Media Miniseries | Match Marketing Goals to Advertising Products

In the Content Marketing, Engineered Media Miniseries, we’re learning from media experts about how working with external news outlets and trade publications fits into your content marketing strategy. Today, we're diving deeper into advertising -- and in particular how to align your marketing goals with the right advertising products to support your business. 

Last week, we gave a comprehensive introduction to advertising with technical trade publications, and this week, we're diving in deeper with advertising to really discuss marketing goals and how to achieve them with different advertising products.

In today's episode, Patrick Carmody, Area Sales Manager at Endeavor Business Media which owns publications like Electronic Design and Machine Design, will talk to us about some of the detailed products that we can use to build brand awareness, generate leads, and grow sales. From sponsored content to podcasts to email marketing, Endeavor brings many different forms of advertising to the table. And like other publishing houses, Endeavor owns a host of publications, so you can target your specific, niche audience exactly where they go to find information. 

Resources

• Electronic Design, Machine Design
• Endeavor Media
• Contact Patrick Carmody 
• Morgan Norris, host of the Media Miniseries
• TREW content development services

Transcript

The following transcript was created by an AI Bot which has yet to learn slang words and some technical terms. While it is no substitute for watching/listening to the episode, transcripts are handy for a quick scan. Enjoy!

Hello. in today's episode with Patrick Carmody, we're covering advertising.

Now,

a few weeks ago, we had Lee Douglas on the show, and Patrick is in a similar space as Lee, Advertising for a large media group group that fields technical audiences. But it's a different media group. Patrick works with Endeavor Media, which includes publications like Machine Design, Electronic Design, Microwaves and RF, and Hydraulics and Pneumatics. These different media groups operate in different ways, and they have different products. And because I'm committed to being a well rounded podcast host for you during this medium miniseries, I want to make sure we gave you more than one perspective on advertising.

Now, Endeavor's Publications are really technical. They've been around for a long time, and they are extremely respected in the industry. And in this episode, you'll hear how advertising has gone from that 15 word overview with a full bleed image on the back page, back cover of a trade publication to paid promotion of long form content like even technical webinars. I really hope that after leads, interview and the one with Patrick today that you'll see how trade media can really be another channel to promote the technical content that you're creating.

At the end of this episode, we talk about how these publication sites can become like the new trade show Expo floor. We used to go to trade shows and prospects would meet new brands and build relationships that they wouldn't have otherwise started. That trade show provided the grounds for that relationship to happen. And now these sponsored emails are gated white papers on an outlet like MachineDesign.com can have the same effect. Companies and prospects can be introduced to each other through a third party, which is now this online forum or site.

This interview will be fantastic if you're interested in advertising at all, or you're just curious to see how you could benefit and bolster your marketing plan with advertising. This is just a great place to start. And at the end, Patrick will tell you how to get in touch or how to get started if you're interested. So let's jump right in.

Welcome to Content Marketing, Engineered. Your source for building trust and generating demand with technical content.

Hi and welcome to Content Marketing, Engineered, as you may have noticed, I'm not Wendy Covey. I'm Morgan Norris, a senior branding content strategist, and I'm hosting this media miniseries for Wendy to take a deep dive into technical B2B media. From editorial to advertising to trade publications, we're going to figure out when and how to pursue media opportunities to build your brand, gain that leadership, engage with the technical community, and promote your products and services. I hope you leave each episode of this miniseries ready to take action before we begin.

I'd like to give a brief shout out to our agency. TREW Marketing. TREW is a full service agency located in Austin, Texas, serving highly technical companies. For more information about TREW, you can visit trewmarketing.com all right on with the podcast. All right. Hey, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Content Marketing Engineered. I'm joined by Patrick Carmody, an advertising manager from Endeavor Business Media, who, you know, from their publications, including machine design, electronic design, microwave and RF and hydraulics and Pneumatics. One thing I love about Patrick, and I'm sure it really makes him fantastic at this job is he's been in the industry for a long time, and his background covers advertising editorial, and his wife has been in the business as well.

So this is definitely Patrick's Wheelhouse, and we're happy to have him here to just share with us a little bit about advertising, how we can leverage advertising strategically and leverage publication strategically as we're building out marketing plans for the future. So Hello. And we're glad to have you here. So start by. I want to hear a little bit about you from yourself. Tell us about your background, your history, and then what you do today.

Okay.

Great.

