eCommerce for All Manufacturers

eCommerce is not just for large, transactional manufacturers. Learn how to take friction out of the buyer's journey with helpful digital assets.

When you think of eCommerce in manufacturing, you may instantly envision a store experience where visitors can purchase low-cost widgets. In reality, eCommerce is much broader and includes numerous diverse digital tactics.

Curt Anderson, Founder of B2B Tail, has experienced the evolution of eCommerce, starting from the dot.com boom which he jumped into with both feet.  He helps small and medium-sized manufacturing companies identify how eCommerce strategies can help remove friction from the buying process, help buyers make informed decisions, and create a more efficient sales process.

During the episode, Curt expands the view of eCommerce beyond the store, including product configurators, ROI calculators, essentially all digital experiences that help the buyer specific and purchase. He also explains how with today's enabling technology, many of the more sophisticated eCommerce tactics of the past are affordable and within reach for smaller manufacturers.

Curt is a passionate educator and resource for manufacturers. He co-hosts a weekly LinkedIn Live show called Manufacturing eCommerce Success with Damon Pistulka. He also supports the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) by producing member webinar series on marketing and digital transformation topics.  

Resources

• Curt Anderson on LinkedIn
• B2B Tail
• Manufacturing eCommerce Success Show (and for fun, here's a link to my guest appearance)
• Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP)

Transcript:

On today's episode, we'll be talking about taking friction out of the manufacturer's buyer's journey through adopting ecommerce activities. So that could be the online store or it could be configurators or other digital assets that your buyers can use to help understand the solutions you offer, understand your proprietary process, and gather the information they need to shortlist you as a possible vendor. So how can we make our lives easy? Not our lives, although that's great. How do we make the lives easier of our buyers and help them to do their jobs more quickly and find us and be preferred? So today I'm bringing on an expert in ecommerce or manufacturing. We cover a lot of ground, and one of the things you'll learn, too, are some new educational resources that you, as a marketer at a manufacturing company, can use to be better informed about ecommerce and other marketing activities related to manufacturing. Let's do this.

Welcome to Content Marketing Engineered, your source for building trust and generating demand with technical content. Here is your host, Wendy Covey.

Hi and welcome to Content Marketing Engineered. On each episode, I'll break down an industry trend, challenge or best practice in reaching technical audiences. You'll meet colleagues, friends, and clients of mine who will stop by to share their stories, and I hope that you leave each episode feeling inspired and ready to take action. Before we jump in, I'd like to give a brief shout out to my agency, True Marketing. True is a full service agency located in beautiful Austin, Texas, serving highly technical companies. For more information, visit truemarketing.com. And now on with our podcast. Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Content Marketing Engineered. Today I have with me Kurt Anderson. He is an e commerce consultant for manufacturing companies and the owner and founder of B to B Tail. Welcome to the show, Kurt.

Wendy, what an absolute honor privilege. Thank you so much. I'm just absolutely thrilled to be here with you today.

Well, I am thrilled you are here as well. And between the two of us, we have a lot of energy. So get ready, folks. We're going to keep you awake. Kurt, I thought the best place to start this discussion was to hear a little bit about your career progression and the early days of e commerce and what you've seen from then to now and what attracted you to ecommerce in the first place.

Sure, absolutely. I appreciate it. Well, you've been doing this a long time, man. We got to meet in person. How cool was that, right?

We did. Not too long ago.

Not too long ago. And what's fast? Like years ago, we've been like, oh, that's cool. We met in person. But with COVID it's like a whole different level. Like, oh, I met this person in person. So it's an honor. I attended one of your live events, so any of your listeners out there, if you have a chance to listen to Wendy in person, man, it is worth every penny. So it was Gold honor to be here today. So thank you. My background, ecommerce. So I had this wholesale business, Wendy, and my accountant likes to say I was the biggest disaster that she had ever met. That is the gospel's, true story. Strike me dead. But she looked at me and she's like, you were one of the biggest disasters I've ever met. So I was had this wholesale business, and I tried everything. I was just running out of ideas. It was 1995 now. You were probably, like, in diapers or kindergarten in 1995. You look so young. But it was a long, long time ago. And I'm like, man, I'm taking one last chance with this business. There's this Internet thing going on in 1995 and this word called e commerce.

