 Honestly, what's working best for us is being flexible, tailoring it to the company, tailoring it to the situation. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody, welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, along with my co-host, Beth Popnikov. And today we're talking about marketing attribution, specifically how you as a manufacturer or someone in the building product space can be more effective in measuring your marketing. You know, one thing we're seeing here in the building products industry is that everything is becoming much more dispersed in terms of how we touch and get in front of our customers and our potential partners. And so we're really excited about today's guest today. Beth, do you want to introduce him? Yeah, so we have a really brave guest because this is a big topic, right? We are really excited to welcome Travis Hildore. He is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Pathfinder Systems. Travis, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So before we dive in, Travis, why don't you give our listeners a 30,000 foot view of who you are and tell us a little bit about your company. Yeah, so I'm VP of Sales and Marketing at Pathfinder. We specialize in automation and machinery in the concrete products industries. And I say industries because we do a lot in dry cast, precast as well as ready mix manufacturing. So basically anything from turnkey, brand new manufacturing all the way through, retrofits and automation. So who is your main customer? Are you marketing to the builder, marketing to GC, marketing to other manufacturers? Yeah, so we market primarily to manufacturers and our target audience is everything from plant personnel, plant management, supervision as well as ownership and executives. So quite often when we're trying to develop a pitch for a facility, we wanna make sure that not only the executives and ownerships are on board, but also the people who are gonna be operating the equipment and operating the facility long-term. So when you say manufacturer, you don't just mean like building products manufacturer. You mean manufacturing as a whole, like anybody that has any type of manufacturing. We specialize in building product manufacturing. There is some kind of cross work that we can do on palletizers and things like that. But for the most part, it's block retaining wall and paver manufacturing, tilt up retaining wall, whole course lab manufacturing as well as ready mix. That's super niche. Yeah. I was gonna say, does that make it easier for you to target potential customers? Cause you're like, hey, I've super defined small niche potential customer. Yeah, it can help. But at the same time, we've got pretty wide range of demographics we're pitching to as well. So it's, when you do that personality profile, when you're really diving down into who you're targeting, you have a fairly wide range of people. The nice thing is in our industry, they're all workers. A lot of times they came up from pouring concrete in the field or have an interest in construction as a whole. So you can kind of run with that, but you are getting people who are started out, sweeping floors or people who have their MBAs and came from pretty prestigious schools. Travis, can you give us an example of what marketing looks like for you? Cause you're like a niche within a niche. It's a very unique audience set, but you guys are doing some really interesting things. Yeah, especially with the size of our projects, you start getting into that five to $12 million range for some of the scope of this projects. That personal relationship is very important. You have to build that trust. And so we use digital as a way to keep our name out there to promote our products, to get information out about our products. But really it's a way to bolster that relationship. We're in the door, we're talking, we hire experts, we're able to be that expert in their door telling them what we've seen, what works, what doesn't work. And we do that through handwritten letters. We do that through sending little stuffed tigers for their grandchildren. Sometimes when they have grandchildren or kids and getting that personal touch, but then using that media to push the information we want them to see. So you're not afraid of being a little different? So as far as being a little bit different, I mean, I am a big believer that if your competition's all kind of taking the road to the right, you should take a hard left. You gotta figure out how to differentiate yourself. You gotta make a mark in the industry. And so we've ran some pretty unique ad campaigns in the past, including buying out billboards that we happen to know were on a route that our customer took from his house to his office where we were trying to get their attention on a large facility as a unique case. So we've done some pretty fun stuff. You bought an entire, like more than one billboard? Is that what you said? No, because of that personal relationship, we knew general area where this guy lived and we'd been trying to get into his door for a long time. We knew he was gonna build a facility. We knew he was talking to our competitors. So couldn't get in the door, couldn't get in the door. So we found a billboard that was on his route to work and we run it out for a couple of weeks. So you run it out one billboard for one guy? Yeah. Okay, did you land the contract? Did it work? It did work. And I believe they were one of the first Tiger facilities in the country. That's awesome. And did he mention it to you? Was he like, hey, I saw your billboard. I saw my name on it. Yeah, for sure. And then in addition to that, one of the local high schools, their mascot's the Tiger. And so they had some event going on where they had Tiger paws kind of throughout the city going to the school. And he convinced the ownership at the time that he put those in for him when he finally came in to visit the facility. So they had a lot of fun with that, but yeah. I love that. That's awesome. That's some ROI right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you gotta know your target though. Some people might see that as a little creepy and overreaching, so luckily we knew you had a good start to your work. So Travis, I'd love to know how you're creating your marketing strategies because I can hear the arguments against digital marketing in my head. If I was in your company or on your marketing team, you know, just in preparing for this call you mentioned sometimes your sales cycle is two to three years, which is not uncommon in our industry. You are doing really large five to 12 million dollar projects which sometimes it can feel silly to narrow all that down into a Facebook post and feel like that's going to make the difference. So I'd love to know how all of those different elements of your business are factored into your marketing strategy and why you guys have chosen to continue to go forward with digital. Yeah, I mean, it's a multi-pronged approach. I mean, frankly speaking, digital is cheap. Compare it to print ads, compare it to billboards, compare it to, you know, even rebuilding a website every great once in a while, just the social media side of things is cheap. But in addition to that, it allows you to promote your business on a lot of different levels. So most people know if you're gonna be on Facebook, it's that personal touch. It's talking about the feel good stories of your employees and kind of bringing in that community to help foster that relationship between you and your customers. If it's LinkedIn, you're talking more of your business approach, your white papers, look at the cool things that we're building or your customer business case. Instagram's those beautiful pictures of a brand new facility the first