Redefining Marketing Within the Construction Industry

Podcast Transcript

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Hello there and welcome to the Construction Revolution podcast. My name is Steven Rossi-Zalmons, and here on the show we explore the latest trends, technologies, people, and organizations that are revolutionizing or disrupting the construction industry and are changing what the industry will look like tomorrow. Today on the show, I’m speaking with Dobrila Moogk, the VP of Marketing at Giatec Scientific. Giatec Scientific is a global company, revolutionizing the construction industry by bringing smart testing technologies and real-time collection and analysis of concrete data from production and delivery to placement.

Giatec suite of hardware and software products has leveraged advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and the internet of things, including wireless, concrete sensors, mobile apps, and advanced non-destructive technologies to drive innovation throughout concrete’s lifecycle and reduce concrete’s carbon footprint. Dobrila has over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, encompassing marketing, product management, and research and development across small, medium and large enterprise businesses in North America and Europe. Her innovative marketing techniques for starting conversations and generating leads are powering Giatec’s rapid growth. In addition to working at Giatec, Dobrila is also an instructor at Carleton University as well as a member of the board of directors for Invest Ottawa.

Hello, Dobrila. Welcome to the Construction Revolution podcast. Thanks for joining me today. How are you doing?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Thanks, Steven. Doing well. Glad to be here.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

So I guess we’ll dive right in. And so if you could tell everyone how you learned about Giatec and what made you want to join the company?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

That’s a great question. So I went to a networking event. It was actually a startup pitch competition and I ran into a friend there who knew the founders, the Giatec founders, Pouria Ghods, the CEO, and Aali Alizadeh, the CTO. And she knew of the opportunity to lead the marketing team. So she put us in touch for a few meetings, a series of meetings. Both the co-founders and I came to a conclusion it would be really beneficial on both sides to join the company.

What really attracted me to Giatec is that it revolutionizes the concrete industry and does that in more ways than one. So it certainly is a great technology that positively impacts the environment, reduces carbon emissions, which is important to me. But also as a high tech company, it is very diverse, and the marketing techniques used here are very advanced and they’re based on the SaaS model. And I had experience in these areas. I’ve all my life been in high tech. I started on the technical side. I’m very analytical and I moved to marketing about 17 years ago. So I also had a lot of experience on the marketing side and definitely in SaaS experience. So everything just clicked.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, that’s great. So you mentioned that Giatec is sort of a SaaS high tech company within the construction industry. Could you give us a little bit more information about what Giatec does specifically?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Right, yes. So SaaS is a little bit of an extrapolation. We use SaaS techniques and we are certainly using SaaS marketing models. But essentially what the company does is we are revolutionizing the construction industry by bringing smart testing technologies to the job sites. And that is also combined with advanced data collection and analysis based on our artificial intelligence tools. So very, very high tech in the industry that is slowly evolving in that direction.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. So in terms of implementing those marketing techniques and other marketing techniques at Giatec, can you explain what the marketing team at Giatec does and your role within that?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Right, so this is interesting. Like many companies in our small and mighty team, we do product marketing, we do brand building, we do lead generation and also we include our website development and also marketing automation. So unlike other companies in the construction industry, we are very focused on lead generation. And as a fast growing company, we acquire bigger and bigger numbers of leads, marketing qualified leads or MQLs, to pass onto our sales team. So in that thinking, we align along the channels that we acquire those MQLs, so organic channel, paid channel and marketing prospecting channel. On top of that, we also have trade shows which are not digital in their essence, but we are certainly digitalizing them and making them work better for Giatec.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, okay. That’s great. So it sounds like Giatec has a fairly untraditional approach to marketing when it comes to the construction industry. So can you explain why Giatec focuses so heavily on digital marketing?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

That is actually a fantastic question and an easy to answer one. So digital marketing allows you to experiment faster. So if you are a fast growing company and you want to reach that great growth as fast as you can, you want to experiment with various channels. And if you’re doing it say through trade shows, and the trade show happens once a year, you have once a year opportunity to improve. By contrast in digital marketing, you can experiment much faster. So anything you learn from one experiment, you can experiment in the next situation soon after because you have that digital feedback, that digital data, that is an outcome of the experiment. And I can give you an example. For example, some of our digital content that we put out there, they can be accessed by a multitude of customers, potential customers, as they’re put out. And over time, unlike any other conversations that our marketing or sales teams can have face to face, one on one. And we have pieces of content that have been out for years and they’re still steadily bringing MQLs, marketing qualified leads, to us.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, I think that’s a great point. The longevity of digital content can be extremely beneficial and especially for organic content. So I know a lot of companies sort of focus digitally on paid content, but it seems like Giatec also emphasizes organic content a lot. So could you share some best practices that the marketing team uses when it comes to SEO and other search engine optimization and other organic strategies?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

