Episode Details

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Wendy Covey. Wendy is a CEO technical marketing leader, author of content marketing engineered one of the wall street journals, and ten most innovative entrepreneurs in America.

And she holds a Texas fishing record over the past 24 years. Wendy and her team at Trew marketing have helped hundreds of highly technical companies build trust and fill their pipelines through inbound marketing. Wendy, welcome to the show.

Wendy Covey: I am thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Lisa Ryan: First, share a little about your background and what led you to do what you're doing at Trew marketing.

Wendy Covey: I'll tell you, it's not an easy marketing gig working with engineers at technical buyers. Sometimes I think I'm crazy. But I started my career at National Instruments, now known as NI. And they manufacture hardware and software products for manufacturing. And during that time, I held many positions within the organization, from marketing communications to product marketing.

And then, after a while, a colleague and I decided to leave, put up our shingle, and start our agency. And we did so because we saw a significant need amongst the smaller companies. So say small to mid-size companies that were working within the NI ecosystem. And at the time, they didn't have websites, or they had websites, but they were pitiful.

They had very shallow and content. They weren't doing well in search and didn't have a differentiation—story about what they offered. And so, knowing what we did from our time in marketing, we knew we could help these companies. And so that was the beginning, and that was back in 2008, and we all know what happened around 2009, which wasn't a pretty economic time.

And so for us as an agency going from, okay, we'll work with whoever we know engineers, but we'll work with whoever. So we need to get serious about who we are as an agency. And so it was around that time that we decided, you know what, we're going to only work with engineering companies or companies targeting highly technical buyers, something we know inside and out.

And once we narrowed that focus, that's when our agency took off. And you mentioned that wall street journal award, which was based on the reality that the business strategy of saying no is to grow our business.

Lisa Ryan: So when it comes to marketing, because marketing and manufacturing are marketing and engineering, they aren't generally two words that you find in the same sentence. Why do you find that critical for these types of companies to do?

Wendy Covey: Yeah, and it's a funny thing. Because often these manufacturing companies are doing cutting edge things, right? They're solving problems in new and unique ways, yet when it comes to marketing, they can be woefully behind in their adoption of new technology and strategies.

And so when it comes to marketing and manufacturing, Boy, if you think about these buyers, let's put ourselves in the shoes of the technical buyer. They have a severe problem they're trying to solve and need lots of education. They might be innovating, solving something that's never been done before.

And so when they go to education, where do you think they go? They go to Google. They do searches. And they're trying to find information from trusted sources. And that's naturally what marketing should be doing - creating content on behalf of that company to help that engineer, that technical buyer.

Find answers, build trust and start to build credibility so they can be on that shortlist. We believe strongly that this content-driven marketing approach methodology is perfect for the technical buyer.

And from a customer standpoint, marketing is fantastic because you have to get your product knowledge and the cutting-e