In this webinar we assume that you already know who your customers are, you have a website that functions in many capacities, your social media presence is primarily limited to one or two, and usually managed by one person who wears many hats with very little or no marketing experience.

LET’S JUMP RIGHT INTO WORKABLE STRATEGIES

Developing strategies are important and shouldn’t be avoided. They just need to be workable, realistic, and achievable for implementation. We’ll focus on three strategies to build your tactics around. With easy online digital marketing approaches, you'll keep your organization ahead of the game without the stressful cost of learning by trial and error.

TACTICS TO TURN AROUND YOUR BUSINESS AND BUILD YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

We’ll demonstrate ways to take your traditional brick-and-mortar to a digital presence with easy tactics. We’ll look at how you can use your website’s role, forming email lists, simple and persuasive formulas for how to carry out a email and social media campaign to generate leads, and turning leads into clients.

FOCUSED CONTENT AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT

Creating your content is driven by your strategy. How to create a calendar for your company that includes content to direct your employees with focused social media content, directs your messaging in email and mobile text messages, and website promos to drive your products and services.

MAXIMIZE YOUR COMPANY’S WEBSITE AS A E-COMMERCE VESSEL

Your company’s website is your digital hub functioning in many capacities beyond simply creating an online presence. Websites with higher conversion rates, simplifying menus and search bars to avoid confusing visitors, common missteps to avoid, and building an email subscriber list - all to create great user experiences and drive sells.

FREE AND COST-EFFECTIVE TOOLS WITH BIG PAYOFFS THAT GO A LONG WAY

Cost effective tools to centralize and continuously build your company’s email marketing presence, send text group messages to your clients to assist with product promotions, and cross-sell with building and maintaining a social media presence.

ENHANCING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE

As your company’s leader, you have very little to no time to check your social platforms. We’ll demonstrate a few approaches to take on your current platforms for just minutes per week to promote your company, change your mind-set from owner to one who thinks like a key stakeholder, and rather than as an owner.

UTILIZING YOUR EMPLOYEES TO THEIR FULL POTENTIAL

Everyone in your company has the potential to promote your products and goods. Let’s turn them into your organization’s “digital brand ambassadors” with little training and lots of results. We’ll show you simple techniques for your team that can be applied where your company’s most sophisticated digital advocate will champion, and your most ardent luddite will feel comfortable to embrace.

GETTING THE FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT

Many platforms have basic tracking and metrics that you can utilize; we’ll show you the ideal ones to track, monitor, and provide the best analytics to improve your ROI.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Focus on how to get the fundamentals right
• Optimize your website for e-commerce
• Utilizing your team in the most efficient way
• Assigning staff tasks with little to no marketing experience
• Think “stakeholder” in self-promoting your business on your personal social media platforms
• Develop e-commerce best practices for your website
• Simplifying tracking and monitoring to avoid wasting time
• Choosing the right metrics for your company and improve your metrics where it’s most needed
• How to get clients, gain market share and serve your audience

FIND TALENT WITHIN THE PANDEMIC LANDSCAPE

How does your human resources department find talent? How does it attract, retain, and engage a digital workforce, all while keeping the old manufacturing system running? Rethinking your employee career path requires renewed focus. This will involve re-evaluating your performance management policies.

KEEP YOUR EMPLOYEES

Keeping your valued workers from jumping ship requires the bold implementation of new employee retention techniques. You’ll rethink how you offer incentives and benefits. Learn from a Tulsa, Oklahoma manufacturer’s leadership example, which shifted its focus from discounts on gym memberships to providing a state-of-the-art, comprehensive wellness program for its 900 employees.

ATTRACT TALENT WITH INNOVATION

Thinking outside the box to attract qualified candidates will take some non-traditional approaches. Generating exposure for your company may involve reaching out to areas not normally associated with your business. You might have to shift your focus to recruit from populations currently underrepresented in manufacturing. We’ll show you what works.

SPEAK TO MILLENNIALS IN THEIR LANGUAGE

Here, you’ll actively dispel myths about manufacturing careers by highlighting the benefits of working in the industry. Learn techniques to market to millennials, such as emphasizing that manufacturing has the highest average wages of private sector industries ($81,289) and the highest tenure for workers (9.7 years). You can alter public perceptions about the industry’s careers as a whole.

WORK WITHIN A NEW SCOPE OF NATIONAL TALENT

Due to COVID-19 worker migrations to various regions of the U.S. have changed employee demographics, creating ongoing talent shortages, and altering employment landscapes. Discover the strategies that companies are using to optimize their employee candidate bases.

