the $80,000 investment. But the reason that worked is 10 or 15 years ago, there was no internet. Actually, I'm dating myself 20 years ago. There was no internet. And so a trade show was the only place that Chevron could go to, like OTC, and go speak to every choke manufacturer at one place.

So the value there was that Chevron could go talk to all the vendors. They brought POs. And so he had millions of dollars of business done on that showroom floor. Well, for the last decade, Chevron has no need to go to OTC to talk to choke manufacturers. Anybody can go online and look at every choke manufacturer out there. So if you notice, if you attend a lot of the big oil and gas conferences, if you notice

all the majors, the super majors, the big independents, the nationalized oil companies, even the big service companies have disappeared or have greatly lowered their footprint. So the industry knows that trade shows don't drive the same results they used to. Print has gone out the window, although print has increased a little bit post COVID, which was bizarre. It may just be a blip on the radar and even in person events.

So we talked about this on the last show where there's no longer a decision maker. So it used to be you could take the decision maker to play golf and further that relationship. Well, now there's a whole decision making team that you don't know who they all are. So in person stuff isn't as valuable. So there's how like the oil and gas industry traditionally market it. So Matt, let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the things they could think about

changing that would actually draw better results. Yeah. Well, I think you covered a lot and certainly I think that there still is a place. I think the number one source of new quality businesses referrals and the absolute best way to do that is in person. And when you talk about trade shows and conferences, you are right because I like the education

component of a lot of these conferences and they have little rooms and a lot of that though can be found online these days, right? It's just explaining it. I think conferences are a great way to actually create quality content, like take a videographer with you and interview people and, you know, get some great content to use later, but you're right.

Like I don't think that trade shows and people having POs ready to go and the meeting, however, it is a great place to meet a bunch of people all in one area or if there's somebody that you had been connecting with online and you know they're going to be at that trade shows. I actually feel like trade shows now for me is like you're talking to a bunch of people maybe online and you really need that in person touch. And so you're going to the conference because everybody's in the same place and then you

set up all these meetings really outside the conference, right? Or outside the trade show to have all those meetings. It seemed like OTC in Houston and NAIP and everything else. It was all about the meetings that were happening outside the conference just because everybody was in one place. So again, I do think it has a spot in marketing, but everything's kind of shifted a little bit,

right? Because the trade show could be considered a webinar. Print advertising in certain trade journals, there's a lot more views and reach online. So shifting that to digital. I also even think advertising in newspapers, for example, we have a service that we've been offering that's been really effective is to use the Google ad network and some of

these other big ad networks to target specific sites or pages in, okay, the finance section or the business section or whatever, and you can show those ads to people looking at that section. You don't actually have to be in print, right? And so I think that there's just been this shift to, like, okay, for example, you go to a networking event, right?

And a networking event could be the same as a clubhouse or a LinkedIn group or a Facebook group. It's just online. So I think people are still interacting in the same ways. I think the medium is just changing and the medium to reach people, to connect with people, to communicate with people has just gone more digital, right?

But they're still doing the same thing just in a different way. Yeah. And we don't want it too deep in our trade show strategy. It's got to be a future episode. But what you're talking about is basically modernizing the way the oil and gas industry markets its services.

So let's actually take a step back further. Imagine if you're a CMO or VP of marketing and most of your career at the service company you've worked at for 20 years has been making sure you're staffed up for trade shows, making sure your booth is up to spec, making sure you're spending the right print money. What do those people need to start thinking about now, Matt? Do they need to bring in new skill sets?

Do they need to hire differently? Do they train their own people differently? Like if you're a CMO listed this, what do they need to do to actually think about modernizing their marketing? Wow. Okay.

I know it's a lot. I think it'd be awesome to put that question out to people and then try to answer specific questions because I think depending on where they are and what company they're at, they're all dealing with different challenges. But certainly if the, I saw this, okay, I saw this so big when COVID hit is so many people that had trade show budgets still have those budgets, but they didn't have any trade shows

that they could go spend it on, right? And so a lot of that money. OGG and killed it for that year because of that. We got all that trade show money because they had no other place to spend it. Yeah. I mean, they spend it online, right?

Yeah. They spend it with online ads. I mean, LinkedIn targeting the right people on LinkedIn, certainly the CPA or the cost per impression is maybe a little bit higher, but it's so targeted. You can target certain job titles. You can target certain companies, you know, certainly people that come to your website

remarketing. I would tell you I've been working with a lot of CMOs in and outside of the oil and gas space. And I think a lot of like retargeting, sequenced retargeting, okay? So I won't go too, too deep, but if someone comes to your website, Mark, and you know, they go to a certain page on your site, you can then serve them up and chase them around

the end they're at with a specific ad. And not only that, you can sequence it so you can say, Hey, this person comes to the website. They come to this specific page. We can show them this specific ad. We can chase them around.

