Our first podcast: top challenges for Engineering and B2B Manufacturing clients
In the first B2Be Different vlog and podcast, Co-Founders Stephen Judge and Samantha Tonge were interviewed by agency consultant Chris Morris about who they are, why they launched B2Be Different, and what the top marketing communications challenges they see in the Engineering and B2B Manufacturing sectors.
Watch the video here, or read the transcript below:
Listen to the podcast:
Transcript
Host, Chris Morris: Hi, welcome to the first of a series of B2Be Different podcasts to help you improve and maximise your efficiency in marketing. Today we’ve got Samantha Tonge and Steve Judge from a new dynamic agency called B2Be Different.
My name’s Chris Morris. I have a creative consultancy, and I’m going to be your host today.
To start, let’s talk a little bit about how you lovely people first met.
Samantha Tonge: I live in Scotland now, just outside of Edinburgh, but I used to live in Ampthill in Bedfordshire, which is where Steve’s Agency Bonfire is based. I was client side at the time, working as a Strategic Marketing Manager, but I was also on the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) local Bedfordshire board, which is how we met, talking about a potential collaboration.
Stephen Judge: Yes. At the time, I was also running a local creative agency network where we could sit down with peers and chat about, the challenges of running an agency and anything else in the creative world. One of the things that I always felt was missing was the client-side. There was the agency network, and there was the CIM network, so I spoke to Samantha about how we could maybe bring the networks together so that agency and marketing could sit in the same forum.
But unfortunately, Samantha moved up to Scotland, so that stopped there, but then we’ve kept in contact ever since and the last few years we have been working in the same sectors.
Chris: So, what motivated you and Samantha to set up B2Be Different?
Samantha: Since moving to Scotland, I launched my own agency. I tried to focus entirely on strategy for engineering, but almost every client I worked with said, “you’re the first agency we’ve spoken to that actually gets the technical side of things and can actually translate what we do and can you not do it for us?” So, I ended up doing some delivery, but we’re very small, and we can’t offer everything. Then I was speaking to Steve who was also focusing on, and is very passionate about, the same sectors, looking at the same areas, it made sense to have that holistic approach, strategy and creativity.
Steve: And we were also seeing that our clients were facing the same issues. Even longstanding companies in the engineering and B2B manufacturing sectors saw their world completely change after Covid. They were used to going to trade events and those stopped overnight and they had to look at other ways of growing their awareness and lead generation and we started talking to more about digital marketing, which is something that was always the last thing on the list in this sector. They relied on trade shows, websites, brochures, data sheets, but the world changed.
So they were asking us more and more about how they could embrace marketing, how they could, and also look at branding, and that was where we started to work with consultants, and that’s how the conversation grew into B2Be Different with Samantha over the last six months.
So it’s been quite an exciting transition, but it’s one that we’ve all recognised that there are with the changing world of work, but also the big focus on manufacturing as well, at the moment, I think there’s a time and a place for everything, and right now I think there are big opportunities there for manufacturing, engineering sectors that they can capitalise on.
Chris: It’s really interesting you say that, Steve because I think that the next thing we should go on to is taking a look at some of the manufacturers and engineering companies that you guys are working with and taking a look at some of their top challenges. What do you think the top three challenges are for your clients today?
Samantha: We’ve gone for the name B2Be Different for a reason; I think the top challenge is standing out in an increasingly crowded marketplace and a very traditional marketplace. From a strategic point of view. There are a lot of stats to back up how important it is to have strong recognisable and different branding. It’s not just about looking pretty for the sake of looking pretty. Unfortunately, in the sectors we work with, it’s often thought of as a fluffy thing, and it’s not, neither the strategy nor the creative side.
There was some PWC research that showed that brand-focused companies make double the profit of other companies in the same industry (brand-focused being ones that have a clear brand that they can express clearly with a brand proposition and that their employees understand the brand and where they fit in it). That’s why that is so key.
There is also some other research: The long and short of it from Binet and Field about making sure that you’ve got a balance of resources for your long-term objectives and your short-term objectives. The long-term is usually more about brand awareness, getting your target market to know and remember you when they need you.
