Technical Buyer Trends 2025: Trust, AI, and the Shifting Marketing Landscape

Curt Anderson  00:01

Hey, I remembered. Okay, hey, Michelle, thanks for the thumbs up. Okay, I haven’t mastered my mind sometimes, like I sometimes I get the hearts going, sometimes I get the thumbs ups. I haven’t, I haven’t quite figured it out yet. So, okay, letting people in and okay, we happy Thursday or, like we love to say Happy Friday Eve to everybody as you’re popping in, we are just thrilled and honored to have you here today. We have a an incredible, wonderful program. I hope everybody got a good night’s sleep tonight, because we’re gonna we’re gonna go fast and furious. Julie Warner, do you want to give a little intro here as we get things started?

Julie Warner  00:47

Sure, thanks everyone for joining. We’re right at the top of the hour. Like Curt said, we’d like to start right on time. I’m sure more will struggle in but thanks for everyone for being on time. I’m Julie Warner with the Purdue MEP. I also have Michelle Macy online with us from Purdue MEP as well. For those of you who don’t know, there’s an MEP center and Manufacturing Extension Partnership Center in every state in the US, plus Puerto Rico, the one in Indiana is at Purdue University. But we service the whole state. And I always like to say, we help any manufacturer with any issue you have, we can always find a solution. So whether it’s lean or leadership or quality Six Sigma marketing, we have the resources to reach out to us. And from that, I’ll turn it over to our friend Curt,

Curt Anderson  01:31

Julie, thank you. And again, I just want to give a huge welcome to everybody joining us today. Thank you for being here. We have a wonderful speaker. And again, as Julie just said, if you have not engaged with the Purdue MEP, we strongly encourage you, invite you, welcome you to do so. They do all sorts of amazing work. As you said, Julie’s here, so drop a note to let or Michelle, if you have any questions whatsoever. They do marketing. They do cyber, everything that Julie just mentioned and anybody else that just popped in so and if you’re coming to us from another state. You have a wonderful MEP Manufacturing Extension Partnership in your backyard. So reach out to your local MEP. They are here doing wonderful, amazing work for manufacturers throughout the Great our great country in United States here. So speaking of that, let me my name is Curt Anderson. What an honor privilege to be with each of you here today. If we were all in person, we would be high fiving, handshaking, and we’d be handing out business cards, or maybe we’d be exchanging LinkedIn profiles off of our phones. I strongly encourage you. I invite you, welcome you, drop your LinkedIn in the chat box, if you would. And it’s a great opportunity make some new friends, some new networking. We’ve actually Juliana, remember last year we had some people actually came to the program, started doing business together, so who knows, there might be a customer sitting right next to you in the Zoom Room here. So drop your LinkedIn or your website, let us know where you’re coming from, and we would welcome you guys to connect with each other. With that being said, I’m going to turn this over to my dear friend. I need to give a little intro to Wendy Covey. Now. Wendy is an amazing, incredible, dynamic speaker. I actually this program. She does a high level research project every year for engineers on marketing strategies and tactics, on how to approach and engage with engineers. I’ve caught this program every year. We’ve started bringing it here to Purdue. I caught this program in person in in February. And I’m telling you, this is a powerhouse program. Wendy is the founder and president, maybe co founder, president of true marketing. Little sign right over her her head there, and she is just a powerhouse marketer. Does an amazing job. She also runs an incredible program. It’s a conference called the industrial marketing Summit. We’re going to talk about that more with that being said, Now, Wendy, last thing I want to mention about you. She’s a wonderful mom and creative, incredible family person. I met her daughter this year. Wendy, what’s the you’re coming to us from Austin, Texas, what’s your claim to fame in the state of Texas? Haven’t you done something where, like, you’ve caught the biggest what? What was that I can’t remember,

Wendy Covey  03:58

you know, Curt, you’re going to laugh at me, but I’m going to show my screen because I actually have a picture of it. I decided for fun, because I’ve never showed you the picture. This is my state record redfish. So there it is. Look at that in certain circles in the state of Texas, I’m kind of famous for this. That’s red fish. So

Curt Anderson  04:20

that’s right. So eight and before, Wendy, before you get cranking here, last thing again is, you’re just joining us. Drop your LinkedIn or website in the chat box. Any questions we would love to make this interactive. Wendy has a great program here. I’m going to keep my eye on the chat box for you, Wendy. So please feel free to bring the questions with that. I’m stopping Wendy. Take it away.

