 Today, we're giving our top lessons learned from this past year. 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, alongside my co-host, Beth Popney-Glove, and it's been an awesome year. We've done how many episodes, 52? One a week? We probably missed one or two. Yeah, roughly 50. Yeah, 50. We're gonna cross the 200 episode mark this next year. Like, very soon, very, very soon. What are we gonna do to celebrate? What are you gonna give me as a present? Wine? That feels appropriate. I heard the 200th episode is the wine anniversary. That's what I heard. It's well done. From all the podcasting friends you have? Yeah, mm-hmm. I have a whole Pinterest board on it. Excellent. We'll cover that in the next episode. But on today, we're giving our top lessons learned from this past year. Our team has gone through and done a little bit of research on, number one, what was our most popular episodes? And then what were the ones that we got the most feedback from? And so we've got our five biggest takeaways that we're gonna jump into with you here. Beth, what is the first one we're gonna dive into? So the very first one, we are going to go back to the very beginning, almost 12 months ago, to an episode and conversation that you had with Jerry Messina. Do you wanna tee us up for what you guys were talking about and how we came to this conversation for that part, Zach? Yeah, so Jerry's a long time friend of mine and we had him on the show and he was talking about architects and contractors. And he said something that was really interesting. We've always thought and heard from people in the industry that, hey, architects are a little bit more forward thinking. They're more likely to try new products. But in the changes that have happened in the marketplace, his comment was that, hey, contractors, if you can talk about how your product is quicker to installation or quicker to finish or whatever it might be, or you do more of the prep work as a manufacturer, you're actually more likely to flip a contractor. So let's quickly play that clip for our listeners and then we'll give a little recap. Because I know that if you look at all different audiences building product manufacturers target, architects, builders, homeowners, GCs, facility managers, I mean, the list goes on. But like contractors are the ones that are probably for the most part the most reluctant to change. You could argue that, you know, pro against pro for the most part. And I'd be curious to get your perspective on, are you seeing people more likely to try new products? And if so, what's working to get them to try new products? Yeah, I think they are more willing than say an architect, you know, an architect has a reputation and if they find something that works, it's much harder to get them off the spot. A contractor, especially now with labor shortages and the challenge to get folks who really understand how to install a product properly, are a little more open if you can come and say, hey, I can install this X percent faster and here's proof. You know, I did a study, a third party study even would be better. But if I did a study, I got other contractors who've used it and they're validating that this product went in well, it performed because it's so hard now for contractors to find qualified people to do the more technical aspects of a window installation, say that if you can have the product installed quicker, maybe pre-install some stuff to the factory so that when it gets to the job site, there's two less steps they have to do and they can get off the job quicker and get onto their next job. So they are a little more open than I would say an architect might be. That's interesting. Probably like one of the first people, Jerry, that I've heard say that. Zach, it sounds like you were really surprised by the feedback from Jerry there. After thinking about it and having other conversations throughout the year, what do you think now? You know, my first response and thought is like, yes, that makes sense for certain products. Like that totally makes sense. But I think that my big takeaway is that the messaging that works today is gonna, it's always gonna change. And so like one thing we always thought about with contractors was, hey, we do want to help them make more money. We want them to have an easier time installation but there's been so much pain with speed and issues there that there's a higher likelihood of trying new products. So I think about messaging, I think about what moves the needle when it comes to getting somebody to try your product and that the market as a whole is constantly shifting. But I thought it was a great conversation and he brought some really good firsthand insight on what he's seen work in the industry. So the next one on our list here is a conversation we had in episode 162 with Kevin Kilpatrick who's the chief marketing officer of Blue Lake Lumber. And Beth, I'll let you take this one here but I think it's what he's talking about is really interesting and something that honestly applies to every single building product company out there. Like a lot of our shows will apply like to one segment or one audience but it's interesting when we run into an episode where like, oh, this applies to every single brand out there. Yeah, I completely agree. We actually brought Kevin on because he has significant experience in working with manufacturers and building products companies that are going after both an English speaking and Spanish speaking community and building specifically authentic marketing for the Spanish speaking community. And so in this clip, he's talking specifically about that about not just translating what you have in English into Spanish in case somebody needs to read it in Spanish but actually creating a community for the Spanish speaking base of a specific brand. I love what he has to say here. So I'm glad that we get to revisit it. It's absolutely like evergreen advice. I'd love to hear your opinion on how manufacturers can do that in a way that offers authentic customer support to the Hispanic customer base. Simply offering installation information in English and Spanish is not authentic customer service for a significant portion