So out of sheer desperation, I went on e commerce, and lo and behold, it turned into something I need. It actually worked. And so I had an e commerce business for many years. I was blessed fortunate. I stopped being a disaster finally. And there was a magazine called the Internet Retailer. We run at top 1000 Internet retailing companies in the country. Three years in a row, I end up selling the company. And since that time, about ten years ago, eleven years ago, I've been trying to help manufacturers navigate the waters of ecommerce. So that's my story.

And why manufacturers specifically?

Great question. Because I'm a Gen Xer, and there's a lot of manufacturers that makes me I'm a digital immigrant, and there were just a lot of I'm in New York, and so there's a lot of manufacturers where I'm at. And so at the time, I was looking for like, I know ecommerce. I know what it did for me stop being a disaster. And I'm like, there's a lot of these digital immigrants that they're widget experts. They know how to bud. They know how to make things. That's who you sing to. You're targeting manufacturers. They are really the heroes of our economy, the backbone of the United States. And I'm like, they need help with marketing. They need help with this whole ecommerce thing. And so there was a lot of questions like, how do I do this? And I just kept running into folks. It just drew me to help manufacturers try to figure out ecommerce and this whole digital transformation.

Yeah, I know. On the just pure marketing side, manufacturers tend to be pretty far behind when it comes to just adopting modern marketing tactics. Right. And we find ourselves still doing a lot of education on basic blocking and tackling. Is that the same for e commerce? I would imagine so.

Oh, probably even worse. Yeah. And it's twofold, because you have, like, the OEMs folks that manufacture finish, good proprietary product, much easier lift for them to get on ecommerce. However, a lot of them are in that B to B space. So they sell a quarter million dollar piece of equipment, or they sell something very industrial or Department of Defense type products where they're like, I'm not trying to sell on Amazon, but when I hear e commerce, I'm thinking, like, the Ups driver at my door every day because we keep buying, buying, buying. But it's really not that. It's so much more. It's trying to create that frictionless. How can you make it as easy as humanly possible for those buyers to make that purchase? You target engineers. So those engineers out there, I think you and I, when we met, you might have even shown it in your report, in your research report. Maybe I got it from you. Gartner came out with a study, like, 83% of all B to B buyers prefer to buy online. You have your annual research information that you come out with, and it's just digital natives now are just swarming the marketplace.

Digital immigrants are starting to retire. And boy, you just have to have that footprint online. With e commerce, what it does, it's not just like, hey, I sell a proprietary product or finished good, and somebody needs to hit the buy button. I have a company I'm working with very closely. They do covert antennas. They're selling to, like, FBI field agents? Department of Defense. It's mission critical. Covert and tennis. Well, they're not selling to Mr. Or Mrs. Consumer. They're selling the b to B. But what they want to do is they're creating, like, a customer portal so their buyers can now come online and make that easy purchase. Okay, the purchase order, the emails back and forth. I can just go online and I can buy.

So you talked earlier about this misconception that it's just low cost widgets that are available. But what I'm hearing is even what's a good candidate? Where's that line where it's too expensive or too complicated, that it's not a good fit for ecommerce? Or is everyone a good fit?

I'm a little biased, so I feel every person is applicable. So we'll talk a couple of solutions. Again, you target engineers. Let's flip the script and talk about the engineer. Okay? There's an engineer at Boeing. They come into this work this morning, and they need somebody at the food chain says, hey, you need to go out and prototype this product, and you need to buy. Spec out 30 things right now. Hurry up, go. And they're like, man, how am I going to finish this today? I need to get to my kids soccer game by the end of the day. How am I going to find 30 things? So what we do is work with maintenance manufacturers. Number one, I want to geek out in this, but we try to this is a lot of what you do is, how are you found? Can you be found? Like, our tagline is, how do you stop being the best kept secret? So that would be another conversation for another day. But once you're found that engineer, they don't want to email back and forth. They don't want to pick up the phone. Do you have standard products?

