The technology behind targeting can be intimidating for industrial marketers who deal with complex buying journeys. The Industrial Marketer podcast offers up a three-step approach to help you get started. It includes dipping your toe into the intent/big data waters, a little bit of account based marketing, and a whole lot of importance on personas.
The technology behind targeting can be intimidating for industrial marketers who deal with complex buying journeys. The Industrial Marketer podcast offers up a three-step approach to help you get started. It includes dipping your toe into the intent/big data waters, a little bit of account based marketing, and a whole lot of importance on personas.
Welcome back, everybody to another episode of the industrial Marketer Podcast, your place for the tips, tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads and revenue to their businesses, especially in 2023. I am one of your hosts as always Joey in the street. And as always, I am joined by the incredible, the indelible, the indelible Nels. How are you Nels?
Nels Jensen:I'm apparently a little bit congested still. So hopefully I sound okay. But yeah, I'm doing fine. It's been. It's I'm looking forward to this episode to bring some levity to my week. So let's exactly it's let's target in on what we're going to do today. And oh, do some good stuff.
Joey Strawn:Nels I like that you say you tiptoed us right into that segue, because we are continuing our first quarter theme of Technology, Industrial marketing. And this, you know, we talked a lot about AI last month. And that's one of the big topics. This month, we're focusing in on audience targeting and segmenting and actually how to find and target the people that are most important to your marketing communications to your sales organizations. And honestly, just to the universe in general, that you need to be speaking to. So you know, if you're on the ground floor, and you're in the automation systems, and you're trying to piece together segments and audiences and you know, do dynamic content, this will be an episode for you, if you're thinking about how to structure your marketing organization, and what tech and tools and things you need to think about in your tech stack for 2023, we're going to give you some good information in this episode, as well. And on our shop floor segment, we're gonna give you three tips that you can you can use this year to get started with some of these advanced targeting opportunities. So it's going to be a fun, exciting episode. Now else, I wouldn't want to do it with anybody else, because I targeted you, as the co host for this episode, knowing that you're gonna bring a lot of experience a lot of knowledge and some Smarty smart stuff.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I'm not sure I'm qualified as a lead for that, but we'll find out what we,
Joey Strawn:Oh, it's gonna be great. And honestly, this is one of those where we, as a marketing sector, and as marketing professionals are still diving into these topics are still learning about these tools, audience segmentation, big data, you know, the universe of finding intent, and getting people and their segments all around your personas, like that's sort of the world we're gonna be living in today. It's gonna be fun, you know, it's, it's one of those things of, you know, I know from, from your perspective, when we're putting together, you know, content plans, or, you know, trying to figure out what a piece of narrative that we're putting together is going to be one of the first questions you always ask is, who were rewriting this for? If why, why, from your perspective, as a creator? Is that so important to know who you're writing it for? who the audience is?
Nels Jensen:Well, I guess my, my short, snarky answer would be because the client is expecting ROI within the first six months doing ROI within the first six months. I think we right, but that's really, like I said, I'm sorry for being snarky, but no, I mean, you know, let's, it's, especially in the industrial sector, right? We're specialized, right? These are niches these are, these are highly segmented, you know, situations here. So, you know, we're not, we're not selling general consumer products, and we're not trying to reach the mass population. So, you know, it's, it's kind of Captain Obvious here, right? You know, the, the combination, the intersection of, you know, target and intent is gold. So whatever we can do to, you know, find those, you know, qualified leads, if you will, the, you know, and it's, it's not awareness, right. This isn't about top of mind, this is about intent. So, yeah, it's, it's one of those things where that's just the nature of our business. That's what separates that's what makes it harder to be an industrial marketer, in my opinion. Yeah, we're not competing with quite as many people for eyeballs and that kind of thing. But we're competing for the same eyeballs. Exactly.