of your customer base. So can you talk a little bit about your experience of building out an authentic presence amongst that target demographic? And that's when we had the name of the media platform was Constragia Al Diaz. So the up-to-date construction guy and it was a hundred percent in Spanish and we started as a magazine and we kind of tripped it into video and social and digital and everything else and really watched trends closely. We can tell you, we worked with over 200 different manufacturers on this process and then targeting this consumer, right? So it is, like I said, there's some intricacies on how they differ and in the media habits or how they learn and then being authentic to your point is so many times we had clients and we would advise against this but they would run an ad with us or buy some media with us and it would be in Spanish and it would look pretty and you'd hit that link and you go to their site and it's in English. I could see it coming, I could feel it. So you're inviting them to the party in Spanish and then you're like, everything's in English. It's easy enough to, I mean, it's an extra step and it's an extra expense but to translate the videos into Spanish and have your own YouTube channel in Spanish. To have your manuals are downloadable in Spanish and every touch point needs to be in both languages from the original ad or the digital ad all the way through their journey and learning about you. The YouTube videos, it's easy enough to translate downloadable information, the white papers. You've already created the content. It doesn't take that much longer to put it in Spanish and create an environment that they feel comfortable in. And so what we saw is that there are so many manufacturers that aren't creating an environment that is inviting and authentic and so they're searching out ones that do. So that they are gonna have the head start with this consumer. You know, that this is a really great clip and I actually did a little bit of research after this episode and the thing I took away was I was trying to see if there was data out there about increasing Spanish speaking individuals within the building product space and how many people are actually trying to translate content and things like that. And there's not like a definitive amount of data there but there is an increasing number of Spanish speaking or native Spanish speaking individuals in North America as a whole. And so to me, there's like two slam dunk wins here is that like if you've got an installer base who needs this, like number one, go do it. And number two, if you wanna increase traffic, one of the quickest ways to do it is provide, you know, bilingual, you know, first-hand written not, you know, computer generated written Spanish content. And so it's kind of a no-brainer here. It's just the unfortunate part is it takes time and effort but we've heard time and time again. I mean, Beth, you could speak to this that people tend to respond really well and they'll actually prefer your brand because you care about them and their pain point, you know, being the, getting the content is worth as possible. An easy place to think is if you talk about you have great customer service but you know, you have a significant Spanish-speaking customer base then you need to be servicing that customer where they are and as who they are. This is just a really easy, straightforward, authentic way to show them how much you care and how much you value their business. The next one we've got on the list is episode 160 with Jan Ruckers. She's the president and founder of Vestabule, excuse me, she's the president and founder of Vestabule School of Design and we talk about CEUs here. And I'll be honest, like I was a little nervous about talking about CEUs because you're like, oh man, like, is this gonna be boring? And it ended up being like one of our most popular episodes. I agree, yeah. Just because I think that a lot of people have the same questions as we do, which is like, should I really do these things? Are they really gonna help? And it was a really valuable conversation. What did you think, Beth? So like all cards on the table, I had the same feeling. I was like, okay, we should talk about this. This is gonna take a lot of energy to make it interesting. And it was the opposite experience for us. Jan was incredible. Had really good information to share, but that's kind of how people can feel about CEUs themselves. And I think it's a great example of if you're engaged, if you're educated and have an interesting conversation, then actually having an educational tutorial about your product or product category can be really, really interesting. And I love that Jan brought that to the episode and just really brought to life what she preaches, which is making it interesting and impactful for your audience. So if a lot of manufacturers have some form of CEUs, whether on an official website or on their own side or many ways, and if I'm a manufacturer that's already released some type of CEU course or is currently developing one, how would you recommend that I evaluate it to know if I'm doing it right or not? Yeah, well, I think, you know, first off, you know, when you're sitting down to write, to write a CEU, even just putting aside all of the rules and the regulations, there's all of that. You know, I think that just like I said, you've got to go through it and make sure you're talking to the professional, not the consumer. That would be the first thing that I'd be looking for. What type of little tidbits can you offer to that professional that they're gonna get? Like, and I think that's another thing too. As a designer, I've been trained in the elements and principles of design or as an architect, you know, I'm trained in structural and mechanical things as that manufacturer writing a CEU be okay with talking that technical end of it, but without making it dry. So that'd be the first thing. I'd go through making sure you were talking to the professional. The other thing, and this is a real pet peeve of mine, is to really look at your images that you wanna make sure any of the images that you're using in your CEU are appropriate. I cannot believe