Advertising for engineering firms

Products vs services

Advertising services is different than advertising products.

There are differences in which aspects of a given platform you’ll be most interested in. For example, products (especially hardware products) are usually more visually oriented than services, so display-style ads might be more interesting.

While some of this article is applicable for advertising products, the focus is on advertising engineering services.

3 reasons to advertise engineering services

In my view there are 3 primary reasons to advertise your engineering services:

1. Try to obtain sales-ready leads.
2. Brand awareness.
3. Experimenting with finding a niche.

The first two are often obvious to most businesses.

You generally want sales-ready leads because you need new clients. You need new clients because your repeat business isn’t enough to sustain you or help you grow.

You may want to increase awareness of your brand. In many ways that’s less applicable for smaller engineering companies (those with less than ~100 employees), and less applicable for any company without nurturing capabilities in place. That’s not to say there aren’t things you should do to try to increase your brand awareness. It’s more that this probably can’t be your primary focus if you run a smaller company.

The third reason for advertising engineering services is less obvious to many. If you’re unsure about your niche, advertising can help you explore and experiment. In order to experiment, you need a way to engage with your potential audience. Paid search is a mechanism for this.

You’ll need to define a niche (or multiple niches)

This is a reasonably complex topic.

Let’s say you want to advertise on a platform run on a search engine (e.g. Google, Bing). Your first goal is to show an ad when people perform specific sets of searches within the search engine.

Question is: what do you want to show up for?

Do you want to show up when people type in “engineering services”? Maybe, but probably not. That is something that people search for in the US. However, it’s a very vague / broad term.

What kind of engineering services do they want? And what type of company are they looking for? Your niche (or more likely, multiple niches) helps define these things.

Your niche can help you play in a smaller, or less red, ocean.

Check out why you need a niche for more on this.

Advertising is not cheap

I wish it were, but it’s not.

Not all platforms cost the same, but they also don’t have the same market share.

Generally, Microsoft Advertising is often cheaper on a cost per click basis, but that doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s more cost effective. The answer to that is too nuanced to address in an article.

As a data point: in 2024, you could easily spend several thousand dollars per month on search advertising.

If you told me that you were only spending ~a thousand dollars per month and not seeing anything, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. Except in some corner cases, I’d be more surprised if you were seeing leads. More so with Google Ads than with Microsoft Ads. If you found the right niche that is.

You need to be ok spending money on things you didn’t want to

No one wants to spend money on things like competitors, people that aren’t ever going to buy from you, or people trying to sell to you.

However, these things will almost definitely occur. You’re showing up in a search engine, where anyone can search for whatever they want.

Also, for better or worse (worse in my opinion), advertising platforms are getting very good (sneaky?) at making their ads look just like the organic search results.

The platforms are complex

There’s a lot to learn about with advertising platforms. You’ll probably never learn everything there is to know, because there’s just so much, but even the basics take a fair amount of time to get a handle on.

Examples of some of the things you’ll want to gain an understanding of:

1. The various campaign types.
2. The various elements that make up an ad (e.g. headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, images, callouts).
3. Bidding strategies.
4. How to analyze the data once you kick off a campaign.
5. Deciding when to pivot, emphasize, backburner, or slow burn a campaign.

That’s just a sampling.

The main takeaway here is: however big or complex you think it is, it’s probably bigger and more involved.

The platforms are constantly being updated

Advertising platforms change regularly.

The changes vary from minor to show-stoppers.

Sometimes they’re improvements, other times minor annoyances, and other times quite frustrating. Sometimes you’re stopped dead in your tracks and can’t continue advertising until you make the requested changes before the deadline provided by the platform.

Some of the changes are cool and likely a win-win. However, on balance, I get the sense that changes are often more focused on increasing ad revenue for the platform than they are on adding efficiency for the market overall. This makes sense to me, because there’s an inherent drive for the advertising platform provider to try to increase the amount of ad revenue they take in. This sets up friction between advertisers and the platform provider.

A few examples of changes I’ve seen:

1. Changing the definition of foundational terms (e.g. what “phrase match” meant, isn’t what phrase match means now).
2. Automatically updating ad copy. I don’t like this and prefer to try to keep it turned off.
3. Changing ad formats, making older ad formats obsolete. This one was annoying, but had some solid benefits as well.
4. Advertiser verification requirement.
5. Introducing more and more machine learning. There are pluses and minuses to this one. It’s also very dependent on the advertiser’s business model.
6. Removing metrics that are useful in understanding ad Not helpful.
7. Encouraging eye catchy new ad campaign types that ultimately remove a lot of insight and control from the advertiser. I really dislike this one when the platform tries to draw you in with a shiny new feature that’s not available in the other formats, even though it could be.

Get ready to be frustrated

Google Ads is one of the more frustrating platforms I’ve dealt with. Much of the frustration comes from having to decipher whether any given suggestion is more beneficial to the advertiser, or Google Ads. It’s often unclear. And that’s frustrating. Some examples that stand out in my mind:

1. Constantly being nudged to let the platform automate more and take more control out of the advertiser’s hands.
2. In-app recommendations are relentless and abundant. Dismissing them is inefficient. Of all the recommendations I’ve looked at, I only accept a small portion, rejecting or ignoring the vast majority.
3. Unclear automated emails – it’s often unclear whether the topic of the email is a necessary change to make, or a suggestion for consideration. Some suggested changes come across as too heavy-handed for my liking.
4. Account managers / account specialists – claim to want to help, but rarely seem to. They switch every 90 days, which is way too frequent. They usually don’t have a good understanding of your business. They encourage you to take actions that sometimes seem like great ideas on the surface, but then less so after further pondering.

The upside

Okay, I know it might seem like I’m trying to talk you out of paid search advertising.

I’m not.

I’m trying to share some of the challenges and realities with you so that your expectations are more appropriately set.

Just like engineering, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops.

The upside to paid search advertising with the likes of Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising is that you’ve got a mechanism to experiment with engaging with potential customers in a market-focused manner.

And that experiment can be ramped up or down or switched on or off with relative ease.

That’s powerful.

Case studies leveraging advertising (paid search)