Joey Strawn:And the universes are smaller. And that's actually one of the things that I want us to get into, because that's where targeting becomes so important, you know, throwing out a couple examples, and these are things that anyone who's worked in the industrial marketing sector will have lived through and probably sent some PTSD but when you're writing a piece They're like, well, who? Who are we writing this white paper for? You know? And it's like, well, we're writing it for everyone. It's like, well, no, you're we're not we're writing. We're not writing it for sixth grade teachers in Milwaukee. You know, we're writing it for engineers who work in additive manufacturing, you know, or systems, manufacturers, systems managers of large e commerce stores, you know, there are specific outlets. And it may be, you know, now to your point, the answer could be, well, we're talking to a more general audience of people looking for information about this topic within a particular industry insert Air Force, arrows. Yes.
Nels Jensen:So right, but at the same nickel, at the same time, the buying committee, which we've talked about before, is, is is not just engineers, and quality control managers. It's somebody in finance, right? Exam billion purchasing, so it's, you know, and that, again, just that's makes it harder squared, right? You know, it's like you've, you've got to deliver ROI content, while you're talking about, you know, solutions. Orientation. So, and
Joey Strawn:I'm so glad that you referenced our previous episode about the buying committees, because that's where we I was kind of circling back to is to say, that's why this question of, who is the audience? Who are we looking for, and who are we targeting is so important, especially in the realm of industrial marketing, because one, as you said, we're not dealing with 1000, Walmart retail locations in the Midwest, we're dealing with seven to 10 nuclear power plants in the entire Western Hemisphere. You know, the, the audience of targets is a lot smaller in these industrial realms. And so we have to know more specifically, who was involved in these decisions, what they will be looking for, and then how we can target them. And so that's where we sort of get to, well, that sort of seems like magic, how can you find people before they intend to do something and you said, intent data, you know, a couple of times, Nelson. So that's, I think the first place to start is, when we're thinking about targeting audiences, how do we find them in the first place? You know, how do we look for them? Yeah, I'm gonna start with the intent data of it all, because that's one of the big technology terms this year, but you know, even according to status to the US marketers last year report using intent data, to improve their delivery of targeted ads, specifically, by like, 52%, more than a year previously, by an email marketing, it's nearly 47%. And then personalization across all of their content, like in the 40%. People are using intent data now, whether or not they're using it correctly, we shall see we can talk about but you know, just to define it, when you think of intent data analysis, what would you say to someone who asks, like, what, what's intent data?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, to me, it's, it's, it's based on behavior, that would lead you to believe that there's intent, right, so they're researching a product, they're comparing multiple products, they're, you know, downloading something, you know, they're basically certain behaviors that you could do lead scoring based on that, you know, help qualify them, you know, get them farther down the funnel, right now know, are they are they about ready to make a big purchase? How much do they want to spend? Yeah, and you know, none of that, of course,
Joey Strawn:None of that that's like insulated in a sales, except it's like, yes, ah, but to your point, you know, getting that knowledge of where they intend to be, or knowing things about their intent is really, really important. And this is kind of where we get into the realm of magic a little bit, there's two ways to go about getting intent data, this these days, you always have your first party intent data, that's what we have on hand. You know, like for some of our clients and some of our past experiences. Now, we will know, well, if someone comes to the client XYZ is website, and does these four or five things or are looking at these types of resources, we can naturally come to the conclusion that they have intent to take the next step. That's first party data, that stuff on our website within our ecosystems that we have. What's really kind of blooming over these past couple years is third party intent data, where we use systems or tools and you got the you have your big boys in the system like Bob Barra and some of those, but a lot of systems will use the big data that we were talking about years and years ago and marketing and scientifically come to the conclusions of oh, if these type of users are going to these websites at this frequency and doing these types of activities, it indicates that they are in like intent on a big machine purchase or a car purchase. You know, a lot of this got started in the b2c markets of people like buying furniture, houses, cars, you know, things of that nature.
Nels Jensen:So historical data is gold on your CRM old Right, right. Yeah. So is that a shortcut? If you may be an expensive one, but is that a shortcut? If you have not established historical data in a CRM? You know, I mean, it's one thing, what when do people buy machines? Well, typically seven to eight years after they bought the last one, you know, I mean, but if you don't have that, and yeah, and it's also after they did X and Y, here's the three key things that half of these folks are going to buy a machine in the next two years. Right. But if you don't have that data, what what?