So I really target custom manufacturers. That's who I really those contract manufacturers job shops where they feel left out of that e commerce party. We're like, hey, wait a minute. I don't have a proprietary product. How do I sell on ecommerce? I'm like, well, you have a proprietary process, and it doesn't matter. It could be a quarter million dollar piece of machinery. You met my dear friend Nicole Donnelly. We're working on a huge project with a company that does like it's down your way. As a matter of fact, in Tyler, Texas, they do massive quarter million, half a million dollar dust collecting units that go outside of buildings. They're going full blown e commerce. So it could be your $1 pen all the way up to a quarter million dollar piece of equipment. Can you put that product on Ecommerce? A b. Another one of my favorite words is configurators. I am super pro man. I feel like anything can be configured, from your t shirt to a pizza to that quarter million dollar dust collecting unit. If you have a complicated product and you're like, wow, you don't quite get every manufacturer says we're different, we're unique.

I hate to say it, Wendy, and I know you probably agree with me. They're really not unique. I hate to say it. I hate to hurt anybody's feelings, but when you strip it down and really get down to bare bone basics, the bottom line goal is how do you make it as easy as humanly possible for that ideal buyer, that engineer, to engage with you, to build that know like trust as fast as possible? Our tagline is, how can you make that ideal buyer? Allow them to make a buying decision on a Friday night at midnight without having to wait for you to open up your doors on Monday. That's a great competitive advantage, right? And you can do it online.

Your hardest working salesperson is your website right there. I'm so glad that you brought up configurators, because talk about a value add. So not only taking friction out of the buying process, right? Because you're able to do it all online and not necessarily talk to someone, because you might not be ready for that. You're still information gathering. But to use that configurator to create your custom system, that's exactly what you want. We saw back in my Ni days that be very successful with industrial test and measurement computing platforms where you can put configure each instrument, for example, and each processor and that sort of thing. So I've seen it in action, in.

Action, and it's becoming more and more prominent, and I've seen, like, very low end. So if somebody has if it's a small ten person manufacturer, they're like, oh, man, that's like a super complicated it really is. There's super simple solutions that a small mom and pop family job shop, small manufacturer could implement all the way up to incredibly sophisticated, as you well know. You've been a guest. I have a LinkedIn Live show and we're now bringing on folks that are high level experts on configurators on our LinkedIn Live show. And it can get very sophisticated, very complicated. But again, it's in the spirit of making it as easy as possible for the engineer, for somebody in purchasing to make that buying decision. Now they have so much information before they actually pick up the phone.

So true. So going back to mom and pop, smaller companies that thought, I'm not big enough to be able to afford this or be able to adopt this, what has changed? So when I look back 20 years ago at the configurators that the bigger companies use, and I think about now there's all this new technology. So I imagine that's been one enabler of these smaller companies being able to have access to this, I don't know, somewhat sophisticated way of offering a buyer a path on their website.

Yeah, great point. Just with technologies, you will know those costs come down dramatically. I know you're a HubSpot expert guru. When clients walk in your door, you have powerful solutions helping them. On the content side. When you started in 2008 to today, I'm sure you've seen a lot of things grow and a lot of those costs come down, right? So shopping carts when I'm talking either like shopping cart too, do we talk in grocery? For ecommerce, it's called a shopping cart. So probably the most common and what most people are probably familiar with is shopify. Again, I'm kind of a dinosaur. But what costs a significant amount of money 1520 years ago, you can get online for, like, $20 a month if somebody is on WordPress, which 37 38% of all websites are on WordPress. And say you're a manufacturer out there, like, well, hey, I'm on WordPress, and I'd like to tip my tone. Ecommerce, you can take a plugin, not to get complicated, but it's called WooCommerce. It's my favorite word free. You can install WooCommerce or have your favorite designer. WordPress is ubiquitous. There's a WordPress designer on any block. You could install WooCommerce and you literally could be in the ecommerce game for little cost possible.

And I find, like, with ecommerce, we can research, we can study. Ecommerce just gets you on the playing field as soon as possible and just like, hey, let's kick the tires and just see who's interested. Who wants my product? And I know you're an SEO, you love those keyword rankings. When you niche down and you go after e commerce, now you're creating product pages that would really speak to that buyer. And now, because manufacturers are so niche, it's not like selling commodities where there's a lot of keyword opportunities. It vastly enhances your SEO rankings, and now you can stop being the best kept secret and get found much easier.

