At Rivergate Marketing, when we start working with a new client, we complete an intensive onboarding process typically involving an in-person two-day kickoff meeting to cover pertinent business information to inform the marketing plan and strategy. But beyond the business issues at hand, we like to take a deep dive into the backstory – who they are as individuals and as a company, the history, what drives them, what is their company’s culture, etc. That’s human nature, isn’t it?
Of course, we all want to choose a business partner based on capabilities, but we also want to really know them and ultimately, we want to know, like and trust them. With that in mind, we decided to reshare a 2018 podcast for new clients and those considering working with Rivergate Marketing to get a flavor of who we are.
The Podcast
Rivergate Marketing’s Founder and President Georgia Whalen was interviewed by Tony Veroeven of the Control System Integrators Association (CSIA), discussing Rivergate’s origins and the company’s strategy of specializing in digital marketing for clients in the industrial automation sector. At the 2018 Manufacturing in America conference, Tony introduced Talking Industrial Automation podcast listeners to Georgia and the company she founded, Rivergate Marketing.
“This week, get to know Georgia Whalen, president and owner of Rivergate Marketing, a firm specializing in industrial automation companies. Georgia started her company and re-entered the workforce in 2008 after raising her three children, and we can all imagine how challenging that must have been given the economic forces at the time. Perseverance and tenacity won out as they often do. And now, Georgia and her staff perform marketing services for many CSIA members, including setting strategy, blogging, and social media management. Georgia discusses how engineers and technical people shop and research. She warns against the old-fashioned viewpoint that business will always just walk in the door through referrals and repeat customers, something established companies have enjoyed in the past. Finally, Georgia helps us understand how to start marketing. If you’re at ground zero, visit Georgia’s company at rivergatemarketing.com. Enjoy getting to know Georgia Whalen.”
Rivergate Marketing’s Backstory
Georgia Whalen took an unusual path to business ownership. She said, “I decided to reenter the workforce after staying home with my three children; I had been home for about 10 years and my oldest was getting ready to go off to college. It was the 2008-2009 timeframe when the economy had hit the skids, so needless to say, it was not easy for a stay-at-home mom to find a job. Even though I had worked for major corporations in the past, they were all in hiring freezes. I had worked for Kraft, I had worked for Pitney Bowes in sales and marketing, but I found that I needed to recreate myself.”
Georgia reached out to her brother, Sam Hoff, owner of Michigan-based control system integrator Patti Engineering. “And so that’s where the relationship with Sam came into play in that he has his own integration business and had been in business for a while. And he, like most integrators – anybody in Michigan – was really struggling at that time, especially with the auto industry.”
Georgia knew that Sam was experiencing a downturn in his business due to the recession, so she offered him a win-win proposal. “Originally I was going to sell for him in the New England area because I knew he wanted to expand and diversify into different industries. I told him that he didn’t owe me anything unless I sold something, so that’s how it all began. Sam pointed out that my degree is in marketing and asked me if I wanted to do the marketing. I ended up doing the marketing and things turned around for Sam. The economy started to turn around, so it ended up working out.”
“It was going very well for a long time. I was working just for Sam’s business. But as my kids were growing up, getting older, and not needing me as much, I knew that I wanted to potentially expand what I was doing. I talked to Sam about it and I asked him if he would be opposed to me working with other integrators. I had always stayed independent from Patti Engineering. I was not an employee; I worked on a contract basis. Sam said he had no problem with it as long as the new clients are not a direct competitor.”
“I had some other people who had encouraged me as well. Peter Treible from Siemens had encouraged me to work with other integrators because he noticed that Patti Engineering had significantly more presence with digital marketing as opposed to a lot of other integrators that feel like it’s a word-of-mouth industry and don’t pay attention to marketing.”
“Peter said, ‘Well, your Patti Engineering is showing up in Google alerts and people are asking me why Patti Engineering is doing marketing and nobody else is.’ Peter planted the seed probably about four years ago. It took me a little while to get systems in place and feel comfortable. And now [in 2018] we have four employees and six clients. We’re really enjoying it.”
