00:08
Shay: Hello, and welcome to our Sales and Marketing Training videos. I'm Shay.

00:12
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we'll be talking about an important part of Marketing, understanding your customers.

00:18
Shay: In this video we'll be discussing how to create a connection with your audience, ways to identify your target audience, and the importance of understanding the customer journey.

00:27
Lauren: Today, our guest is Doug Dudley, Director of Marketing here at Inductive Automation. Doug, thanks so much for taking time today.

00:33
Doug: Yeah, glad to be here.

00:35
Shay: I was hoping before we get into our content of understanding our customers, we could talk a little bit about how you got started with Inductive Automation in the Marketing department.

00:42
Doug: Yeah, that's a great idea. So I started here about eight years ago, or so, and I was brought in actually as a content writer to write marketing content. One of the reasons I was also brought in, is 'cause I could do a little bit of graphic design. That was my background, I got a degree in Graphic Design from Sacramento State. So because I could do that and I could write, they figured I was a good person to bring on the team. But when I joined, there was only two of us on the team, and it was really cool 'cause I got a chance to work on all kinds of different projects. I really focused on content at first, so I got the webinar program started. I wrote a lot of white papers and case studies for the company. Eventually the company grew, we got bigger and more people got added into Marketing and then I got a chance to work with a lot more people on different projects, like the Conference, which I've been involved with since the beginning basically. And working on different promotions for the product, like the launch of Ignition 8, and now I get to work on projects like this, talking about Marketing. So it's been a really cool place to work, a lot of awesome projects and awesome people to work with.

01:46
Lauren: Oh thanks.

01:48
Doug: You're among them.

01:49
Lauren: Yeah we are, yeah.

01:52
Doug: Yeah, so that's how I got started in Inductive Automation.

01:54
Lauren: Well, we're excited to start this series with you, and we're starting with kind of a big topic...

02:00
Doug: Sure.

02:01
Lauren: Understanding your customers. Why is that so important and how is creating that relationship or finding a relational point so important to building any marketing or even just starting out with marketing?

02:15
Doug: Right, so understanding your customers is definitely kind of a foundational principle for any kind of good marketing. And one of the reasons for that is you are just trying to build a relationship with whoever you're trying to market to. Similar to sales, where in sales, you're doing a one-to-one relationship, where you're talking to someone on the phone, or in person trying to get to know them, trying to win over their trust. Marketing is much the same, but the difference is, instead of a one-to-one relationship, you're kind of doing a one-to-many relationship.

02:44
Doug: So you're talking to hundreds or thousands of people at once. But in spite of that, you're still trying to build some kind of trusting relationship that you can build on so they start to trust you and start to believe the messages you're telling them about your product or service. And that really has to begin with understanding who your customers are, understanding your audience. It's very difficult to have any kind of meaningful relationship or trusting relationship, if you don't understand the other person. So if you had a friend who just didn't understand you, didn't know anything about you, chances are you probably weren't great friends with them, you probably didn't have a lot of great conversations with them, because they don't understand anything about you. You have to be able to understand something about the other person, to be able to relate to them and to start building that relationship, yeah.

03:38
Lauren: Awesome, and then how do we get to that point of not only understanding but connecting and making ourselves someone they come to for answers?

03:50
Doug: Yeah, so a couple things there to think about and that's being credible, and being relevant. So credibility is you want to kinda talk-the-talk. You wanna sound like your audience, people can pretty quickly catch on to the fact that you might not know what you're talking about, especially if you're trying to talk to them about a subject that they know very well. Your customers have probably have been doing what they're doing for a long time, they're experts in their field, so you have to be able to relate to them in a credible way, use the terms they use, understand the problems they face on a daily basis so that you can have conversations where they can start to have the feeling of, "This person knows what I'm going through. This person knows about my industry, about my business, about the problems I'm trying to solve," and that credibility can help them believe you more.

04:43
Doug: The other piece of it is relevance: So you could be incredibly credible, but if you are trying to relate to your customer in a way that's not relevant to what they are looking for at the time, they may very well discount you because you're not gonna be helping them with whatever they're facing at the moment. So, you know an example of this is if you were trying to market snow cones in Antarctica, right, it's gonna be hard to really relate to that audience there, because you are giving a solution, you're trying to market a solution to a problem, none of them really have. They're not worrying about warming up, they're... or they're not worrying about cooling down rather.