Thanks. Thank you, Morgan. I appreciate it. This is great. So I started my career at an ad agency, and that ad agency went public. They're kind of known as the parent company for Monster. Com. That was their claim to Fame. We did a lot of local marketing solutions for B to C and B to B companies. Michelin North America was our largest account, and I was the account manager there. So a lot of great experience at a young age and set me up for my marketing career going forward.

I was there for eight years, and today I've been in business to business media for sales and marketing solutions for about eight years, also first in health care and now in the engineering space. People need to speak with engineers and get in front of engineers. We have a lot of great solutions to do. That awesome.

I love it. So tell me a little bit about especially for this kind of B to be audience. How is advertising change over the last couple of decades? I mean, it's gone through an immense shift. We went from completely print to very digital focus. But tell us a little bit about kind of what the highlights over time have been in those changes, and especially for people. I think some of our audience probably may have been entrenched in large companies 20 years ago and are now doing something else with a smaller company.

And so their last maybe big experience with advertising was I mentioned before we got on this call, the back page back cover of a big printed trade publication, because if we left off there, what have we gone through and where are we now?

Yeah, that's a good question. And it has changed a lot. Branding and awareness was King. And you found one or two channels that you knew were important to your market, your audience, and you kind of went with that. Social media was in its infancy, and it wasn't driving a lot of great engagement or results. Back then, people were doing banners and maybe doing some local online directories in the BD space. Those things are still important. Branding and awareness. Some of our biggest customers, like you think of the big distributors like Mauser and Keysight and people like that.

We work with them, but they still do a lot of awareness and branding. They also do some things that are about engagement that are about who is the person that we're talking to, and how are they interacting with our content? So for people now today it's creating an audience for themselves, getting people to come back to their website on a regular basis because they have engaging content. They can maybe get some insight from their engineers. Lead Gen is important now in a way that it probably always was important.

But you couldn't get that from the media company.

It was still hard to measure too.

It's hard to measure, right? I mean, print still has its place, and we still publish a print copy of machine design, electronic design, and our other audiences, which is important. But Lead Gen helping our customers build their own databases is important and helping to some cases, we have content, but we need more and they need a volume of content. And some publishing companies, BTB media companies can help with that. And others don't really have maybe the tools to do that. So we do get involved when it's appropriate.

We do get involved with custom writing. We do a lot of webinars and webinars are great for maximum engagement, because if you're trading 45 minutes or an hour of your time, you've qualified yourself and you're giving up a lot to learn. And hopefully the people that are putting that on our heavy hitters. They're VPs. They're engineers themselves, and they're talking very technical information that's super helpful. So things have changed. It's about proving things. Proving engagement metrics, driving traffic en masse to our customers. Websites is important.

Gated content is important for Lead Gen as I touched on and then you kind of get back to the content marketing concept. It's like, what do people want and how can you get it to them? And what they want is not necessarily your product. They want insight, they want education, they want help. They don't want someone jumping up and down saying, Buy my product. So we do a lot of things that fall outside of that. And then having said that, we do have some customers who, if you think of like an electronic parts, a tiny little part that goes into an iphone or goes into a smart speaker or something like that.

They are trying to sell product and they're a little bit different. So we've had some really unique solutions for people like that, too, where they're not telling a story and it's less content marketing. But we have some really good ways to engage for those people, too. And it might be that an engineer needs a spec sheet or a data sheet. We can help with that, too. So it's video getting back to what's important and where things have changed. Video, podcasts, short form content, long form content.

You try and help people where they are, where they are.

I love that because I think it also shows advertising content can be used so much for advertising, where I think it's easy to think of kind of the advertising of two decades ago, being that an image with a logo and a five word headline and a ten word descriptor under it. And that kind of being your limit. And so those things are wonderful for brand building and brand awareness and things like that. But for these more detailed topics and detailed kind of endeavors, creating that really deep technical content and then promoting it in paid channels can be so beneficial.

Absolutely. There's things that you can do that from a marketing standpoint. When you think of, like a banners or you think of email marketing, and we do a lot of banners. Still, we do a lot of very targeted email solutions. Those are kind of a moment in time, and when you look at some of the things that are longer form, they may live on our websites indefinitely. So if he does a sponsored article or a video or something with us that could be on our machine design site, for example, for the next three years.

So it's kind of a different play and a different tactic, but a different strategy. But it's important, too. Yeah.

You mentioned email marketing, which is something I've heard of. I've just heard the term a decent amount from the advertising perspective. Can you give us an overview of kind of what that means to you as an Advertiser? What does that mean? Yeah.