Georgia took her time in planning the strategy to expand Rivergate Marketing. “I really struggled with whether I wanted to open myself up to doing marketing for other types of businesses, but I knew that the learning curve was so long for me with helping Sam with marketing for Patti Engineering. I would be in meetings calling from Boston – they’re in Michigan – and I would remote in for meetings and Dave Foster would mention a PLC and I’d be ‘a what? What are you talking about?’ I went through a learning curve with Patti Engineering and I wasn’t afraid to ask a lot of questions because of course it was Sam and, you know, he’s my brother. When I would be out in Michigan, I would say, ‘Take me into a facility; show me.’ I knew that my background would be an asset and the fact that I know what HMIs are, what SCADA systems are, what PLCs are… I know the lingo. I know that is valuable because a lot of marketing people don’t know the lingo and it’s a very long learning curve, like I said. I decided at that time that it would be best to really just try and serve that niche because it’s a specialty for me.”
“Most of the integrators I work with are CSIA certified, and I do work with other integrators. I also work with automation distributors. I have expanded a little bit out of the integration business and I would look at other types of businesses that are in industrial automation. If they’re not an integrator, maybe they’re a manufacturer.”
The System Integration Industry
Georgia has invested a lot of time to learn the system integration industry, understanding that it is a small and very niche market. “Everybody knows everybody in this industry, and that’s nice, actually. I enjoy it, and the ladies that work with me enjoy it also. Meghan has been with me for over three years. She grew up with a father who was an engineer in aerospace, so she grew up around it and plus had her dad there to ask questions when she was first starting out. Christine works with me and has been with me for a couple of years; she is an engineer herself. We have a lot of flexibility; we’re all virtual, we work out of our home offices. They enjoy the flexibility and it just works for everybody.”
“And then Caroline, my daughter, came in recently and she has experience from internships. She graduated last May from UMass Amherst, the business program. She had experience in social media marketing from working with Kronos, a software company. At the time I was expanding the business, I asked Caroline to come work for me for a little while. I could really use her help and she can learn other things that maybe she hasn’t yet, like some of the other software platforms, marketing automation, how to do a press release, and all that. She’s working with me right now, too.”
The system integration community is small and tight-knit, and there are several family businesses that have been operating for decades. Many of these companies have not had to do digital marketing or be present on social media, as it was traditionally a word-of-mouth industry. Georgia said, “It’s still a lot of word of mouth, but the world is definitely changing. Ten years ago, if we were going to research a major purchase that we were going to do for ourselves personally, we may have gone about it a different way, gone to a store and looked at items. Now, we’re sitting down first and we’re searching in Google and we’re trying to look at reviews. We’re trying to educate ourselves on things before we actually even have to leave the house.”
How Buyers Find Sellers
“That’s how the engineering world is working now too, especially with the millennials coming into decision-making roles. The first thing they’re going to do is get on Google and educate themselves as to how they might be able to solve an automation problem. It’s more and more important now to have social media and a digital presence overall, so that you can actually turn up in those searches when people are exploring solutions.”
People aren’t necessarily using the Internet to search for vendor or partner companies; they are searching for the solutions to their problems. “If and end user has a problem with a specific brand, they might research ‘Mitsubishi integrator’ or ‘Siemens Solution Partner.’ They are going to search for specific keywords. If you are making sure that you’re talking about your areas of expertise and how you can help people, more than likely you can be found in those searches.”
Searching for keywords might uncover a white paper, video, podcast, etc. on that subject matter, but how does the client find a good system integrator that they don’t yet know? “System integrators are very different from business to business. We have clients across the country and they all are so unique in the industries that they serve and their specific niches of expertise within those industries. System integrators really need to be talking about how they solve problems for the clients that they really have a niche focus on. It has to be about the clients and how the system integrator can make clients’ lives easier. We need to educate the integrators as to what they do, and what they do really well. I know some clients probably have a big in-house integration team and that’s great, but from that client’s perspective, hiring an integrator to help with that in-house team is tremendously valuable because that integrator has experience with multiple clients that are just like their business.”
“Integrators have this bank of knowledge that can be tapped by these clients and their in-house engineering team to understand what all is available to them, so far as what types of solutions they could be looking at. A lot of times, they’re not even aware of what the possibilities are. I love to get that message out for the integrators because I really feel like they’re adding a lot of value at the end user level.”