Joey Strawn:Exactly well, that and that is where a lot of the the key to will hopefully there have been frameworks and records kept along the way that if if you haven't digitized things, if you haven't brought things into a CRM, this is the perfect time to get things out of Mike out of Mike's Excel, and put them into an actual CRM that can look over time at trends. And honestly, that's where we get into the benefits of being able to say to your point, oh, you bought a machine from us five years ago, we know that the average lifecycle is seven years. So in year six, we're gonna start sending you emails about updates to your machine and, you know, new versions of your machine. And it really does that baby stepping into the intent data world using that first party data that I was just talking about a minute ago, it's your own goldmine of your customers, histories, your knowledge of their histories, oh, man, we know that when they start calling us about parts, every six weeks that we know their XYZ is about to fail, and we can you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, Rose types of first party experience, data points are our Goldmine, like you said, and you don't have to spend the 1000s of dollars to tap into one of these mega big data engines to get larger industry ones, which are also important you can if you have the money, it's definitely a lot of these tools have free trials. And you can go in and this is something that we love to do is go in, do a free trial, look at the segments and do your filters, because we know their audiences almost better than these tools do and see what comes back, see if it's valuable on targeting your audience segments, because there's a lot of things nowadays they can target by IP or history or user account. And like I said, it sort of seems like magic, some of the things you could
Nels Jensen:Yeah. Well, I'm wondering, you know, is this the kind of thing that with? And I don't know, to what extent AI is involved in this? I assume it is. But I'm I'm guessing that this third party is evolving pretty quickly.
Joey Strawn:Oh, yeah, I mean, this is these are becoming kind of ubiquitous across the board, you know, you'll hear these types of terms and people talking about intent data all over the place. One of the things that's been interesting, and I was in a webinar about this earlier this week, is tools that are focused on website traffic, or you know, website identification and, and those types of knowledge, are integrating with tools that allow for audience segmentation and intent targeting based off their connections and based off their historical knowledge of website interactions and IP connections and, you know, unveils, so it's becoming more of a normal thing across all platforms. And on a lot of industrial, especially industrial marketing, AI tools, you'll see these types of targeting or audience build segments. There's a tool called net wise, that is really good about audience segments, and polling, getting lists. And then there's definitely AI elements involved of being able to start with basic parameters of lists, qualifications, and then have the system populate a list with the best qualified candidates. And so there's, there's like machine learning involved, as well as AI as well as manual manipulation, which brings a lot of especially in the industrial marketing world, to getting segments that matter, you know, being able to say I want to target HR representatives in companies that make over $10 million a year that work in the nuclear industry and function in you know, North America, and you could get that segment and come away with the list of 20 to 75. Very Very clickable clients and very prospective clients to then get your message out to and we'll talk about how to follow up with them. But finding them is one of the most important things nowadays. And we have so many tools at our disposal to be able to do that.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so are we basically talking about programmatic? Is that just another way to describe? When when you say, programmatic? How do you? How does that jive with intent data?