So people think of Eblast, and I'm sure your customers, your clients are doing their own emails through survey monkey and things like that. And that's super important. And we deploy custom HTML that are given to us to our audience in a targeted way. We also have some custom emails where we're really putting together the pieces part. So you would give us an image. You give us some assets, multiple assets, often times it could be an article, could be a video, could be a combination of multiple of those.

So article, blog, product video all going out in custom emails that are from us that look real familiar to our readers. So it's cobranded. So it's coming from design, for example, and the client. But those are really effective, whether it's sort of that traditional HTML or some of these custom email marketing solutions. Either way, there's a targeting form that our customers fill out. You want to reach these types of engineers in these verticals that are involved with these types of technologies. That's the targeting. And then we pull that from our audience and deploy those.

So there's a lot of some emails are all about traffic driving back to our customers sites. And some emails are about gated content where there's a landing page and you have to fill out a form to get away. So it depends on what the goal is.

That makes a lot of sense. I think that what a way for you guys to maintain and nurture those relationships of your subscribers and then to be able to access that. But still under the trusted umbrella of the publication for a company.

Exactly. Same with video. Some of our video solutions have the voice of our editorial in there where you've got a kind of a senior content director who's leading that interview with a thought leader, and that has some weight because it's kind of their stamp of approval that, hey, this is worthy for our audience, and this is valuable information. So that's something that we do as well.

That's great. And then how do you work in those types of scenarios? So somebody comes to you, they kind of know about the advertising products that are available? Or does somebody typically come to you with some goals in mind? And then you start to suggest out what the advertising plan looks like?

Yeah, it's usually that second part. Where are you now? And what are you trying to in twelve months from now, after you've deployed some marketing, what are the questions that are going to be asked of you? Did we generate leads? Did we develop new content? Did we just drive a lot of traffic back to our website? So you need to ask those questions. I always want to know where people are coming from with, like, hey, how much content do you have? What do you have and what are you planning on having?

So those are things that you want to consult. And sometimes I do show people a lot of different options just to get the conversation going and say, hey, we do do a lot of things, but you can't do all of them. And then we direct that conversation to what's best.

Yeah, that's great. So as far as kind of types of advertising and different products that are available. So we talked about email, types of products, webinar video, podcast, probably more the more traditional kind of banner and placement on page placement, anything else that we're missing as far as different products?

Well, yeah. I think with the banners, there can be some targeting in that. So when you think of banners, you may think of mixed results in some cases, but if you target it the right way, geographically and by content channels, our websites have different content channels on them, so it can be really effective. And then we have virtual events ourselves. Our customers are doing virtual events. Sometimes we can drive audience to that. But we have a Women in Science and Engineering initiative, and there's something at the end of November for Allyship.

And it's really about mentoring and bringing people up. And so we're talking to a lot of heavy hitters in the industry. A lot of folks kind of in that women and science and engineering space for that particular virtual event. But it's available for sponsorship. And there's things that you can do around that. We held an automotive technology event, which still out on battery technology, electronic vehicles, sensors. And that was something that had an editorial. We developed the editorial. We had a keynote speaker from Mahindra Racing, which is E Formula Racing.

So it's electric formula. Yes, we're a sponsor there. So we sponsored them. They helped us with our notes, but those are sponsorship opportunities. Some of them are about branding and awareness. Some of them can contain lead Gen, too. But, yeah, I think we've touched on a lot, but I do have customers that have had podcasts themselves that they're like. We've been doing this for a year, and we don't have a big audience yet. It's their podcast. It's not our podcast, and we can house that as if it were an article on an editorial page.

And then drive using that targeted email format, drive audience to that page and drive registration, drive followers to their podcast. So there's a lot of things we do. And then I know you're probably going to ask about this, too, but things have changed with us, because when you have a print Journal that is published once a month, you have certain needs for content. But now we're deploying newsletters, in some cases, three days a week. Some of them are less frequent than that, some of our specialty newsletters.

But we're publishing content on our websites daily.

Right.

So we have a lot of need for content, and people can participate with us on the earned media standpoint, too. So I try to make introductions to our senior editorial people. And then I kind of get out of the way because they do what they do. And I do what I do. But we are looking for contributed content and help with thought, leadership and perspective from engineers.

