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Technical and engineering buyers live within vertical markets. The products and services are specialized as is the expertise used to specify, purchase and implement them. Effective marketing and sales ...

Technical and engineering buyers live within vertical markets. The products and services are specialized as is the expertise used to specify, purchase and implement them. Effective marketing and sales methods will then focus on targeted narrowcasting methods with high information content. The industrial marketer will find the Web 2.0 model an excellent fit.
Successful outreach establishes the vendor’s expertise and credibility as a dependable resource for a successful project. Well developed topic specific content is critical to the task. The industrial marketer’s task is to identify the topics, produce the content and make it as visible and accessible as possible. The content should be presented at multiple events and in multiple formats that mutually reinforce each other. The goal is to use the Write Once, Publish Many principle to employ Web 2.0 to successfully reach Technical Customer 2.0.
A typical content creation sequence begins with developing technical conference or trade show platform presentations that can also be recorded as a screencast and then repurposed as articles, whitepapers, eBooks, etc. This video/audio/text content can then be published on the vendor’s site, trade press web sites, special interest blogs, and professional group sites.
Developing a webinar series is an effective next step. To be credible, the webinars should be more than product demos. The most effective approach is to choose a current industry topic that includes the industrial marketer’s product as part of the solution. This is a high value, low cost vehicle to establish credibility while getting quality attention and collecting qualified leads. The industrial marketer will do best to recruit speakers from professionals who are motivated by mutual benefit for presenting and establish a win- win partnership. Identifying motivation is critical. If it is not there, there will be poor cooperation and limited opportunity to develop useful alliances and gain leverage.
The cycle is repeated when this content is repurposed into videos, articles, white papers, etc. Social media provides the perfect tools for event promotion, content publication and distribution. Web 2.0 resources such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, and YouTube are used in an integrated campaign. The industrial marketer uses analytics to monitor the results and works to improve the process with each cycle.
The underlying case study is of a yearlong promotional effort focused on explaining a major topic in food processing, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) and ISO 22000 standards. The products being sold are process based analytics and quality information systems. Since these are part of the solution to successfully comply with GFSI, the webinar series positions the company and its offerings as solutions of choice. The company is positioned as a vendor who understands the larger issues and is a desirable project partner.