When end users are searching on the Internet for an automated solution to solve their manufacturing problem, there is no one best way for a system integrator to be found. “It can be through case studies, it can be press releases. We put out press releases for clients that might be on a specific project and Automation.com, or Robotics Tomorrow, or Manufacturing Tomorrow might pick that up. An end user may find it on someone else’s website and see that this particular integrator solved this problem for a company similar to them. So again, it’s all about finding those keywords that you think would help the end user solve their problem. There’s also the CSIA Exchange and others; Control Engineering has their own guide too. End users have different resources they can go to and search for integrators that way. Integrators will specify in these guides what their areas of expertise are, what locations they service, etc. That’s another way that end-users can go to find a bank of integrators to choose from.”
There are a lot of Internet resources available for end users who are conducting research, but ultimately the system integrator needs to build trust with the end user. An end user should take a deep dive to get to know the system integrators they may be working with. “I would definitely say go to the system integrator’s website and a look at their case studies. Hopefully they have a blog. Take a look at their blog where they’re talking about some of the problems they saw. A lot of times, the blog might be a little bit more of a casual format, and they might even talk about company culture and whatnot, so you can kind of get to know what the company is like before they even have to reach out. They can also do that on social media. I find a lot of traffic to our clients’ websites comes from LinkedIn posts.”
“We recommend creating your own company LinkedIn page, but we also do company updates on the company page. There’s a whole process behind that; integrators knew it would help the clients get to know them. If a post goes on the company page, they’re only going to see it if they’re following the company page. But if the employees share that post from the company page, it goes into the feed of all the connections. There are all sorts of ways that you can help your company be known to end users. This is all for the end users to get to know the companies, right? You know, go on LinkedIn and see if they know what you’re talking about. And look them up on Facebook and Twitter too.”
Marketing Automation and the Sales Funnel
System integrators may be reticent to devote resources to develop marketing content, concerned that this unbillable time might not result in leads. “I always try and explain to potential new clients that marketing is an investment. It’s not an expense, it’s an investment. You have to give it time to give you a return; it’s not going to happen immediately. If you haven’t been in the game, you don’t have a blog. You’ve never been active on social media. It’s going to take a while to get traction. What I will tell you is to also invest in a marketing automation platform.”
“For clients that have been with us for a while, we’ve been able to build a following there, and we’re using this marketing automation platform to send out a newsletter for them or whatnot, and we can do some more of the actual ROI and tracking. If a lead comes in from a newsletter and the visitor filled out a form stating they are interested in learning more about this, whether it’s cybersecurity or whatever, then you can trace that lead back to the marketing, to the effort that you’ve done.”
“I’ve had our clients get projects through sharing LinkedIn posts. When a large project comes in, we coach the clients to ask, ‘How did you find out about us?’ That can help you to see the ROI a lot more often. Because sometimes that information is not going to come back to me on the marketing team. We’re not going to know that they picked up the phone and called you because now they know you have a new office in a particular area. One client, Huffman Engineering, had a contact that used to be a client in Nebraska. Then they saw a LinkedIn post about Huffman opening an office in Colorado. That former client was now out of a manufacturing facility in Colorado. Well, he picked up the phone and gave them a call. I never would have known if Huffman Engineering didn’t tell me. So, a lot of times you need to ask the questions to find out how people are finding you.”
Asking how a lead found you only lets you know what was the last thing they saw from you that triggered the call. It can be a challenge to understand that the last thing may not be the trigger, rather it’s a culmination of many steps in building your brand. If a system integrator is just getting started with digital marketing, what should they do first? Georgia said, “I think for social media, definitely LinkedIn is best for the B2B companies. Create a company page and then be active on it. If you’re trying to do this yourself and you’re starting from ground zero, trying to do Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn when you’ve had no presence on any of them is a very difficult thing to do. You really want to focus on one and get one going strong. So far as the other types of digital marketing, I would say two things are most valuable in my opinion. One is to have a company newsletter or email that goes out at least quarterly. It keeps your brand in front of potential customers, especially in this business, where there are long sales cycles. You might have done a project for a customer three years ago and they haven’t needed anything from you since then, but if they see your name go past them once every quarter in an email…you’re not harassing them. You’re giving them good content in that newsletter, and it’s keeping you top of mind for that client. And maybe they’ll think to reach out to you.”