Yeah. Getting experts in there. If somebody comes to you and they've got deep expertise and they want to advertise it, and they may be a good candidate as well for that room to media side, too. I can see that. What about you've touched on this a little bit, but what are just some examples of different types of goals that people come to you with, and then how do you kind of match advertising to that? So I imagine people probably come to you with sometimes might come with just have their expectations and their goals and expectations come to cross where they say, I want this product and I want it to achieve these results.

And that doesn't make sense. So what does make sense? Well, I'll let you go.

Yeah. You have to find out how people are being evaluated and how their marketing needs to work for them. And in some cases, again, awareness and branding can be still an important part of. I have that conversation a lot with people where they bring it up and there's, like, awareness and branding. It's important. But lead Gen where you're actually delivering true leads to people. And we try to follow some best practices with that to help people with their sales funnels.

Yeah. You had mentioned gated content. Does that look like you host gated content on your site? And then the qualified leads that come out of that get delivered to your client.

So they get either weekly report of qualified leads, or we can even interact with their HubSpot or their potatoes. If they ask, the leads could go directly into their CRM.

Okay. That's awesome. So I think that's something that we talk about a lot is creating really quality technical content. And I think our audience that's something that they also value and do. But I think a lot of times right. Then we put this content on this content now lives on that company's website, which is fantastic. But if we could have it live somewhere as a paid placement that has more eyeballs on it and new eyeballs potentially. Right.

Exactly.

Seems like a really great fit for a lot of clients.

Exactly. Okay. This is something interesting that we do that people might not think of us for content. Scoring is something that there's a couple of products that we have that if you have multiple pieces of content and you have two blogs and one, three white papers and a video, and we can put them into an environment on our website where it's gated. But we're scoring content and scoring the leads. So we're able to say this piece of content saw this level of activity, and it's number one.

And this piece of content is number five. We don't know why, but you could draw some conclusions. And then with that, at least with one of our products, you can see if Steve Jones interacted with all six pieces of your content. Sally Smith interacted with one, then maybe Steve Jones is a much more qualified prospect for you.

That's excellent. Well, I think in that feedback loop, too, of what's working the best and what's not working as well. I think that's wonderful, too, because I think if we're stuck in kind of the old thought of advertising, we put ads in print content, and then we go, I hope that works. But having that kind of feedback loop to be able to edit and edit our plans over time, iterate on our plans over time or understand that this topic is really drawing people in or this topic is drawing in the right type of people or something like that is excellent.

I love that. Okay.

Maybe one more thing I'll mention, too, is I've been involved in projects where we've done custom research for people for, like, brand awareness or industry knowledge, and you're taking that information and using it to fuel your marketing campaigns. So you deployed these questions. We helped you with the questions, and we gained some real knowledge about what engineers want, what they need, what their pain points are. You can use that to drive strategy to drive content.

Definitely.

All that. So that's something that people might not think of us for, but we're pretty good at that.

That's a great tool. Well, and with your audience being so broad, having access to such a large set of people and being able to ask them the right questions based on kind of what matters and what doesn't I think that can really help flesh out the messaging and the content that you're creating so that you're creating what people actually are looking for, especially things like a product launch. To just advertise a product is not going to be as impactful as to advertise or to kind of see the content that walks somebody to that as a solution.

Yeah. Okay. I love that. So tell me this. What does it look like to even work with the publication on these opportunities? What does it look like to work with you? How long does it take? How many Ducks do you need to have in a row before we call you? How long of a time frame do we need to be thinking? I think people's expectations are often too small or too large, right?

Yeah.

So what's a good spot to be in to go? I think advertising is a good next step for us. Let's get involved. What do we need to be thinking at that point?

I think it's good to have your messaging, your strategy, sort of an internal game plan that we can use to sort of anchor. But there are some things that we do that are pretty quick to happen. So custom of these custom email solutions and deploy within three weeks or a month. Some of the digital solutions are even quicker than that. The hope is that we're driving people to things that are valuable, and then there's other things that we do that take a little bit longer. For us.

Video creation is Cam based, so it's really simple and easy, but video creation is quick content development from scratch, which we don't do for all of our customers. But we're good at it now. That takes longer. If that's six weeks, eight weeks. That's how long it takes. We have to write an outline. We have to get an agreement. That's a good outline. Then we have to write the content the same with webinars. We have to have time to promote a webinar and drive registrants and drive audience.

So we need to make sure that we're not rushing too much to do that. So some things take longer than others webinar might be at that eight weeks situation.