Joey Strawn:Should actually the you know, one of the interesting things about intent? intent that is just how it's going to be used. Programmatic is one of those. And primarily, it's used in the advertising realm nowadays, you know, that's where we'll kind of talk about it today. But the programmatic ad distribution uses a lot of this data to say like, well, we need our ads, we have this product, we have these solutions, we have, you know, this need, and we know the audience's that we want it whether it's a tool that we you know, you have, whether it's first party data, and you're going through your old databases to say, hey, everybody who is bought a machine six years ago, out of deference Excel. Now, Mike left is Darren now. Yeah, Darren is Excel, we have a list of 80 people, and that's the list we want to target, we put that into a system. And that system can do a couple of things. One can target those users specifically, if you're doing more of like an ABM model, or it can programmatically learn from the, I guess the the knowledge of those 80 or 90 people, and then match people that have those same qualifications, and those same activities and those same intent indicators, and then target those people as well with your ads. So like, hey, I want my ads to go to these people, and people who act like them. And that's where a lot of that comes up with programmatic. It can go as high level as I want my banner ads to show on, you know, websites to focus on sports and outdoors, and the automotive industries. Or it can get a lot more in depth and say I want to follow people that bet that have behaviors that match people that show these intent pieces, or these 10 steps. And so programmatic is usually I mean, nowadays, we think about it primarily within the ad sector. But it is taking that list of all right now I have ads, I have a message let's push them out to the right people and get in front of them. And programmatic is a way to do that you surely
Nels Jensen:You're but you're you're pushing out it could be in gangs of nerds could be nurturing in terms of emails are some type of outreach, but it also clearly is fodder for ads to
Joey Strawn:Yeah, most of the programmatic engines or exchanges nowadays will be ad centric. And then they may have, you know, discovery, or ABM uses on the sides. And then a lot of the big data engines, some of them just exist as engines that people pay for access to. And then some of them have built upon those engines, and actually have, you know, the intent data, ocean, and then they have the layers on top of it that you allow you to segment and advertise from that ocean of data. And so you know, there's different levels. And that's why that's why at company at any level can start with intent data, like it doesn't matter if you have no budget, if you have millions for a budget, there's a way to get started with it. We can talk, you know, some hands on advice later for that. But yeah, finding those audiences and using in your tech stack as a consistent method of tools that allow you to find that perfect audience segment for your messages is really going to make a difference when you're pushing those messages out and communicating them and trying to see, you know, Nelson ROI, we talked about it a little bit earlier. That's what everybody wants in AD marketing is ROI and how you can measure and see the results of what you're doing. And so you know that there's no difference here for that. You always hear like, well, what does that do? How many how many sales of that blog post get us nows? How many, how many proposals are we going to send out because of this case study that was commissioned, you know, how are we measuring? How are we measuring the effects? I mean, that's, that's is going to be the big question. In all of this. You know, like as a content creator now says, as someone who's To focus on the strategy and going to market and talking these client strategies, what types of things do you like to hear like to have measured on the return for your content pieces on your marketing pieces?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, you know, it's, that's a hard question for me to, because I because I usually don't get access to anything more than surface level metrics. Right, right. Yeah, this isn't the click throughs. And the thing, right, right. But you you don't know, in the long run? How many people who purchase a six figure machine? Actually, you know, where did they engage in the process? You don't see? You know, I know, you may see that in some of the, the tools that you use, but I don't, it's like, I crank it out, and they post it. And, you know, I can see how, you know, search works and doesn't work. And, you know, you, you know, adjust your dials accordingly. And you try to stay on top of the things that the marketplace is looking for. Yep. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's, that's, I guess that's, that's a sign of, you know, that we're we're not completely integrated in that all of us don't know everything about Inbound, right.
Joey Strawn:Well, and that's, and that's one of the benefits of having this collective and this inbound community that we're growing here. Is these these are industrial marketers, and these are people dealing with these problems. You know, I would imagine that there's a lot of people feeling that pain that you just described else in their own organizations, and that how do we connect some of these dots? Especially if we're thinking of these targets? Are we thinking of these, you know, these groups in these universes? And I'm gonna go back to marketing 101 on this one is this is a perfect opportunity to think about those personas. You know, is the the questions always referred basically boil back down to how is what we're creating what we're marketing and what we're doing. resignated I mean, hearing with our audience, how is it? How was it doing with our audience? And how are they hearing it and responding to it? And is it positive and or negative. And so being able to connect those dots is is key on this. And that's how I was kind of leading you to, I want a tool that connects all these dots for us. And that's where, you know, some of these tools can be really important. Having that layer in your tech stack, can connect those dots, whether it's Google Analytics for or whether it's, you know, a tool that you're paying for, that includes those analytics. And if you're paying a lot of money, he you should be getting analytics from it.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah. You know, the personas is really interesting, because there's a matrix, and how do you use personas? And how does the messaging vary at each stage of the funnel? So if you would just think about a typical company, you're marketing to, let's say four different personas, right? And you have, let's just say, I'll just say three different stages of the funnel, though, we all know, it's more nuanced than that. So your messaging is going to vary across, I'm just described 12 different potential touch points. You know, how does your messaging vary? So most small to medium manufacturers? Don't think of, oh, I need 12 different blog posts to account for this one product, you know, right. But in reality, it wouldn't hurt, you know, do you? Can you segment your customer base and target your messaging so that you are sending a different newsletter to engineers than you're sending to finance? Yeah, you know, that would cost a lot of money. But the companies that have content rich sites, do tend to attract more visitors. So, you know, that's just, that's just something to keep in mind. It's it can be extremely complex to target.