how often I'll be looking at some educational piece of information and they'll have an image and I'll be reading something and then I'll see the image and they don't compute. They've grabbed a marketing image or they've grabbed a stock image and nobody's really paid attention. And as a professional, you've lost me there. I've seen mistakes from the big organizations right down to the small guy. They make the mistakes. They hand off that end of it to an intern to find some images to go with it and they miss the mark. So those two things, talk to the professional, make sure your images are reflective of what you're saying would be very important. Yeah, it was such a good episode. Episode 160, which I encourage you to listen to if you haven't. The next one on our list is actually episode 163, which was about solutions for labor shortages and how manufacturers can help. We had Spencer Brown, who's director of sales at Fister Fawcett and Kevin Johnson as the president of CHS Plumbing on the show with us. It was a great episode because they were talking about specifically how are they tag teaming the labor shortage issue and how they're going after a younger generation? And this is one of those other episodes that it doesn't matter what category or industry you're in when it comes to your brand, that this is something that's facing almost every single manufacturer out there. So it's a great episode and great reminder for how you can help your partners as well as how you can get ahead of the labor shortage problem. Let's listen to a quick clip of that one. I'm a manufacturer who I see this and I'm like, this is the answer. Let's tell interesting stories. Let's get in front of the younger generation and get them excited, not just make them feel like it's second best option, but a great option. What's next and how could manufacturers get involved or start something like this? Yeah, that's interesting. So as we've come out of this and it started showcasing what we're doing, the amount of other manufacturers that have reached out to us has just been incredible. They've asked how they can be a part of it because they obviously see it too. Their customer base or plumbers, they hear the same thing. And I think a lot of people have tried to do some things differently and try to be involved, but they're seeing what we're doing now. They really want to be involved. And one of the brands that we did bring on in season two was Rigid, which is a big incredible brand name in the plumbing community. They specialize in a lot of tools for plumbers and they're donating product to a lot of the high schools. So there's some things like that in donations or we're not asking for sponsor, we're not getting on sponsor, but they have become a sponsor in a way that they're helping us provide, getting the word out even more for us because of their base. So yeah, I think that's important. Definitely is the, because a lot of these schools, the money is not there. They can't just go buy a bunch of plumbing equipment and start teaching. There's no budget for that. And so it's going to help manufacturers can help support that a lot just by donating. And in return, they're getting their brand name out if these younger students become plumbers, they'll probably remember their brand. So it kind of works both ways. I love this episode because labor shortage is a extremely prominent topic in our industry. But this is, I would file this under not at all what you would expect because they go after it through telling stories. And similar to what we said about Jan, this was incredibly interesting for a topic that you're like, what could possibly be said here that hasn't already been said, that hasn't already been said. And it's the whole episode hasn't been said before. It's such a unique perspective and strategy to tackle the labor shortage issue. I just, I really, really enjoyed the conversation. Highly, highly recommend the episode. And the final one on our list is episode 166, which is how to support builders in today's construction industry. We had Caleb Williams, who's from TrueCraft Builders on the episode with us. And he's talking in this episode about what challenges he and other builders are facing that comes to supply chain issues. And more specifically issues with what happens when they don't have product and or using the example of land. Let's quickly listen to a clip from that episode. If I'm hearing correctly here, Caleb, they're hedging their bets saying, hey, we don't know what the market's gonna look like, but if we wanna survive today, we're having to buy material and just hope. Hope's the wrong word here, but expect that demand is gonna continue. And we're hearing that from other, even contractors too, like I'm having to overbuy product. In order to make sure my doors stay open, you know? Is that right? That's right, we're having to overbuy. I told the guys, I said, we'll use the material somewhere. If you have a leftover store, we'll use it somewhere because it's so hard to get, whether it's plywood, sheetrock, whatever the material is. So we know we're gonna use it somewhere. But the other thing, no one, what they're saying as far as material, the other thing, they're not making any more land. The land that's here is what you have. So as a developer. That's a really great way to say it. If you come across a property, you can, today you can't say, you know what, I'm gonna save my money in two or three years, then I'll go out and get that piece. It's probably not gonna be there in two or three years. So if you see land today and you wanna start a development and you have the backing to do that, you've gotta go ahead, even though it might be two years from now, you've gotta buy that land today. And so knowing what Lowe's is saying about, hey, we're buying material for the next two to three years because all the permits that are issued today, short of a war or an economic crisis happening overnight, we're still gonna need these houses. There's such a shortage in houses a year from now. We still won't be caught up. So by looking at that, you can say, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and purchase this land because I know even if I'm