Jeremy Weisz 14:10
just describe what we’re looking at, because people may be just listening. And also, what did it look like before right now describe what we’re seeing here. And with that with the branding, and then what was it like before this?
Orit Oz 14:23
So so first of all, what you’re showing here is a wide range of marketing materials we can see exhibition booth. So if you think that whenever there’s a tradeshow anywhere in the world was will look the same, the internet packaging, so everything, you know, icons, explaining it’s one of the things that I think are interesting with this is a product in the end gets to the house, it gets to the consumer, but it’s still a very technological product. So usually the person that will recommend it is a professional person. So that’s now outlook about the question how it looks, one of the things was the product is called dolphin. And for many years in the world, it was known as dolphin, it’s still known as dolphin biomechatronics.
But part of what we did in the brand strategy is really giving the Maytronics umbrella because in order to enable more product lines come in, over the last 15 years, we’ve done I think about three rebranding each time updating the look and feel, making it more up to date more connected to the new products, because they come up with new products all the time, they and so the what we do always connects to the business strategy of the company.
So if Maytronics at the beginning had a premium product, and later on, they decided they’re gonna widen that to to, you know, you have now a lot of people have a swimming pool in the garden, that’s, you know, they bought an index or whatever swimming pool not. So they develop products that will work for there as well. So, our work is always to support with the marketing materials and with the messaging to support the company’s strategy. So
Jeremy Weisz 16:21
let’s talk about you know, I could see how you want the brand strategy and the look in the field to be universal. So wherever you are, people will actually recognize it. The second part is also the digital marketing. What were some of the things you did on the digital marketing side? Because I’m looking at this and it says, you know, digital marketing 360, SEO, HubSpot webinars, smart content, what were some of the things you did on the digital marketing side? So
Orit Oz 16:48
actually, I think digital marketing takes us a bit fast forward. So perhaps I’ll change the example if that’s okay with you. Sure. Well, I’ll press festival, I can say a few words about how the, how AWS evolved into digital marketing. 10 years ago, we didn’t have the technology we have today. So over the, in the last about seven years, we’ve added more and more capabilities in the company today, about half of activity in ours is digital marketing. We have here a team that can really be an extension of our marketing department in for our clients.
I said before that, you know, Maytronics has really really grown, they have a lot of the capabilities in house. So the example I want to give as perhaps a different example is a company that doesn’t have a very, very big marketing department, they have perhaps a marketing manager, CMO, and perhaps a marketing communications or digital marketing manager. And now in order to do really effective marketing activities around the world, you need about five or six different people, each one with a different expertise. You need someone to write the content, and you need someone to do the strategy. And you need someone to do the SEO and the PPC and Inbound and HubSpot. And a lot of you know, the I think the digital marketing has a lot of expertise in it.
So the place that we bring value is companies that don’t have the ability to, to bring in all these people, we actually that’s why we call ourself your marketing partner, we become their partner, and we become an extension of their company, of their marketing agency for theirs. If you can see there’s a company perhaps a good example is Teflon you can see here, Teflon is if we’re talking about water technologies there, there are companies that sell to the in the agriculture market. And then we operate as an extension of their marketing department really building up there we did, we gave the whole package here. So we started building their brand strategy and updating their look and feel. But in the digital marketing, as you can see, it says here to the mighty 360 degrees which means we are like their team.
So we we build a yearly plan, we build the content strategy, and then we really we have people here that are like their mark, the digital marketing managers helping them during the activities for the company, if they have a trade show now so a month and a half before we start promoting the trade show and doing sponsored campaigns. And so it’s really you know, I think talking about it, I can say that one of the biggest advantages us today is the combination between the branding capabilities and the messaging to the digital marketing and we see out you know a lot of competition there either branding agencies or digital marketing agencies, there are many companies that have both capabilities combined very, very strongly and it brings a big advantage because we see the whole picture. So if we after we’ve created the brand, we know exactly what their value proposition is what the messaging is, and we start breaking it down and sort of if we know we, they have a tradeshow now we will design the booth but we’ll also do the marketing materials the company.
So that’s a good example of a smaller company or medium sized company in Israel, that we can really give them the whole package. I wanted to go back to your question and give an example because he talked about the global challenge. So I want to give a different completely different example with a bigger company called Stratasys. Stratasys is a world leader in 3D printers.