Wendy Covey  04:39

Alright, sounds good. So let me, I will. I will back up. My slides are here, so we know why the heck we’re here. So today, we’re going to be walking through the results of a research report that my agency recently released, along with a couple other partners that I’ll talk about. It’s called the state of marketing to. Engineers, and each year we ask a battery of questions, some we ask every year so that we can benchmark how things have changed. And then with each year, we add new just things of interest. And so it’s meant to help inform your marketing strategy and help you reach technical buyers. So that’s the whole premise behind this, that we have lots of time for interactions. So I definitely want you to chat questions. We can answer them as we go throughout each of the findings. When you have Q and A at the end, does it matter to me? I do have a QR code here, and I’ll show this again at the end. But from here, it takes you to a page where you can download the research report some other resources. So you’re welcome to snag it. You’ll have the because I won’t go through every single finding today, so that’ll be helpful to get everything. As Curt said, my name is Wendy Covey, co founder and CEO of TREW marketing. I have a podcast. I wrote a book. So lots of resources out there to help you learn marketing, and of course, the fish true marketing. So I founded it along with my partner in 2008 so we’ve been around for a while. We were previously colleagues at a manufacturing company called National Instruments that many of you might know. So I’ve been in marketing in manufacturing for almost 30 years now going on in, I guess, 28 years. So I’ve seen a lot of change. I know what works. My agency knows what works, and so that’s why we really just focus in this area, because these buyers are very unique, and that leads us to why we’re talking today on this report, so I want to help you better understand buying behaviors and communication preferences of technical buyers. To do this, we talked to over 1000 qualified engineers and technical professionals. I’ll show you the demographics in just a minute. Again, this research was this is our eighth annual research report that we’ve done with global spec, and this year we brought in a partner elector from Europe so that we could have a little more of a global presence. And so you’ll see the breakdown there. But fun fact, as we broke down regional differences in the findings, we found that Europe and North America tracked very closely together, and that surprised me, because in the past, I would say pre COVID, there was more of a difference between those two. So just interesting there. So about the respondents, so you can see here the job functions primarily in engineering and already also some manufacturing staff and technical sales, and then the industries. We try to get a broad range of industries, but you see, we do have some concentration in electronics and semiconductor and energy automation, automotive utilities, and really all of these have a good in sample size all the way down to medical devices. So good cross reference here the age range. We had a pretty decent age range here. There is some cluster of that looks like 46 to 65 but again, enough of the younger engineers where we have a good end sample to look at, say, the 26 to 45 year olds and how those preferences are different than their older counterparts. And we’ll look at some of that. The Americas was 38% Europe was 34% Asia, 22 and then the rest. And then you can see there’s an interesting bookends on company size between small and pretty large. Okay, so today, we’ll walk through five areas, the buying process, how, how these buyers seek information, their content preferences. We ask some questions about artificial intelligence and specifically generative search, and then finally, we have some findings that’ll help inform how to work on branding and messaging for your company and your solutions. Okay, any any questions before we get started? Curt, anything. How are we doing?

Curt Anderson  09:14

Looking good. We had a couple people just pop in. So again, we’re here with Wendy Covey today. And strongly encourage you guys drop your LinkedIn or your website in the chat, and we encourage conversations. Love to make this conversational. This is a wonderful program, and we’ll go from there. So take it away. Wendy, alrighty,

Wendy Covey  09:32

okay, so we’ll jump right in. So one of the questions we ask every year is, hey, technical buyer, and thinking about the entire buying process for a significant purchase, how much of that do you spend online before you choose to talk to someone at the company? And the overall average is 60% so think about that. So 60% they’re spent talking to people. They’re spending online. They’re going to forums, they’re. Like on social media, they’re going to your website, they’re going to industry publications, all these places. So that means that a salesperson isn’t talking to them until pretty late in their journey. And I always find this is a great thing to share with sales to show them why they may consider investing some time on LinkedIn and investing some time with marketing to make sure that we have our messaging right and we understand the buyer really well, so that everything they’re reading online lines up with what sales feels we should say. And of course, they’re reinforcing those messages once they pick up the ball. If we break this down by age, we see that younger engineers and technical buyers spend even more time online than their older counterparts. And I find this not surprising, obviously, because these are digital natives, but I also find it somewhat concerning, because those are the folks that need to talk to our technical sales force the most, right? They they’re the less experienced ones. We often have experienced sales engineers on our team. So it is what it is, but it shows why we need to invest in content and education to help these people through their journey. When they choose to reach out. We asked, What was it that motivated you, like, what motivated you to pick up that phone or send that email or fill out that form and reach out to us? So the number one answer was the technical complexity of the solution. So right there, there’s an expectation that when they reach out, the person they’re talking to has some technical acumen, and they’re able to talk about their application and help them, you know, figure out if this is the right product or how to solve this application, whatever it is. Then the next one on the list is pricing and inventory. And this is, this is friction, right? They can’t find pricing on your website, they can’t find inventory information, so they’re picking up the phone. A lot of buyers would would prefer to be able to have that answered online. So, you know, again, it’s a friction point, but it is what it is. That’s the second reason they call and then the third, more, most popular, is to validate information gathered online. So I’ve read a bunch of things, maybe I’ve gone on a chat GPT, learned some things. I don’t know if I trust that. So now it’s time to say, Is this really what I can trust? Is this information valid and recent and all that? Okay, only 6% said none of the above. I would prefer never, ever to talk to a salesperson. So most people, yeah, I’m ready to talk to them. I’m just, you know, for these reasons and when I’m pretty far along in my journey. Okay, any questions so far, or observations? Good so far. Okay, thank you. Move around along. So here we asked, and this is one of our benchmarking questions we ask every year. Where do you routinely seek information? So routinely is an important word here. All the time I go to these sources when I’m researching a product or service for work related purchase. So number one, and it’s always been number one, is supplier and vendor website. So they’re going to your website first that is their preferred place to go. New this year. No, it moved up, not new, but there was a big jump in a preference for trade publications. So going to their websites that jump by. Let me see how much jump by, like 20 percentage points, something like that. So the popularity is increased for that, technical publications in print also very popular. We also see, again, talking to your sales engineers, industry directory websites and then YouTube is really high here too. So as we look towards the bottom, we see things like LinkedIn and podcast. This doesn’t mean that they don’t go there, they just don’t go there as routinely, and we’ll have other data later in the presentation that speaks to that. I did find it interesting that generative AI platforms was so low, and of course, has Google has integrated their their generative responses, those AI overviews, into Google. I think a lot of buyers are thinking, Oh, I’m going to Google and I’m reading those things, but they’re not, maybe, necessarily equating those with a generative AI platform, like one that you specifically and intentionally go to. So to be interesting, I think we’ll need to ask this question, possibly a little bit differently next year, or at least one of the answers to kind of ferret out those people that are reading those AI overviews and, you know, in Google, and what are they doing with that? Okay, so then we wanted to ask, Okay, what about your online journey as you go to vendor websites, what interactive online tools do you find most valuable? And we wanted to ask this question to help manufacturers inform investing in your website. So if you were to do one thing to your website, to improve it this year, beyond just making sure your content is up to date, what might be something you could do to lessen the friction of the buyer’s journey when they’re on your website? And by far number one was product selection tools and parametric search and product comparison tools. So it’s kind of, you know, two in the same so make it easier for them to understand your product offerings, compare between them, maybe even comparing against competitors. Or, I don’t know where you want to take this, but at least help them find the right product as quickly and easily as possible. And parametric search used to be something that was really expensive. It was a heavy lift, and now there’s so many easy, inexpensive ways to incorporate that to your website. And Curt man, Curt an expert when it comes to e commerce and taking friction out of websites, so he’s definitely a good person to dig into the details on that interesting near the near the bottom of this so less valuable are chat, chat bots and AI assistant chat. And I believe so this is the Wendy theorizing. Here. We just saw that when they reach out to you, it’s because of the technical complexity the solution or to validate information. So they just, they don’t want to trust a chat bot. Like chat bots are great for quick information, you know, when is my product going to arrive? You know, something that’s straightforward, but for technical complexity, they they care about these other things. Maybe customer support is where you put your chat bot. Okay? All right, okay, let’s talk about social media. So year after year after year, when we asked this, YouTube always reigns supreme on this chart. LinkedIn is also highly popular for social GitHub has jumped up in popularity the past few years. So those are your top three. And I know there’s a lot going on in this chart, so sorry. Real quickly to orient you, the teal is so it’s how valuable are each of the social media platforms and seeking information for work. And the teal is extremely, or very valuable, and that Navy is somewhat valuable. So that’s where I’m focused in so you see YouTube, GitHub, LinkedIn, all very, very valuable when wanting to talk with other people, interact with the community. And then at the bottom, if you look at the red, either I don’t use this platform, or the purple, my company doesn’t allow, or the light blue, not very valuable. So those are Tiktok discord, you know, threads, you know, those things towards the bottom, and then somewhere in this middle, you see Facebook, Reddit jumped up in popularity. So we’re seeing growth there. I think a lot of that has to do with Google. They made an algorithm change about 18 months ago or so where they prioritize community answers and specifically Reddit in their search results. So it’s taking a lot of engineers that search for answers to Reddit, and then they start to rat hole on Reddit, and they’ve discovered it and they found it to be useful. But they’re not necessarily always going to Reddit directly. They may go through Google and end up on Reddit and find it helpful. X has fallen down in popularity. Facebook has fallen down a bit. Instagram, Stephanie fallen so as you’re thinking about your social media strategy for your company, certainly we recommend prioritizing YouTube and LinkedIn and then GitHub. It’s appropriate for what you do.

