MT Magazine July/August 2025

FEATURE STORY

THE SALES & MARKETING ISSUE

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segments differ (and relate) as individuals, as well as how macro trends influence their industries. Understanding this allows us to effectively segment and personalize our inbound marketing efforts and prioritize them accordingly. In this case, the question we want answered is: How can I understand the unique needs of a potential IMTS attendee at the firmographic, behavioral, and psychographic level, so that I can best 1) prioritize marketing efforts, 2) personalize outreach at scale, and 3) provide the best customer experience for each attendee based on their needs?

Step 1: Clarify Your Business Objectives To improve your segmentation strategy, understanding a particular market or segment is not a specific enough goal. You

must be able to articulate what that understanding will unlock. Do you want to focus your sales team on where regional trends drive the most revenue? Or make inroads into a new segment? Or attract more attendees to your event? Building off our

IMTS example, IMTS hosts domestic and international attendees from various industries – job shops, aerospace, medical, defense, automotive, and others. In designing an IMTS marketing strategy, we need to prioritize efforts across various demographic (individual-specific identifiers, such as job role or gender) and firmographic categories (company

Step 3: Identify Your Data Sources

Customer Experience

To answer this question, we first identify data sources that would best help us answer it. In this case, an analysis of government

Community Growth

data sources provides us with projected trends on facility expansion and employment growth by industry, and an analysis of data from the U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) statistical program provides insights into equipment consumption by industry. Administered by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology, the USMTO program collects data on the demand for manufacturing technology in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. We can continue to pull in additional data points to deepen our understanding. For instance, we can use data from IMTS Exhibitor Passport to understand equipment buying preferences. A marketing tool available for IMTS exhibitors, IMTS Exhibitor Passport provides access to an opt-in list of current and previous IMTS attendees, segmented by factors such as industry, region, and equipment interest. This tool can serve as a marketing platform and develop users’ understanding of manufacturing buying trends.

specific identifiers, such as industry or company size) as well as behavioral data (customer-specific actions, such as purchasing history, browsing data, or campaign engagement) and psychographics (the “why” behind an individual’s behavior, such as personality traits, lifestyle, or values). In this case, our business objective is twofold: 1) to provide an exceptional customer experience and 2) to grow the IMTS community, both by fostering in-person show attendance and online community growth. A deep understanding of our audience’s firmographic, behavioral, and psychographic intersections fuels both objectives.

Step 2: Define Your Key Market Questions Based on Your Business Objectives Now that we understand our core business objectives, we can drill down further into the

questions that segmentation will answer. To set and prioritize our target segments for IMTS, we examine how demographic, firmographic, behavioral, and psychographic categories interrelate. For instance, a job shop owner on the East Coast whose customer base is a mix of aerospace, defense, and medical will have different equipment needs and buying cycles than a production engineer at an automotive OEM in the Midwest. From a behavioral and psychographic perspective, they may consume media differently, have different linguistic profiles, and prefer distinct communication channels. We need to understand how those