Inbound marketing strategy for industrial engineering services companies – 23 niches explored

Last updated: January 26th, 2026

For this article, we’ll focus on small industrial engineering services companies (i.e. less than ~100 employees). Much of this article is applicable for larger companies, but that’s not the focus.

Why inbound marketing?

A big reason: because you get to focus on being helpful. This is in contrast to outbound marketing, where there’s a bigger tendency to be pushy and interruptive. Engineers typically don’t like being pushy, and often hate when they get interrupted, so in turn, don’t like to interrupt others.

But why inbound for industrial engineering specifically?

Well, I performed an initial round of niche exploration analysis. I intentionally stayed close to core industrial engineering (e.g. manufacturing process improvement, facility layout, robot automation & integration, supply chain optimization).

With this view, I uncovered 23 potential industrial engineering niches to assess.

My market opportunity assessment of these niches suggests solid inbound marketing opportunity for small industrial engineering services companies across several niches.

Here’s a summary of that analysis:

1. There are several niches / problems to solve available to focus on.
2. There appears to be relatively low competition (both organic and paid search) across several niches.
3. There are multiple industry verticals to focus on.
4. It appears possible to stay away from A/E/C firms.

A note: If I had branched out a bit into adjacent niches (e.g. deeper within control systems integration, machine building and similar, etc), the # of potential niches would have grown significantly beyond this tighter look.

Why embracing marketing as an engineer can be a competitive advantage

Engineers often consider marketing a “necessary evil”.

I get it. I used to have very negative feelings about marketing. And, to be fair, I still have some, although they have evolved.

I’ve mostly come to embrace that marketing is a different animal than engineering.

Here’s where the problem starts: as an engineer, if you want to accomplish something, you develop good requirements, architect a solution, implement, integrate, test, and that’s usually the end of it. Not that there aren’t bumps along the way (especially during integration and test), but for the most part it’s a very deterministic (though not easy) process to get from point A to point B.

With marketing, there’s so much human behavior, so much nuance, so many partially observable variables. This reality often causes the engineering personality to shy away from, and get frustrated with marketing.

I see this reluctance as a potential competitive advantage for engineers. Your peers often view marketing as a necessary evil, so they put as little energy / effort / resources into it as possible.

If you can accept or even embrace some of the messiness of marketing, you’ll be ahead of many engineering companies that chafe every time they hear the ‘M’ word.

But how do you embrace marketing?

It’s a long journey, but a lot of it has to do with:

1. Focusing on being helpful to your potential customers
2. Shifting to an experimental mindset

Focus on being helpful to potential customers

Shifting your focus to being genuinely helpful with your marketing to your potential customers. That doesn’t mean teaching DIYers how to do everything you do, but it does mean being empathetic and clear.

Experimental mindset

Shift from a project mindset to a more experimental mindset.

While not a rigorous scientific experiment, you are experimenting / testing the market. You’re trying to figure out what resonates, and what doesn’t. Metrics change depending on your goals and how far along you are in your journey, but some potential KPIs could include:

1. more or better sales ready leads,
2. more engagement with topics of interest,
3. improved rankings in search engines,
4. or increased visibility in AI search.

How to get started with inbound marketing for your industrial engineering company

Here’s the no-BS way to think about it:

1. Select a marketing category goal.
2. Select inbound marketing methods to leverage.
3. Start building your marketing machine.

Selecting an inbound marketing category goal

There are 2 primary inbound marketing category goals:

1. Build brand / company awareness
2. Get SRLs (Sales Ready Leads)

There are also a couple secondary marketing category goals:

1. Sales support / enablement.
2. Account-based marketing support.

We’ll stick with the primary inbound marketing goals for now.

Most small engineering companies are much more interested in trying to get SRLs than they are in building awareness of their company. That’s not a judgment. Just an observation. There can be value in either. It just depends on your current goals.

As a small company, you should usually select one of these as a focus at any point in time.

Selecting inbound marketing methods

The good news here is that there are a small number to choose from. Here are the 3 primary inbound marketing methods:

1. Organic search
2. Paid search
3. AI visibility

Organic search and AI visibility are complex, nuanced, and require significant patience.

Paid search often requires less patience, but more direct cost (i.e. advertising costs).

One isn’t necessarily better than the others, and it’s not crazy to leverage all 3 methods at once, though there are smarter and less smart ways to do so.

Building your inbound marketing machine

Building your inbound marketing machine isn’t magic, but it is hard work, nuanced, and complex. It’s not just a turn-the-crank sort of process. The details matter. Here are the high level steps of this process:

1. Find a reasonable niche (or two). See why you need a niche.
2. Create / update content.
3. Start testing / experimenting.
4. Assess market feedback.
5. Iterate / pivot / refine.