Curt Anderson  19:14

Hey, Bonnie, let’s just just out of curiosity, and we’ll see if we can get some participation here. I would love to see if you are comfortable, what so like the what social media platform do you find most helpful, most useful that you’re using as resource, education information for your company? I’m just out of, just out of my own curiosity, I’d love to see how it matches what Wendy has. If you are so kind, or would be if you’re not driving, maybe we don’t want anybody at risk. But if you’re not driving, just you know, are you on YouTube? Are you on LinkedIn? Wendy, I want to chime in on the Reddit. We are finding that exactly Reddit is everywhere, literally on every search. And so I was working with a electronics manufacturer years ago, and we were posting. On Reddit and Cora and medium, all the, you know, all the Q and A type websites, discussion sites, and like that company, their their their organic rankings went through the roof. This was like in 2017 18. I, and I was doing it myself. I’ve kind of backed off it a little bit, but now I agree with you that we’re strongly encouraging, like every client, to really consider getting more active on on Reddit.

Wendy Covey  20:25

Good. And by the way, it sounds like somebody maybe came off mute, and we hear some background stuff. I don’t think that was on Curt side. So maybe y’all could mute that. Great. Good feedback on Reddit. Yep,

Curt Anderson  20:36

and we see So Diane buyer put in LinkedIn. Julie put in LinkedIn. So again, if you guys are comfortable, just just out of curiosity, just love to see what everybody’s using. But let’s lot of great stats here, you know. And I don’t want to you know, 60% of the buying journey is done online. Like, like, if you let that sink in, and then 73% are looking at your website. And so, like, I know, like, I do this for a living, I think I’m constantly scrutinizing my website, like, Does this make sense? Does it make sense to me, or does it make sense to my buyer? So great information here. Mark says YouTube and AI and grack, AI on X or chat. GBT, Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. Christy says, LinkedIn and YouTube, excellent. And let’s see Pete grand o says LinkedIn. So we’re getting some link, lot of LinkedIn.