There you go. All about niching down. I'm right there with you. So tell me, when you engage with a company that has never done e commerce, who typically owns this project or process, or is there one typical owner?

Great question. So I'll throw on my DIY. So we do a few different things. So DIY do it yourself. We do dwy do it with you. And then, of course, your expertise is like, man, I love to do content, but it's beyond my scope. I need DFY do it for you. I'm going to hire True Marketing and your amazing team to help folks do that. Where I live, the lane I'm in is kind of that DIY and Dwy what I typically. So when I say Dwy, I'm sorry, do it yourself. I do a ton of webinars, and, man, I am so blessed in 2023, Wendy, you're one of our speakers, and we're going to be geeking out together at Purdue University at different MEPs, and we can talk about that a little bit more. But what we found is we'll go to Purdue University, where there's a lot of manufacturers at the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and they're like, hey, I'm raising my hand. I need help. Forbes just came out with an article this week. It said, Trends for 2023. Digital Marketing is not a nice to have for manufacturers. It is mission critical. Man, I should send you the article because you would love it, right?

I would love it.

Mission critical. So what we find at these webinars that we do is like, these are the do it yourselfers, and it's typically either the business owner, the manufacturer themselves, or it's the marketer of that manufacturer. And so they'll come to the webinar. We try to get them all excited, all fired up. I call myself like I'm the crazy uncle. Get your kids all sugared up at the holiday time and give them back to you. Right? You remember those uncles, Wendy, right? You're like, hey, my kids are you. But what we try to do is get them really excited, fired up when they come to the DIY, the webinar. I'm a little bit hungry. I want to learn a little bit more. So then what we do, we work with these manufacturing extension partnerships on training. We want to teach. And, boy, is this a perfect analogy for my hostess of the Moses. We try to teach our manufacturers how to fish, and you are probably the most esteemed awarded fisher person that I know. Right?

If we start talking fishing, we'll never get back on track. You know, that dangerous water is there.

For anybody that doesn't know this about Wendy, and she is an incredible, wonderful fisher person. Fisher woman. So anyway, what we love to do is we teach our manufacturers how to fish, meaning let them understand how does this SEO thing work? What is Google Ads? How does LinkedIn because what I want to do is then I don't do it do it for you, per se. So when somebody needs heavy duty marketing, that's where you and I are great friends, where I can contact you. Wendy man, I have this wonderful manufacturer. They want to go a deep dive on content marketing. But now I'm handing you a much more educated consumer, which makes your life so much easier. It makes it better because now they're speaking your language, and now you can move the needle so much quicker for them. So that's our goal, is trying to help educate that manufacturer on what's going on in e commerce. How does SEO work, and what are some of these things underneath the hood?

Okay, for those listening that have ecommerce today, and perhaps it's owned by web or sales, so marketing is maybe siloed elsewhere. What are some ways in which you've seen marketing better support, whether it's drive traffic to e commerce or do other campaigns to help make that effort be successful?

Phenomenal question. So on the b to b side, how you and I connected our favorite word, right? LinkedIn. So you're like, well, wait a minute. LinkedIn and ecommerce. I'm thinking ecommerce is selling products, but it's all about those relationships, right? Especially on the b to b side. When I describe that customer portal, like that covert antenna company, or we have a ball bearing manufacturer. We have a chemical manufacturer. These aren't typical. Like, man, I'm going to find these on ecommerce. Well, yeah, what they're doing is they want to go ecommerce to make that b to B buying relationship much easier. So from the marketing side, boy building those relationships on LinkedIn, mission critical number two, video, video, video. You and I have a mutual friend with Jeff Long. He is the video king for manufacturers boy couldn't encourage. Folks, get on video. There are no excuses. Just pull out your phone. How to how does your product work? What are best practices for your product? For those engineers out there that don't necessarily know your product intimately the way you know your product, stop being the best kept secret and go through how this product works.

What are the details? What are the ingredients on the food side, if it's a circuit board, if it's 3D printing, be that subject matter expert. And as you all know, that's how they're going to help their SEO rankings. That's how it's going to build that know, like trust. So two fold LinkedIn YouTube videos, those will be like, two my top. If they're like, boy, don't overwhelm me. I just need one or two things. That's where I'd start, right there.