Jeremy Weisz 21:02
Quick question or we’ll talk about stress in a second I just have a question about this one is why does Israel have so many more innovations around the water filtration and in that space irrigation?
Orit Oz 21:23
I think that the answer is very simple. Half more than half of Israel is desert Israelis in general all the notion of startup notion it startup nation comes from I think our culture that when you have a problem you have to solve the problem. So many many years ago when we have a small country and half the country is desert. The question was okay, how do we grow agriculture in the desert? And from there there were then all the dripper irrigations and a lot of innovations came out also all the all the needs for I don’t know if you know, but Israel has today.
I hope I’m not met in between 70 and 90% of the water in Israel is water that’s been desalination water. So water from the sea that has been so we have a lot of the innovation in Israel comes out from the pulp problems we have so agriculture today, there’s no problem water in Israel, because we have all these desalination plants. And in general, I think that’s true for a lot of things that happen in Israel water technologies, and agri tech, you one of the leading innovations. When you look at our customers, you sort of get the range of what Israel really is strong in or you know, what are the and you can see us there in the industry.
Jeremy Weisz 23:00
So you know, you’re the agriculture here you have water treatment, tech, medical, automotive, high tech, and manufacturing. b2b To see to Yeah. Anyways, I just want to ask about that. And then the second on the on this one, or it is the webinars what kind of stuff and work you do around with webinars for competition.
Orit Oz 23:23
Okay, so one of one of the biggest challenges is to try and bring in new into bring it into array and bring in leads the company wants to bring, make the exposure as big as possible, bring the awareness as big as possible. We found it started in the COVID that perhaps I’ll go back a step for before. One of the tools that a lot of technological companies have is seminars. So what they used to do, they used to bring over 15-20 engineers for five days, give them a very interesting seminar, take them around as well to see Israel to learn about what’s happening here. And that was one of the main marketing tools. When the COVID started, everything stopped.
And really, I think in two or three weeks, we came and offered them to do instead of those seminars, we said, let’s create webinars and do webinars. And really, we did a very, very fast shift. And what was unbelievable is, instead of 15-20 engineers coming over, suddenly, we had 300 people all around the world, listening to the webinar. Now a webinar is when you create a webinar, you have to bring value to the people. So first of all, the people that come on the webinar are really really that the right fit. They’re usually really good leads potential customers. And also one of the great things about the webinar is that it’s a very, very strong marketing tool before, during and after. So before, where you put up the, you know, you promote it around the around the social media and email marketing, all the
Jeremy Weisz 25:15
A lot of the awareness we have.
Orit Oz 25:17
Yes. And then you start people start registering. So even if, in the end, the statistics say that about 50% of the people that register will attend, it’s okay for us, because when we do the webinar, we record it. And now we have content that we can distribute. And we have really, really good leads that you can lead nurture, and you can send them materials and, and you have questions that we found that the webinar is, I think one of the most powerful marketing tools, the only thing that you need is really good content.
So as long as you have good content, you can really, really leverage it to great things. And then afterwards, you keep it online, people can download it, people can listen to it afterwards. So I would say that webinar is one of our, you know, we have a lot of different tools, so that the webinar is one of the strongest tools. But in the end, when we build a marketing strategy for for customer online marketing strategy, what we try and look at the urine. So they have places where you know, either it’s a tradeshow or it’s a webinar or it’s conference, so the anchors, and then we will create the marketing materials around that.
Jeremy Weisz 26:36
And we’ll talk about you know, we are mentioning, or read around the three phases, kind of the evolution of your company, it kind of, you know, went from graphic studio, to branding, to digital and doing all digital stuff. Well, we’ll go back to kind of the inception, where it came from the color graphic side, kind of from the graphic to the branding, and seems the Maytronics. And then we go from branding to digital, which is the Stratasys.
So talk about some of the stuff that you did, you know, because interesting to see from a digital agency perspective, the evolution that any agency goes, sometimes I found they’ve decreased their services, and they started one and then some have grown because of the need of their clients are demanding of them these things, what what kind of work to do with
Orit Oz 27:32
Stratasys. So first of all, I just want to a small correction from our perception, we moved from being a branding agency to a marketing agency. Today in the marketing, a lot of the marketing activities is online is digital marketing, but not only. And I think that’s part of the understanding that you want to combine online offline. So I think the first of all talk about the evolution of the company of ours, it’s from being from supporting the marketing activities to really being part of the marketing activities. Now, I told quite a long story about Tiff and it’s a medium sized company.