Joey Strawn:And I'm happy that that's where we got to because that's where I sort of wanted us to land is the the importance of personas allow for the planning of the marketing activity. So if we know that through, you know, the the searching that we talked about the finding of the audience earlier, that there is a total of about 5000 individual people in the country or in the world that meets the hiring or the Meet the targeting sales, budget and need criteria that your sales team has to go after whatever those factors are your sales team and your business growth team will know those better than us humble podcasters well, but once Those are known. And once you go out and use a tool to discover what those people are doing or find within your own first party data, where those touch points are, then it becomes a lot easier to align. Like you said, now's those pieces along the way. So okay, well, if they are at this stage of the funnel, they need to have this type of information. So we can stick with blog posts and emails, and, you know, maybe some informational videos or some content that we have a webinar in the past that we have. But then in the middle stage of the funnel, these are the buying committee personnel that we're talking to. So we need a more in depth engineering piece. And we need an more in depth, finance piece. And then you can start to track how each individual element is doing to see like, Okay, well, we have the most activity within our middle of the funnel pieces. What does that mean? Does as everyone's getting stuck in the middle of the funnel, and not moving down, which personas are the ones that are falling out that were not convincing correctly, and to your point now is it becomes instead of this matrix of 1000, unknown opportunities, we can look at the data because there are known points and sort of pinpoint the handful of opportunities that are very relevant to that audience that we targeted in that first phase that find phase.
Nels Jensen:Yes, I agree with what you're saying, Yeah,
Joey Strawn:I like it, it becomes very we I mean, that's what we're doing every day is like figuring out the best ways to communicate our brand message and our industrial expertise, and our benefit within the supply chain, whatever it may be, for your industrial marketing organization, or your marketing organization or industrial organization, you need to communicate that message, whether that's sending out emails, you know, we talked about advertising and find getting your ads and banner ads and things in front of people, just generic, generic content marketing of hosting guest posts, you know, ABM we'll talk about in just a little bit. But being able to find those audiences, I mean, even as something as direct mail, or SMS, like sending text messages, a lot of these services, if someone has a work phone or a registered cell phone, I mean, all of us get spam texts. And it's like, hey, what about this? Whether or not that's necessary for your universe, it's possible these tools allow us to connect with the users and send them hopefully, relevant, helpful, and brand specific messages to get them, whatever next, and the next phase of that funnel might look like.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, well, you could use more of your magic to figure out how I want to see it, not just would be good for me to see, but how do I actually want to consume it? Right?
Joey Strawn:Well, you know what, and that is, we can probably talk about that in a follow up episode two, but some of that is involved in this, you know, in the AI of it all and the machine learning is, a lot of these tools will allow us to see which types of vehicles are engaged with the most. So we will know that people in the engineering field want videos, and people in finance need very detailed, you know, spreadsheets and or documents that outline, you know, pricing and specifics and etc, etc, etc. So that's, that's in the mix here. And it starts to become, I guess that a little like magic and it's kind of fun. All right. Speaking of magic, should we head on down to to the shop floor? Or is there more that we need to dive into? Before we get on to like our three ways to actually dip your toe into these targeting opportunities? Yeah,
Nels Jensen:well, I think we, you know, we're kind of circling the wagons let's, let's land and set up camp and sit at the campfire and get to the good stuff.
