How to get started with digital marketing
For engineering / tech companies

Do you head up a mature company with lots of technical experience?

(if you’re heading up an early-stage company, you’ll probably want to check out How to bootstrap your marketing instead)

Are you getting frustrated with your digital marketing efforts?

In the B2B tech services world (e.g. software development, engineering, etc), you’ll want to:

  1. Get a handle on why you want to do digital marketing.
  2. Capture a basic understanding of your customers and the problems you solve.
  3. Figure out which aspects of digital marketing are most relevant for your scenario. There are lots of options. You’ll only want to focus on a small subset.
  4. Lay a decent digital foundation.
  5. Create a team.

If you’re newer to digital marketing, and you’re trying to figure out how to make it work, here are a few big nuggets you’ll want to truly appreciate (read each twice):

  1. This is not a set it and forget it technique. It’s going to become part of your regular life as you learn how to operate in this domain. It’s true that there will be some points in time where the level of effort will be much greater than other, but your marketing machine will require continuous monitoring and updating.
  2. There are no silver bullets. If you’re looking for one, you may as well forget digital marketing.
  3. There’s no such thing as “optimizing your site for SEO” and then walking away while some magic occurs. Why? Because (1) google is always changing (2) your customers expectations are evolving and (3) your competitors are changing.
  4. If you think this is about blabbing about yourself and your products/services, you’re way off. It’s about understanding your customers needs, and how those needs map to useful information.

Digital marketing is a gateway to communicate with your existing and potential customers. It’s a digital representation of who you are and (somewhat) what you want to be.

Do you know why you want to do digital marketing?

There are lot’s of good reasons to do digital marketing. “Because everyone else is doing it” is not one of them. You need to care about the “why” here because it’ll drive your methods and your content.

Some good reasons to choose from:

  1. Do you need new business opportunities? Maybe you’re in growth mode. Maybe your current sales channels are starting to fade. Maybe you’ve saturated your market segment.
  2. Do you need content to facilitate/enable your sales process?
  3. Do you need to sell more to your existing customers?
  4. Do you need to increase awareness that your company exists?

In the long run, you may care about each of these reasons why you want to do digital marketing. But to start, select just 1. The approach and content will vary significantly based on this answer.

Capture a basic understanding of your customers and the problems you solve

For some, this is a “well, duh…”. For others, this will take a bit of effort. If you can’t do this, you can’t even start doing digital marketing, let alone do it well.

Your customers

You need to be able to describe the most important attributes in order to:

  1. Identify your customer
  2. Engage your customer

If you can’t, stop here and work through this. Get some help if you need it.

The Problems you solve

I assume you already know what solutions you provide, but what I’m focusing on here is the lead into the solutions you provide.

  1. Why do they need your solution in the first place? What are the motivations? Trigger events?
  2. What else do they care about surrounding your solution?
  3. How do they describe what you provide?

Again, if you can’t articulate the answers to these questions in writing, stop here and work through it, and get some help if needed.

Figure out which aspects of digital marketing are most relevant for you

  1. Inbound
  2. Outbound
  3. Content
  4. SEO
  5. SEM
  6. Social media
  7. Email
  8. Account-based engagement

Inbound Marketing

This is a philosophy as much as anything. The focus of inbound marketing is to attract people to you, as opposed to pushing yourself on them. I like this philosophy and believe it should be the preferred approach whenever possible (sometimes it’s not possible/viable).

The idea is that search engines have enabled people to find you when they have a need. Psychologically it’s easier for someone in sales to talk with someone that’s already got a problem and is seeking a solution vs pushing yourself on them in the hopes that they’re interested.

There’s generally a lot of overlap with content marketing.

See:

Outbound Marketing

The focus of outbound marketing is to push your solutions onto people, vs being ready and waiting when they are looking for something.

There are differing opinions on what constitutes outbound in the digital marketing world. Most of that has to do with where you draw the line regarding how targeted you’re being and how the contacts found you in the first place.

Here’s my brief take based on a couple examples:

An example of outbound is posting an article on LinkedIn on your company page. I generally consider this an outbound method because there’s usually not going to be anything that ties to a need of any one person, and it’s pushing info to people, vs letting them pull for it the moment they are ready. However, some people might consider this part of their inbound strategy because they’re posting the article to try to get people to link to it and hope that Google picks it up as a signal of quality content.

Sending emails is a tough one to categorize because it all depends on your approach. If it’s just sending a quarterly email to people on your marketing list, without regard to timing, I’d put that more in the outbound camp. However, if the email is in response to a known behavior (or sometimes interest) of an existing contact, that’s more in the realm of nurturing and likely on the inbound side of things.

Whether a specific instance is more inbound or outbound isn’t as important as understanding the philosophy behind outbound is that you’re pushing yourself on to your potential customer, vs waiting for them to engage you. Very different psychologically. See inbound marketing vs outbound marketing for more.

Content Marketing

Content marketing’s main goal is to utilize content (e.g. articles, case studies, white papers, landing pages, webinars, videos, posts, and supporting calls to action) to drive engagement with your company. This could be utilized for:

  1. Engaging new potential customers.
  2. Supporting the sales process with sales enablement.
  3. Engaging existing customers.
  4. Increasing awareness that your company exists.

This is the broadest reaching aspect of digital marketing. It overlaps and can be utilized by all the others below. In the world of digital marketing, you’ll most likely be utilizing content. See The pros and cons of content marketing and Content Marketing for Engineering.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the set of efforts revolving around the goal to show up in Google’s (or other search engines’) search results.