For sure. So yeah, that’s a good point. Paid channels are very, very useful. They bring results quickly, but each time you spend any kind of money on paid, that money is gone. You may have acquired a lead, but that lead is where the story finishes. With organic content, on the other hand, it lasts a long time and especially if you make it so. So we are a leader in our niche. And the reason we can say that is that our search engine optimization analysis actually shows it and it’s publicly available. If you do a search on any of our keywords, you will see us shown in the top three searches on the top of the search engine. And we do this. I mean it is a lot of work. I guess ultimately it is a lot of consistent work. So we put out great content, we make it follow all the best practices for search engine optimization and then we keep on top of search engine algorithm changes.

So whatever search engine is the most important for a company, for us, it’s Google. We are on top of the upcoming changes and we weren’t always there. There was an instance in 2020 that we weren’t, but we’ve learned our lesson and we are certainly always looking ahead to the changes that are coming up and preparing for those SEO changes that will impact our rankings well ahead of time. So when they come to power, we are fully ready. So just to summarize again, writing great content, getting an expert in technical SEO and then being on top of search engine algorithm changes, produce good results for organic.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, that’s really interesting. So speaking of being prepared for upcoming changes, as a company that is so versed in digital marketing, what do you think are the biggest marketing trends in front of us for 2023?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Right, I mean it is Giatec”s marketing efforts and everybody’s actually. So the privacy protection or consumer customer privacy protection will be a big one and it started last year. Well, this year it’s still going on in 2020 with Apple’s privacy protection changes. And then we, as you said, we are anticipating the third-party cookies elimination from Chrome that is planned to come in October 2023. So definitely the world is going in that direction and through laws, we have GDPR laws in Europe several years ago, and then several similar laws throughout the US and throughout the world that are impacting marketing tech stack tool providers to make changes themselves. And these changes are there to protect customers’ privacy and that’s a good thing. So it is an obstacle when looked from the perspective of how we used to do things. But then looking forward there’s great solutions coming out of there. Each time of change produces an opportunity for innovation.

And we are seeing this through the Google Analytics four or GA4 that’s coming in full force on July 1st, 2023. So it is existing already, but it’ll be the only one from July 1st. And this is where we will see a lot of positive changes where we could look at the data of how our customers behave cross-platform and cross-device because we know they use more than one device when they interact with our offerings. And that will actually make it easier for us to observe the customer buying journey and adjust to it, become more proficient in serving the customer that way. Another thing that’s interesting for the construction industry and concrete industry this year will be the return of in-person conferences. And during COVID we had conferences, especially in-person ones that weren’t that active and we saw them coming back last year, but this year we have several big ones coming up.

One of them is ConExpo and Con/AGG coming up in March that happens every three years is a big one. Also, we have World of Concrete before then in January. And in-person conferences are great, they provide that opportunity to meet customers face to face, but the digital aspect of them is very, very important. And if companies haven’t done that yet, bridging the gap between this physical in-person world and digital world is very important. So in Giatec, we’ve been very successful in doing that in the past. And do we do that through QR codes, through UTM tags, through internal leads automation, like when we transfer leads that we receive on the conference floor.

So these are some digital techniques that companies can master to take bigger benefit out of in-person trade shows because they require quite a lot of investment of both time and money. At the same time, virtual trade shows and events that came of age during COVID are here to stay as well. And they have an advantage that they make it much easier to attend, both from a time and expense perspective for the professional participants. And you can find like-minded people from all over the world to join you in a virtual event fairly easily. And those events actually have a very, very low carbon footprint and this is what we stand for here.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, that sounds really interesting. So if people want to learn more about Giatec’s marketing and what has allowed it to be so successful, where would you recommend that they go?

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Right. I love the work I do. So I’m always open to connecting and answering any questions. Coming to our website is a good place to start to see what we do, following us on social media that are easily accessible from our website. And then if they choose to do so, they can contact me directly on LinkedIn.

Steven Rossi-Zalmons: 

Yeah, that’s great. So thank you, Dobrila so much for coming on. It’s been really interesting to learn more about the marketing at Giatec and marketing and construction in general.

Dobrila Rancic Moogk: 

Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure, Steven.