Joey Strawn:I like it. All right, let's head on down to the shop floor. All right, whatever shop floor music people had in their head right there. That's the correct one. So we wanted to make this applicable. We wanted to start off the year correct. And so for our on the shop floor segment, this this episode, we're going to be going through three ways that everybody can get started with targeting with some of these targeting opportunities we've talked about today and getting started this year making it a reality not planning for it, not thinking about it, but doing it. Everybody. Everybody All right, who wants to everybody and then industrial marketing world.
Nels Jensen:Everybody they said the barrier to entry is you can overcome it. You can do this.
Joey Strawn:Yes. So the first one is We talked a lot about intent data today. So our first bullet point is getting started is just get started with intent data. Look at your own internal systems, if you have Google Analytics or whether it whatever you're using Salesforce Pardot, HubSpot, any of the any of the tools, look at your first party data and your web history and the buying trends of your customers. Are they on six month repeat cycles? Or is it nine year repeat cycles? You know, what is what does that look like for your world, that's the easiest place to get started, you have a goldmine of data in your experienced salesman, or in your website data, somewhere along there, you can put together what people are doing, and what steps they take along their buying journey. But the other side of this is make this the year that you actually do a trial of some of these tools. We had mentioned, the borrower or net wise, there's a plethora of others, but just go out. And some focus on industries, some focus on the type of third party data, but just do a trial, get it out there or dedicate some budget this year to have one of these tools opened for six months, it's the easiest way to figure out how much value can be pulled from it is to see what they're able to do for you. So that's one of the that's going to be our first first thought there's actually just get started looking at your own intent data of your users, and then reaching out to some tools to see what they have to say about your universe and your buying potential users. Now, any other any other thoughts there on just getting started with doing it?
Nels Jensen:No, I, you know, I'm a big fan of lead scoring. So you know, if that's, you know, the there's a lot of companies that are going to be like, oh, yeah, well, you know, we're already doing that. But I also know, there are lots of companies that are not leveraging their CRMs. And I think this is one way to look at how to reengage some of your CRM data. So I would just say, you know, you refer to it as a internal goldmine. And I would say yes, and it's that sales team, as you mentioned, as well. But yeah, it's like, you know, do you understand how you can arrive at intent data based on your existing operation? You might it might be, it might just be an assumed thing, and you might be spot on? But are there other indicators that you're not considering?
Joey Strawn:Well, and I'm, I'm so happy that you said lead scoring, because whether or not there, you know, people are using a system, lead scoring is something that should be used when you're getting started with intent data is just what you were saying, if you know, the steps are like, Oh, everyone who's checking out these pages on our site, is looking for the level of data that would enable, you know, show us their intention of moving to the next step. Well, if you know what those are, then you can apply just the logic and the math to your database and see who matches it. And right there, you have a targeted list within your first party intent data on Oh, well, these people have this job function, they bought a machine within this timeframe. They have been with us for this long, and they were on our site seven times in the last two weeks. And you have a filtered list of targeted individuals or companies to think about, there's no reason that every one with a database of customers can't do that this year. Right. So I think yeah, that's a great way to get started.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, you're leveraging your internal database is something that we experience on the client side is lots of room for growth among leveraging your existing database.
Joey Strawn:And, and that's going to kind of take us into number two. The second thing that, that I think people can really do this year and really dive into is sort of baby step into Account Based Marketing. Now, I say that lightly because that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But when I when we're talking about Account Based Marketing, in this scenario, it is the idea of targeting exclusive sales efforts around a collection of individuals at a known Group of Companies and then surrounding those individuals and following them through you know, their journeys at those specific companies and having company specific communications to to go so if you're going after GM, then you would have GM specific messaging that would match the targeting you have for the GM users along there. are funneled journey. There are a lot of different ways to baby step into ABM. But essentially, getting a list of ideal companies that you would love to work with is a good place to start. This is a good way that you can target sales efforts. Because if you have a list of ad companies that you know, are big players in your field that your sales team can go after, then you can use one of the tools that we just mentioned in the first section to find known contacts and known websites where people at those companies spend time to put your ads on. So it's kind of a baby step into get a list of companies that you want to target. And then use either your own methods or a, you know, some tools in the technology sphere that we've mentioned, to uncover contacts and surround those contacts with messaging, whether it's HubSpot, emails and marketing, whether it's ads through a programmatic server, whether it's SMS, or direct mail pieces, make sure that your messages are surrounding them on all the touch points that you have access to.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, I'm guessing you could make, you can make this a team sport, too. If you have, let's just say you have three salespeople, it's like, okay, you each target a different area, you know, whatever, maybe it's, you know, something extremely small with each of them. But it's like, you could also try different tactics within that you could experiment. I mean, you know, if you, if you don't have a big strong ABM base, it is a good time to get started and to try things you'll learn, you'll learn, right?
