Marketing for engineering services companies

Many presidents / founders / CEOs don’t like the word “marketing”. It puts a bad taste in their mouth.

I don’t blame them.

I used to be an engineer, and the word marketing generally put a bad taste in my mouth as well.

A couple primary reasons for this:

  1. I’ve been exposed to years of consumer advertising where I felt like advertisers were trying to play mind games to get people to buy things they didn’t necessarily need.
  2. Marketing is so much fuzzier than engineering. That lack of determinism and low probability of succeeding is in many ways the polar opposite of engineering. It’s frustrating.

Marketing for engineering companies doesn’t look much like consumer advertising (at least not when done reasonably), so we can put that aside for now.

However, the point about marketing being fuzzier than engineering is important. The reason is that marketing is all about complex human behavior within a capitalistic system.

This creates a lot of uncertainty in the form of partially observable information.

The good news is that there are ways to reduce frustrations and be more reasonable with your marketing.

You can run tests, gather data, and use feedback to inform / influence your decisions easier than in the past.

It’s by no means as good as most engineering tests, but it’s something over nothing. Marketing data isn’t the decider in most cases, but rather an influencer. You need a balance between gut instincts and data.

Okay. Time to get off the soap box.

Ready to simplify some of this marketing junk?

Let’s dive in…

No non-sense lead-focused marketing framework for engineering companies

At the most core level, marketing for engineering services companies is about answering these 3 questions in significant (sometimes painful) detail:

  1. What problem(s) am I solving?
  2. For whom?
  3. How do I engage them?

What problem(s) am I solving?

If you’re struggling with marketing, you may not have a good handle on the problems you’re solving, at least not in the way your customer cares about. You likley have a great handle on the solutions you provide, but you may have an inside-out problem. An inside-out problem occurs when a company is:

  1. very internally driven (vs customer-focused) or
  2. not empathetic enough with their marketing.

Some important questions:

  1. How do your customers / potential customers talk about the problems they have?
  2. What are the actual words they use to describe their problems?
  3. What triggers them to do something about these problems?

Don’t know? You need to find out.

For whom?

Chances are you understand some of the “who” already, but probably not enough. Assuming you directly interact with your customers, you likely have a good handle on elements like: which companies, industries, company sizes, and likely roles. Where companies tend to start falling short are in areas like:

  1. Targeting too much breadth in industry(ies), roles, and company size.
  2. Lack of externally observable indicators of good fit (e.g. assigning roles by problem being solved rather than how they refer to themselves).
  3. Care-abouts / worries.

How do I engage them?

The two main components to making progress on engaging your audience are:

  1. Selecting a small number of reasonable marketing channels/methods. Whether this means inbound, content, social, email, account-based, or search marketing (whether organic search or paid search), you’ll need to figure out what makes sense for your scenario, as you likely can’t afford to go all-in on all methods (see How to get started with digital marketing for more on that).
  2. Empathy. You need to approach (almost) everything from the perspective of what your customer cares about, not what you care about. It’s not about you. It’s about them.

Differences to keep in mind when selling / marketing engineering services

There are 3 key underlying differences to keep in mind (vs selling or marketing other types of businesses):

  1. The high complexity of what you do
  2. The amount of trust you need to build
  3. The no-nonsense approach you need to have

Complexity differences

Unless they have a technical background, It’ll likely be harder for your marketing person / team to understand what you do as a company. This is pretty foundational to your success/failure within the realm of marketing. Your marketing people may have all sorts of knowledge around marketing methods, tactics, and tools. But if they don’t “get” the fundamentals of what you actually do, how are they supposed to do a good job conveying this to your potential customers?

Trust differences

The level of trust required for a potential customer to believe that you can help them is huge. Trust is a funny thing. You can’t just tell someone to trust you (though companies often do in one form or another). You have to show them they can trust you.

You do this by:

  1. Pointing to information that shows you have experience in similar situations (e.g. proof points, case studies).
  2. Sharing useful knowledge within your domain of expertise (e.g. articles, videos).

No-nonsense approach differences

It’s not that you can’t be funny/humorous at all. You can, and should, if it’s an authentic part of who you are as a company and something your customer will appreciate.

It’s just that your marketing likely won’t be focused on funny cat videos and the like.

This isn’t fluffy marketing. It’s serious, no-nonsense, hardcore, problem-solving marketing.

It should be full of information that your customer finds useful, showing both topical knowledge (articles) and examples of your work (case studies).

Some actionable tips to improve your marketing

  1. Get real with your marketing
  2. Improve your empathy
  3. Get to know your customer better
  4. Improve data gathering for analysis
  5. Find a niche

How to get real with your marketing

Many engineering companies are still just dabbling with marketing, which will do nothing but frustrate you or leave you behind eventually.

If you think that because you post company updates, new hires, and events on social media, you update your website occasionally, and you write things you call “blog articles”, that that means you’re doing marketing, you may just be throwing effort and energy out the window.

So how do you get more real with your marketing?

The short (slightly oversimplified, but useful for effect) answer: focus on sales-ready leads (SRLs) as a starting point.

Improve your empathy

Why?

Because no one cares about what you do. I’ll say that again:

no one cares about what you do.

They care about solving their problem. They aren’t looking for a digital brochure about how many years you’ve been in business or how you opened a new office. They want to know if you can help them, and they want to know how.

Your job is to give them the best user experience (UX) possible.

Being seriously empathetic is one of the harder aspects of marketing to get right, but it’s also the most important.

So how do you improve your empathy? Well, there are several nuances, but for starters put a lot of work into:

  1. Asking more questions.
  2. Learn how to become an active listener.
  3. Practice pretending you are (or someone you’re working with) is the person you’re trying to help.

Teach these things to your team over time. Make it part of your process.

Improve data gathering for analysis

There’s a quote that goes something like: “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.

Engineers tend to understand this concept better than most, yet many engineering companies get lazy when collecting marketing data.

You want to know all sorts of things about your customers, including things like:

  • How they found out about you
  • What their buyer’s journey looked like
  • Where they’re located
  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Roles
  • Affinity groups
  • Niche category
  • Motivation for reaching out

You need this data as part of your feedback loop to help determine how to change your behavior in the future. Check out What data to capture in your CRM – and why, for more.

Get to know your customer better

Are your main customers / buyers / influencers technical or not? Maybe some are and some aren’t. Maybe some used to be but aren’t so much anymore. You need to help these groups differently because they care about different things.

Go through your customer data. Pick your top 20 or so favorites for a particular application area. What do they care about? Do more of them care about technical specifics or are more of them more business-oriented? Whichever dominates, start there. Don’t have these insights? You need to start gathering customer feedback.

Create new content for what they care about most.

If they’re technically-oriented, the most important thing to remember is: No. Fluff. Allowed.

Find a niche

Or two. Or five. But start with one. Why?

Because your potential customers will demand it more and more.

If they can’t tell the difference between your company and several others that they’ve easily found, that’s a problem. You’ll end up in a race to the bottom (from a pricing standpoint).

See this article on why you need a niche – and what to do about it.

Next Steps

There are all sorts of marketing methods out there. At the highest level, there’s inbound marketing and outbound marketing (see Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing). RocLogic generally prefers lead-focused inbound marketing (check out this article on inbound marketing for engineering). 

If inbound resonates with you and you’d like some help, feel free to reach out for a chat.

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