Sometimes this is treated as a cat and mouse game with Google. Sometimes it’s treated as something that can be optimized, say, when a new website is developed, and then left alone. You don’t want to think about it in either of those terms. Why?

I suggest you don’t treat it as a cat and mouse game for two main reasons:

  1. Because it’s you and your resources, vs Google and theirs. Google will win.
  2. It doesn’t focus your effort where it should be: satisfying your potential customers by providing them the best experience you can.

The reason it’s not set it and forget it is because of several factors:

  1. You’d be missing out on one of the most important elements for optimization: feedback from the market!
  2. There’s a ton of effort that goes into this. You wouldn’t want to do it all at once even if you could.
  3. It takes a long time for google to trust your content.
  4. Google’s algorithms are always changing.
  5. Your competitors are constantly evolving.
  6. Your customer’s expectations are evolving.

Caution: this is a huge world that’s constantly on the move. There’s a balance to strike here. There are those that rely on it too much, trying to play games, and there are those that don’t utilize reasonable practices hardly at all. Either situation is costly.

In the B2B side of the world, this is more of a sub-set of a marketing strategy. It ties in tightly with inbound marketing, but also often has strong connections to content marketing.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing is the paid side (e.g. Google Ads) of search-based marketing. Like inbound and SEO, it’s focused on showing up in search results when people are searching on specific terms. The main difference is that you’re paying to show up when these terms are searched on, rather than earning a top spot.

When used wisely this can be a very useful piece of your digital marketing strategy, as it can help you learn about your market.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is essentially the digital version of TV ads. Some might argue with me on the details/logistics of that, and they’d be correct, but the point is, it’s essentially an attempt to get in front of a bunch of eyeballs and seeing what sticks.

I recommend you don’t spend a lot of time on social media marketing in the beginning in most scenarios. Why? Because it generally takes a lot of effort to rise above the noise, or, it takes being the unicorn (and there just aren’t a lot of unicorns out there).

The other reason I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time at first is because chances are you’ll do it all wrong. You’ll spend too much time blabbing about yourself. That’s pretty much exactly what you don’t want to do.

There are very good use cases to use social media in a supporting role, such as:

  • promoting certain types of content,
  • engaging with specific audiences or people
  • and learning from your target market.

Your most likely channel in the B2B side of things is going to be LinkedIn. Other platforms should only be considered on a case by case basis, based on whether or not your audience is interested in engaging with you on your topics on that platform. Check out Social media marketing for engineering companies for more.

Email

Most people have a sense of what email marketing is, because most of us have been marketed to via email. A lot of it is no good. I’m not generally a huge fan of email marketing, at least not the way in which it’s generally done.

My view: companies should be way more picky about what they’re sending out, to whom, how often, and why. Respect your potential customer’s time and energy.

This method is generally not going to be the best place to start when entering into digital marketing.

Account-based engagement

Account-based engagement is all about shrinking your target audience drastically, and having more sophisticated/deeper conversations with that small number. It essentially suggests (I’m oversimplifying to give you a flavor for it):

  1. You have a small number (say ~a dozen) of accounts of interest to your company. These accounts have a particularly high LCV (Lifetime Customer Value).
  2. You have a particularly strong value proposition and proof points to offer these accounts, that very few, if any, other companies have to offer.
  3. You can develop very targeted and deep content to speak directly to different groups of people at these accounts.
  4. You’re willing to invest significant amounts of money to attempt to acquire some fraction of these accounts.
  5. You have a sophisticated sales team ready to engage with high level people one on one in strategic business discussions.

If you’re not feeling reasonably comfortable with these criteria, you’re probably not ready to start experimenting with account-based marketing. Even if you are feeling good about all of these, this method of marketing will challenge you in ways you haven’t been before. This is generally not going to be the first place you want to start, but rather a potential addition to your digital marketing after you feel like you’re grounded.

Check out account-based engagement vs inbound marketing for more detail.

Lay a decent digital foundation

When you enter into digital marketing, one of the most important things you get is improved feedback in the form of data.

You’ll want to get these ducks in a row pretty early on, as they’ll affect not only your efficiency, but ability to make decisions on how to evolve.

  1. Analytics tools setup and configured.
  2. An Integrated CRM.
  3. A decent website structure / CMS.

Identify the team

If you think one person can do it all, you’re mistaken. Why?

Because no one person seems to have all the right knowledge or skillsets to handle it all. The reason for that is pretty straightforward once you understand the different roles. It’s not that you’ll need several people on this all working full time, but you’ll need multiple people working on this a fraction of their time as needed, because they’ve got the knowledge/skills to support a particular part of a particular task.

You’ll generally need these roles:

  1. Content creator(s) – you need someone (or multiple someone’s depending on how much content you need to create) to pull info out of your SMEs and tell a coherent story. This includes not only articles and case studies, but landing pages and ads as well.
  2. Analyst – runs digital marketing tests, analyzes the data, and determines where to optimize.
  3. Digital marketing guide – ties it all together and walks you through the process. Also drives decisions on content topics.
  4. Content reviewer(s) – support role that reviews content before publishing.
  5. SMEs – support role that provides input on content and interfaces with media outlets.
  6. Customer interface – support role that has intimate knowledge of your customer base. Provides input/feedback on messaging.

So what now?

Now you have to start filling roles. You’ll need to decide whether you want to try to tackle this on your own or if you’d like help. If you’d like help marketing your engineering company, feel free to reach out.

Yes, let’s chat

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