Why Knowing Your Customer Helps Create More Tailored Messages

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In 2021, every marketer is trying to crack the code of who their customers are. What makes them tick, and most importantly, what will make them need your product? But what happens when every one of your customers has a different use case for your product? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for that situation, so how do you tailor your message to fit their individual needs?

“Getting to know customers is a really critical function for any marketer, and it’s something that I encourage across my entire team, regardless of role, you need to get to know the customer.”

Jeff Boehmis the CMO ofFormlabs, a professional 3D printing company that is pushing the boundaries when it comes to what can be printed. Formlabs sells to companies across various industries, from dentists to engineers, to architects, so finding a message that works for everyone can be a daunting task. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jeff explains how Formlabs is getting to know its customer base by implementing a data-driven marketing approach, and he gets deep on the importance of personalizing your marketing messaging to resonate with the customer.

“Our product is used by architects, jewelers, dentists, and engineers, and each one of them thinks about 3D printing in a different way. One of the core challenges for us is how do we create marketing, messaging, materials, and strategies that serve such a wide audience? Where do we go horizontal and try to come up with messaging that resonates with everybody and where do we create materials and information that is very specific to an audience?”

“We market to dentists and they love to see bloody teeth. When you market to everybody else, they do not want to see bloody teeth. So we really need to tailor to that audience of who we’re talking to and using images, language, and examples that resonate with them as opposed to just thinking everybody will know what 3D means for them.”

“A big part of what we have to do in marketing is figuring out who are the unique personas in each one of these industries [we sell to], and what is the messaging that’s going to resonate with them?”

“Getting to know customers is a really critical function for any marketer, and it’s something that I encourage across my entire team, regardless of role, you need to get to know the customer.”

“3D printing is not something that we can offer a free download of and it’s not a freemium model. We can’t do that with 3D printing. We used to rely a lot on in-person events — trade shows or our own events — as an opportunity for people to come to see the printers. A year ago that all changed, and all of a sudden we weren’t going to in-person events. [My team] did an incredible job of pivoting quickly from those in-person events to Formlabs Comes To You, which was a virtual environment… We tried all sorts of different things to figure out how we could reach our customers and our prospects most effectively, but most importantly, it kept a constant connection and a constant opportunity for us to keep talking to people and having people see and experience 3D printing.”

“I intentionally try to focus more on what may seem a little bit more dull, but what is more practical and more scalable because our primary use case is not people printing demogorgons or Baby Yodas. Our primary use case is people tackling the mundane, but really important parts of streamlining manufacturing workflows. That’s where the biggest opportunity is, because 3D printing fundamentally transforms how every product is made. There are sexy and fun things, but then there’s also just the majority of stuff that’s being made that we can accelerate either product development or even create those end-use parts with.”

“Everything in marketing has become more data-driven. We can measure things a lot more effectively than we used to. I really encourage my team to [to use data] in part, because data is to do a lot more experimentation and we like to try new things and test it out and fail quickly.” 

Jeff Boehm leads the Formlabs global marketing team, responsible for all aspects of revenue, brand, and community marketing. Jeff brings to Formlabs more than two decades of enterprise marketing experience at technology pioneers and leaders including Endeca, Qlik, and Business Objects. Jeff’s experience spans all stages of growth – from seed funding through initial public offering and acquisitions. Jeff holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Tufts University and an MBA from Boston University Questrom School of Business.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffboehm/ or @jsboehm on Twitter.

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To read an unedited, automatically-generated transcript of this interview, click here.