Stratasys is a very, very big company, a global company, they have the I think that the one of the two biggest companies for 3d printing. And the big challenge that we found there was, first of all, I’ll say a few words about Stratasys. They produce 3D printers, but they produce 3D printers, for automotive and also for medical and for dentists and for aerospace. So you have so many different verticals, it’s really a big challenge. So you have that one challenge many, many verticals, many different target audiences.
And the second challenge is that after all those things we did also, you want to do globally, so you want to do in France, and in Germany and in the US and in Asia and wherever it is. And what happens a lot of times is that if they’re in one country, they’re in the marketing department of, let’s say Stratasys. In France, there’s someone that knows digital marketing, so they start working and doing, you know, posting online and doing things online. What we understood is that the big challenge in on social media is that you want to build a strong brand, which means you want your brand to look the same all around the world. If you think of Coca Cola, there’s no question Coca Cola looks the same all around the world, but they do even Coca Cola has their source of adaptions local adaption. So the what we did here
The one of the projects that we did was to create a social media strategy, the global social media strategy for Stratasys. And to build the guidelines so that we built a guideline that talks about what you talk about, what are the values, it’s very big project, so I won’t be able to talk about it, talk about it all. But in the end, the outcome was very, very big manual that gives explains all around the world, how they need, how they should work on the different social media platforms. So how they work and how they need to work in LinkedIn, how on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, whatever they’re doing, also giving guidelines but also understanding that they will, each country will have their own adaptions.
And each business unit will come out with their content. So the content comes is created from all around the world. So you have sort of it’s if you can think of it as something that starts from the headquarters down, but also from the business units up. So it’s like so it’s, and I think the Appleton, it’s it’s a project that is evolving all the time, it’s not something you know, digital marketing isn’t something to stop, but it really, it really sort of made sort of some kind of unity made it unified, unifying, if you can say, what you’re what we’re seeing here is like the templates, templates for webinars templates for if you’re showing your use case, templates for different things that they can use. And these are now all around the world, and they’re working with them.
Jeremy Weisz 31:52
It seems like it seems very complicated, because you have, it would be complicated, if it was just dental, even, right. But now, like, if you’re looking at the screen, we could see some of these 3d printing, there’s a bunch of dental examples, okay, that it’s still a pretty complicated project, because it’s global. And it’s gotta have, like you said, all the guidelines, but now you add, you know, you know, dental, you add healthcare, you when you add all these other, you know, use cases? Where do you start with getting the, like everyone on the same page, even though there’s different uses and products.
Orit Oz 32:39
So just to clarify about the project, they were looking about, looking at the dental the dental actually was, it was a strategic project. And it was to brand dental division, under Stratasys. Okay, so I think that’s a good example, when you work with very, very big companies, then you have these, you have these projects, that strategic products. So what is the value proposition of the strategies, strategies, products for the dental market? That was a strategic project? And, and there are a lot of those going on. But what we were talking about before is, and you’re right, it’s really complicated is really building some kind of guideline that is that on one side is makes it clear to everyone how to how, what the, the tone of voice is going to be, what, what different kinds of content can we create?
How do we post on different platforms, but on the other side, to give them the freedom to really create their own content, because we want the content, you know, if you have a perhaps key opinion leader, that someone that works with their with with their printer somewhere and you want them to publish content, we want that to happen as well, you know, we don’t want it all to be cooperate. But so it’s, it’s very delicate sort of balance between creating guidelines so that when people see content from Stratasys, all around the world, they say, ah, this is Stratasys.