How much do editorial calendars play into the kind of content topics. Should they look through editorial calendars or if people are going to advertise, can they kind of come to you with? Sometimes I'll have clients who say we're going to focus on a different kind of topic each quarter, or we're focusing on automotive second half of the year leading up to automotive test or something like that. Is that reasonable? Or do we need to kind of look through editorial calendars and go that route?

I think we're trying to get people to think differently. And there's people that have been with us for a long, long time and started out in print or whatever they're like. Yeah. Let me look at that editorial calendar. But really, what do we write about? What is our editorial focus and who do we reach are really the most important things. And then if we reach the right kind of engineers and the right verticals, the right technologies and we write about the right kinds of things that are appealing to those folks, then I think any time of year is a good time of year.

And then, like you said, there may be certain things internally, like half of the year is dedicated to this strategy campaign. And we do do things around events, too. We have some events. And then we also have close relationships with events that we don't. But we're very close with. We write a lot of articles about the Pack Expo, so it could be that that's part of the timing decision. Hey, we need to get our messaging out a month and a half prior to this show because we're going to be there.

So there's a lot of things that go into timing, but I think editorial calendars are becoming less important.

Okay.

It's more what the customer wants than what we're going to be writing about.

Yes. Okay. I have one more question I didn't frame you with. I'm sure there are things. What do you say no to? I'm sure you get calls of people who say, what is it? You've got to stay true to kind of your audience. And so I'm curious, are there budgets that are too small timelines that are too short audiences that are too far out things like that.

That's an interesting question. And no, you didn't prep me for that question. I don't think there's a too small customer. I work with a lot of new customers. There are some major accounts folks here, too, that handle some of those big, big electronics distributors. And I'm not that person. But I think you want to have someone that has a sense of what this is going to look like six months. You do want a relationship over time, and you do want to say, yeah, we'll do this test for you in the hopes that we're going to have developed a long term relationship.

And then timing wise, you do have to say no to people. Sometimes for timing reasons, we have to respect our subscribers inboxes the real concern. And so you can't promise something that's going to cause us to kind of get off of our game as far as how we go to market with outbound stuff from us, that makes sense. Yeah.

Well, and I think it's that kind of what's your plan and what's your kind of cadence. I liked how you said it's helpful when people come with kind of a marketing plan that you can anchor to and then put that appropriate advertising support in there, because I'm sure it's difficult to same thing with content, right? If you produce one piece of content and put it on your website, it doesn't mean that you're going to just shatter the Earth with your leads you generate from that, right? It's an ongoing kind of steady stream of things.

So I think this is so helpful. There's just so many different products that either people can create with you guys promote. It's just a whole other channel that I think a lot of smaller, potentially companies aren't necessarily taken advantage of. And so I love that we can hear from you and just get that insight on what it looks like to participate and to use this channel and to take even some of the fantastic content that they're already creating and then promote it in a new channel to the right people, too, because this is especially you think about events being canceled and things like that.

How do we reach those new people who would have otherwise been sitting at a keynote or who would have been walking the show floor? And I know we're starting to pick back up with shows, but still capturing the audience that you didn't know they were there and they didn't know you were there. And so trying to meet in a central place. So good. Okay. This is wonderful. I love it so much. So if somebody's listening to this and they go, all right. I think that I want to talk to Patrick.

I'm ready. I want to explore my kind of advertising opportunities. What does that look like?

There's two things you could download our media kits so you could go to any one of our brands in our design and engineering group and download a media kit. I would actually see those downloads.

Okay. So go download Machine Design or go download electronic Designs media kit. And Patrick will see that you did that.

Yes. And they could also email me or you can email. I'll give you that if you want it's Pcarmody. So it's P my first initial C-A-R-M-O-D-Y. At Endeavorb two B. Com.

Awesome. And we will include that in the notes, too. So that's all the questions I have. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that people will consider just supporting their marketing programs with advertising. He's a great fit. So thanks. I really appreciate it.

Me too. Thanks, Morgan. I appreciate it.

Bye, Patrick. Thanks for joining me today on Content Marketing engineered for Show Notes including links to any resources we talked about. Visit truemarketing. Compodcast. While you're there, you can subscribe to our blog and newsletter. And we've also got a book that Wendy authored called Content Marketing Engineered. It's about building and executing an end to end content marketing plan. I would also love your reviews on this podcast. So when you get a chance, subscribe Rate Review Content Marketing Engineered on your favorite podcast subscription platform. Thanks again. Have a great day.

Bye.