Joey Strawn:Well, and we are finding just more and more that companies people, and especially large organizations respond when things are personalized. And that comes in advertising as well. So if you're reaching out to large opportunities within your field, the more personalized you can make the experiences, the better. And the more directly your targeting and going after those companies, the easier it is to make those experiences more personalized, because you're dedicated to them. And so that's where you can kind of baby step into it this year using some of those tools and information that you already have at your at your disposal. Because a big barrier for entry for a lot of people with ABM or Account Based Marketing is oh my goodness, we do not have the budget for an over an ABM tool, you google search how much ABM tools are, and it's so much money. But that's not what we're talking about here. That's why I want to say baby, step into it, take those little steps to identify target companies. And then I, the next step is find a tool that will allow you to uncover contacts at those companies. And then the next thing is identify within your sphere of capabilities, how you can surround those individuals and those companies with your message and personalize that message to them is those are kind of your baby steps into it.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, sounds like pretty custom to me.
Joey Strawn:I, you know what, and that's where, you know, partnering with a marketing agency to either help you build the framework for something like this, or at least talking to experts to help you in get come up with your buyer personas, which, oh, my goodness, that's number three. Our number three thing to get started with your targeting opportunities this year is buyer personas. And I mean, either revisit them, or actually just do them. If you haven't, if you have if you're one of the agencies or companies just like Oh, we'll get to those buyer personas, we'll get to those, actually write them and actually talk about them and use them this year, there is no better way to start understanding your audience than to try and characterize the major players in the buying committees that you're going to be dealing with, and understanding them better. Because if you know who they are, then you can go back to those tools that we mentioned, and know what to look for, then it's easier to baby step into Account Based Marketing, because you know, the personalities and personas that you're going to have to interact with along the way.
Nels Jensen:I'm going to I'm going to ask you a question. It's always you know, like when somebody's a witness, you know, in a trial, you never ask a question if you don't know what they're gonna say. So yeah, I'm not sure I'm not sure what you're gonna say here. But you know, I wish in writing buyer personas that I got more access to actual customers because they provide a different lens on the products and services and a different lens on the company relations and all that stuff. I'm going to what do you think about revisiting your current customers to see what's changed to see you know, in terms of just updating what what is has changed in their world since you last did this drill?
Joey Strawn:I, I just as a general rule, I think ongoing health checkups with your customer base is an extremely important practice for any organization sales, marketing, or otherwise, you know, the idea of reaching out and being like, hey, what, you know, what struggles are you having in the industry? What things could we do better? What new sorts of things? Are you, you know, are you paying attention to, and getting a sense from them of what they're dealing with is incredibly important. I mean, now it's, you, you know this because we do it together. But, you know, when we're going out and interviewing subject matter experts around ideas, we're usually looking for an expert on what like the product or the service of the company. But we also want the viewpoint of someone who would be buying it, what are the problems they have? What are the Oh, ya know, what, what are the questions that they're going to be searching for when they're trying to get their problem solved? What station do they have within their organization? And what is their role within the ultimate buying decision? Like those been circling back around to Sure, right, type things become even more important, then? Because then we know what questions to answer.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and a good buyer persona is pretty detailed. It's not just, you know, what information are they looking for? It's what objections do they hear? You know, at some point, you know, when, what, you know, what do you what objections Do you hear from them, you know, as you're trying to pitch your product, you know, it's what, and maybe their motivations have changed, or their goals have changed, you know, there, there are certain people who want to be the technology leaders at their company. And so, you know, they're really good earlier in the funnel to, you know, get on the radar screen and push things, you know, that way too. So, yeah, it's, it's a buyer personas. You know, I guess it's like, go go deeper than you think. You can get lost in there. And you can have too much detail. There's, you know, it has to it has to add up to, you know, something significant. But, yeah. You know, that's where the value of actually talking to customers helps, because they will cut to the chase, more than, you know, in many cases than a manufacturer. Well, yeah, well, here's what we hear kind of thing and all that. But yeah, customers, it's like they get right to it.