Wendy Covey  21:27

I think that’s that’s great. And I have a whole nother presentation we don’t have time for today on just how how to do LinkedIn well as an individual within a company. So I give quite a few presentations to sales organizations. So I was just at Hayward flow control, for example. We probably a lot of us know Hayward, if you have a pool, they have an industrial side to them, and they wanted their sales force to work on their personal brand and specifically how to use LinkedIn to build credibility as a salesperson and to engage with, you know, prospects and customers, because we know it’s a long sales cycle oftentimes, and people aren’t ready to buy. And so how do you stay top of mind, and how do you craft your brand as a salesperson, so that people see you the way you want to be seen, and you can help amplify the company’s content, and that’s a great way we’re finding on LinkedIn, the algorithm favors people, not brands, and so more and more, if you want to get traction and get shares on LinkedIn, it’s harder to do through your company pages and way easier to do through your spokespeople and your salespeople and individuals that are that are committed to having a steady cadence of of being on there. Anyway, we’ll move on to, I wanted to show you by age, because this, this is interesting, but, but, but not, but no, it’s definitely interesting. So YouTube, like, like, YouTube reign supreme here across all age groups and then, but now the 25 and under, we only had 14 responses. So take that with a grain of salt on the in sample there, because LinkedIn was the most popular for the youngest, and that really shocked me. But for all the other age groups, LinkedIn was number two, and then you see Reddit showing up on the 25 and under. So we’ll love to do this again and see how things change. You know, with another year so it’s 25 and under. Get older, and hopefully we can find more. It’s hard to find technical buyers that have what we filter people out that don’t have direct responsibility for influencing a purchase, and 25 and under have less of that, so that’s why they get weeded out more.

Curt Anderson  23:51

And when Atlanta says, I’d like to learn more about LinkedIn for our spokespeople. And so you know what, maybe Julie will have to we’ll have to have like, a little LinkedIn party at our next session here, so we’ll plot that out. So Lana, if you have any questions, reach out to us anytime and again, connect. If you just we had a few people pop in, please drop in your LinkedIn in the chat. Great opportunity for everybody connect with each other here.

Wendy Covey  24:13

Yeah, perfect. And we did a webinar sometime a little under a year ago on LinkedIn best practices, and I can share a link to that. Maybe I can add that to that QR code so that you guys can find it. You can probably find on the true marketing website, just LinkedIn webinar. It’s in our resource center, and it has some good tips there too. Okay, well, let’s move on to podcasts. So 64% of technical buyers listen to work related podcasts weekly. So 64% this is a lot of folks. Now I will say this was a 26 percentage point drop year after year. So I was surprised that we had this drop. I don’t really know how to explain the drop. I’ve lots of people have given me theory. Companies, no one really knows for sure, so still really popular. And then there is this group that says, I listen, but I don’t subscribe. So if you have not yet looked into your products, your company being a part of a podcast. What? What this says to me, if you haven’t done it yet is don’t run off and just start a podcast, because it is a lot of work. So I wouldn’t start there unless you’re very committed to the time and resources it takes to do it. However, there’s a lot of industry podcasts, so think ones that are industry influencers, technical publications, host podcasts, so it’s a great place to put your subject matter experts. So pitch them to be on relevant podcasts. Some are going to be maybe a pay placement. Some are just, hey, great. We’d love to have you as a guest. You’re a good fit. Come on. So consider that in your strategy, and then see how it goes. The hard part about podcasts is you don’t necessarily get names from it. You don’t know. You could see how many people, as a Podcast Producer, you know, I have my own podcast. I can tell how many people download a particular episode, but I don’t know who they are. They’re not a lead, right? So it’s more of an awareness thing, and you can’t tell how many people, how many unique people go to one and, you know, go to all of them versus subscriptions. So know that the data is there, but not all the way there, but it’s still an interesting avenue to consider. All right, trade shows, we asked, do you plan in this survey was field fielded last fall. So it closed mid October, 2024, so in the survey, we said, do you plan on attending trade shows in 2025, and 75% said yes. And you can see here how many trade shows and they plan to attend. So 55% say they’ll plan they’ll go to at least two. And then 75% at least one. We did see a little bit of drop in the number of shows that people are going to but still pretty healthy statement on trade shows here. Okay, then we asked, What forms of content do you find most valuable when researching to make a significant purchase? And this was a you can select as many as you want to. And so data sheets, obviously, data sheets give us like the nuts and bolts, you know, the specs, everything we need. But beyond that, it’s always fun to look at the top three or four, because the it tends to all be the same content, but it switches position. I will say white paper fell a little bit this year. I think white paper last year was the number two. So that’s kind of fun for whatever reason. Technical publication articles, CAD drawings, very popular. And CAD drawings, don’t forget, are a great lead generation type of content, so don’t forget, you put forms in front of that and use that for leads, product demo videos, product reviews and testimonials were high. I was surprised that came in a little bit higher than How To videos. So again, a lot of these switch positions year over year, but they’re all pretty darn equally popular in that messy middle there. Then we’ll talk about newsletters. So 91% of technical buyers subscribe to work related newsletters. And we said, how many do you subscribe to? And we were showing a three year history here, and so you could see that the biggest growth was in three to five newsletters. So that’s good. So it looks like there was a lot of email fatigue there during and right after COVID. So it looks like the email fatigue is is past us, and people are starting to look to newsletters a little bit more than in the past. So that’s great. The other thing, if you haven’t noticed this is LinkedIn has provided a way to do newsletters within that platform, and we found those to be very successful for our clients and our own company. And you may want to consider that, because you may have a big following on LinkedIn, and you don’t have their email addresses in your CRM. So that might be another venue for you to get the word out. It has a lot of good analytics, so you can tell what people are interested in. The other thing that LinkedIn has is articles. So that’s another thing you could consider doing on that platform, native within that, we were we were curious. You know, as marketers, we like to personalize email communications and email newsletters, and we wanted to figure out, where’s the biggest bang for the buck. Right? Because some of these are a heavier lift to personalize than others. What it takes to personalize is you have to really trust the fidelity of your data and your CRM so right here, you know, buyers are saying, I would love you to to give me content related to products I use. I would love you to recommend additional products or project case study. So personalize this to my industry, my application, my past product purchases. So all of that is great. You just need to make sure you have those fields populated and pretty accurate in your CRM to be able to do it down at the bottom. No surprise that least valuable is having a personalized greeting, but it’s also the easiest as a marketer. So it doesn’t mean don’t do that, but it means, yeah, that’s kind of boring. It’s kind of a table stake compared to some of these others up top. Okay, the other thing we’re interested in learning is how technical buyers think of independent sources. So these might be an influencer within the industry. It could be an analyst. So people that are not part of a that work for you at a manufacturer, manufacturers organization, they’re not a distributor. So what do they think of them? They could be an industry editor. So we said, How often do you purposely seek out independent sources? So 86% says, yes, at some point in time, I seek these out. Now always was only 9% so that tells me, although they do it, it’s not super duper important for every single purchase that we make, right? So it’s a sometimes it’s, you know, sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t. So we said, Okay, what do you want to hear from those independent sources? Like, when do you look to them? What types of content do you find most valuable from those sources, and product reviews came out number one in product comparisons. And that really makes sense, right? Because, again, you’re not necessarily wanting to show comparisons to your product and the competitors on your website. You may not want to mention their name, but you could see where a buyer might want to see that comparison from an independent source. Now, I found that interesting down at the bottom that vendor reviews were the least helpful, and maybe there’s some skepticism that these are unbiased. I don’t know if that’s why. I’m not sure. Maybe they just don’t think to look at vendor reviews. But anyway, these are a few to think about, any comments or questions

