Us marketing people tend to obsess over all the tools at our disposal. Analytics. Email automation. Lead scoring. Heat mapping. Live chat. Chat bots.
And hey, can you really blame us?!
The marketing and sales technology landscape has changed more in the last five years than over the rest of history combined. Frankly, it’s exciting.
But Tools Can Also Distract Us
Instead of looking at the problems, goals and questions of our customers and prospects (and constructing our marketing and sales strategies around those things), we find ourselves looking at all these shiny new tools and wondering, “what can I do with this fancy gadget?”.
I encourage you to put aside all the glamorous technology for a moment and consider the best marketing tools you already have at your disposal: the brainpower of your engineers and technical professionals.
Consider all the problem-solving knowledge these experts inside your own walls possess.
They know the inner workings of your best customers better than anyone.
They interface with the engineers on the customer’s end regularly – answering questions, uncovering the source of problems, helping construct solutions.
Now consider how many more companies are out there asking those same kinds of questions, experiencing those same kinds of problems and in need of those same kinds of solutions.
What if instead of starting our marketing plans by asking, “How can I make use of this chat bot?” or “What kind of automated email workflows can I queue up?”, we instead asked ourselves, “What are the biggest issues, problems, goals and questions our engineers are seeing all the time with our very best customers?”
Leveraging Our Expertise
Let’s tap into the minds of our most technically-skilled people and harness their knowledge and experience.
Let’s extract their expertise and turn it into genuinely helpful, problem-solving content that will attract our best customers to us through search engines, capture their attention in the Learning Centers of our websites, earn their trust and prompt real human-to-human sales conversations.
This is the kind of marketing that your future customers actually want to consume. They crave and and even seek it out.
So let’s give it to them.
Start with your best customers and prospects. Identify what matters most to them. Then lean on the tools you already have – the expertise of your engineers and technical professionals.
I’m confident you’ll be more than satisfied with what happens next.
Author: [email protected]
Joe Sullivan a Co-Founder of the industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76. In Gorilla’s Industrial Marketing Strategy Learning Center, you’ll find an ever-expanding collection of articles, videos, guides and tools to help manufacturers identify, attract, engage and drive sales with ideal-fit customers.