On the other hand, give them the freedom to really keep the and yes, it’s complicated projects. And, and also, I think it’s a product that evolves. I think everyone’s learning, you know, learning this the this idea of how do I really create now I have social media and I have so many different sources of content coming out. How do I really create strengthen the brand and it’s something that I can say that it’s a big challenge, we see it, we see it with a lot of our customers, not all the companies that their customers is an online so much. So that’s also something to understand their countries or there are verticals where there’s a big question about our farmers online or not online, you know, where how do I catch them? They have their mobile phone they. So yes, it’s I think the b2b in general is complicated, but very fascinating and interest rate,
Jeremy Weisz 35:25
how did you get started talking about the transition from employee to founder, that was, you’re
Orit Oz 35:35
taking me back 30 years back. From the beginning of the story, actually, I started my career with a company called scar. Scar is, as well known in Israel, I think it was maybe quite well known, is an industrial company that Warren Buffett acquired about, I think, seven, eight years ago, he still defines it as the best company ever acquired. It’s a company that manufactures physical, they develop and manufacture cutting tools to the metal industry, leading in the world. They were acquired for over four and a half billion dollars, I think, if I remember right, quite many years ago, before that today, it’s already become the multiples have grown.
But anyway, very, very good company. And it was my, I would say, my school for marketing. I work there in the marketing department as a marketing communications manager there, and was in charge with the team for all the marketing communications of scouring the world. So that was you can understand the sort of the, I’d say, opened my path to my career, I worked there for five years, I loved every minute of it, it was a company that had great budgets for marketing, they really, really believed in marketing, which is something that’s a lot of times very challenging in industrial companies, that other times, we have to persuade industrial companies, they really need to invest in marketing, they are much more into sales. So you can’t really put in a lot.
The marketing was really the center of the company. And after five years, and really doing from catalogs, to multimedia to designing the website, when it was really, I think probably one of the first websites, industrial, you know, business websites in Israel and doing great things I just said many times I’ve been asked about this, I just had a felt I need to go I want to do something independently. And it was it’s strange, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot since because I’d been asked about it. Why do you live? Really great job, you know, I was really successful, and I really liked it. To start something by yourself, and I don’t have the the answer. I just think I felt that I wanted to do something for myself. I’m very, very optimistic person.
And a person sees opportunities everywhere. So just it seemed to me that, okay, I’m gonna, you know, buy a Macintosh and I was a designer. So, you know, start designing for companies that want my what my work? What happens was that the expertise that I came out with, and the fact that I’m located in the north, which we didn’t talk about, that’s unusual. I don’t live in Tel Aviv where everything happens in Israel. I actually live in the Galilee. So the combination of those two things, I think. So the Mei brought to me. Companies like EA Scout were technical companies.
And very quickly I started employing people and growing and I think one of the advantages there was I understood, even though we were graphic studio, we understood, we looked at the marketing materials through the marketing eyes. So we brought in something that I think was was then an advantage and the company grew very quickly and after probably a year or two, when I was finding myself designing at two o’clock in the morning, I understood I have to stop designing and going to and since then I’ve been I see myself more as a marketeer and you know, strategy and managing the company. I think the lessons I’ve learned from grinder company is probably a podcast by itself so we won’t go into it, but it’s really
Jeremy Weisz 39:55
one of those lessons.
Orit Oz 39:56
The biggest lesson I may I took me quite a few years is to really trust, trust people bring in people that know how to know, to do things better than you do in their profession. And, and changing your job, you’re my job today isn’t doing the work, it’s actually mentoring people actually, you know, being really more a mentor more grind, the people in my team grind my managers that grow their teams, and it was something that took me I mean, it’s not easy, not easy to sort of go back, give the responsibility 100% to the people that are under you, in my journey, I had nearly 10 years that I wasn’t the CEO of my own company, I brought in the CEO, someone that grew up.
So that was a big lesson of really giving her the space and the responsibility really managing the company, while I sort of went aside that so I think it’s understanding that, you know, we may do things very, very well, maybe, maybe very good at things, but we make mistakes as well like, employees and, and just to, to have this as a verb to, to really have the understanding that if you bring in really, really good people, a really good team, you can go, I have to say in that aspect that I understood a few years ago that digital marketing will never be my mother time. It was I talked about it as my second language.
And I understood it when my son, my oldest son, that digital marketer, and he works in technology company, when we spoke when we talk together, and when I really understood that I will never understand digital marketing, like he was born into it. So it’s his mother tongue. And it’s my second language. I think that’s an understanding as well, that we bring a lot of experience we bring, you know, why the you know, but but in the end, with all this technology in the world changing, I think it’s really important to bring the people that can really that really,
Jeremy Weisz 42:14
yeah, so you obviously have hired team members that are — that’s their strength. I’m wondering, when you brought in a CEO? Or what did your role look like, at that point?