And then you know what? If after five days, they don't take some kind of action we want them to take to move further down the sales funnel, we can show them another ad and typically maybe you add some kind of offer to this ad because now they're further away from whatever state they were in that buying process. And you can make them some kind of offer to come take maybe some different kind of action

or get some kind of free thing or whatever. And then you can even sequence it out more and more and more. And then you could put them on like a nurture after X number of like if your sales cycle, whatever your sales cycle is outside of your sales cycle, you may put them on a nurture where you show them an ad once a week or once a month or something like that. But there's all kinds of sequencing that you can do.

But I think that when I look at the amount of money that bigger B2B companies are spending on trade shows, I just think that there's a lot better uses for that money. Not to say that trade shows and certain ones don't have its place, but I think you've got to be more strategic and even running ads. So we had a couple conferences that we wanted to have a presence at this year. We were running some Twitter ads and we were running some Facebook ads in that zip code.

And you could even say, hey, come to this booth. And you could run an ad and say, hey, come to this booth. And there's all kinds of strategies where you can hijack hashtags at conferences and really make a presence. But it's all this advent of digital that you want to use to leverage what you're doing. But yeah, I think the trade show budgets in a big way since COVID have gone into digital

ad spending. And I can tell you there's a lot of people that are used to InstaRer or they're in conference and they're not as familiar with the analytics and the digital and how people are interacting with the website. And I would just say analytics, understanding what the visitor traffic looks like and what kind of people are going where is the place to start.

Yeah. So let me back you up, which by the way, we don't want to give away too much about ads on on ads. That's going to be another subject for a future episode, we're going to go deep into that. And Matt, Matt is a genius around this folks, a genius. So you have to stay tuned for that.

But back to what you should do if you're a CMO, it sounds like to me, you're saying there's new tools and processes out there. And so if I'm a CMO of a major service company and I'm looking to try to modernize my marketing, it sounds like I need to bring in talent, new talent. How do you find people that have these skill sets that you're just talking about and do you think they need to have an oil and gas background or you think they need to have

a digital advertising background? You know, I think that first you can't throw money at stuff and just like hope somebody else is going to take care of it. That would probably be like rule number one is to really understand what your needs are and like what kind of skill sets you can get, right? I remember when the internet was on the rise, right?

My mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft and you know, you just said it, right? And you would think that if anybody had IT in their title or that's what they did for a career, they knew everything there was to know about IT and computers and servers and you know, everything, right? And that's not true about digital either. And so there's so many different silos or skill sets that you need.

I think you need strategy first, but even before strategy, you need analytics. And it seems like there's a lot of companies pushing all kinds of different analytic tools, but understanding data, I would almost say, is probably the first step to say, okay, like what's the data telling us? We need to set a baseline of where we're at. And I think that the personal investment to really understand online analytics would

be number one. And that person should be, I think, trying to educate the CMO if the CMO is not educated theirself on that and just getting a really good handle around analytics and then starting to explore different kind of strategies that you could incorporate into sales and marketing is where I would start before hiring an SEO person or hiring a paid media person out of the gate.

A lot of times you're looking for that consultant that's going to provide the marketing direction, help get the baseline of the analytics. And then from there, you can build a game plan. Yeah. And I know y'all do this a lot for very large companies that you come in. So actually one of the things I love about your company is when I first engaged you didn't

try to sell me anything. I freaking love that. You actually want it to understand. So it sounds like what you're telling me is that if you're CMO, first you need to understand your environment that you're working in. And then next steps after that would be the analytics part to have the data.

And then what would happen after that? Well, then you would build out your strategy, right? After you have your analytics. Now you'd figure out, okay, what mediums do we want to use, right? Print, trade shows, those are all great mediums. There's different social channels that have different audiences.

I think what you were talking about with print, I've seen it at least direct response like mail and stuff to people's homes has actually been really effective because people are at home all day and they check their mail. And there's so many different tools in the toolkit. And it's trying to craft that strategy on how to reach that ideal customer. So it really depends what you're trying to do, who you're trying to reach to figure out

the skill sets you need on your team. I would also probably look at, I've seen, when I come into companies, one of the things I've seen most, I'll give you a quick example, there's a company out there called HubSpot. They really coined the phrase inbound marketing. They're an advanced email automation tool. And they have a pretty big price point comparatively to other even free tools in the space to do

email automation. And I've come into a number of companies over the last year, year and a half that they're paying a big ticket price to send a newsletter. And that's all they're using them for, right? And so they're like, of course, you can roll around in a Cadillac, but if everybody doesn't even know you're in a Cadillac, there's a lot of things that will get you from a point

A to point B. And if you're not using all the bells and whistles, is it really effective? So like one of the first things that we do is we try to help clients cut out waste, right? And what tools do they actually need? What's the tech stack? They actually need to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. And then you start going down rabbit holes from there.

