The Kula Ring

Should B2B manufacturers step into the already-crowded podcasting arena? Iris Weeden, Director of Marketing at MacroFab, says the MacroFab Engineering Podcast is the company’s content engine with the added bonus of generating leads and revenue. She shares how the podcast drives traffic and conversions to the website, how they’ve grown to 5,000 downloads per week, and how they choose topics for the...

More manufacturers are moving their business online than ever before and the pandemic has accelerated that timeline. Jeff and Carman present eight different ideas on how you can stand up an ecommerce platform relatively quickly without a large budget and use of resources.

Many manufacturers have not stopped working during the pandemic and they have continued to buy and sell from other manufacturers. So how does the sales team close a B2B sale without having the factory tour as a successful “club in the bag” when prospects are social distancing? Jeff and Carman discuss ways to harness technology and knowledgeable staff to make a virtual factory tour a personalized,...

Why do marketers avoid website accessibility considerations? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff W. White talks about where marketers fall short when building websites and web content for all users, and how accessibility features and conversion goals can work together to build a good user experience.

Websites that marketers and other stakeholders are being asked to create are more and more complex, and at the same time, generic templates are on the rise. On The Kula Ring, Jeff White talks to Carman Pirie about how marketers can move beyond the aesthetics of the web build to thinking holistically, considering how information is organized and ensuring it meets accessibility requirements.

The inbound marketing sales funnel suggests there’s an unlimited amount of traffic and leads, but how does that strategy scale when you’re a manufacturer with a limited number of prospects? On The Kula Ring, Carman Pirie and Jeff W. White discuss why the funnel doesn’t work in a B2B context and how manufacturers can shift to a more human-centered approach that focuses on a small number of target a...

With trade shows and conventions postponed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19), what can manufacturers do to showcase new products and services they had lined up for 2020? In this special episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman talk about how manufacturing marketers and other internal stakeholders can adapt to this new reality by moving parts of their business online and serving customers digitall...

With data consumption rates doubling every year, and regulations becoming an industry trend, the data center industry needs to increase its reporting of power consumption. How can companies square their offerings with the global reality, and evolve their positioning and their messaging? Sam Prudhomme is Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Mission Critical Environments for Senneca Holdings, a co...

Building trust on an e-commerce platform is about more than just posting pictures and prices. How can manufacturers digitize the $4-billion per year used aerospace parts industry while ensuring transparency? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Lisa Butters, General Manager for GoDirect Trade at Honeywell, talks to Jeff and Carman about how blockchain technology is key to winning over sellers to use...

Any time a manufacturer acquires new assets, the brand evolves along with their customer base. How do you manage your communications strategy to keep pace with mergers and acquisitions? Cathy Dodd, Vice President of Marketing for PolyOne, talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring about how PolyOne created a campaign called “Challenge Accepted” to bring clarity to their brand messaging across a bro...

Emotional marketing campaigns are compelling, but where do they fit into a B2B manufacturer’s content strategy? Luke Schoenbeck, Marketing Director at Mark VII Equipment, created a year-long campaign showcasing car wash equipment factory workers and the team atmosphere at the company. He talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring podcast about how a focus on people (versus products or services) dra...

With a small centralized marketing team tasked with digital transformation, step one for Jon Sujecki, Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing at Enerpac, was to evaluate the company’s websites. On The Kula Ring, Jon discusses with Jeff and Carman the challenges and benefits of consolidating their tech stack, including sacrificing flexibility to be able to do more for less.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, manufacturing content veteran David Holliday, Director of Product Marketing at ProMach and founder at LabelingNews.com, shares his experience creating successful, problem-solving B2B content. Among his top tips: own your platform, build your personal brand, think long-term, and don’t try too hard to rank—be a problem-solver instead.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Courtney Sperlich—Marketing Director at The Duha Group, an international manufacturer of colour marketing tools—discusses her organization’s challenges in scaling and interpreting marketing content for global and local customers. Colour has universal impact, but its appeal can vary dramatically between geographical regions. Courtney talks with Jeff and Carman abou...

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Market Intelligence Analyst Jason Cappiello describes how Kanthal (and its parent company, Sandvik) approaches hiring and developing skilled talent—including marketers with technical backgrounds—for a complex B2B business. He discusses his own journey, which took him from an engineering degree to a sales role to his current manufacturing marketing position.

Lisa Hargrove, Director of Sales and Marketing at LS Industries, shares with The Kula Ring her approach to taking highly technical content and reframing it in a way that’s accessible and appealing to customers. She also explains why you should never underestimate the effort it takes to write good content as part of a website redesign.

MSTQ founder and principal product designer Yazin Akkawi discusses why he has moved away from demographics and toward a five-factor OCEAN model to build more accurate and useful buyer personas, and how user-centric design can enhance the entire customer journey.

Sangram Vajre—co-founder of Terminus, the SaaS platform for account-based marketing—discusses how ABM can transform your business on The Kula Ring. Sangram is a leading mind in B2B marketing as host of the FlipMyFunnel Podcast and author of ‘Account-Based Marketing for Dummies’ and ‘B2B is ABM’. He talks with Jeff and Carman about ABM’s strategic nature and how it aligns the goals and metrics of s...

Daniel Englebretson—Director, Growth Marketing and Demand Generation at B2B manufacturer, Phononic—shares his account-based marketing process which helped him achieve a 100% win rate in a tier one campaign over 10 months.

Tracey Rettig, Marketing Specialist at Kistler Instrument Corporation, joins Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring to share how her journalism background has helped shape her approach to marketing and communications. She also explains why, as a B2B manufacturing marketer, it’s important to distill technical information into messaging that fits each audience and where they’re at in the buying cycle.

Michael Blake, Director of Marketing for KM International, joins Jeff and Carman to discuss his company’s ecommerce launch, the evolution of their trade show strategy, and how he thinks video will be the differentiator between manufacturers that get ahead and ones that fall behind. In discussing these different marketing and sales tactics, Michael gets at the heart of KM International’s forward-th...

James Stanaway, Director of Marketing at Epilog Laser, talks with Carman and Jeff about how video content plays a major role in their marketing strategy. From creating how-to videos that support their customers post-purchase, to co-creating video with customers and showcasing user-generated content, James shares how Epilog has grown its YouTube channel to over four and a half million views—along w...

Greg Palmer, Director of Marketing at National Nail, talks with Carman and Jeff about how the marketing and product teams work together to use a customer-centric approach to product development. They also discuss which channels National Nail finds successful when launching products including trade shows, social media, and print.

Jen Miret, Director of Marketing at Bendheim, describes the listening strategy she uses to create marketing that resonates with specialty architectural glass and systems customers. Tools such as keyword research, social media, and public relations enable Jen to identify market opportunities so that Bendheim can better serve its customers.

As official media sponsors at ManufacturED 2019 in Chicago, The Kula Ring had the pleasure of podcasting onsite, interviewing leaders at the forefront of digital transformation in manufacturing.