Orit Oz 42:26
So I feel first of all, for about two years, I just went back. I need that sort of it was after seven years, 17 years of managing company, I just needed to get out of the everyday, and, and sort of bring my life back to myself, I think, in a way. And what what’s happened in from that experience, is that when I came back to manage the company, two and a half years ago, there was already the company is much more organized because me as an entrepreneur, you know,
I am very I see opportunities all the time, and what’s the next thing and that so first of all, my main role in those years, were bringing the next thing, bringing in the next strategic project, bringing in the next trends and understanding what being an entrepreneur, the everyone talks about, you know, you have the visionary, visionary and the
Jeremy Weisz 43:25
integrator. Yep, integrator.
Orit Oz 43:28
I’m a terrible integrator, everyone always says that it really, really terrible and understanding that you know, is bigger than sending. So I love being in the more business development place. That’s what I did. Most of the time. When I had a CEO. Coming back, I came back I actually said, it’s the first time I’m a real, I’m really a CEO. Because I started the company, I was in everything. I wasn’t really a CEO, I was the marketing manager, I was account manager I was after going back, coming back as the co chair I came back much more mature much more,
I think ready and to a company that already had management and today I really see my role, as I said before as being as sort of managing the company managing the helping the team, you know, grow the business. I am still seeing what’s the next thing that we need. What’s the next challenge? How, you know, how do we go forward all the time.
Jeremy Weisz 44:38
I want to talk about mentors that have helped along the way. But talk about how is EO impacted you?
Orit Oz 44:48
in general, talking about mentors at any junction I had in my career. I always had someone next to me. I never did it by myself, I never, whenever I had, you know, had sort of jumps to the next thing, I always, I really, really believe in finding the right people in the right stages and learning from people that have done it. So that’s general, I joined EO two and a half years ago. And the first thing I understood was, I was so sorry I didn’t join earlier, really, really, it, I joined EO, in quite a challenging time, it was just before I came back to manage the company. And the first of all, when you meet in the fire, Oh, mine, the chapter, you understand how most of the people around us in our everyday our employees, there aren’t business owners.
And I have really, I have really, really good friends that were CEOs of, you know, really big companies, hundreds of millions of dollars, and that but in the end, it’s not their company, and the when you meet the people in Yo, you understand this, there’s some kind of energy and, and also the safe zone that you’re in understanding that you whenever you meet someone from yo you can sit, you’ve never met them before you’ll sit after quarter an hour, you can open up your hearts and say everything. And I think that those are the things that really, really, really have helped me.
We’re now as we’re recording this, we’re in a very, very challenging time in Israel, a month into the war and altered things that we’ve passed and the support we’ve got from around the world that has been really there were days where I felt that they sort of pushed me pushed me, you know, to continue and to go forward and really to really, so it’s from one side is the support from the other side, really to speak with people have already been there done, it has been down been up. The value that I get from the forum is that I, whoever I can recommend to join you as a young entrepreneur, young founder i do i really think it’s it’s really, really great organization.
Jeremy Weisz 47:33
I want to if people don’t know what to do, it’s called Entrepreneurs’ Organization. I think there’s over, I don’t know, 14,000 people in over 60 countries. So it’s a global organization. It’s where people get together and share what they’re working on challenges, struggles and have a group to support that. So the other question, obviously, you mentioned this, how is the war affected your company,
Orit Oz 48:00
explaining what’s happening here is something that perhaps the I, I understand people don’t really understand the reality we live in four and a half weeks ago, with all the terrible things that happen here. First of all, Israel is very small country, you reach you, they say you reach any person with three connections. So you can understand that there isn’t anyone here in Israel that doesn’t know someone that was killed, or that’s been kidnapped, or that’s missing, first of all, emotionally, it’s very, very big, very, very difficult time. And it still is, but then, just to talk about what’s happening in the everyday so they’ve, there’s 350,000, men and women that’s been queued up to the army.
