As much as things change, the more they stay the same.

Industrial marketing has many times been a buyer persona of one. When you’re selling a multi-million dollar mining operation, the resources of many company professionals work together to make the sale. But not all of our clients are like that. Some sell resistors which have unique markets that could care less about each other. Others sell processing equipment, and sometimes they tried to get their regional reps to sell to all of their markets whether they were in the food industry or the chemical industry. It has never worked. You can’t take an expert in selling to the candy industry and put them in the plastic industry. This is where the new customization in website content to the visitor comes into play and mimics age old sales techniques used in industrial marketing.

New computers and search algorithms are so fast that as soon as a visitor comes back to your site, your web site can remember what they did the last time they came to your site and start them off at that point rather than starting them off at the home page again, and again, and again.

Thanks to Target Media’s post on the subject from SilverPop for retail, Today’s buyers are tired of marketing content that’s irrelevant and inconsistent across channels. But most companies lack the means to capture cross-channel buyer behaviors and use them to trigger personalized messaging.”

The first thing you need to do is learn what are the top pages on your site and the most important ones for individualization. Our most visited page beside the homepage and our blog is our “Services” page, that’s not much help. From there it’s our “Green Building Services” page. Next, it’s our “Employment” page and finally our “Editorial Calendar and Public Relations” (PR) page that is the most popular. We’ll focus on the two major subjects that represent our core capabilities: Green Building Services and Media Placement and Public Relations.

Secondly, you need to learn what those buyer personas are interested in. For our Green Building Services, it’s persons wanting to intern with us and to work on our U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) projects to get the experience required to sit for the test. We can also see that they are reading the blog posts placed on those pages. Now we really don’t need to do much more with the Green Services because we average two intern applicants a week wanting to apply. And about one or two project owners wanting some consultancy about green building. Our problem is making our services profitable. Currently we only take on exceptional interns and sustainable green building projects that are “extraordinary” in their sustainability. It keeps us up to date with current trends. What we really need to shift the focus to, is Green Building Marketing for sustainable building materials. We can target those by the consumption of those blog topics.

Our other target market or buyer persona is our “Process Equipment Marketing” page and whether they were sent there from the Editorial and PR pages. To encourage those visitors we need to continually research and blog about the changing face of media, trade shows, internet, sales representatives, industry associations and company goals. One of the most pertinent things I’ve seen recently is tying the telephone to the internet, email, print advertising, trade shows and public relations; 90% of your contacts from media just pick up the phone and call. If you can track that, you can optimize what you’re spending. That will be the subject for our next post.

If you liked this post, you may also like, “Create a Customer Path with Website Marketing Communications.”