“If you have a marketing automation platform, you’re going to know that that person that you reached out to, or that you did a project for three years ago, has suddenly been back on your website. You can see that they’ve been looking at the retrofit blog post or they’ve been looking at the case study on the SCADA system that you installed at a manufacturing facility… I would say the newsletter is very important and also the blog. You don’t have to be overwhelmed with thinking, ‘Oh, wow, how many times a month do I have to do this?’ “
“You don’t have to worry about that, you just need to start, even if it’s only posting once a month. Start because it’s putting fresh content on your website and that’s going to help keep Google happy and thinking that you’re relevant because you have fresh content and it’s going to be valuable to people that come onto your website. You look active, you don’t look like you’re stale and static. And you’re just a brochure… Also, case studies are huge for B2B and being able to educate, that’s kind of middle of the funnel type of thing, where you want to be able to educate people. Whereas social media is sort of top of the funnel, getting them to come and notice you and be aware of you.”
The “sales funnel” is a visual representation of the sales cycle and the larger number of leads that go into the top, wide part of the funnel and the fewer closed deals that come out the smaller bottom of the funnel. “At the top of the funnel, it’s basically your brand awareness and for your company to even be found. It might be that someone sees a LinkedIn post and goes to your website or it might be a press release that gets them to notice you and come into the funnel. The top of the funnel is basically building your brand awareness. The middle of the funnel is more educating them; they’re looking at your blog post about the RFID project for example, or some project that you did. They’re looking at your case study on the RFID project you did; they’re educating themselves before they ever have to talk to you and they want to do that. They want to feel comfortable that you are worth their time before they reach out to you.”
“The bottom of the funnel is when they contact you, then you or your salesperson goes in and explains more and the sale is closed. Down at the bottom of the funnel, not only do you want that sale, but you want to continue to nurture them. That’s where keeping a quarterly newsletter helps so that you’re reaching out to them regularly. Or, do a customer survey after you’ve done the project to make sure they’re happy. Obviously, you want to know that they’re satisfied because gaining a customer is a lot more expensive than keeping one.”
Advertising and Google AdWords
Rivergate Marketing focuses their efforts on digital marketing strategy for clients, which often includes articles, white papers, case studies, press releases, blog posts, social media management, videos, and more, but clients sometimes ask if printed material is still relevant in today’s market. Georgia said, “We’re not big on printed material, we really aren’t, and maybe some people would disagree with that. Sometimes it’s nice if you’re going to have an open house because you’ve opened a new facility or you’re celebrating a milestone and you want to send out a really nice invitation; that’s impressive and that comes through the mail. Sure, yes, do print for things like that, but I think for newsletters and for that type of thing, you’re really better off with the digital edition because now more than ever, people are using their mobile devices to sift through their email, look at your website…everybody’s very connected. As far as print advertising, most of my clients don’t do a whole lot of that, unless it’s part of a guide listing that goes along with an online guide, then they have both the digital version and the print version.”
If they have a marketing budget on the smaller side, firms must choose where to spend their limited advertising dollars. If the choice is between print ads in a trade magazine versus Google AdWords, Georgia said, “Print ads are very expensive. I would put my money into Google if I’m going to be totally honest about it.” Google AdWords can also get expensive and need to be actively managed. There are strategies such as using long-tail keywords, which are forming several words into a phrase to be very specific for targeting ads (think of “controls” versus “industrial control system retrofit Siemens”).
“If you’re going to invest in Google AdWords, then you really need to pay attention to it because you can have a whole lot of traffic from Google AdWords, which can quickly use up your budget. Everybody should have Google Analytics no matter who you are, you need Google analytics: it’s free and it helps you find out what’s working for your website. If you go into your Google Analytics and you see AdWords is sending a thousand visits a month to your website, but they bounce off of it… Maybe the bounce rate is 90%, which means 90% of them are going to leave before they even go past that first page. Then you’re wasting your money. If you’re going to invest in Google AdWords, you need to have the ads be very targeted and specific, and it needs to go to a page that addresses exactly what that person was looking for, or they’re not going to stay on it. You definitely don’t want to drop them on your home page from a Google ad.”