One of my sons a month ago, he’s an engineer in a startup company, puts on his uniform left his wife, and since he’s been in the Northeast Israel training, hopefully you won’t need to fight but 350,000 people, men and women have stopped their life and are now in the army. Then for three weeks, there were no schools. So my team I didn’t say but out of the 30 people and it might have 25 women, lots of them young women with young children at home so three weeks at home with the children but still continuing to work while they’re putting the you know, making sure that the children are okay luckily they’ve gone back to school and back to kindergarten so that’s made easier but after saying that, think of a lot of places in Israel two three times a day you get you have a siren there rockets coming over. You have to run into the bomb shelter.
And after seeing all that we continue to work we continue to deliver we have our customers have customers all around the world, we know the world is continuing to work. And in all those challenging situations we continue to work, I think the biggest impact it’s had on us is that everything has slowed down. So for me, my main focus today is to retain my team, and to try and bring in work from outside of Israel, as we were saying, most of our clients are headquartered in Israel with global operations, but we do have customers from outside Israel, and the understanding that if we succeed, to bring in, you know, if there are more companies that really can value from my expertise from our experience, and bring in projects from outside of Israel, that will be my, that’s the main thing I’m now focusing on.
And, you know, trying to bring in work so that we can we talk about continue to, to the Israeli economy needs to continue to run, that’s part of our strength here, we can’t just stop the economy. So for us, we get up in the morning, in order to do that, to continue to run the Israeli economy and to really serve our customers, and hopefully to bring our expertise and our experience to other companies in the world. So from just an example, out from such a big challenge, I hope there’ll be an opportunity here and really, to do it, but it’s been challenging times emotionally, and you know, what’s going around, but even so, I think that we’re strong people, and we don’t have a choice.
And we’ll continue to succeed, just to say, as well, that to see the impact it’s hard on the world is also very, very, it’s really hard for us see how Jewish people around the world have really been impacted from this. And it’s not easy, but I think, you know, where we were optimistic people, and we believe that we will continue and grow from this from this big, big crisis that has been here.
Jeremy Weisz 52:14
Right, first of all, I hope your son and everyone else, you know, stay safe. And on the global strategy, you know, so anyone thinking of, okay, we need this global strategy, we need these guidelines to build because we’re all over the, you know, all over the map, who are ideal? Who are some of the ideal companies that you think of maybe that aren’t in Israel, that would be a good fit for your company?
Orit Oz 52:41
So that’s a great question. And I can give an example, an example of quite a few years ago, five or six years ago, I got an email from a, from a company called Axon that are located in California family owned company that they are in water technologies, they manufacture very special. Min brands, it’s called. So very, very micro filtration
Jeremy Weisz 53:10
membrane around membranes. membranes, yeah.
Orit Oz 53:15
membranes, I would say, why is that the right one, it’s far it’s for the selling nation. And for very, very, very microfiltration. He sent us an email and said, I would like to have a meeting with you. And because I want to do a brand strategy projects and to the world. hasn’t got any connection to Israel doesn’t know. He just I said and when we met, I said, How did you hear about us? And he said, Well, I actually I’m following your customer, your main customer at that time was Amjad. Um, yeah, this is one of the leading filtration companies. And he says, I’m so fed up of trying to explain to agencies around here about my industry and this I thought, I’ll see who does on the ads work.
And, you know, the credit was on the website and that’s how he got to us. And we actually built his brand strategy created all these marketing materials implemented HubSpot, there is everything can go and from there, he continued with the local agencies, but we built all his materials. So that’s one example. So that example talks about really, industries that were really really good in but after saying that, any b2b company that operates globally or wants to operate globally, I think we can help brand strategy you can help in creating marketing materials. We have storytellers and designers here do unbelievable. Presentations, investor presentations, marketing, presentation, sell tools, so a lot of marketing materials that we create.
And and the examples that we talked about of like really creating that global strategy for social media or doing a webinar or anything that I think that the the companies that are best fit or the b2b companies that operate globally or like axon wanted to he was working he was operating in us and wanted to grow to glow market, as I gave examples of medium size or big size depends on the different size companies have different challenges or different needs that we can really help him.
Jeremy Weisz 55:38
First of all, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone should check out OzGlobalB2B.com to learn more about what they’re working on. And just think so. You know, I can’t imagine going through it you and your surrounding family and friends are going through and still just pushing forward to just business not as business as usual but from the companies working with it’s kind of business as usual. So thanks for sharing your lessons and your story. And we’ll see everyone next time. So great. Thank you
Orit Oz 56:17
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me here.