not ready for another two years, I've got this land in place, I've got this development planned so that I can move forward at that time. And if you're not thinking that far ahead now, you're gonna be behind. The days of going out and just buying a lot here and there, I think are there in the past, you've gotta be planning for the future. And you can't wait for just months at a time. I can remember three years ago, if you wanted to go a lot, you'd go down the road and you see a lot of sign, you call about it and you get it under contract and that's not the way it is today. This episode is interesting because it's a really good vantage point into how builders think about the problem that they're facing about getting product, getting land, making things happen. I mean, he's literally talking about overbuying. Like overbuying is like, I don't care, like I need to make sure I have this. Yeah, it's not necessarily quite the issue that it once was, but even though it's not necessarily the issue, it goes to show you like what these individuals are willing to do if they see a risk or an issue that comes up against their organization. I think you could say here, we're going into a market that's going to be more unpredictable than we've seen in the past couple of years. There's tons of conversation about what's going to happen, but nobody obviously knows for sure. And it's easy to sit in your own seat and hear sales predictions, concerns about revenue, longevity, keeping the factories running at full capacity, but to remember that for your builders, they have their own pain points and it's not just we have too much inventory and how are we going to sell this, but that goes farther down the chain and resonates deeper with them. And I think that's really what's being said here by Kayla, because he's being really honest about how they had to react, not even wanted to react and just keep that in mind. Well, I think it's also why I like our podcast because we get to hear like all the pain points that are happening in the industry and it's a good reminder. All the honest feedback, like really honest conversations sometimes. Well, we had that one event in Denver where we were asking all the developers and builders, like, hey, what are the problems you're running into? Like, nobody, the great thing about this industry is like nobody really softballs anything. That's my favorite, yeah. Here's the issues, here's why I'm upset, here's what would make me happy. Here are the exponents that I need to use to show you how upset I was. Yes. Which was authentic, it was true, it was really, no one was being rude, it was just, it was a 10 out of 10 emotional experience as well as business experience and that sometimes comes out. True. This to me is a good reminder of the fact that we need to always be listening to our audience and hearing from them what are the things that they're dealing with because you don't want to get in a situation where like what we've had of Alaska of Ears where a lot of manufacturers can't really like have not listened to their audience. They just been like, hey, there's so much demand, there's, you know, I'm gonna sell this thing no matter what. And now manufacturers are playing catch up like the thing we heard from our event and in this episode was that, well, you know, you burn that bridge, I'm not, you know, I'm not necessarily brand loyal anymore. I'm willing to try other things because of how you treated me when things were, you know, crazy. So to your point, it's unpredictable but having that foresight to always care about your customer and over communicate even when there are issues is really, really important. Yeah, absolutely agree. Absolutely agree. Zach, this was a killer year. Killer. Killer year. I wanna take a moment to two things. I'm gonna, Beth, I wanna thank you first and foremost for elevating the quality of this episode or excuse me, all of our episodes, you know? This, no, it's just this one. The rest of them at subpar. No, you do a great job. I've mentioned this before on this show that like every couple of years, like my, well not every couple of years, every year or so my siblings will get around like a Christmas time and like look at reviews of the podcast and they always make fun of me because they're like, everyone's talking about Beth. Like I thought that this was your episode. Well, I'm using this as a story as a reference point to our listeners to, you know, if you wouldn't mind if you're listening to this and you found our episodes helpful or our content helpful, take a moment, go to the iTunes podcast store, find our episode and give us a five star review and a nice comment. We would be so, so thankful and grateful for that. I mean, we wouldn't be able to do this show. It really makes a difference, yeah. It really does make a difference. We wouldn't be able to do this show without you. Like we all the time ask for opinions of like, what do you wanna hear? And I love getting like those random emails from people that are like, hey, I'd really like to listen to X, Y and Z, right? We had one guy, I'm not gonna name his name, we had a guy on the show, we asked him after the show like, hey, what do you wanna listen to? And he's like, I wanna hear from more manufacturers. He's like, I wanna, I just, I just like, I love hearing, I love hearing from more manufacturers than other people are like, oh, I really like hearing from voice of the industry. You know, so we encourage you to drop us a note at podcast.fenvio.com. If there's something in particular we have not covered that you want us to cover in 2023, we're doing some content planning. So there, and we'd find that really, really helpful and give us that five-star review that would be a huge, huge blessing to Beth and I. But again, Beth, thank you so much for a great year. This has been awesome. And 2023 is gonna be even better. I'm excited. Well, for our listeners, again, thank you so much for being a part of our show this past year. It's been our best ever and we are 100% confident 2023. It's gonna be incredible, even better if I can make the prediction. Again, until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Popticlove. Thanks everybody.