Okay, well, going back to something you said earlier about taking the friction out of this buying process, I could see a cross functional team thinking through, okay, what are those steps? When do we want them to enter into this ecommerce experience, whether that's the configurator or the shopping area. But you talk about Shopify and some of those, they tend to live alongside the website, but they're not necessarily fully integrated, right? And so I think it's important for marketers to find ways to show the relationship of that information to those higher level product pages or product family pages or solutions pages, and in some cases maybe even run campaigns about those digital experiences like a configurator, so that they make sure people know about it. They find it, but they find it at the right time.

Yeah, absolutely. And again, throwing back to your area of expertise is great way of blogging, right? Great way is doing the blogging. So, say, even if somebody's on Shopify or there's multiple, like we mentioned, WooCommerce, they're big commerce, which is down your way in Austin, Texas, they're a great solution for B to B relationships. Magento, which is purchased by Adobe, that's for super high level. It's kind of the Lexus if you were, whatever your high end Lamborghini. So wherever the particular client is budget wise on that food chain or wherever they want to get started. Now, if they're on WordPress, that is a blog per se, right? It's content management. It's a content CMS content management system, if you will, or software rather. So that is a blog. You can blog, right. With your e commerce Shopify, big commerce, they have a blog within the shopping cart. I don't always necessarily encourage that. I know you're huge on HubSpot. You can marry HubSpot and you can be putting out all your content on HubSpot and marry that with your Shopify store on your blogging. Again, like, aligning with an expert like yourself is like, hey, we do CNC machine parts for turbine engines.

So create the official resource guide on CNC machine parts for turbine engines and you create that real meaty juicy blog post and you can embed it with your product pages. You can have those links from HubSpot going back to Shopify. So I don't know if I'm getting too perfect.

So a lot of just cross linking and calls to action to make sure that when you're thinking of that not just writing that blog post, but forgetting that, okay, we have a call to action directly to this store, and let's make sure to help them find that.

Absolutely. With your public speaking and your podcast here, and I've been following you for many years. I've been a fan of True, we connected a long time ago on LinkedIn, but just finally met this year. And the big thing is, what I view is you're the educator, you're really adamant and you're just a fierce educator, dedicated, serving your clients to help them win. Right? And I think as manufacturers, if we take that same approach, that you're going to be speaking at Purdue this year and aligning with different universities as manufacturers thrown on their marketing hat, and it's a little bit different climate where in the past they didn't have to think about this, like, hey, let's go to a trade show. Hey, let's go send our sales rep on the road, and we're going to jump up some business. What I encourage you to think about now is dedicate yourself to be that servant leader, be that educator, and even like, the Engineer. The Engineer might be absolutely brilliant, smartest engineer on the planet, but they don't know your specific process the way you know your process. And if you could just make that Engineer, there's a tagline and win the Engineer, you win the sale.

So if you could just really dedicate yourself like, hey, Engineer, I know there's probably like 50 different components that are going on. This one thing that you're making, I'm going to make your life as easy as possible with this one component. You can worry about the other 49, but boy, I've got your back on this one. And I'm going to provide how to videos, I'm going to provide resource guides, blogs. I'm going to send you links back to my product pages with pricing. So you don't need to make I want to make this as easy as possible for you because I want a great relationship with you. I think the more when you think of it that way, it just makes it when someone says, hey, you need to go create content. You need a blog, you're like, oh, man, I'm not going to do that. But if we dedicate ourselves to making other people's lives easier now, it's not creating content. We're just trying to help other people win.

And then when they're ready to buy your product or your solution, they understand how you work and they're coming in with a level of trust and also understanding. So I know that's the way you run your business as well. Kurt and you mentioned very briefly earlier your weekly webinars, so tell me more about that.

Yeah. Thank you, Wendy. So we do a couple of LinkedIn lives. You've been a guest, and what an honor privilege. And so what we do is we bring in high level, wonderful, amazing folks in manufacturing. We had the founder of Reebok. We've had the founder of I don't know if I can say this word big Ass Fans. Carry Smith, the founder of Big Ass fans. You can edit that out if you want to, but he was a guest on our show. So we're just dedicated to trying to help people move the needle in manufacturing. Our lane is really that e commerce lane. We cover a lot of women in manufacturing, diversity in manufacturing. How can we get millennials and gen zers into manufacturing? So I'm really heavy on my ecommerce hat, but we try to COVID some of these other topics as well. We're very passionate about it. We do it on LinkedIn Live with my partner in crime. You've met Damon Pestoka. He's just wonderful. And we're just dedicated and passionately trying to help manufacturers. Just how can we work together to make ourselves more competitive on a global stage?