05:24
Lauren: Typical I know, they are, yeah.

05:27
Doug: They're worried about warming up [chuckle]. Unless they're in a...

05:27
Lauren: More of a hot-chocolate market. Yeah.

05:29
Doug: Yeah, that would be better, a hot-chocolate market, more relevant to the problem they're trying to solve, right? You're selling those same snow cones in a warm place like Miami Beach on a summer day, you have a relevant solution to a relevant problem that those customers are facing, and they're probably more likely to listen to what you have to say. So that also goes with understanding your audience. If you understand your audience, you understand what problems they're facing and therefore can give them a relevant solution to solving those problems. If you don't understand the problems they're facing, if you don't understand what they're doing in their jobs, it's very difficult to relate to them in a relevant way that's gonna be something they're gonna wanna take the time to listen to you for.

06:10
Shay: Definitely. So I agree, making sure that you're credible, and relevant to your customers is super important. And another huge piece of this is identifying who those customers even are. And a lot of times when we're getting started with this, we want everyone to be our customer, right? The more customers, the better. But why is that not always the best approach?

06:30
Doug: Yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive, right? Because you think, "Man, a really good marketing strategy would be to appeal to as many people as possible", 'cause then you have this much higher base of people that could be interested in your product, right? And that should give you more sales. And the problem with that is it really makes the message you have kind of too general to stand out to anybody, if you don't narrow your target down to who you're specifically trying to address. An example I have of this is, at one of my first design jobs, I was working at a small advertising firm and we had a customer come in who wanted us to create a campaign that appealed to a broad segment of the audience. He was selling trash bag liner and his thinking was everyone throws away trash, everyone needs a trash bag liner. This should appeal to everybody. Yes, it's a universal product, right? And so he had some very specific instruction about the type of campaign he wanted us to create for him. And so we tried to create a campaign that appealed to as many people as possible, and the problem was, by appealing to as many people as possible, it just was too general to stand out. And as a result, it just wasn't very successful.

07:35
Doug: If instead, you can narrow down to who you're really trying to talk to, who you're really trying to target and then be able to give them a product or a service and describe it in a way that's very relevant and credible to them at the time, you're gonna have a much higher success rate at communicating to that person and by having them think, "Hey, this is a product that really was meant for me and is addressing the problems that I have." You're gonna have a much higher success rate if you narrow your target down a bit. Yeah.

08:05
Shay: And what sorts of questions can we ask to be able to help narrow that down? What kind of things can we think about to look internally and look at, "Okay, what do I do that applies to them," or that sort of thing?

08:16
Doug: Right. Yeah, so when you are identifying your audience, I think as you said, internally that is a good way of going. Instead of looking outward and trying to speculate or figure out what is the best audience out there for me to try to capture, which industry is gonna be the most profitable or which one has the most people in it so I can sell the most, whatever. I think you're better looking inside-out. See who you are as a company, what values you have, what you do better than anybody else, and also who you know better than anyone, anybody else, and also like what audience do you really know?

08:57
Doug: If you start there, you are gonna be much more likely to be able to have a product or service that is gonna appeal to that audience or better said, you're gonna be able to know how to make that product or service appeal much more to the audience because you really, really know who that audience is. Some of the questions you need to ask about that audience is, what's their day-to-day job like? What kind of problems are they facing everyday that frustrate them? What slows them down from doing their job? If you can kind of identify those, those kind of pain points that they face, that'll really give you a blueprint to understand how to address that target audience in a relevant way and be credible with them as well.

09:40
Lauren: We had some time to actually sit down with some integrators and talk to them about this whole process of understanding your customers, relating to them and identifying your target audience, and two integrators in particular, Grantek and Vertech, had some really awesome things to say. We'll be cutting to them throughout the series, but today in particular, we're interested in hearing what they have to say about this topic.

10:04
Doug: Awesome.

10:05
Lauren: We'll roll that clip. Check it out.