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
As opposed to driving paid traffic such as Google ads, blogging and creating technical content will attract viewers over time through organic search. Google indexes all websites in order to provide faster and more relevant search results. Search engines match the long-tail keywords that users are searching for with the technical content on your website or blog, so developing this content can bring good-quality traffic. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of tailoring your website content to attract the type of users you are looking for.
How does a system integrator get started with blogging, when they have the often more immediate need for billable hours, especially in a smaller company? Georgia said, “We help clients with the whole blogging process. We have created worksheets to give them ideas of what to write about. We also suggest hosting a blog lunch – everybody’s got to eat anyway. If your engineers are not out on site, buy them pizza and set them up in the conference room. You can, number one, come up with topic ideas, and then number two, actually start working on writing them from the worksheet. If they have an idea, maybe it’s a certain tip that they just found a workaround for, or if it’s a customer question that they typically get, you definitely want to write about that because you can guarantee people are putting that question into Google so it is a challenge and others are searching for the same solution.”
“Engineers like solving problems, and a lot of them don’t like to write. There are certainly exceptions and some of them are phenomenal writers, but a lot of them don’t like to write. We get past that by saying, ‘Just give us bullet points; just give us a rough draft. We’re going to make it look really nice. We’re going to clean it up for you. We’re going to send it back to you. Then you can tell us whether it looks good or it doesn’t, and then when it’s ready, we’re going to post it for you. And when we post it for you, you’re getting credit for that blog post, not us and not somebody else. So, this is good for your career too, it’s not just good for the company.’ It definitely is good for the company, but it’s also good for the engineer’s career. When website visitors see that piece, they think ‘this guy knows what he’s talking about.’ It can be a win-win for the engineers and for the company.”
Your Internal Marketing Department
Helping develop and write content is only one of Rivergate Marketing’s core services. “We’re a full-service digital marketing agency, and we function as our clients’ internal marketing department. Once in a while one of our clients has an in-house person that does marketing, which is wonderful. And we work with that person as a team, but more often when we go to work for a system integrator, we are their marketing department. We attend internal meetings; Sam calls it a huddle. He does a weekly huddle where they’re talking about projects and giving updates and everything. We attend so that we can keep abreast of what they’re doing so that we know what to talk about online. But then we’re managing all of their marketing, like social media accounts, putting out press releases for them, whether it’s on a project or a new hire or a new certification.”
“For press releases, if there is company news to announce like an engineer just got certified on a new technology, we will send out a press release. We also help clients with blogging. We help them write industry articles for trade publications which is very valuable for building thought leadership and authority. Because when somebody sees that Patti Engineering or another integrator has published an article in a trade magazine, it really adds to their authority. Readers feel that they must know what they’re talking about, or the editor wouldn’t have published their article. So, we do a very broad spectrum of services for the clients. We also do their website updates. If they’re on a WordPress platform, it’s very user-friendly and we can go in there and put up their blog posts for them; we can post their press releases.”
“On our clients’ website, we can create new landing pages for them for specific technologies. We do everything for them and a lot of things that they wouldn’t think about or wouldn’t necessarily know how to do themselves. We try and make it incredibly easy on them, because we know they’re busy running their business and they only have so much time. It can be time consuming to write technical blog posts and articles, and we’ve gotten good at helping with that process. We interview clients if the engineers are too busy and they can’t take time to write. If it’s something that we really need their input on, we’ll schedule an hour-long phone interview that we record. We refer back to the recording when we write the piece. We try and do a lot of the heavy lifting on the marketing so that they can benefit from it without it being too much of a pain.”
On the Personal Side
When Tony interviews his podcast guests, he likes to get to know a bit about their personal lives. When asked where she grew up, Georgia said, “I grew up in Maryland; I come from an entrepreneurial family. My father and mother had their own business for well over 50 years. I grew up in farm country, in a very rural area and a lot of my uncles are dairy farmers. I still have cousins that are dairy farmers. One milks almost a thousand cows a day, and farms over 2000 acres.”
“I live in Boston now. I worked in the Boston area after graduating from college. I went to Susquehanna University out in Pennsylvania, a small school. I was working for Carnation Food Service at the time when I moved up to New England, they’re now Nestlé. I really missed home, and actually wanted to come home until I met my husband – he’s a true Bostonian. After I met him, Boston became a lot of fun! So, I’ve been in Boston for a long time and really enjoy it.”
