Inbound marketing for engineering companies

Inbound vs outbound for engineering

It’s important to be clear that while you can do both inbound and outbound, it is important to decide which of them you’re going to focus the bulk of your energy on right now. That’s because your company is small and scrappy. You can’t afford to do everything all at once.

Neither inbound nor outbound are definitively better than the other. One is just more appropriate than the other, situationally.

So what’s inbound about?

In a nutshell, it’s about trying to position yourself ahead of time to show up somewhere (usually search results) when a potential customer is looking for something (either to learn, or for direct help). It’s a pull / attract mechanism.

Ok, so how about outbound?

Outbound is more about pushing yourself onto potential customers with a strong enough message that they want to learn more. It’s a push / interrupt mechanism.

Philosophically, RocLogic leans toward inbound. I prefer to be helpful, and I hate being annoying. That way of thinking seems to align well with quite a few engineers.

That doesn’t mean that outbound isn’t appropriate in some scenarios.

Check out this article on inbound marketing vs outbound marketing if you’d like to learn about the good, the bad, and the ugly of inbound and outbound.

Selling things that don’t exist yet

When you’re selling your engineering services, you’re selling something that doesn’t exist yet. Contrast that with selling a product.

There’s a lot of trust baked implicitly into a product.

As a services provider, you don’t have that encapsulated trust.

So what does that mean for you?

It means you need other ways to build trust. You can do that in a couple ways:

1. Show potential customers that you know some useful things. You do this mainly by teaching, and sometimes by providing a more uncommon perspective. You show them by creating solid articles, webinars, calculators, etc.
2. Show potential customers that you know what you’re doing. You do this through proof points. These generally come in the form of case studies, metrics, certifications, etc.

Marketing / selling to technical customers / clients

Maybe not all of your clients are technical, but assuming the bulk of them are, you really want to showcase your technical prowess. That’s certainly not everything, but a technical customer generally wants:

1. No BS / no fluff.
2. Proof points in the form of showing over telling.
3. New ways of thinking about things, but often incremental as opposed to bleeding edge. This goes along with the risk-averse nature of technically-minded people.

An inbound marketing method for engineering companies

Here are a few high-level thoughts on how to start thinking about this.

A good way to start thinking about this is:

1. Find a reasonable niche.
2. Create / update content.
3. Start testing and analyze feedback from the market.
4. Iterate / pivot / refine.

Let’s peel a layer on each of these onions…..

Find a reasonable niche

You need something to focus your effort on. You can’t focus on everything you can do. It’s not practical for your size. You need some way to be less common / less generic.

Keep these 4 criteria in mind as you think about potential niches:

1. Interest – how interested (preferably passionate) about a particular topic is your company?
2. Capability – how much capability or experience do you have?
3. Market interest – does the market appear to be interested in getting help in this way? Are there things they want to learn about?
4. Awareness of the market environment – this may not stop you from what’s otherwise a solid niche, but it’s good to have a sense of where you stand in the market (with respect to both direct and indirect players). Where do you stand?

See why you need a niche for more.

Creating content

Yes, you’re going to need content. Quite a bit of it, most likely.

Whether in the form of case studies, articles, calculators, etc, you’re going to need it.

If you’re focused on organic search, you’ll:

• almost definitely need articles.
• Probably case studies.
• And maybe calculators.

If you’re focused more on paid search. You’re definitely going to need case studies.

A few tips for creating good articles:

1. Empathy – why should I, as the reader, care? Do not be self-promotional or self-centered. This is not about you. It’s about them. Your main focus should be on teaching the reader something, not selling. What are you trying to convey to them?
2. Are you drifting off-topic anywhere? If so, kill that section. All sections should tie back into the main topic.
3. Using less words is harder, and usually better.
4. If you’re not comfortable writing, frame it first, even just at a high level. Don’t just ramble. What are the 3-10 main major points you want to get across?

A few tips on creating a good case study:

1. Be clear about what problem is being solved.
2. Specify what your customer did versus what you did.
3. Provide a short version of what the results were. Bullet points.
4. If you’re able to show visuals or data, great.

Start testing and analyze feedback from the market.

You need to connect via a channel, likely a search engine (either through creating content or running ads), and then evaluate the feedback that you get.

This is somewhat messy, and attribution can be challenging, but you’ve got to twist your head sideways, squint, and seek out the patterns.

Potential sources of feedback include:

1. Ads engagement data.
2. Organic search analytics data.
3. Organic search ranking data.
4. Contact form data.

Iterate / pivot / refine.

Once you start to see patterns, or you give up on trying to see patterns, you have decisions to make. These decisions generally come in the form of:

1. This is working well enough. Do more of this.
2. This is not working at all. Reduce, pause, or kill it off. Pivot to another niche.
3. It looks like there’s a potential related angle to this. Refine.

Point of clarity – what’s your goal?

You’ve got two potential primary goals with inbound:

1. Improve awareness of your company.
2. Try to attract sales-ready leads (SRLs).

Neither is better than the other. It just depends on where you’re at in your journey. You probably don’t want to focus evenly on both at any point in time. For engineering services companies, I believe there is generally more interest in sales-ready leads.

Point of clarity – what channels are you going to use?

You can create all the content you want, but until you’re connecting to a channel, you’ve got nothing.

So, what are the channels that inbound leverages?

The primary channels are:

1. Organic search (SEO) – this means the unpaid results that show up in search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc).
2. Paid search – this means the ads that show up in search results. I’m referring to the text-based ads that show up within search engine search results.

There are also a couple secondary channels worth considering to support your inbound efforts:

1. Social media (namely LinkedIn).
2. Email.

Inbound marketing gotchas

There are a lot of ways for your efforts with inbound to go south. A few favorites:

1. Don’t just blab about things you know about. There are ~2 main reasons to consider creating an article from an inbound perspective:
   1. Because your customers / potential customers are looking for answers about the topic.
   2. Because your sales team is asking for it.
2. Beware the DIYer. Some of the content you create might get great engagement, but from the wrong audience. How much content you create for DIYers depends on the niche / topic cluster that you’re pursuing. In general, your primary goal is not to attract DIYers. It’s to attract those that want help from a company like yours. There are scenarios where it can make sense to attract a DIYer:
   1. To help show a strong knowledge base for a particular topic.
   2. Even DIYers have their limits on what they’re willing to take on themselves. If you can help them and show them where they should hand over control, that may be of interest.
3. Farming out the creation of your content. I’m not saying that you can’t get help. You can. What I’m saying is that for any meaty content, the gory details need to come from your SME’s heads. Let’s put it this way, if you put one of your SMEs up against a writer, even a technical one: who is going to have a deeper understanding of the subject over the long run? Your SME, or a technical writer? On average, I’m betting on the SME. The SME lives and breathes the topic. They feel the pain. They learn the lessons. That’s not to say that the SME knows how to take that raw information in their head and structure / filter / amplify it in order to make it more digestible and engaging to a reader. They probably don’t. That’s why I said they can have help from someone. Someone that understands how to take raw information and structure / filter / amplify.
4. Check out these marketing machine gotchas and tips for more.

A few more inbound tips

1. With the proliferation of AI, I think it’s going to become more important to let your personality out as a company. That personality has to be authentic, not fabricated.
2. With the proliferation of AI, I think it’s going to become more important to let your perspective / lens / take on things. Your uncommon points of view will become more valuable.
3. Customer feedback is wildly important. You have to learn from your customers where you’re adding the most value, what unanswered questions they have, and in what ways you could better help them.

Case studies