time it runs and being able to continue to get those in front of a customer on a regular basis while developing those relationships just helps keep you fresh in their mind and helps really push new products also in front of people fairly inexpensively. Otherwise, really the goal is to get them to travel and see facilities, but that's also expensive and there's a lot that you can do to lead up to that point, not only to qualify them, but also get them to have interest in seeing those because they saw a little snippet on Instagram that piqued their interest. Talk to me about what measuring your marketing looks like. You guys sound like you do a lot of digital, but you're like, you also mentioned, hey, I send people plush animal dolls and I put billboards with their name on it. So talk me through what's your methodology for how in the world do you track everything you do and frankly, do you track everything? Yeah, we certainly could do a lot better at that. It's hard when you start having a three-year sales cycle, how do you track that the campaign that you're in today is effective three years down the road? So oftentimes we start looking more at opportunity generation. Are we in the door at every opportunity? That's also how we a lot of times gauge our sales reps, effectiveness, not necessarily how many sales they close, but are they a part of every large project in our industry? Thankfully, we're niche enough that we can see that. We have eyes on it. We know typically what sells and where, but we track that. But there's actually a company up here in Michigan, I don't know if you've ever heard of Myers, little grocery store that compete with Walmart, but he was famous for saying that I know that half of my marketing budget is effective. Unfortunately, I don't know which half. And oftentimes that's very true, but sometimes you kind of got to stick your thumb up in the air and if the wind's blowing the right direction, continue that direction. Certainly we're doing more with SEO. We're doing more with content, contacting tracking open rates and things like that, just to make sure that the content we're putting out, there's interest in people are clicking on, people are following up on going to our website and ultimately calling our sales reps. What's the most effective marketing strategy you've got right now, Travis? Like if you look at everything you're doing, like the craziest stuff you mentioned to more traditional marketing, what's working best for you? Honestly, what's working best for us is being flexible, tailoring it to the company, tailoring it to the situation. It really does stem from knowing the customers that we're approaching and knowing what works for some people and what doesn't work for you others and really tailoring our approach to each. So we have a generic email blast that goes out for general company news, general updates on new equipment, new processes, things like that. But then we also, in addition to that, might target a company that we know is in a buying mode and if the guy's a technology geek, we'll send him some information on the newest sensor that we've got or the newest way that we can track heights and weights or self-adjustment on the machine or talk to him about industry 3.0 or 4.0, engage in a conversation about what's coming up. If the guy's a little bit more traditional, we'll focus more on that kind of hard work ethic, back sales service support and that family relationship that we can build with those companies. I like that. Yeah, so you're really doing more like personalization with your marketing as well. Yeah, and it's probably not as well-defined and produced as some other companies. Just because we're a family business that's been in the business for forever and have those family contacts, we're able to just get a feel for somebody and do it. But I do think ultimately your marketing campaign needs to drill down to what the person you're trying to sell needs and wants and has interest in. We're not selling to the general public. It's not a numbers game. We're not doing the shotgun approach and hoping one out of 100 buys. We need to be involved in almost every project out there. Is there a company out there that you look at and you're like, man, this is who we aspire to be like? Is there a manufacturer or somebody even outside of building products? There's certainly snippets of products out there or companies out there that I admire. You know, one of the things that we have been doing that I actually think Tesla has been doing a good job of at least marketing is that quick responsiveness of the executives, that personal attention of the executives, knowing that when you put an issue out there as an example, Elon Musk might tweet back and say, hey, we fix it in the next update. Seeing some of those types of things I think has been very good for their brand in showing their flexibility and their forward thinking and everything else. And that's a big one for us. You know, if a customer calls me up and says, hey, we need this and I ignore them, that's not good business. And we've been able to be successful because we do do that outside of that. I mean, I think you kind of take inspiration of everything you look at. We try to promote ourselves as a highly professional fast moving company because that's what we do and that's who we are. And so I'll look up everything from Caterpillar to Lamborghini to Ferrari or whoever and see what approach they take as kind of that higher end manufacturer and see what fits with us and see what doesn't. That's great. If there's a manufacturer's listening to this Travis and they're like, hey, I love how you guys are thinking outside the box. I like how you guys are being nimble as well as measuring things. What's like the one piece of advice that you would give them? We actually for a long time wrapped a product line called Optimus which was mechanical paver installation. And that was a product that we would sell to their customers, to the contractors to help install products. And I remember that for the first 10 years of trying to sell that product was like hitting my head against a brick wall because I couldn't get them to understand that this is faster, this is more efficient. Yeah, you gotta spend 80 grand on it. They'd rather go out at the time than spend 80 grand on a pickup truck because it could do more things. But eventually it got to a point where they started seeing cost arising was harder to get labor, they needed to automate and it started to take off for us. And the best way we could do that was just through that education. Spending the time to sit down with people, talk about their needs, talk about how their business was growing and how we could help them become more efficient and more nimble and pay that personalized attention to them. Now that's harder when you got a contact list of 300 in the territory versus five in the territory or in a state, but yeah, that'd be my main thing is just really get to know your customers, get to know what they need, speak their language, don't tell them what they need, but understand why they might need it. Very sound advice. Travis, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. Is someone wants to connect with you? What's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, so my email address is travisatpathfindersystem.com. That is singular, no S at the end of system. That messes us up a little bit every once in a while, but reach out there and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. This is great. Travis, man, thank you so much again for coming on the show and for our listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you check us out at vanview.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Lopniklav. Thanks everybody.