“I did make my husband move to Maryland when we were first married. I’m like, ‘You need to know where I’m from.’ We lived there for about four years and then we moved back in 1993. We have been here since 1993 and I love it. We’re close to the city. We live in Arlington, Massachusetts, so it’s fun.”
Tony asked Georgia about what business her parents ran. “It is real estate and insurance, and I worked in the business. I actually did when we moved back to Maryland. We have four kids in the family; I have an older sister and two younger brothers. I think my father always wanted me to come into the business and maybe take it over. So, we moved back to Maryland and I went into the family business, but my husband is too much of a diehard New Englander. He missed Boston too much and I actually loved Boston too, so we ended up back there. I said to him, ‘You have to give it a try and then we can move back.’ He got to know the Maryland area and we still go back to visit, but we live in New England.”
Rivergate Marketing Today
Rivergate Marketing has four employees and is in the growth stage of business. As an entrepreneur, there are many challenges to growing your business, but what are the main challenges that the company is running into right now? “The first hurdle was just getting over the fear of doing it, really. And then the next challenge, at least for me, was that I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I’m very passionate about what I do and I want to do it well for people. It was really hard for me to give up a little control, you know, but I have gotten really good at that because Meghan, Christine, and Caroline are amazing and they do such a great job and I trust them so much that it really works well. One of the easy things about today’s world is that I can work anywhere that I have wifi access. And so can my employees. It’s not for everybody; some people couldn’t be self-disciplined maybe to do it, or wouldn’t like the isolation of not being able to go into an office. But I think it can work, especially for people that have families and want the flexibility. A lot of times I’ll get an email from Meghan at 11 o’clock at night, but she was able to do something else earlier in the day that she wanted to do. I don’t care when they work, as long as we get the work done.”
In today’s economy, you can work from anywhere but it may be tougher to unplug and turn it off, especially as a business owner. What keeps Georgia up at night is having too many things going on in the business at once. “But that’s where the whole-team mentality comes in, everyone on my team pulls together when they need to and we get it done, we won’t miss. So, it’s having that trust in the people that are working for you. Also, I’m good about investing in software platforms that are going to help my employees be able to work smarter and help my clients be able to have a further reach, whether that’s a small business platform to put out press releases so that we can build out media lists that are specific to their niche of the business, or a social media scheduling platform so that we can schedule a post in advance. There are all these different platforms, which is the beauty of today that there’s so much available to you to be able to make the whole digital marketing program successful.”
Manufacturing in America
As Tony wraps up the interview, he asks Georgia what she is hoping to learn or get out of the Manufacturing in America event. “I always love to attend MiA because it’s a great venue to network with a lot of different people. I love to be here with Patti Engineering because they have the big event going on at Ford Field kicking the football and monitoring the ball’s speed and accuracy with Siemens MindSphere. I like networking with the Siemens people because I like to work with them on different marketing initiatives for my clients, so it’s always good for me to be able to get to know them better. I like to see what’s new out there and to sit in on some of the seminars. I also enjoy the Summit portion of the event; the keynote speaker this year is Alan Beaulieu from ITR Economics, and he’s a great economist. He always thrills everybody with his unbelievable information. He’s very spot on; he has a very good record for accuracy. So, the Summit is always a big draw, and I work with Electromatic Products as well. Siemens and Electromatic Products host this event. I like to network with the Electromatic people.”
Tony appreciates that Siemens and Electromatic Products allow him and the CSIA team to attend MiA as well. Tony also appreciates that Rivergate Marketing chooses to be a CSIA vendor partner, which is unique because the company does not directly benefit from membership like the other vendor partners who supply equipment. Georgia said, “I love being part of CSIA. It gives me the ability to network with the integrators, and I see how valuable the organization is to their businesses too, and I like to stay apart of that. CSIA is very valuable to their business, and my brother Sam is a huge believer in CSIA and how much it’s helped his business. I find that the integrators that are a part of CSIA really care about their businesses and they are in a mode of continuous improvement and that’s the kind of people I want to do business with. It’s a great place to be. I’m looking forward to the CSIA Executive Conference, and I hope to see plenty of integrators there and be able to network with everyone.”