10:08
James Burnand: The way we determine our target audience for our marketing is by creating profiles of our most successful engagements and clients. We like to look at those engagements from a number of factors, including where folks sit inside of their organizations, what the verticals of those organizations are, as well as what types of engagements we have to ensure that as we're creating marketing materials and we're crafting our messaging is that the folks that we're targeting are already the kind of people that we know will receive our messaging very well. Our typical customer can range anywhere from someone on the factory floor to someone inside of a corporate engineering role, or someone who sits inside of the executive suite at one of our clients' sites. What we found is that the key in those clients is really making sure that those folks have the support of the organization and not just from an engineering capacity, but also from a general business capacity for solving the issues of that particular customer.

11:02
Chris McLaughlin: Our typical customer, that, let's talk about the semantics of that. I would say that our customer is actually going to be down on the engineering level. And so this is an old... I don't know, it's kinda like a wives' tale of that you would be going after a C-level person or a director of this or the plant manager of that and that's who you're going to start with when you are selling an MES project or even a SCADA project, but we did a lot of research and found out that that's just not true.

11:34
Chris McLaughlin: The first person that always contacts us is some engineer or senior engineer or IT ‘this.’ And inevitably, that's the person that we are looking for to make that first contact. So the reason why we're appealing to the engineers and the IT people, we didn't choose them, they're the ones that are choosing us. And so, yes, we wanna talk to everybody in the company and inevitably, you're going to have to step it up a little bit as you get through these meetings, there will be more senior people or different positions that you're gonna end up relating to, but the first person that we have to relate to is going to be on that engineering and IT level. They are the ones that are searching after the solution. They are the ones that are doing the research on the software and on Vertech and therefore we want to show them what we're all about.

12:23
Lauren: Not only have we kind of established who our audience is and kind of refined it, targeted it a little bit, but we've also created some connection there, right? What's the next step? We talk a lot in marketing about the customer journey. It's this process that our customers go through from first discovering the name of our product to purchasing and maybe even giving the referral to somebody else. And I know there's a lot of steps in that process and I know you can walk us through it, but I have a really memorable analogy that I learned from you, actually...

13:01
Doug: Oh yeah, okay.

13:02
Lauren: That really helped me understand the customer journey and it has something to do with a marriage proposal on the first date. Can you tell me a little bit or our audience a little?

13:10
Doug: Yeah. Yes, I'm definitely happy to explain that and I feel that I definitely need to explain that. Yeah, so as you said, the customer journey is a typical journey someone goes on from first hearing about you to becoming a customer and then hopefully referring other customers to you. And the way they go through that journey is really through a series of commitments. So going to the marriage proposal example, if you were going on your very first date with somebody, and then you asked the person at the end of that first date to make a commitment for them to marry you, that's probably, that's probably...

13:47
Shay: Not gonna go well.

13:47
Doug: Yeah that's probably a no-go, right.

13:48
Shay: It's a no.

13:49
Lauren: It's a no for me it's a no from both of us.

13:51
Doug: Okay, and why is that? Maybe you had the best first date ever. Maybe there was a connection there and everything, but you haven't given it enough time.

14:01
Lauren: It's too soon.

14:02
Doug: It's too soon, there's not enough trust built up and it's just too big of a commitment to ask at first. However, if you were to ask somebody, that same person after let's say, a hundred dates. There's a much higher likelihood that they would say yes, 'cause they've gone on that journey with you, right? You've gone on that journey together, you've had a series of hopefully engaging conversation and dates if you've gone on a hundred of them...

14:28
Shay: Yup.

14:29
Doug: Right? Either that or you're really going to some nice places to eat or something. [laughter] And you probably had a series of commitments that have gone a little deeper, and deeper. So the first commitment from the first date is probably asking for the second date. That's a little easier to say yes to than...

14:46
Shay: Spend the rest of your life, with me please, now.

14:48
Doug: Right, just give me a small period of time, another date, and then after that there might be another commitment. So this series of commitments can kind of help lead along this journey. It's similar to the customer journey, in that when you're first marketing to people, the first part of the customer journey is awareness. And awareness is just when the customer first becomes aware of you. Maybe they see a print out that you put out, or maybe they stumbled across your website 'cause they were searching for you. Or maybe they just heard about you from a colleague, right, they become aware of you as a company and that you might have something that is of interest to them.