Curt Anderson  32:46

looking good so far. Lot of great information there. So Wendy, I want to circle back. You have a great podcast, just to mention everybody, so it’s content marketing engineered. So check out Wendy’s podcast. I thought this might be another great if I don’t want to, I know you’ve got a lot more to cover. You have the industrial marketing Summit, and this is a wonderful conference for any of our marketing friends out there that are looking for like we call it like your folks, your people, right? So if you’re a solo marketer and you’re in the industrial B2B space, I would I’m going to assume that you are, since you’re here with us today at the Purdue MEP, big thanks to our friends of the Purdue MEP, but Wendy, just talk. I’ve had the honor and privilege of being at the past three industrial marketing summits with you. Just share a little bit about the industrial marketing summit real quick, and then we’ll get right back to

Wendy Covey  33:31

your program. Yeah, sure, and I’m happy to pull up the website at the end, if we have time, or you guys can look it’s industrial marketing summit.com. And we’ll be in very soon, flipping over to posting information about 2026 so 2025 was held the last week in February in Austin, Texas. The 2026 event will be held also in Austin the first week of March next year. And it’s a gathering of marketers in manufacturing and engineering, and we had 300 and I think it’s 323 attendees this past year, and and all in this niche space, not that we consider it niche, but we know that selling to technical buyers and the industrial buying cycle, it’s different. You can’t apply B2B labels to it, and so this is a time for us to share with each other of what’s working and what’s not. And we have small companies that come, marketers have won. We have large companies that come, like Eaton and Caterpillar are part of it. So a big, diverse set of people and marketing experts that present so and Curt you were, let’s say you moderated a panel

Curt Anderson  34:46

I did, and what a privilege not tell you the speakers you had were just phenomenal. I can’t I just and it’s great, because sometimes you get into a silo, it’s just great to get out of your comfort zone, get out of like, your office, and just be around the energy. And just the ideas and the creativity and everything’s changing so fast with AI, so it was really, I couldn’t encourage everybody enough, you know, again, not a salesy pitch, just, you know, just a you’re doing an amazing job with community building and educating. And I just really commend you. All right, we’ll come back to it because I know I don’t want to sabotage I know you have a lot to cover. Christy has a great question here. I just wanted to comment. I’d be interested to find out whether vendors are offering reviews or if that’s limited information, and therefore affecting how seriously people are taking that information. What are your thoughts on that one?

Wendy Covey  35:36

Well, that’s a great question. Christine, we have not I think that’s something maybe we put on our radar for future one. We haven’t dived into how valuable they find product reviews on the vendor website. You know, do are they suspicious that those reviews are, you know, planted or fake or whatever we haven’t asked those types of questions to say, do you value this? Do you trust it? We know that colleagues, they trust colleagues, right? And they do crowdsource some recommendations. But if that’s what you’re asking, I don’t think we’ve ever asked it quite like that.

Curt Anderson  36:16

Yeah. Thank you. Chrissy, great comment. There again. Anybody has questions? We encourage them. Welcome them. We’d love to make this comment. To make this conversational. So Okay with that being said, Wendy, keep on rolling.

Wendy Covey  36:26

Okay, all right. So generative AI, so we asked from a scale from one to 10, where 10 is complete trust and one is complete lack of trust. To what extent do you trust answers from generative AI platforms? Oops, sorry, and the overall trust average was 4.4 and North America was a little bit under that, at 4.2 and Europe came in at like 3.8 so not very trusting. Last year, it came in at 6.5 but we asked the question a little bit differently. We just add, do you trust answers from AI based tools? We use the word tools, and it was before we kind of knew what to call this stuff. So this time, we said generative AI platforms, so there was a drop in trust. But again, answered asked a little bit differently, you know, and I think this goes back to I’m not seeing the sources where you pulled this answer necessarily. I’m seeing still some some made up information. And so we know that that engineers and technical buyers, they have critical applications sometimes, right? It could be life and death. It can affect someone’s health and safety. So they need sources. They need credible information, and that’s why they like your websites. Vendor websites best not just trusting chat G P T to serve up the answer. Speaking of chat G P T, oh, sorry, that’s that’s two slides for now. Um, okay, here’s it. Here’s a fun one. How often do you use generative AI to help evaluate or make a work related purchasing decision? And 42% said, Never i This blew my mind. And so to me, this goes back to people not seeing Google generative answers from Google as generative AI, because I think they’re using it and they don’t realize it, but 42% still said never, because I know in my own life, I’m going to chat GPT and other Gemini to do research for at least personal purchases, even business purchases. So this will be we’re going to ask these things the same way next year, and it’ll be interested, interesting to see how it’s changed. My recommendation to you guys as marketers would be to see how your company is showing up in these tools. We’re definitely seeing sources like chatgpt, Gemini, Claude, we’re seeing these show up as referring traffic in Google Analytics, so where it used to be, you know, how am I? What is Google driving? You know, what? Where’s my organic search coming from? What are the sources we’re now seeing these pop up more and more. And so we expect that pie to change in the future. So here are the ones that are most popular chat, G, P, T, no surprise, since they were first to the market, so to speak, 72% look there. Then there’s some proprietary tools, followed by Gemini cloud, propecity, llama, I’m sure it’ll be it’ll be interesting to see how these mix up again a year from now. Any comments or observations about, have you guys seen, you know, generative search show up as a traffic source in your analytics.