If I wanted to go back and see the founder of big Ass fans, I'm a huge fan of their products. Hey, in Texas everyone has these. Do you show those? Do you catalog the recorded episodes too?

Absolutely. Ironically. So I interviewed Carrie Smith a year ago. It was last January. This morning I'm not sure when this podcast is going to go out. This morning I took a little video clip of our interview with Kerry Smith and it's about a two minute video of him describing how he found he walked into this little tiny job shop, this little machine shop, and he saw this giant fan and he describes it was like trumpets were playing, angels were singing. And he had struggled. He shares right on our show. He struggled for years with his business. He walked in and it was like his AHA moment. This is my future. He built a 500 million dollar company. So I just put out that little clip on my LinkedIn profile today. I can send it to you. Every episode, including yours, is on Btbtel.com. It's called manufacturing ecommerce success. And so you can check out our dear friend Wendy. You can check out Carrie Smith. Joe Foster, the founder of Reebok. We've had cara golden, the founder of hint water. So just a lot of inspiring people that are just dedicated to manufacturing.

Great. Well, thank you for taking the time to put that show together. And I can't wait to go find that episode.

I'll send it over to you. Awesome.

What parting advice do you have for those listening that are thinking of adding ecommerce or some sort of digital experience to enhance their website? Where do they start?

Yeah, great question. You and I were huge fans of what I'm going to throw a little plug out to the Manufacturing Extension Partnerships. So it's MEP. Manufacturing extension partnerships. There's an MEP in all 50 states. OK, that is a great place to start with. You know, they service all sorts of different solutions, resources for manufacturers on a national scale. So, for example, like, Texas has a very large MEP. We've talked about Purdue in Indiana. Here in New York, we have multiple MEPs just because the size and geography of New York. But check out if you're manufacturer and you're trying to like, hey, where do I start? Turn to your MEP. They have a lot of grant fund opportunities to help manufacturers with this whole digital transformation. And they can align you and connect you with trusted guides that can help you get started. That number one. Number two get on LinkedIn. I know you have a wonderful network. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn. Go through her network. If you have any questions, I would love to connect with you, but just. Ask. When you ask the question, it's a little bit vulnerable to say, like, hey, I need help.

But, boy, what we love to preach on our show, Wendy, is like, as an entrepreneur, man, it gets lonely sometimes. You feel like you're in a silo. You're on your own, man. You are not. There are so many resources. Just raise your hand, put yourself out there, get on LinkedIn, say, hey, I'm trying to get an e commerce. Anybody know any experts that can help you? Be a little cautious with who comes your way, but reach out to your local MEP. Reach out to Wendy and just find a trusted resource and ask the question, and they'll get in the right place.

And reach out to Kurt, too. So where can people do that?

Absolutely. So a little plan words, name. My business is b to BTL. So I took retail and B to B and kind of smushed it together. So if they go to B to Btal.com, I would be absolutely honored. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Kurt Anderson. I'm one of those guys that's all over the place on LinkedIn. And, boy, I love working with entrepreneurs, love working with manufacturers. That's my passion. It's my purpose. It's why I'm on this planet. And so anybody out there has any questions about Ecommerce, your manufacturer, I would love to help you. And what I do is I kind of play quarterback where either if I can help you, and if not, I align you with a subject matter expert, just like my friend Wendy. We have a deep bench of partners that we align with, and we can get you in the right place.

Sounds good. Thank you so much for being here today, Kurt.

Wendy, thank you. I appreciate you.

Thanks for joining me today on Content Marketing, engineered for show notes, including links to resources, visit truemarketing. Compodcasts. While there, you can subscribe to our blog and our newsletter and order a copy of my book, Content Marketingengineered. Also, I would love your reviews on this podcast. So please, when you get a chance, subscribe and leave me your review on your favorite podcast subscription platform. Thanks and have a great day.