Driving Growth: Manufacturing Marketing Mastery | Paris Vega from The Nine

Ernesto: Pathmonk is the intelligent tool for website lead generation. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in their buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments. With relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos and much more, stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%. Add Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Let the AI do all the work and get access to 50% more qualified leads while you keep doing marketing and sales as usual. Check us on pathmonk.com. Welcome to today’s episode. Let’s talk about today’s guest. We have Paris from The Nine chief growth officer with them. How you doing today, Paris?

Paris Vega: Doing good. Glad to be here.

Ernesto: It’s great to have you on. I’m sure our listeners are tuning in, wondering what The Nine is all about. So, let’s start off with that. Paris, in your own words, can you tell us a little bit more?

Paris Vega: Yeah. The Nine Digital is a full scale website design and development digital marketing agency. We do SEO, ecommerce marketing, content marketing, performance marketing, for all types of businesses. But our main focus is on the manufacturing industry and industrial clients. And we’ve seen a lot of success helping them grow, especially grow their SEO performance in search engines and their lead gen performance across different social platforms where we run ads for them.
So yeah, we’re full scale agency, making things happen for people. And one of our mottos is we get real trackable results, not the vanity metrics that some agencies sell, like just impressions and views and that kind of thing. We actually focus on conversions. So something it seems like Pathmonk is all about.

Ernesto: Definitely. Exactly. Yup. Think then. Thanks, for the plug. But let’s focus here on The Nine m. So we’ve been so that way our listeners could get a good understanding then. Is there a key problem that you guys like to solve for clients?

Paris Vega: Yeah, so, as I mentioned, you know, we focus in on these manufacturing clients and, these bigger industrial companies. And a lot of times these kind of slower moving technical companies may not be up to speed on the kind of modernization, tools and strategies out there in the digital marketing world.
So we come alongside their internal teams and fill in any gaps with their skills. Or it just might be that they have greatly, you know, highly skilled marketing folks on their team, but there’s just so much that they’re trying to do for these big organizations that they need additional hands, to help, achieve their goals.
And so we come along the side, their teams and our, yden team of experts in each field, can basically handle any type of company within, this space and help them grow and hit their goals.
So we’ve worked with a variety of these type of companies and one of the main things is their SEO and their lead gen efforts. We go through a deep process of analyzing and auditing everything they’re doing and finding those deeper opportunities. Instead of just staying at the surface and doing best practices, we actually try to customize what we’re doing to each client.

Ernesto: All right, awesome, great, great to hear that. And would it feel, I mean, I’m assuming here, but with your manufacturing, would that be your ideal client or is there another vertical segment that you guys like to go for?

Paris Vega: The ideal would be a manufacturing business that also sells their products online. So there’s lots of companies like that where, especially like companies, that manufacture in the US and sell their products online. At the end of that process, they’re, more stable companies. And then the fact that they sell online means that they can take full advantage of all of our services and we can help them at every step of the way to get more sales.

Ernesto: Definitely. Okay, perfect. And so how would these clients, of yours typically find out about The Nine? Is there a top client acquisition channel that you guys have?

Paris Vega: Yeah, so we try to kind of eat our own dog food, so to speak, and use our services on our own efforts and we’re slowly doing more and more of that. But through SEO, through searching for services related to what we offer they find us a lot of the times. That’s where some of our best leads come from.
And so if people search for, different things related to manufacturing marketing agency and related services that manufacturing marketing agencies offer we’re starting to show up more and more in those results, and then through our own lead generation and outbound sales efforts.

Ernesto: All right, perfect. Great, great. And is there any tools or tips, methods that you would recommend to our listeners as far as some website lead generation?

Paris Vega: I think that making sure that you set up proper analytics and tracking, as a first step, and that’s part of what we call our foundation phase. When we onboard a client, the first thing that we do to make sure we’re starting off on the right foot is get access to all their tools that they’re using, especially their website management tools.
And make sure they have some kind of Google Analytics or similar things set up and then make sure they’ve defined the actual goals and conversions that they want to happen. Like what are the business actions you want a user to take on your website?
And anything that helps around that is what I would recommend. But making sure that you’ve set up those conversions and goals for your website and done that consistently across all the platforms because you can define conversions on Google Ads, Facebook, any of the different kind of big platforms where you might run ads these days need to make sure you set up conversion tracking and especially on your website itself so that you’re measuring the main actions you want people to take and allow those campaigns and all the amazing AI that’s available today, you allow those things to optimize for that main goal that you have.

Ernesto: Awesome, great, thanks for those methods there and tips. And so that way our listeners could check you guys out. You could check them out at nine.is. What role then would you say does your website play for client acquisition?

Paris Vega: I think in the ideal situation it can be your best salesperson because it’s 24/7 never sleeps. And if you’ve optimized your site to rank well for the things that you offer then it can be a constant stream of inbound leads for you. So I think it’s critical, your website’s critical to the inbound lead generation process.

Ernesto: Definitely would agree with you on that. And well, let’s switch gears a little bit, priest, and let’s talk about you as the leader, you being the chief officer there for, for The Nine. What are some key tasks you focus on your day to day work.

