MT Magazine July/August 2025

FEATURE STORY

JULY/AUGUST 2025

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attendees, our production engineer may be more interested in learning versus buying in the upcoming show cycle. These insights can help us prioritize how we go to market for each segment. We can go even further by layering in product interest data from IMTS Exhibitor Passport. Cross-sectioning IMTS Exhibitor Passport data by industry and equipment preference over two show cycles might show us that job shops have increased interest in automation solutions. This helps us further tailor the IMTS experience for our shop owner profile to highlight the solutions that may best resonate with that individual. Of course, there is more analysis to be done. Still, industry and buying preference trends tell a nuanced story about how to best approach our job shop owner serving a portfolio of multiple industries and our production engineer at our automotive OEM. More importantly, they tell us how we might prioritize our outreach and spending for each audience based on their evolving needs.

Step 4: Analyze Your Data and Prioritize Your Core Segments Now that we have identified data sources, we can perform our analysis to gain insights to help us prioritize our segments and identify

the best go-to-market strategy for each. For instance, trends in employment or the number of facilities may indicate that the medical, aerospace, and defense industries will show varying levels of growth through 2026. Since these are all industries served by our job shop owner profile, we may expect that a persona with this customer mix will likely be in a buying cycle in 2026 and that we will need to shape our messaging to them accordingly.

Step 5: Reassess and Adapt Regularly

It’s important to note that this type of analysis is not meant to be static and should be revisited over time, particularly in industries

where macro events could cause larger shifts. For instance, in our automotive example, if market projections became more positive, we would reconsider our industry projection and approach to our engineer, as buying needs may change.

We may also see that the forecast of the automotive market fluctuates wildly, perhaps due to a combination of tariff impacts, financing challenges, EV market dynamics, supply chain disruptions, and changing consumer behaviors. This tells us that, although automotive is an important segment of IMTS