Joey Strawn:Right. Yeah. And you know, and they, they, they change and they, they evolve. And that's why customer personas need to change and evolve. And your buyer personas, you know, we talked last season about the buying committees, and how just the process of industrial sales is different than our standard marketing processes. You know, when people hear buyer personas, I, I feel like I don't know this for a fact. But I feel like in their heads, especially if they've got the marketing classes. It's like, oh, well, Janet. And she lives in a cul de sac, and has seven cats and two dogs, two daughters, one of which is in college and loves gymnastics. And it's like that. And I think industrial manufacturers industrial marketers rolled their eyes at that idea of a buyer persona. But to your point nails, it needs to add up to something valuable. So it'd be the buyer persona of like, oh, well, the these types of job titles and works in these types of industries, and has these types of objections and asks these types of questions. You know, it's the what are the what are the common attributes of the person or persons who will fulfill this role within your opportunity client? So that's really the question to answer. So Nels to your point, I think it all has to add up to something at the end of the day just shouldn't know Janet a little bit better.
Nels Jensen:Oh, yeah. Well, it's, you know, if your priority is uptime, your priority is also probably not ROI doesn't mean they're both not important. And maybe the facility manager is going well, duds both but most people it's going to be one more than the other. So and, you know, because to somebody else, uptime is going to equal ROI. So but yeah, if your butts on the line for you know, keeping the machines running, that's a whole different, you know, game, then I'm responsible for the p&l. They both ladder up to the same thing, but it's a different way to get there.
Joey Strawn:Yeah, and that's why targeting just kind of put a nice little bow on this is so important, especially in the industrial marketing realm. It's, if we don't know who our audience is, then we don't know the types of messages we Need to create for them. So if it's a guy who's focused on the p&l, versus a woman who's focused on their hiring challenges, or their, you know, their CEO at like the, their operations, those are going to be very different concerns. And so knowing the players on the field, allow you to create and have the right assets handy, but then also using the tools that are available to find and push your message out to those people. So having the advertising messages, the email automations, the website metrics to know who's coming and who's not coming. That's increasingly more important, as there's more and more noise. In the in the world of digital marketing. We are bombarded every single day with so many ads and messages and texts, and spams and emails that the messages that really resonate, the messages that get through. And the messages that sell are the ones that speak directly to the challenges of the people hearing them. And that's what all of this targeting really allows us to do in a world of so much noise. And that's why it's so important. That's why we want to dedicate an entire episode to finding and honestly, I think we targeted the exact right people for this Nels because the industrial marketer, podcast community is the best one to think about these issues.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, bring it it's, you know, how do you how do you find the riches in the niches? You know, it's Oh, I like that.
Joey Strawn:Can that be the title? The riches in the niches? No, I think the riches in the niche. Okay, it doesn't have to be, but that'll be a subtitle. I love that nows. And honestly, guys, if you have tips or tools or tech and that you love and want to talk about, email them to us, just share them on our Facebook and on our and on our podcast comments. Let us know let's build a community here of the ways that you love to target your audiences. What have you found helpful? What have you found not helpful? Is there a tool or you know, a slide method that you have figured out that we didn't mention? Send us an email at podcast at industrial marketer.com. And we will, we can do a follow up. We want to know what is out there and what's helping you guys in this world because targeting the messages to the right people is so important. So if you liked it, press the like button subscribe to the industrial Marketer Podcast, go to our website and read the articles that we have there because we do cool reviews and we have in depth articles on all of the things that you need to know as an industrial marketer. And like I said, email us at podcast at industrial marketer.com to send us your best targeting tips.