Paris Vega: Checking in with the team, the leaders of our different departments, seeing if there’s anything, any issues, any hairy problems I can help, kind of keep moving or help troubleshoot on because as this growth officer role, a lot of times it’s more like sales focused. And there is some of that.
I’m definitely doing a lot more sales related work now. So I’m going to different like prospect meetings and that kind of thing, trying to onboard new customers.
But I think a big part of it for me, my main focus the first year or two in this growth officer role has been more on improving internal processes, then the company so that it can grow better, healthier instead of just that heavier sales focus. I think that might be more typical of a growth officer role.

Ernesto: All right, awesome. Great. Great to hear that from you. Well, let’s switch gears a little bit, Aris, and let’s jump into our next section now, which is our rapid fire question. Are you ready for.

Paris Vega: Yeah. Awesome.

Ernesto: All right, first up, what is the last book that you read?

Paris Vega: The last book that I read, I’m in the midst of many books, so that’s hard because I don’t really always go through one at a time. So I’m m gonna pull up audible right now. One of them is. It’s called, like, the best damn sales book ever written. I think it was, yeah, the best damn sales book ever. I’m, going through mobs, messiahs, and markets. The accidental superpower startup community way. Oh, the last one I completed poor Charlie’s almanac by Charles T. Munger.

Ernesto: All right. Poor Charlie’s almanac. Perfect. Great. Great read there for our listeners.

Paris Vega: Yeah.

Ernesto: Next is, what is one single thing that The Nine is focused on at the moment, the most?

Paris Vega: So, right now, we’re focused on starting off our client relationships in a stronger way. And so what that means for us is making sure that we start with a full scale audit of the client’s website, their advertising efforts, their current state of where they are SEO wise, all their content, the design, you know, performance of their web, the website itself.
So these full service audits are our main focus, and that solves many things up front. It makes sure that we have the analytics and tracking and everything that I mentioned earlier. We have that in place, or we understand at least the state of the client’s website and digital efforts.
And it helps us understand on a deeper level where the client’s at, and what type of company they are, what type of problems they have, so that we can actually then offer them the proper services for where exactly they are.
Instead of a client just coming to us and saying, hey, we want to buy this specific service from you. Do they even need that service? Sometimes. But sometimes after going through an audit, they don’t even understand the buzzword they were trying to buy.
You know, they’ve just heard all these buzzwords, and they’re trying to fill the gaps on what they think they should be doing, but in reality, they might not even understand the definition of the buzzwords they’re using, and so they’re buying things that they don’t need sometimes. So it can help us make sure we’re selling the appropriate service, to each client.

Ernesto: Okay. All right. Awesome. Now, Paris, if there would be no boundaries in technology. What would be that one thing that you want to fix for your role as a marketer today?

Paris Vega: Just talking about the landscape in general of how everything is. I think that tracking conversions sometimes can get really complicated. So that’s kind of the core of understanding what you’re even doing.
And the whole benefit of digital marketing is the fact that, hey, it’s more trackable. You can see where your money goes, because otherwise we’re doing the same thing as running a billboard on the side of the highway.
You hope that somebody calls that number or whatever, but for the most part, you’re just looking at generic traffic data to estimate how much exposure you’re getting. And without proper conversion tracking, we’re back to traditional marketing mode where we’re just guessing and hoping that the specific maybe landing page URL that you put or QR code you can put up there now, or phone number gets called.
And in the ideal form, all that tracking is simplified and all the browsers track everybody until they die. I know there’s been the browser cookie issues all these years. Everybody’s worried about the privacy and everything. It’s definitely made tracking and targeting the appropriate customers a lot harder these past several years with all the privacy issues. And not that we don’t need privacy, but it does make the marketer’s job much, much more difficult.

Ernesto: Would agree with you, Google, wanting to have a free cookie, this world by the end of this year, right? Right, definitely. All right. And well, lastly, Paris, what is one piece of advice that you would give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today?

Paris Vega: Talk to more people in the industry, probably make more personal connections, have more conversations, m to. And learn more about whatever, target customer I was going to be getting involved with, because I think that’s.
So I host a podcast on the side called the first Customers podcast, where talk to companies about how they got their very first customers. And so through that, I’ve learned that the most successful business people figure out a way to connect to their target customer, in as deep a way as possible and have conversations with their customers and learn from their customers feedback.
And I think that I would have definitely prioritized that customer interaction and target customer feedback a lot more earlier in my journey.

Ernesto: Definitely some great advice. Right. At the end of the day, if, your customer is telling you something and you switch to that, you might get two, three more, right? So, it’s an x factor when you listen to your. Definitely some great, great advice there.
Well, Harris, thanks a lot for being on the show with us today. I do want to give you the last word. If someone forgets everything about the interview today, what is that one thing they should remember about your company?

Paris Vega: We can help you get trackable results from your marketing budget. We can help you grow.

Ernesto: There. You guys heard it. You could check them out at nine.is. The Nine Digital is your website and digital marketing agency that you need. Paris, thank you so much for being on to our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in and looking forward to our next episode at Pathmonk Presents. Thanks a lot, Paris. Appreciate it.