Curt Anderson  39:48

I was, I was just on a call with a client yesterday who large, large company, and they’re in Chicago, and they, you know, website, SEO, any like, all this stuff was not a priority whatsoever. Yeah, and what was interesting is we were doing some different searches, and they actually came up a couple of times in generative AI, and they were like, they were thrilled, you know, they’re, they’re my age ish, and so I, you know, we’re digital immigrants. And so they were excited. But it is, we are at a point now where it is very difficult to ignore, you know what I mean? So maybe even in the chat box, if you guys are comfortable, if you want to jot down, like, see Mark says, yep, using AI a lot more for giving me ideas on sources for certain components, for assemblies, excellent. Thank you, Mark. Any anybody else want to share? Like, what are you using AI for? Are you using chat? Are using it for search, research? If you, if you, if you’re comfortable, drop that in the chat. Let us know what you’re using it for. Wendy, do you want to share? Like, I know you and your team are doing an amazing job. Very you guys are sticklers on you know, you’re dealing strictly with engineers. Everything needs to be truly flawless, you know. So you can’t be like, if I’m using the right word, like, flipping about, like, Hey, we’re going to use AI talk a little bit about how true marketing is. Like, what’s your approach with AI for your team? Yeah,

Wendy Covey  41:06

yeah. So we were early on in testing these tools because, you know, it, half of our business is creating technical content, right? So we could look at this and be freaked out, or we could understand how to use it and apply it to its best use and where not to and so we’re finding that research and ideation for developing content is a great way to use it. So say we’re writing a technical white paper on 6g something like that. We’re going to interview a subject matter expert, right? But in doing our own homework ahead of time, we’re going to think about topics, talk to that person. Then as we outline, we’re going to say, Okay, here’s all the things that showed up in that interview, but here’s what we found in our research. And bring that back to the subject matter expert. If we uncover something, and I will tell you, 90% of the time, it adds content and adds topic that the s and me didn’t think about. And then there are other times where, like, Yeah, this is this is not as relevant. So it’s a worthwhile step to do in that ideation. The other thing that is a good use for AI is what I call derivative content. So once you have your white paper together, it’s written, it’s your voice, it’s your tone, it’s technically accurate. Now you can use AI to create the start of social posts and blog posts. You still need to edit those and make them perfect, but it’s a good starting point, and so that saves a lot of time. So there are two really good ways that we use it today.

Curt Anderson  42:38

Excellent. Hey, chrissy’s got a comment here, yes, utilizing AI for research, great starting point, creative options. Wordsmithing, in my opinion, Gemini better for research. Wordsmithing and chat. GPT better for creative options. So excellent. Thank you. Chrissy, alright, Wendy, just give you a time check. We’re doing good. We’re at 1242 Eastern time. Thank you. So, just to give you an idea where you’re at. So again, thank you for the comments. Thank you for the questions. Keep them coming. And Wendy, why don’t we keep rolling?

Wendy Covey  43:05

Yeah. And before I roll to the next slide, I wanted to mention something that’s not really included here, but related. So I kept bringing up Google and their AI overviews. And I just, while this isn’t in this research report, there’s been a significant impact to organic traffic to websites across the industry, because Google is trying so hard to keep people on the platform. And by the way, LinkedIn is doing the same thing, like if you put a link to your website in your post, LinkedIn isn’t going to promote the post as much as if you don’t include that link. So all of these rented communities, if you will, they’re trying to keep people there. And so don’t be surprised if you’ve seen the past year or two your traffic drop. It’s because Google’s trying to provide as many answers as possible before people go to your site. So it is what it is. I mean, long tail search is still a thing. It’s still alive, and you generative AI, so they’re trying to surface sources more. So we’re seeing a trend towards giving more sources. And so you want to strive to be one of those sources that they’re giving, right? So all of the same traditional SEO tactics still help to influence that. But there’s also a lot of just chaos in the SEO. SEO community is these tools keep changing. The algorithms keep changing. There’s there’s less and less ways to game the system, so to speak. And it really goes back to having a solid content strategy

Curt Anderson  44:42

and writing, you know, little, little tagline that we always loved, you know, is, how do you out teach the competition, you know, how do you out teach? And if you just come in as just a fierce, unapologetic educator, I don’t want to say that that’s the silver bullet, or that’s going to be the magic wand that’s going to, you know, when you you know. Turn on investment sales leads, so on and so forth. But to Wendy’s point, I think if you just always come in, like, how do I What? What problem does my client? We call them soul mates, right? Like those buyer personas, you know, what problem, what challenges my soulmate have today? And if you come in just unapologetically, just answering those questions, I think that’s going to that’s going to be a big win for you.