Chris: Steve, how are you finding that from a creative perspective?
Steve: It starts with the strategic piece, if a company can communicate who they are, what they are, what they do and who they want to speak to well, that makes our life a lot easier creatively
because we’ve got a really good brief, but at the same time, the world’s constantly changing channels are evolving, you can lose yourself in insights and data and worry about what’s trendy and what’s not, but at the core of everything successful in brand, no matter how many channels we’ve got or where we promote the messages, it comes down to the messaging.
If we can be really good, clear communicators of what the benefits of using a particular product or service are, and we can do that in a compelling way that stands out, then we’ll succeed, or we’ll be more successful than someone else who’s not doing the same. Let’s not forget that, every company is not talking to every person and every other company on the planet, we do need to be more, more specific and as Samantha mentioned at the beginning, we’re called B2Be Different for a reason.
I think the most important factor in all of this is being able to stand out, as Samantha mentioned, in crowded markets and growing markets and right now with the opportunity that exists in the manufacturing and engineering sectors, it’s more important than ever because the sector is growing: we’ve moved up to eighth place for manufacturing in the world now, UK, not by volume, but by value and that’s a really exciting statistic and something that a lot of companies may or may not be aware of.
Chris: So would you say that for both of you, that’s the number one biggest challenge – standing out?
Samantha: Number one, yes, but there are a lot of challenges, but that would be number one. Yes.
Chris: So, what would you say the number two issue is?
Steve: I would say distinctiveness. It is becoming harder and harder to differentiate from your competitors. There are some who have completely unique products or working in niche areas but generally speaking, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate purely on technical or functional merit, which is where the branding comes in.
Distinctiveness helps you because distinctiveness is about standing out, it’s being bolder, braver and maybe doing something that’s slightly outside your comfort zone, but you get noticed.
Samantha: Yes, I think that’s that’s an important point and even if you have the most exciting product in the world, it really is differentiated and completely different, you still need to get your customers’ attention otherwise they’re not going to know the difference.
So distinctiveness is so important. It’s not just about looking pretty, it’s about being interesting and different and noticed.
Steve: And you can talk to many clients when you do the first engagement and you’re talking about competitors, you’ll often speak to companies and they’ll say, “We don’t know why their product sells so well because it’s not as good as ours”. Well, that’s marketing positioning messaging, company culture, how they engage, where they’re selling their products. Almost anyone you speak to can give an example of that in their sector and in one way, it’s you can’t understand it, but on the other hand, if the differences aren’t being communicated clearly, then how is anyone else going to understand that?
Samantha: I also think an easy trap to fall into in engineering and B2B manufacturing because they make these really great products or provide these really great services they’re so proud of, and rightly so, that they forget to put themselves in the customer’s shoes, but you need to talk the customer’s language. Just listing all the features just doesn’t cut it. How are you helping your customers solve their issues?
Steve: There’s a lot of jargon within the industry.
Samantha: Yep, you see that a lot, and I’ll name no names, but I know one engineering company that I was working with that was very good at using acronyms that only they understood, and at one point they were even using product codes as the navigation on the website so you had to already know what the product code was to look at the information about the product, nothing about why you would want their product.
Steve: There’s a lot of knowledge in that space as well, and I think it’s easy to assume that customers have the same knowledge. As you said, a lot of companies they have their certain nuances and ways of working and our job is to make sure that the message is clear, and that it is in language that employees, suppliers and customers understand.
Chris: How do you normally go about trying to extrapolate that sort of information from a client? Because often it’s so challenging, they’re so focused around the technical elements of their product, they often can find it quite challenging to articulate some of the more value based messages about their products.
