Common Sense Marketing For Water And Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers

I wrote recently about the Holy Grail of Marketing and the age-old quest to tie each sale back to a lead. Since that post I’ve had a number of conversations with sales and marketing executives who are trying to find a footing in the ever-changing quicksand of digital marketing. What I want to write about today is what I would call “Common Sense Marketing” in the business-to-business (B2B) world of the water and wastewater industry.

Much of modern marketing technique comes to us from the business-to-consumer (B2C) world. Over the last 5 years, marketing prowess has moved significantly away from the power of your ads (Creative) to the measurement of your marketing performance (Analytics). New software vendors like Hubspot and Marketo have arrived to automate your marketing and provide metrics on performance. Salesforce and other CRM platforms are installed to track sales interactions across your organization. These tools are far more effective in the B2C arena where the responder to your marketing message is also the likely purchaser.

In the world of water and wastewater, drawing a clear line between the responder to your marketing message and the eventual purchaser of your product is far more difficult. Here is a simplified example to illustrate my point:

Let’s say you run a display ad in a traditional print publication that gets mailed to water treatment plants around the country. The magazine lands on the desk of a plant manager who flicks through it while drinking his morning coffee. On page 10, he sees your ad and it sparks his attention. He notes down your booth number for the upcoming WEFTEC tradeshow that he’s attending in a month.

At WEFTEC, he visits your Company’s booth during some down-time between technical sessions. Your rep educates him on your product and scans his badge to capture his details as a tradeshow lead.

After returning from the show, the plant manager discusses your product with his engineer who discusses it further with the consulting engineer on file who reaches out to your rep firm to understand more about your product and incorporate it into his design spec. The spec goes through multiple evaluations and revisions before being approved and the project goes out to bid.

After multiple bids, a contractor is selected who proceeds to purchase your equipment and install it.

How would the information in your CRM database reflect this transaction in relation to your marketing efforts?

I would imagine that the initial lead would be recorded as a WEFTEC lead despite the fact that it was your ad in the magazine that initiated the booth visit. And unless you’re capturing data on where the contractor is going to install the product that he purchased, the link between the magazine reader and the final purchase will be lost. Likely the sale will be attributed to your manufacturer’s rep who just happens to be a golfing buddy of the contractor and not to marketing at all.

When it comes down to “Common Sense Marketing,” look for these relationships in your campaign data:

1. Company data coupled with geography. It’s one thing to see that 150 American Water employees saw your recent case study. More meaningful to know that 50 of those American Water employees work for Pennsylvania American Water and even more impactful knowing that 10 of those Pennsylvania American Water employees work at the same WTP.
2. Content coupled with time. It’s one thing to see that a Consulting Engineer in Spokane WA has read two of your case studies, one product datasheet and watched a video. It’s far more important if she’s accessed all of that content within the past week than over the course of the last year. That should be a trigger that somebody needs to be in touch.
3. Contractor coupled with engineer coupled with utility. Linking partners in your database is really valuable. This is another example where geography can be important. If you know that A&N Engineering works with BTB Contracting Co. who has worked in the past with the City of Middlebury, then you can tie the marketing responses of locally-aligned representatives of those three entities together.

Our industry is inherently local. Water is sourced locally. It’s treated locally. It’s distributed locally. And it’s used and recycled locally. Therefore, connecting responses together at the local level may make the most common sense in evaluating your marketing performance.