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0:03
Let's look at an example of a really
interesting company called Makino.
It's a Japanese machine
tools manufacturer, and
this is about their US division.
As you probably know,
machine tools are used for
cutting metal into precise shapes, so
naturally their largest customer
categories are automotive and aerospace.
Makino is a top-of-the-line premium
supplier of high-end machine tools,
and Makino Americas is
its largest division.
0:37
For a long time, Makino Americas went
to market in the traditional way
used forever by industrial marketers,
through exhibiting at trade shows and
advertising in trade publications.
Around 2004 they came to the realization
that they were incurring a lot of
waste and not doing a good job of meeting
the needs of their top prospects,
so they upended their approach by
building a database of current and
potential buyers, and attracting
their interest through informative
content delivered through social media,
specifically Facebook.
For myself, I found it pretty surprising
because I didn't think of Facebook
as a b2b vehicle in those days,
but I do now.
1:20
Their first step was in
building a marketing database.
They knew that there were around 55,000
companies in the US buying machine tools,
but they also knew that only
the top segment was going
to be interested in the higher-end,
most precise tools available.
So they began their database with
their current customers, and
pulled together records on prospects
most likely to buy from them,
using various internal and
external resources as you can see here,
out of the 55,000 they concentrated
on about 14,000 accounts.