EXPAND YOUR TECHNOLOGY FOOTPRINT

It’s important to understand technology’s road map within the manufacturing industry and how it will affect hiring new workers. The Manufacturing Industry 4.0 (MI4.0) is shifting toward technology-oriented positions and fewer assembly jobs. Achieving staffing levels will be replaced by securing new types of workers to program advanced machinery.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Has COVID-19 made retaining your employees more challenging than ever? Corporate culture is what makes a company recover quickly—and even profitably—or falter. Learn how businesses are developing strategies to accommodate today’s disruptions.
• Are you struggling to retain your staff beyond a year or two? Revamp your employment development plan into one that increases engagement and communication. This will allow your workers to develop their skills while you boost their compensation over the long term.
• Are you offering the same employee incentives and benefits as other industries? Learn how to make your packages stand out.
• Re-evaluating your recruiting strategy? Learn what other companies are doing, like changing employee review ratings. For example, instead of evaluating the ability to produce 100 widgets, assess how your employee was able to improve efficiency by programming a robot to produce 500 widgets.
• Are you attracting good candidates but not hearing “yes” to your offers? Learn how some companies are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get the word out about manufacturing careers.
• Lots of resumes but no good candidates? Maybe there are! Learn how to change your company’s job descriptions to focus less on a job candidate’s past positions and more on what’s really needed to do the job—including tech skills—so promising candidates aren’t disqualified based on their past roles.
• Does manufacturing have an image problem? Okay, so manufacturing isn’t sexy to millennials. You can change that. Develop active and effective strategies to dispel myths about manufacturing careers.
• Thinking of delaying your MI4.0 new hire implementation until COVID-19 passes? The role of MI4.0 is actually the most critical amid the pandemic. Creating strategies to attract new employees is worth the investment now if you’re going to stay ahead of the curve.

Towan Isom is the President and CEO of Isom Global Strategies (IGS), an award-winning strategic communications, public relations, and digital advertising firm in Washington, DC. Since starting IGS in her basement 20 years ago, Towan has generated over $22 million dollars in annual revenue. IGS’ clients have included Nike, Comcast Xfinity, the US Marine Corps, Department of Commerce, the US Army, GlaxoSmithKline, and numerous other Fortune 500 companies and federal government agencies with a combined revenue in the billions.

Towan founded her communications firm while transitioning from BET Networks (a Viacom company) and the public broadcasting giant, PBS. Clients and partners often cite Towan’s ability to create, curate, and cultivate culturally appropriate campaigns. A graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, Towan funnels her decades-long experience in corporate consulting, marketing, and public relations into her personal brand, TowanIsom.com, and helping her clients.

Working with Millennials from early on, Towan grew her firm 710% in one year and landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private small businesses two years in a row. Towan is the leading expert other CEOs call when they want to lead, engage, and develop Millennials in the workplace. Towan Isom is the author of Managing Millennials: How to Hyper-Grow Your Company with Millennials (www.ManagingtheMillennials.com) and Chasing Greatness: The Young Professional’s Guide to a Dynamic Life.

While running her own company, Towan lectures, trains, and consults for other CEOs, organizational leaders, and small businesses at every level, whether home-based, micro-sized, or hyper-growth businesses, on how to win and scale their businesses for success in the digital age.

Cardell is a partner in the Transaction Advisory Services group at Aprio, LLP. Cardell has over 15 years of tax consulting experience serving clients across a wide range of industries, including construction, distribution, financial services, manufacturing and telecommunications. Prior to joining Aprio, Cardell was a senior director with the Alvarez & Marsal Transaction Tax Group and a former member of the Mergers & Acquisitions Transaction Services Group at Deloitte & Touche, LLP.

Cardell focuses on advising financial and strategic clients on the tax aspects and structuring of taxable and tax-free transactions. These include mergers and acquisitions, dispositions, restructurings, leveraged buy-outs and recapitalizations. He has been involved in all aspects of due diligence, transaction structuring and reviews of transaction-related documents.

Cardell has assisted in providing tax solutions for companies going through different phases of their life cycle, such as mergers and acquisitions, dispositions, bankruptcies and ownership changes. The tax solutions provide a variety of structures to retain valuable tax attributes (e.g. NOLs, tax credits, etc.), maximizing value and flexibility for all parties involved.

Cardell earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in taxation from the University of Alabama.

Bill is a director in the Transaction Advisory Services group at Aprio. Bill has over seven years of and merger, acquisition and divestiture due diligence experience with Aprio. Bill’s primary focus is manufacturing, distribution, consumer products, software and retail industries. He has worked on transactions varying in size from $1 million to approximately $500 million.

He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration with a major in Accounting and Masters of Accountancy at the University of Georgia and is a licensed CPA in Georgia.

Bill’s professional and civic/not-for-profit affiliations include:

• American Institute for Certified Public Accountants
• Associate for Corporate Growth – Young ACG Steering Committee
• Technology Association of Georgia – TAG Young Professionals Board Member
• Rebecca’s Tent – Board Member & Treasurer
• University of Georgia Alumni Association

Wesley Brandon is President of Sienna Dynamics, a leader in electrical systems integration and manufacturing services, delivering reliable and high-quality solutions to enable innovation and progress for some of the most cutting-edge tech companies, including Tesla, Lucid Motors, and KLA. Prior to Sienna Dynamics, Wesley served as President at CTEMS, a subsidiary of Jack Cooper Investments and the largest over-the-road specialty logistics company in North America with over $600M in sales.

Wesley led organizations such as Rockwell Automation, Callaway Golf, Jack Cooper, Procter & Gamble, NuFACE, and Life Technologies to significant growth through engineering expansion, commercial innovations, and turnarounds. He has worked with both internal and external financial professionals to develop and implement financial systems that reduced risk and achieved Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Wesley’s executive leadership experience includes P&L management, product development, mergers & acquisitions, commercial innovation, and engineering management.

Currently, Wesley serves on the boards of Palo Alto Partners in Education, 4CITY, and the YPO SF Bay Chapter.

Wesley earned a BSE in both Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering from Duke University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.