Is there something specifically you want me to speak to, Mark? I just want to make sure I'm addressing this. No, no, you're exactly where I think we should be. So what we're talking about is literally if you're a chief marketing person, organization, you're thinking about how do you modernize your marketing? What are some of the ways you need to be thinking about it?

I love this. I love the fact that a strategy comes before you spend a penny on anything. I love some of the tools that you mentioned. Let me ask you this. Each company's journey could be the same or is each company's journey could be different as they modernize their marketing?

Well, again, I would go back to your sales process, right? And I would have your top salespeople lay out what is the perfect sales cycle? What's the perfect experience? What are the most common objections that you're getting? And lay that out on a whiteboard and then figure out from a digital perspective how you can support that, right?

One of the things that I didn't mention that I think is helpful is there's a lot of third party listening tools that can give you data also on what maybe your competitors are doing and what's working for them if they're further down that path than you, right? Love it. Love it. And you got to be careful because they might not be knowing what they're doing either,

okay? But you can at least see that. And that's the thing I love about digital is you can reverse engineer a lot of things. You can get really good data points. You can A-B test things. It's not static, right?

Like, if you buy a billboard or you buy a print magazine, after you buy it, you know, you just let it run and you hope that it does whatever it's going to do. Digital, you can pick it. You can optimize. And so you want to understand what that data is. But again, to help you craft that best strategy, understanding the data of not just what's

happening with your own company, but also happening with your competitors or other industries that may be similar to yours that you might be able to pull from. I know oil and gas, there's been a lot of things that have come in from maybe aerospace and technologies that people have incorporated into what they're doing. There's some really great tools out there to figure that out. And so, yeah, I think that you need to, I guess your question was, is it the same for

every customer or every client? Well, I think, again, right? It goes back to your sales journey. And I think a lot of sales journeys look somewhat similar if you paint with the broad brush, but there's unique selling propositions to your companies. There's things that you uniquely can do or have or assets that you built that are different.

And so, I mean, maybe all the water's flowing in the same direction mark, but how you navigate those waters is certainly going to be different. Yeah. One of the things I love about digital marketing is it levels the play and field. So with both, you know, my company, Motel Point and Oil and Gas Global Network, just 10 or 15 years ago, if we would have tried to compete in that space, we'd had to spend

millions of dollars on print advertising, on PR type of stuff. But with digital, you now can get in front of the same people that companies 10 times your size can get in front of. It makes especially an oil and gas industry. There's a lot of stuff around like search engine optimization that nobody's doing. So if you're a small widget provider, you know, if you make drill bits, you can actually

compete with the larger companies and get in front of the same clients and get in front of the same buyers. It's one of the wonderful things about digital marketing. Any comment on that, Matt, about how it kind of levels the play and field? Well, yeah, I mean, there's some data out there that's talking about in today's market, the absolute best way to build a brand, right?

And there used to be these huge moats in the past is social media. It's the absolute best way to build a brand, to grow a community and just wasn't an option, right? There was radio, there was TV, there was billboards before. So you can do it at a fraction of the cost. But again, right?

When you try to couple sales and marketing together and you have marketing zeroed in on the key decision makers on being omnipresent and being top of mind for them, it absolutely levels the play and field. Now, I think that really ad words, when it was a couple cents, you could spray and pray and you could reach a lot of people. Now the market's got a lot more saturated.

I think there's a lot of other platforms. There's a little bit more finesse in the strategies because you can now, the digital space has gotten quite big and you could drop a lot of money and it's like a couple drops in the ocean. One of the things that you talk about, and I think that this could be certainly something we could use later, but I've seen a lot of companies not do digital correctly and you

can easily spend a ton of money on the wrong keywords, the wrong areas and just blow that money really quickly. So if you don't have your strategies and capable hands, you can spend that money rather quickly. It just disintegrates, right? I've seen people that are working in regional areas, run national campaigns a lot and they're targeting also the wrong customers and so all that money's just wasted.

And so I think digital is a double-edged sword and I think that companies in general do need to get a better handle on the digital control panel. And so I think that that's next is you've got to have some specialists that you know are pulling through the strategy that you create. Yeah, it is so easy to waste money with digital marketing. Right?

And you need somebody that really knows what they're doing and a lot of times it's almost counterintuitive what you think, but once again, you need somebody that skill sets an experience to help you with that. So Matt, if you're working for Lords, let's say, I keep saying it all for service companies. Those are the ones that spend a lot of money on marketing to the super majors out there. One of the things that I hear from CMOs is upper management won't let us use social.

