INDUSTRY:
Industrial Fluid Control Products
SKILLS:
Market Strategy, Buyer Journey, Customer Insights
Creating Demand Earlier in the Buyer Journey
about.
BLACOH had an ambitious growth goal, and I wanted to understand where Marketing could have the greatest impact.
By reviewing the buyer journey, competitive landscape, digital behavior, and sales feedback, I identified an opportunity we weren't fully addressing: customers who were experiencing the problem, but didn't yet know how to identify it, let alone what solution they needed.
The opportunity was to expand Marketing's focus beyond customers already searching for a specific product and begin influencing buyers much earlier in their decision-making process.
challenge.
BLACOH sells highly technical products that solve problems like pulsation, water hammer, pressure fluctuations, vacuum conditions, and pump instability.
But there's a fundamental marketing challenge:
Customers don't always know which product they need. They know the symptom they're experiencing.
Someone searching for a pulsation dampener is already relatively far along in the buyer journey. Someone trying to understand why their piping is shaking represents a much earlier opportunity.
I mapped the customer journey from Problem Recognition through Design/Specification and Product Selection and looked at where BLACOH's existing marketing was strongest and where there were gaps.
That analysis revealed an opportunity to reach Stage 1 and Stage 2 buyers with educational, problem-focused content before they had selected a solution or competitor.
result.
I developed a recommended marketing strategy connecting the company's growth objective to earlier customer engagement.
The strategy expanded the role of Marketing from primarily supporting existing product demand toward creating and influencing demand earlier in the buyer journey, using educational content, SEO, technical resources, application-focused messaging, and stronger alignment with Sales.
Because the strategy was still in the recommendation stage during my tenure, I would not claim a revenue result that had not yet been established. The meaningful outcome of this work was identifying and defining a previously underdeveloped growth opportunity and creating an actionable framework for pursuing it.