Samantha: Quite often, usually the best thing to do is get everyone in a room. You’ve got lots of great people in the business, usually with the right knowledge. For example, you’ve got customer service people who deal direct with customers, you’ve got sales people who are face to face with these people on all sorts of different areas of business – even finance, if you get them in the room together with the people who have the product knowledge, that crossover between, what the issues are in the market, and what’s special about your company and it’s products? That’s where the magic happens and you often see light bulb moments, even leaders of the business are like, “oh I didn’t know that was important to customers”, and sometimes it’s “oh I didn’t know our product did that”. And then that then you start to extract all of the different messaging out of that I think that’s the best way to do it, to get all those knowledgeable people in a room together because often it’s all up here in their heads and it’s just about extracting that and making sure that the people who understand the customer’s side of it, can understand living in their shoes, are involved in the process.
Steve: Manufacturing and engineering is quite an interesting sector because it’s often a career for life. So, a lot of people that we work within sales and marketing teams as well as the managing directors or CEOs, might have been with that company for 30 years from an apprentice and worked up from the shop floor – they’ve worked nearly every function within the business and that wealth of knowledge, as Samantha mentioned, it’s easy for them to forget how much they actually know and that not everybody knows what they know,
You’ll just be amazed by some of the anecdotes that they can share with you and it’s being able to tease that out of them because to them it’s business as usual, but to the outside world, they’re really interesting facts and figures that someone else might not know. They take for granted and they forget that they’re just as exciting now as they were when they learned it.
That’s why I think it’s such an exciting sector. There is just so much in there to uncover and promote.
Chris: Talking about the people side of the business and the value that they add probably really nicely people and culture. You’ve mentioned it in almost every one of your answers. Do you find that that’s a big challenge for businesses today?
Samantha: Huge, especially in our sector – in manufacturing and engineering they call it a “war on talent” because it’s so hard to both attract and retain talent and I think sometimes it’s easy to forget how important marketing is for that. You need to think about your internal communication, you need to remember with your external communication, it’s not just customers that are your audience it’s also potential employees and it’s maybe a slightly different message for them. It is a huge problem in the sector, partly because there just aren’t enough apprenticeship schemes, there aren’t enough people that have those existing skills and people need a mix of graduates and experienced people and it’s tough.
And then we’ve also touched on brand. You need to live the brand. The brand is the core of what the business is and what it represents to customers and employees. Employees need to understand the brand and obviously communication plays a key role in that.
Steve: And a big part of that now is obviously the hybrid working environment, obviously with manufacturing, there’s a factory and QS and various other areas which need people physically there to function and work, but equally you’ve got this hybrid model being used in other areas throughout the organisation, where people are working from home, in the office, they’ve got break out pods – all of that is being embraced into the culture of a business as a modern way of working. We’re seeing more and more companies asking what does it mean, and how can they implement that? Because they want to retain people.
I was speaking with a business the other week, and they’ve in diversifying, they’ve got more and more niche specialists within the business now rather than someone who knows everything. Where the market and the product applications have evolved, now they’ve got more and more very specific specialists on specific tasks for a product.
When they leave, the knowledge is lost because they might have been working on an R&D project, yes, everything’s noted in project management or case management systems. But there is an intellectual part which can’t be transferred in project notes, the way someone thinks and the way they approach a problem is not transferable because we’re all individuals, and that knowledge transfer, they said there’s a big gap now in knowledge transfer, so retaining staff has become even more of a priority. A lot of that will be down the companies that nurture their talent the most, provide hybridised workspaces, comfortable workspaces and places where they feel valued and also be part of a business that they believe in.
Chris: What other advice could you give to a company to retain their staff?
Samantha: I think with everything marketing, you need to understand the situation first to find out what’s important to them, what is of interest? You’ve got to have the right product think of a career like a product and your employees and potential employees as customers. First, get that right and then figure out what’s important to them and what’s special about you.
It’s exactly the same process as if it’s a product for a customer. It’s exactly the same thing, really speaking their language and being where they are, which is not necessarily where your customers are.
We are talking about B2B here, so your main social media tool for example is going to be LinkedIn. Potential employees might spend more time on other channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc.
Chris: So you’ve both come up with some fantastic points. It’s really interesting; I would like to bring up a stat that I found the other day about the brand, which you felt a top challenge was. There was a survey that was done by a company called Up to the Light asking agency clients what is it that they like and dislike about their agencies and what their biggest challenges were.