They're worried about the risk. It's about time to close out the show. So you want to kind of leave this with the CMOs, you know, maybe a quick conversation on how they can talk to their executives about that risk of using social because what they're worried about is affecting shareholder value. But the truth is, with any type of marketing, you can make a mistake.

And one of the things about social is that if you do make a mistake, it's much easier to clean it up. You want just, you know, imagine you're talking to CMO, he needs your help convincing the executives to let him use Facebook or TikTok or Twitter. What would you tell him? How would you coaching or her?

Okay. So just to end on this, and certainly the landscape keeps changing. That's the big thing about digital. That's the big thing about SEO, social. I mean, TikTok is brand new on the horizon and how they wrote the algorithms absolutely different.

And certainly even the big companies, Facebook, like if you have a Facebook page, right? For example, that used to get a lot of views and then they wanted you to push live and then, you know, now it's shorts and reels and that sort of thing. But what I would tell you is, if you have social clearly under the thumb or the control of marketing, right, through the CMO and you can have a content calendar and you can vet out what's being put out, that becomes a great repository for salespeople to pull from, add

their own little gist of something and then post it. And then it drives everybody back to the company, but that main meat and potatoes of the message is driven by the marketing team and is approved through the company. What I'm seeing happening regardless of if companies want it to happen or not, if the company does not have a strong marketing output of quality that the salespeople can use, they create their own.

And I feel like that has a lot greater risk of homemade sales material than it would be to have a approved channels, right? And you don't have to put it out on all the channels, but you can find a couple of channels that work for your company and then you can have a content calendar that you have meetings and you approve that content, you push out that content and then everybody can use and reshare that content on their personal profiles, especially for salespeople and it helps them

so they don't even have to craft their own messages and then you can control that conversation a little bit more. I love it. I love it. Like it's gonna happen no matter what, so you'd rather do it the correct way than the incorrect way.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you need to have a control over that and you should have a succinct message and you should be approving content. I think that that is probably like a social strategy and okay, you can make it more complex. We're gonna boost these that do well and we're gonna cross share these and we're gonna syndicate

this out and there's certainly things that you can build out into a process. But I think that putting that output under your control and say, okay, if we have like these are the things like you have sales pieces that are approved, there are certain things that you can pull from, from maybe you have to run it by legal. But I think that marketing should own that sales content, but they should make content that's shareable for the salespeople to use.

Yeah. And audience, Shell just recently hired a manager of TikTok. So if you don't think it's coming, I'm telling you it's coming. So to Matt's point, you either do it right or get done anyway and it may not be what you want out there. Speak about what you want out there.

I heard me say this before, we're building our insider's group that should launch the second quarter of 2023. That's gonna be the movers and shakers that want to really kill it as part of a community more to come on that. If you want to connect with Matt and I on LinkedIn, all of our social links because the social media are in the show notes.

And then we have our monthly all-in-gas SNM newsletter coming out. That's gonna be tons of fun. And this is the point where we do our LinkedIn fail or tip and this is Matt's turn to actually do a LinkedIn tip of the week. All right. I've talked about the fail earlier in the show, but I would say one of the LinkedIn

tips that I could tell you is build your target list like a lot of companies train their sales people through a target 100 or target 250 lists or what have you. And then you can in sales navigator, add them to a list and then go in and start liking and commenting on the post to build engagement with the people you're trying to connect with. Like if you like someone's post once a week, like if they post on LinkedIn, let's say first they have to post on LinkedIn and they're posting multiple times a week and you can find something

once a week to post on or to like for a couple weeks, they will start to know who you are. I can guarantee you if people are posting on social media, they're posting for the engagement. They're posting for the visibility and if you're liking that, they're looking at who's looking at their stuff and it's a great way to start a conversation. And that's something that sales navigator is even leading into. They have the ability to open that up, but I see very, very, very few people leveraging

that. Most people are just like you talked about last episode, using the bots, spraying to see who responds, but putting more time into connecting with the right people and adding value is where that needs to happen and being intentional about connecting with the right people I think is one of the biggest tips I can give you. And so build that target list and then look at what they're posting on and if there's

a way to engage with them or like their post, start doing that and over time, you'll build some rapport. Hey, LinkedIn, you should come also co-sponsor the show with the brilliance of Matt to give everybody. And you know what's funny about what you just said, Matt? I know that's a technique, a marketing technique, but I have people do it to me and I engage

with them. Even though I know they're liking my post on purpose so that at some point they can start a conversation, just the fact they put in that effort makes them more real and makes it much easier for me to go ahead and accept that connection request and start having a conversation with them. So folks, it works.

It works on me even though I know it's a marketing technique. Reciprocity. Yes. All right. We've got to get out of here. So remember, everybody, 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.