Inbound marketing FAQ
for engineering services

Inbound marketing will likely fail if no one is searching on the internet for things related to the services you offer.

The next most likely reason that inbound would fail is due to lack of market fit. What do I mean by that? I mean that the services that you offer don’t stack up against market expectations. Those expectations could tie back to:

1. Lack of ability relative to market expectations.
2. Lack of authority relative to the market.
3. Lack of trust relative to market expectations.
4. Price relative to market expectations.

For more on this topic, check out Why inbound marketing experiments fail.

Inbound marketing doesn’t always work well (just like most marketing). Of course, people have to be searching for the services you provide. Beyond that, it’s usually got a lot to do with these 4 factors:

1. Your capabilities relative to the market – How good you are. What proof points you have. Your authority.
2. Your ability to express your capabilities and experience relative to the market. Less common perspectives are often better.
3. How patient you are.
4. How passionate you are about what you do.

It’s not. If you don’t want to do inbound marketing, you can try outbound marketing. It’s more of a “does this suit me and my company” sort of choice. Check out inbound marketing vs outbound marketing and pros and cons of inbound.

Once you select outbound or inbound (you don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but you probably want to focus on one or the other), you’ll want to drill down into specific marketing methods:

1. AI-based search (LLMs)
2. Organic search
3. Paid search
4. Social media
5. Email
6. Networking
7. Trade shows
8. Referral

1. Understanding what problems people are actively looking to solve.
2. Content aligned with the problems people are actively looking to solve.
3. Various analytics tools to understand behavior and gather feedback.
4. A thoughtfully structured website high on empathy, UX and authority.
5. Paid advertising platforms (eg. Google Ads). This is generally preferred, but situational.

AEO / GEO / AI visibility should be fundamental aspects of your inbound strategy. Depending on how far along you are in your journey, you may have some foundational SEO (traditional search) aspects to continue working on, but these two pieces compliment each other for the most part. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll likely want an AI-first strategy that incorporates elements of SEO.

I don’t love the word “plan” in this context. It’s not that I dislike planning (I actually love it!). It’s because, for marketing, it generally:

• lulls people into a false sense of security (i.e. if I do A, B will happen),
• discourages rapid iterations,
• and puts the focus on activities over progress.

That being said, there can be value in going through the process to get everyone on the same page (especially if you’re new to inbound). The main elements of an inbound marketing plan should consist of these topics:

1. Competitive landscape
2. Problem(s) that the solution solves
3. Solution that solves the problem(s)
4. Description of your target customer (persona’ish)
5. Baseline content needed
6. Testing metrics

Check out marketing plans for engineering companies for more detail.

The best inbound marketing strategies will include these elements:

1. Highly empathetic content that aligns with things potential customers are looking for.
2. Solid analytics
3. Good service-market fit.
4. The ability to test and iterate

Some articles that you may find useful:

• Creating a no-BS marketing strategy for your engineering company
• Marketing strategy for custom software development services companies
• Digital Marketing for Engineering companies
• Inbound marketing for engineering companies

Like anything complicated, the answer is nuanced. Much of it depends on how well you understand and can align with the market.

Check these out for more detail:

1. Pros and Cons of inbound marketing
2. Inbound marketing for engineering companies
3. Inbound marketing for software development companies
4. Inbound marketing – the risk of waiting to get started
5. How to benefit from inbound marketing

Check out these case studies for examples where inbound was utilized:

• Case Study – Creating a Marketing Machine, and keeping it Running
• Case Study – Running a Marketing Machine for an Engineering Services Company
• Case Study – Building a Marketing Machine for an Engineering Services company
• Case Study – A software development company kicks off their inbound marketing journey
• Case Study – Experiment – Increasing visibility to increase awareness and topical authority
• Case Study – Experiment – Playing with bid strategy options for paid search Google Ads –Maximize Conversions bidding strategy

This is a super-important question for inbound marketing, and will become more important in the coming years.

Quality content means content that satisfies the search intent of the searcher. Pretty straightforward, right? That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not at all. A lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into this. Generally, quality content will have these attributes:

1. Fully answers the question that the searcher was looking for an answer to if they were asking a question. If they are looking for a solution to their problem, good content provides a potential (or multiple potential) solution to their problem.
2. Doesn’t include a lot of fluff/extraneous information.
3. Aligns with the way the searcher views their world, not the way you view your world.
4. Anticipates what the next steps would look like and makes it clear how to take those next steps.
5. Anticipates what other information might be desired and provides links to that information.

These two strategies are quite distinct. While inbound marketing is typically focused on attracting people that are looking to solve a type of problem, account-based marketing is focused on approaching a very small number of select companies or even a particular division at the select companies (accounts) with a strong and differentiated value proposition. In other words, you can name a small number (say ~a dozen or so) companies that you believe are so well-aligned with how you can help, that if you can just get in front of them, they’ll understand why you should work together at some point (even if they’re not currently looking).

You can utilize some of the inbound marketing philosophy to do account-based marketing, but account-based marketing generally ties in more closely with content marketing, because you’re going to want to create and utilize very tailored content to share your unique value proposition with your target accounts and get their attention and engage them. Since you’re not necessarily waiting for them to come to you, you may be utilizing more outbound vs inbound as part of your account-based approach. See this article on account-based marketing vs inbound marketing for more detail.