The Kula Ring

eCommerce expert, Curt Anderson from B2Btail, discusses common challenges manufacturers face when it comes to launching an online store, how to best overcome those challenges to boost online sales, and why certain manufacturers can gain a competitive advantage by simply selling online.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman talk with Tim Bay, Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands, about how manufacturers can use customer feedback to improve their marketing, approaches to introducing brand new products to the marketplace, and the benefits of working for a 100 year-old family-owned business.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman chat with Ross Simmonds, Digital Marketer, Speaker, and Entrepreneur who specializes in B2B. They discuss B2B topics including the heartbeat of SEO, the viability of Facebook for B2B, and the threat of Amazon. They also talk about how providing value is key to engaging your B2B prospects online, no matter what the platform.

Sarah Carson from packaging design and manufacturing company, Rohrer, talks about bringing together marketing and sales teams from two organizations, building in-house capabilities, and her approach to creating powerful sales enablement content.

For manufacturers optimizing marketing and sales processes to drive revenue performance, there's one rule that stands out above all others. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman dissect the Golden Rule of sales and marketing optimization while highlighting several illustrative examples.

Defining an ideal customer and sourcing a target account list to match should be easy, but it isn't. On this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman discuss how to craft an ideal customer profile (ICP), identify tools that can help, and warn about pitfalls along the way.

It doesn’t matter if you call it a niche or a nitch, how big yours is will determine your best next marketing moves. In this episode of the Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman explore examples of B2B manufacturers with large, almost B2C-style niches driving results by getting closer to end user customers.

Mavens of Manufacturing host Meaghan Ziemba started the live video broadcast series to help close the gender and skills gap in the manufacturing industry. The show is a place for women in the male-dominated industry to share their stories and support one another, as well as offer mentorship for women at the start of their careers. The Mavens community also works with the education system in the US...

CJ Brey, the Director of Sales and Marketing at CNC Tooling Management and Application firm PF Markey, discusses the merits of the ‘in-person’ or ‘face-to-face’ approach to generating leads and maintaining client relationships in the manufacturing industry. When the push to virtual came alongside the pandemic, the digital approach to lead generation and sales became commonplace; but now, as in-per...

On this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Greg Paulsen, Director of Applications Engineering and Marketing at Xometry, gives insight into his formula for success when it comes to creating technical content for a B2B audience. Rather than focusing on the question of ‘what is,’ high-quality technical content that resonates should be centered around the question of ‘why’—why it benefits the customer,...

Manufacturing marketers can face a lot of pressure to do more. Include more. Say more. Sometimes it seems like the favourite word in marketing is “and’... there’s always an excuse to add this, and that, and this thing too, and.. well, you get it. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman discuss why you should often choose to do less.

Understand your customers better by humanizing your marketing approach. This is what Cindy Deekitwong, the Global Head of Marketing, Incubator Business, at Henkel Adhesive Technologies believes. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Cindy talks about how she and her team use a customer-first marketing approach, which she calls B4E - Business for Everyone.

Agile Project Management is not something that typically comes to mind when discussing marketing. But, when clients discover that is how we manage marketing work at Kula Partners, Jeff and Carman often find themselves answering curious questions about it. In this episode of The Kula Ring, we discuss what Agile is and share how our experience can help manufacturing marketers weigh the benefits and...

What does a marketing world look like where account-based marketing and privacy legislation can co-exist in harmony? We are not sure yet, but we can prepare by delivering high-quality content that target accounts will opt-in to receive. Of course, that is a simplification of the situation. Jeff White and Carman Pirie dive into the details of the imminent collision of these two trends on our 200th...

The stats around video consumption grow exponentially each year. To what extent should manufacturing marketers care about that? Everyone seems to agree that producing video content should happen and is easier than ever, but taking the plunge feels overwhelming to the point where it doesn’t get done. On this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff Long, Owner of True Focus Media, shares his approach...

We don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we can foresee a wave of economic changes. From inflationary pressures and workforce shortages to living with COVID and a looming recession, these factors all have an impact on how manufacturing marketers are approaching their strategy. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman predict how marketers in the manufacturing industr...

Are personas too popular? In this edition of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman examine the evolution of buyer personas and their usefulness to B2B manufacturers. How helpful are they anyway? How could they be better? What other approaches might manufacturing marketers use instead? All this and more in Episode 197. We think you're going to love it.

Sustainability is a corporate-led initiative, but marketers are often the ones refining the messaging to resonate with customers. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman discuss the common pitfalls of sustainability messaging that will either get it lost in the competitive shuffle or be ignored by the sales team. We also explore how to overcome those challenges so that internal and exter...

Almost everyone agrees that talking to customers is a good idea, but sometimes manufacturers find that one particular department seems to stand in the way: sales. Salespeople functioning as customer gatekeepers can be a real problem. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman explore how manufacturers can move past a culture of gatekeeper salespeople towards a future where serving customers...

Thinking outside the box and getting weird is what today’s guest is all about. Eddie Saunders, Marketing Manager for FlexArm, a division of Flex Machine Tools, discusses his cutting-edge marketing strategies to get Flex Machine Tools noticed by the right people. He explains his cross-platform approach and discusses his use of video-based social media platforms including YouTube and TikTok. He dive...

In today’s episode, we chatted with Cynthia Kellam, Global Senior Director, Digital, Data and Customer Experience Center of Excellence at TE Connectivity, again to discuss how collecting and using digital data can create better customer experiences. She explains their journey of building a better Voice of Customer system to help all business units in TE Connectivity make customer-focused decisions...

Solving your customers' problems and creating a product they’ll want to purchase is at the forefront of all research and development departments. In today’s episode, Chris Witt, Vice President and General Manager of Portfolio Solutions at Tektronix, sits down with us to review his funnel approach to innovation and how it drives the process of developing the right products for his market. He explor...

Digging into data and exploring technology to undercover insights in your organization is vital to operations efficiency. Ryan Knox, Co-founder of Bridge Digital explores the use of digital tools to create efficiency in all areas of an organization from IT, Marketing, Sales, and more. He discusses the benefits of extracting data vs. using specific tools to help organizations get results that helps...

Customer experience can define how your product is sold online. Mike Powers, Director of eCommerce and Digital at Alaska Rubber Group, explains how organizations can identify platforms for B2B functionality to make the customer research and buying experience a positive one. He explains the importance behind product data in online listings and how it correlates with more revenue in distribution cha...

Paying attention to how your product is sold online is only the starting point to creating a positive customer experience for E-commerce shoppers. Jacki Lutz, Head of Communications, Training and E-commerce, Aftermarket, at Sensata Technologies, explores the marketing strategy her team uses to develop messaging that resonates with customers across all E-commerce platforms. She reveals why helping...