76% of clients stated that they’re unable to give as much consideration to long term brand building as they’d like to and that clearly really resonates with some of the some of the biggest challenges that you’ve found what’s your view around that?
Steve: I don’t think it’s that companies don’t want to embrace branding and be brand led, and one of the things that’s drawn us Samantha and I closer over the last six months is this need to make sure that the internal marketing resource and the teams is looking at how can they communicate to the wider senior stakeholders board within the businesses around investing more time in looking at brand building activities as opposed to more of the day to day marketing.
Over the last six months, we have been doing a lot of communicating how important it is to for businesses to invest more time and money in building the brand.
With some clients, we come across slightly irrational fears about focusing on brand awareness. You can measure conversion very easily, but awareness is a very hard thing to measure. You need a top-of-funnel and then feeding right the way through the funnel, but if people aren’t aware of you, they can’t consider you, and therefore, they can’t buy. So I do think being able to support businesses to sell the importance of brand internally, I think has been one of the biggest challenges in the last six months.
And it’s not about just going in and saying, hey, let’s do some branding campaigns, there is a process that needs to be followed and there are conversations that need to be had and there are hearts and minds that need to be aligned. Which takes us back to the people as well. You know, everyone needs to be aligned in what we’re doing, it’s very hard to push something in if it’s only a small number of people within the business looking to push something forward. It’s very hard to get enough traction.
Samantha: And having been on the other side of it, (I haven’t been client-side for a long time) I totally understand these frustrations. I think most marketers do understand how important brand awareness is so I think it’s, it’s important that B2Be Different works to educate the wider market, to help educate those senior people such as finance directors, because it really makes a huge difference to the bottom line,
I mentioned stats earlier that you can make twice the margins of your competitors by being brand focussed and also the Binet and Field research which showed that as a rough rule of thumb in B2B you should be putting 50% of your resources into long-term marketing objectives otherwise, over time you’re going to start to lose sales, let alone not increase. And that is another trap that is easy to fall into, it’s worrying about tomorrow, making sure that you’ve got enough leads in now, yes, that’s important and that’s the other 50%, but a lot of a lot of marketing managers have KPIs that are all about the current year, not about over the longer-term and that’s an issue that they face and plus they’re firefighting. Your average marketing manager will have too many plates to spin, but maybe we can help there.
Steve: I think it’s interesting because it’s a good and a bad anecdote, actually, but Apple, one of the largest consumer brands in the world, was originally a B2B brand. They built machines for the creative industry and look at where they are now. Not everybody’s going to go from there to a trillion-pound corporation in the time they have, but what it does is you look around, you look at more and more B2B brands and the success of ones like Intel, Intel Inside, GORE-TEX, Lycra, all ingredient brands, they’re all manufacturing products that go into other products that could be said for any supply chain, you know, manufacturing has at times very long supply chains with lots of people help get to final assembly like automotive for instance and there is value in selling the brand all the way up through the chain, not for everybody, but where there’s an opportunity to do so, it provides a huge, amount of value to that business and the people that are buying the products as well and then selling those products on. So, I think there’s a whole number of brand strategies that are there, but they’re not always obvious because we sometimes take what we see for granted as well.
All those brands I just mentioned do things for a very specific reason and they are all B2B businesses, but they’re also, they’re in consumer products, but everything else is ultimately being consumed by someone, whether it’s a product or a service and we’re all people at the end of the day.
Chris: They’re all very valid points. So, I’d like to thank you both so much, there’s been some really valuable insights. I’m sure the audience and all the great advice you give your clients as well. And I’m sure that they’re really appreciative of that, but just to let the audience know that we’ve got a number of these coming up, we can cover a plethora of different subject matters, but if you do have a subject that you’d like us to talk about, please get in contact.
Also, if you’d like to have a 1 to 1 with Steve or Samantha, just go to the website contact us and I’m sure they’ll be absolutely delighted to to help and give you any advice they possibly can.
So, Samantha, Steve, thank you so much.
And we look forward to the next one.