Industrial marketers face many unique challenges one of which is small marketing teams. While these small teams are busy running day-to-day operations, they often miss learning and growth opportunities. Additionally, the opportunities for industrial marketers to learn and bring home new ideas are few and far between. Most marketing events and conferences cater toward B2C marketing, so the tactics don’t always translate to B2B or industrial success.

After considering these roadblocks, in 2019 CADENAS PARTsolutions hosted a learning summit exclusively for industrial marketers called the Industrial Marketing Summit (IMS). After the success of the first Summit and a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, CADENAS brought back the event for 2022.

Hosted in Cleveland, Ohio, and with more than 330 marketers in attendance, the IMS was held in conjunction with Content Marketing World, a global conference for content marketers. While accessing the vast array of traditional learning opportunities at Content Marketing World, forward-thinking industrial marketers had a platform at IMS to share knowledge and dive into challenges specific to their industry.

MJ Peters, the VP of Marketing at CoLab Software, set the vision for the afternoon with a talk through her career path from a single-person marketing department with no budget to a VP with a dynamic team and a seven-figure budget. Peters advocated for marketers working more closely with internal teams like sales and finance. She gave the audience actionable ways to replicate her success at their own company.

Joe Sullivan, owner of industrial marketing agency Gorilla76, led a conversation with Daniel Williams, CIO at Samtec Inc., and Ashley Quinlan, Samtec’s Vice President of Global Distribution and Marketing Strategy. They discussed how the marketing and IT departments teamed up to multiply their exposure by providing real-time product data where their audience needed it most.

Wendy Covey and Morgan Norris from TREW Marketing discussed the content engineers need from manufacturers, citing survey data gathered directly from engineers and technical buyers. Norris expanded the conversation by giving tactical writing techniques to help marketers deliver the right piece of content for each step of the technical buyer’s journey.

The final session of IMS was a panel discussion with Lara Schneider, Senior Marketing Manager at Toshiba, Eddie Saunders Jr., Head of Demand Generation at Flex Machine Tools, and John Vander Linden, Director of Digital Customer Experience at Columbus McKinnon. The group, led by Joe Sullivan, discussed how the panelists create and deliver content to help their distributors and channel partners improve their customer experience and increase sales.

With more than 330 in attendance, the Industrial Marketing Summit took another step to deliver on its mission of raising the profile of industrial marketing and help industrial marketers grow their business.