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Skayle Marketing

Mining, Energy & Resources

Marketing to a resources market you can name buyer by buyer

The addressable market here is a list you could print. A small number of operators control the sites, procurement runs the relationship through vendor portals and pre-qualification, and the page that persuades a buyer is also read by a regulator, a community group and a graduate deciding where to apply.

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The category

What these businesses have in common

Most writing about business-to-business marketing assumes a market of thousands of buyers who have to be found. This sector does not have one. It has a list, and everybody on that list either already knows you exist or could be told inside a week.

What follows from that is a different job. The work is being verifiable rather than being discovered: safe, capable, adequately insured, properly crewed and consistent with everything the company has already said in public. These pages are written on that basis.

Shared ground

What holds true across the sector

  • The buyer set is small enough to name. A handful of operators, contractors and engineering houses control most of the spend in any basin or region, which turns marketing from reaching a market into being credible with a list.
  • Procurement is the gate and it opens on documents. Vendor registration, pre-qualification questionnaires, insurance limits, safety statistics and management-system certificates decide who may quote, well before the offer itself is assessed.
  • Safety performance functions as a commercial credential. An incident record is examined the way a credit rating is examined elsewhere, and a supplier whose numbers are poor gets excluded regardless of price or capability.
  • Every public sentence has more than one reader. Communities near a site, regulators assessing a permit, investors, journalists and campaigners read the same pages a customer does, which loads ordinary copy with risk it would not carry anywhere else.
  • Spending follows sanction rather than a sales cycle. Work appears when a project is approved and vanishes when a commodity price falls, and no amount of activity converts a market that has stopped buying.
  • Hiring is a marketing problem wearing other clothes. Remote sites, rotations and specialised trades mean the constraint on growth is often people rather than contracts, and the employer story competes with every other operator in the same camp town.

Where they split

And where a single strategy stops working

These differences are the reason the pages below are written separately rather than as one page with the business type swapped out.

  • Producers and suppliers are opposite businesses. An operator sells a commodity into a market that sets the price and communicates mainly with capital, communities and candidates; a service or equipment supplier sells to that operator and communicates with procurement and engineering. Very little transfers between them.
  • Explorers and juniors are running an investor relations exercise rather than a customer one. Their audience is capital markets, their communications are bound by continuous disclosure obligations, and content that works for them would be inappropriate for a contractor.
  • Oil and gas and hard-rock mining share a vocabulary and not much else. Different service ecosystems, different geographies, different regulators and different cycles, so a supplier positioned across both generally has to say it twice rather than once.
  • Consultancies serving the sector sell judgement against a deadline. Environmental, geotechnical and permitting firms are engaged because an approval, an assessment or a closure plan is due, so their demand tracks regulatory milestones rather than production.

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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal

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