15:24
Doug: That leads to the next step, which is consideration. So consideration is where they have now, are now considering your service or your solution as a potential solution to their problem. Once they do that, they start evaluating other solutions as well, that's where the decision comes in, where they have to make a decision, "Should I go with your solution or should I go with the customer's... Or another competitor's solution? Hopefully they pick yours and if they do, then you get into commitment where they have now decided to buy your service, or your solution, they are committed to you, in some small degree, and you're committed to fulfill that in some small way.

16:00
Doug: Hopefully, you do a great job there, and if you do, then that leads to the last step of the customer journey which is referral where your customer has now gone all the way and they have used your product or service. They really like it and now they're really excited to tell other people about it, which then creates awareness for those people. And then those people go back into their own customer journey where now they're going through it with you too. So, if it all works really nicely then you kinda create this self-perpetuating flow of new awareness, new leads into this customer journey. And the transition point between each one of those steps is a slightly different level of commitment where you're maybe you're asking them to just to do a little bit more, a little more engagement, a little bit more commitment into the point where yeah, they become your customer, they love your product and they're telling other people about it. So that's just a little bit of an overview, what a customer journey is, and...

16:53
Lauren: Maybe could you give us a little bit more of a real world example, what does this look like for somebody in the Automation space, or a Solutions Provider?

17:01
Doug: Sure, so maybe kind of a real world example of how you could put this in play. Let's say you have a trade show and at the trade show, you have a booth there, and someone comes across your booth for the very first time and they see your name, and they're like "Oh," they become aware of you, great. Okay, so they become aware of you. You wanna have some commitment to ask them to take them to that next step of the customer journey, right? So a possible thing you could have there is, you could be hosting another event and you can invite them to that event. Say, "Hey, it's great to meet you, we're doing a lunch tomorrow, and we'd love to have you come out, get some free food. We have one of our customers, talking about the project he's working on."

17:39
Doug: Okay, that's a commitment, but there's free food involved, it's not a super, super heavy commitment. So let's say they show up the next day. They come, they listen to your customer talk, they get some free food. You want some other level of commitment at that point, there's gotta be some next step for them to take if you wanna keep them moving along on the customer journey. So maybe there, you have an invite to get a free consultation to learn about your product or service. They could find out a little bit more to see if it's right for them, right? So, that seems like a pretty good commitment. They say, "Okay, I'll do it for free. It's free."

18:11
Doug: In a little bit of all the time, they call you, you have a free consultation and then maybe at the end of that you send them a quote that's the next level. Okay, so now they've considered you and now they're starting to put some dollars to this, "Okay, should I make this decision?" Let's say they do, and then you make the sale. Now the next level is, you've gotta do some great project work, you gotta really fulfill your end of the promise. And then maybe a commitment after that point is, you ask that customer to do a little bit more for you by telling other people about you, maybe you even ask 'em to your next trade show, so that he can be the customer that's speaking and telling other people about the amazing service he got, and if he does that now he is referring people to you as well. So that's just an example of how you could have this kind of stair-step of different levels of commitment, going deeper, and deeper, and deeper each one transitioning that customer to the next level of the customer journey, and getting them all the way to the end where they're now hopefully creating some referrals for you that you can lead them along the customer journey as well.

19:12
Lauren: It sounds really exciting.

19:14
Doug: Yeah.

19:14
Lauren: And I know this comes up throughout our Marketing series...

19:15
Doug: It does.

19:17
Lauren: Understanding the point at which your customer is in their customer journey.

19:21
Doug: It's definitely a part of understanding the customer. So we talked about understanding who they are, building that level of trust, but then also understanding where they are on the customer journey, is a very important step to know how you should relate to them in a relevant way.

19:33
Shay: You don't wanna be pushy, right off of the bat.

19:35
Doug: You don't wanna be pushy, nope you don't want them running away.

19:37
Lauren: Can't start with the ring.

19:38
Doug: You wanna get to that hundred date, right? You wanna get to that hundred date and then...

19:43
Shay: Well, thank you Doug, this has been super helpful and we're excited to continue to get to work with you on this. Is there anything else that you wanna send us off with today?

19:51
Doug: No, I've just had a great time doing it. I'm looking forward to talking to you about even more tips for Marketing and yeah, excited.

19:58
Shay: So are we.

19:58
Lauren: Alright, so are we. Thanks, Doug.

20:04
Doug: Okay. Cool.