Wendy Covey  45:20

Great. I love that, and that is such a good segue into brand. And so here we were looking at and we wanted to inform. So we do a lot of brand marketing, so brand positioning and messaging for companies, and oftentimes we have this debate over what to emphasize. And so we asked a couple of brand messaging questions that would help inform that process. So this is the first one. When researching a potential supplier vendor, how important are these factors in assessing their technical credibility? And you see, extremely important and the darkest green to the lightest green is not important at all. So the most important things are expertise in a specific application area in a specific industry. And that’s not really surprising, right? If you’re the expert at this very specific application, then you’ll do better reputation for customer service and support also came out very strong at number three. And I would say, you need to back that up with evidence, not just say where we have great customer support down at the bottom, Technology Partnerships, reputation for innovation. I found that interesting that those were near the bottom, because those are oftentimes something that things that people want to emphasize. So again, not to say any of these are not important. You can see there’s still a lot of dark green. It’s just relative importance. The other thing we asked is, How important are each of the following corporate level factors when assessing vendors and look at this product solution, cost and speed of delivery were the most important. So, gosh, I mean, I think in that’s interesting, and it just shows some of the pressure with supply chain. And you know now tariffs that these are, can continue to be things that are really important, and to message around down at the bottom says location of corporate headquarters. I think obviously that maybe this has changed with all of the tariffs set, because this was before all of that happened. So we’ll put a big grain of salt on that finding. But next to bottom is social responsibility. So again, if you’re thinking about what to emphasize in your corporate messaging, I would definitely emphasize some of these other things at the top. First doesn’t mean you don’t talk about social responsibility, but just realize that very few people find it that important relatively leadership team is in the middle. I can’t believe when I go to websites and they know talk about their leadership team, I instantly think that there’s something sketchy about the company. So know that that is also on this list is important. So hopefully that’s helpful to inform your messaging. And then I think I have one more on a scale of one to five or five is a strong indicator of credibility. What are the following factors indicate that you’re credible? And so this goes back to just where to invest your marketing dollars, and they said an informative and well maintained website is the biggest indicator of credibility. So if you’re cringing right now, if you know your website was built 510, years ago or longer, gosh, hopefully not longer, or the content on it’s really old, or you don’t have a lot of content, that’s definitely where you want to put a lot of your efforts. And look at this next one. So the question came up about reviews? Well, this is a cousin to reviews recommendations from past customers, so not just from anybody, but but somebody who’s verifiable as a past customer that that’s recognized that way. So that’s another great thing to use in your marketing case studies, of course, along with that so and you can see visibility across technical publications. So you’re not just throwing a website up there and pretending to be, you know, a credible vendor, but they see you externally, in publications, at trade shows and in just in places where they trust. I’m sure if we had asked, let’s see affiliation with technical experts in industry, that’s us. I would we should have put the word associations there, but I see that as being part of that too. Yeah. So, you know, sometimes you have to pay to play with these. Associations. And you may be like, Okay, I have this primary one, but we kind of fit into these other two. Should I pay to do that? Or should I pay to be considered for an award? And so you can see put some metrics behind you know, the trade off at of those dollars, same with prominent sponsorships at trade shows. So do you do that big banner sponsorship at a trade show, or do you make sure that you’re, you’re visible in a technical publication? Well, here’s your data to help inform that.

Curt Anderson  50:32

You know when, in your earlier slide, you had, you know, website, 73% I believe, is a benchmark, and rate with it was trade publications online. So you know, something to consider. A lot of the trade associations, you know, there’s they’re scrappy, they’re tight on resources, tight on staff, and they’re looking for information. So if you have a, you know, a nice article, or you have some technical information that you want to provide, you know, a lot of your trade associations might be welcoming content, just like everybody else is. So you know, reach out to, you know, whatever trade, whatever industry that you’re in, reach out to your local association. And you know, maybe you could be a source to provide a monthly, a quarterly piece of information. Get those links back to your website. So you know that could be another great social proof opportunity for you. So

Wendy Covey  51:21

absolutely, yeah, those technical associations hold a lot of weight with buyers depending on the industry. So

Curt Anderson  51:27

Hey, real quick our friend Julie Warner from the Purdue MEP, and again, we want to give a big thanks to our friends at Purdue for hosting our party today. Julie, back to our chat. GBT, comment and AI, I use it for efficiency in my work wordsmithing, capital, y, E, S, yes, I tend to get stuck in certain phrases that aren’t working. And I’ll use Gemini with prompts like give me five different ways to say the same phrase. It helps spark some ideas and how I say something. Julie, I couldn’t agree more. So it’s just having that wonderful assistant that has your back all the time, right?

Wendy Covey  51:58

Yeah, very good. Well, guys, we have come to the end. I have this sort of fun, you know, here’s some just key takeaways, some big nuggets from what we just looked at. And again, if you would like to download this research report, we have that available to you through this QR code, and you can also subscribe to my blog and look at I’ve been producing the blog now. I think I’m on my fourth or fifth year. Might be fifth year I did 2000 so I guess, yeah, that’s my fifth year. And so there’s a lot of small, medium, large manufacturers that have come on to share their stories of how they’re doing marketing, and lots of good practical nuggets in there. So with that, any last questions before we wrap this puppy up?

