Tom Schwab is a veteran in a nuclear power plant and an inbound engineer. In this episode, he shares his unique approach to social media platforms and how to use today’s technology with marketable value to his passion and work.
“He focuses on time-proven strategy, and supercharges it with today’s technology.”
Tom helps advising, teaching and leading people using target podcasts.
02:42 Work is what you do and not necessarily where you go.
Tom shares how his life and work startin...
Tom Schwab is a veteran in a nuclear power plant and an inbound engineer. In this episode, he shares his unique approach to social media platforms and how to use today’s technology with marketable value to his passion and work.
“He focuses on time-proven strategy, and supercharges it with today’s technology.”
Tom helps advising, teaching and leading people using target podcasts.
02:42 Work is what you do and not necessarily where you go.
Tom shares how his life and work starting in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Growing up in the Midwest a proud alumni of Dayville Academy, he ran a nuclear power plant where he learned discipline and where everything can be taught and systematized.
He taught himself and moved from sales to marketing to finally running his own distributorship. He started a company that supplies direct to patient durable medical equipment.
When he started his company in the middle of the great recession, making it difficult to establish a real salesforce, he then hired MIT graduates that created Hubspot in Boston that helped him create an inbound marketing strategy.
They have used content to lure customers to their business, and in 2014, started podcast interviews as additional means for their marketing.
03:34 Inbound marketing, how you used content to attract, engage, and delight customers.
Now, he has his team in the United States, serving about 90 clients, helping them promote their businesses through podcasts to tell their stories and help them reach their potential customers.
With selling DME’s to direct set of clients using inbound marketing, his business was voted 2nd unsexiest products sold with inbound marketing in one conference.
As their initial target market are people in crutches, or will be on crutches, and fresh from surgery or from any traumatic experiences, they have gone to analyze who their target audiences must or would be and that set the tone of their marketing.
They started to think of ways to gain their potential customers trust and respect in order to be known for the field of product that they are selling.
06:08 Nobody goes online and says, hmm, what am I going to be sold on today? Everybody goes online with a problem, and to look for answers to their problems.
06:48 The best way to sell something today is not to sell anything, but earn the respect, awareness and trust of those who might buy.
Tom shares with Shmuel the payment methods of the products that they are selling. Ultimately, it all depends whether they are covered by insurance, and when they have to be shouldered privately by the patients of by a healthcare professional, nursing homes, etcs…
Stories are also shared to understand how podcast contents are planned. The best way to attract the focused audience for the specific health care topics, and from there, the talks will make its way into looking for tangible products to use when coping up with certain traumas or accidents.
Tom’s company’s goal is to eventually have the patients or customers look for their business understands they potential limitations, knowing the product that they are selling is a means to help people recover from accidents.
10:37 Shmuel to Tom: You’re targeting people with the problems, not people who are looking for the solution. And that makes sense.
One client actually commended Tom and his team, telling them they are “Preparation H”, because they are doctor-recommended, focuses on the problem, get rid of the pain.
“Nobody cares about your product or your service. All they care about is their pain and their rear end.” And because the team is focused on helping the client on that, they so much better that the other suppliers.
13:03 If one person is asking the question, chances are other people are asking it too.
Another good point discussed in this episode is time-frame of the consumer, from not-knowing to purchasing, as per Tom’s experience, and even though it differs on the needs of each individual, another factor that weighs in on the time scale is the binding cycle of the product. How much does it cost for this number of days or months?
15:37 Biggest problem is obscurity. There are thousands of people we could help if they only knew we existed.
Shmuel interestingly discusses the businesses’ concerns as well, and their needs to tweak their products in order to cater to the needs of their industry, but ends up compromising the integrity of their products.
17:12 Scarcity mentality. I don’t see people asking for me so it must be that I’m not in demand, so let me try to adjust my product to address the needs of the people in front of me.
He pointed out the importance of sticking to the business product, assuming that the product is genuinely good, and avoid obnoxiously focusing away on the unique gift and talent of the product, and that will eventually make its way to the right customers/people.
19:04 Assuming that you have a real product that solves a real problem, then all you need to do is find the people that feels that pain.
Tom continues to suggest ways to maximize marketing by creating meaningful content that offers solutions to the focused customer’s problems.
It also creates harmonious deals with clients being specific with the services that they offer and that if they came across someone who doesn’t appreciate their business, they can proudly let go of the sales, making them accept the ideal clients that they need for their businesses.
Podcasts, for Tom, have become a serious game in the technology industry right now. As it was discussed in Harvard, and group of companies making purchases on podcasts, people seem to appreciate and realize the legit business into it.
23:10 You ask a business owner to write a blog, that’s a homework assignment. You ask them to be interviewed in a podcast, they can talk about their company and their passion all day long.
So now, as podcasts becomes appreciated as a more natural approach to introduce companies and ideas, it has also become a better and more effective approach for marketing businesses.
Inbound marketing, according to Tom, should be focused on understanding the business and strategize it using the current tools. For him, it isn’t solely being dependent on certain tools like podcasts, but using technology and platform and answering the why’s in using it.
Tom and Shmuel also gets into discussing transactions versus relationship and which platforms are better for which purpose, blogs or podcasts.
Tom enumerates the factors of this technology and the percentage possibility on which will be more successful in engaging with the audiences/customers.
As the episode ends, Shmuel also questions SEO technology, asking why if someone typed in “Can I build my business through podcast marketing?” and the podcast is not the first one on the list.
Tom explains Google’s new technology in planning to transcribe audios moving forward.
He also understood that more than the transcription, the suggested links were also about the people wants, plusmore other factors in the search engine, meaning that the suggestions aren’t just based on the titles but also the referencing and mentions in between the sites and podcasts.
Resources
Follow Tom Here!
http://interviewvalet.com/9to5
Book Reference
They Ask; You Answer