Curt Anderson  52:50

Yeah, and I do want to comment. So when we’re dear friends and we’re talking about podcasting, I have a little live stream show that I do LinkedIn live, and Wendy comes on as a frequent friend coming on, and I always love to say her, you know, lot of marketers will call themselves like, Hey, we’re the cobblers kids with no shoes. You know, we do marketing for other people, not so much for ourselves. Well, that’s not the case here for Bundy and the wonderful team at true marketing, if you go to their website, they it’s just a plethora of great information. She has a great podcast, as she mentioned, she has her book, all sorts of really great, helpful information on her website. So check out shoe marketing. And lastly, Wendy, I want to, I dropped in the chat here. I put the industrial marketing Summit. Do you want to just, we’ve got a couple minutes again. Encourage you guys. I want to be mindful of everybody’s time, because I know we’re coming to the top of the hour that if you need to hop off, if you have any questions, I’m going to stick around. So be happy to address those, put those in the chat, or we can even have you come off of mute. But let’s talk about the industrial marketing summit again, for any of our solo marketers that want to get together with folks,

Wendy Covey  53:57

yeah, and again, we’ll be flipping this website over to 2026, here in June. But I spoiler alert, it’ll be the first week of March in Austin, and you can come here to see who our speakers were. It was. It’s a three day event, multi track. We were so lucky to have the expert in marketing, AI that served as our keynote speaker last year, Paul reitzer. If you’re not familiar with Paul, go check out his. His podcast is wonderful. It’s my go to of how I stay up. It’s called the artificial intelligence show. But you can see a lot of and a lot of familiar names. A lot of you probably know Jay call. He’s very active in manufacturing. We had Dale Bertrand, and he’s an expert at SEO and AI. Here’s Ginny from Caterpillar. Chris Luki was there from manufacturing, happy hour. Eaton Craig coffee. So you see just sunumoto. So these these layers were so good because they talked about just their small team, and how do they manage that? How do they work smarter, not harder? In fact, mock Carlo is just on my podcast last week, sharing a lot of information from this presentation. So you can look on here. The speakers will change, but certainly you can get a feel for where we have people that are specific to this industry, not just any old people that are, you know, doing marketing in B to B. So anyway, we’d love for you to join us. Next year. We’re looking at probably having somewhere between four to 500 industrial marketers, so it should be a good time.

Curt Anderson  55:42

Plus, it’s great barbecue in Austin, right? Wendy, so, yes, yeah. So, yeah, excellent. So how about this before we before you guys sneak off for your your next meeting or your next show, first, let’s give a huge round of applause for our dear friend, Wendy. For just she smashes a home run every single time. She’s just a wonderful human being, if you get a chance to go to the marketing summit to meet her in person, we both share a daughter, not a daughter. Our daughters are both named Lauren, and I have it on recording. Sorry, Wendy, so I got to meet her Lauren next year. Maybe I have to bring my Lauren next year so our Laurens can meet each other. But her daughter was working at the industrial marketing Summit, so it was great to you’re making it a family affair. But again, before we wrap up, any questions that you guys have, please feel free drop in the chat or take yourself off mute. We’d love to hit those. Wendy’s got the presentation that she mentioned. You can reach out to her and she’ll share that with you. A lot of great information there. Mark says, Thank you. Charles says, Thank you. Think I saw somebody else. Christie said, Thank you for the link for the marketing Summit. And how about a big round of applause for our friends at the Purdue MEP. So Michelle was here, and we’ve got Julie. Julie, thank you for all that you guys do. And again, just to recap, if you missed it, they help with Lean, they help with ISO, they help with cyber security, they help with marketing strategies, like we’re talking about. Talking about today. So they are, I think, 50 ish strong at the Purdue MEP, all sorts of resources. So reach out to Julie, reach out to the Purdue MEP to help take your company to next level. Julie, anything that you want to close out with on your end. Well, just thanks

Julie Warner  57:17

to everyone for coming. But Wendy, I was going to ask you real quick, out of all of the report findings which or what surprised you the most, where you’re like, wow, didn’t see that one coming.

Wendy Covey  57:26

I The lack of use of generative AI to as part of researching to make a purchase. I just I can’t get over that, and it goes along with the trust thing, of course, but I just can’t help but think that we’re all gonna, you know, as as big tech puts it into everything, it’s just unavoidable that we will be using it, you know.

Julie Warner  57:51

So yeah, that would be, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see your report in the coming years. Yes, how that changes and the trust factor and all that

Wendy Covey  57:59

stuff, yeah. So if you or anyone else has ideas of what we should look at in the future, I mean, it’s hard. We have to keep it short enough to get completes, but we can always add, you know, about four or five fresh questions. So definitely drop me a LinkedIn message or whatever if you have ideas.

Curt Anderson  58:16

So I have a funny one that we’ll close out with. So somebody said something about, you know, not using AI. And you’re like, man, it’s just, it’s like, you you probably, I think we’re doing a presentation. And somebody was like, if you probably just don’t even realize it. Well, my mother is 81 years old, and she said to me, probably, like, a year or two years ago, she’s like, you know, I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song. And I was like, Mom, I’m like, have you been in a grocery store? Have you been in a car? Have you been like, Hey, watch a commercial. I’m like, you’ve heard plenty of Taylor Swift songs. You just didn’t realize that you were hearing Taylor Swift song. So the thing is, you know, I think a lot of us might not realize that we’re, in some way or another, using AI, whether we realize it or not. So that’s my analogy for you. Wendy little, little Taylor Swift for you. I like that. So anyway, alright, we will close up. We got you out just in time. So again, reach out to Wendy. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn. I’d be honored if you connect with me. Julie’s got her LinkedIn profile in there. We want to thank you guys. Give yourselves a round of applause for taking time to learn more and hang out with our friend, Wendy. We wish you guys an amazing rest of your week. Wendy, thank you. I appreciate you more than you know, Julie, thank you guys, keep crushing it everybody, and we’ll see you at the next program. Awesome. Thanks guys. Thanks guys. You.