Marketing for engineers –
thoughts on transitioning from engineering to marketing

This is probably going to be harder than you think.

Not the best selling point to start off with, right?

Well that’s good. I’m trying to help you get into this with your eyes open, not shut.

You didn’t just magically become an engineer instantaneously when you got your degree. There’s a good chance you exhibited some engineer-like characteristics early on in life. Some combination of:

• being a tinkerer wanting to understand how things worked,
• looking at the world a bit differently than most,
• or being naturally good at math.

You went on to learn some challenging and abstract concepts in college. Depending on your specific discipline, you probably learned some combination of quantum physics, linear algebra, electromagnetics, stochastic processes, etc.

Then as a practicing engineer, you learned how to apply a subset of this knowledge in the real world, now constrained not just by theoretical limits, but other non-technical limits like budgets, timelines, politics.

Point is, becoming a capable engineer takes a lot of work, combined with a particular set of foundational abilities. Only a very small fraction of the world does what you do.

However, your ability to grasp complex problems and make sense of the world around you is a double-edged sword. It tends to make you think that you can solve just about any problem put in front of you. It also gives you the sense that most problems worth solving can be boiled down to a set of equations or algorithms.

Turns out, many of the more interesting and valuable aspects of marketing don’t work that way.

Here are the main factors that make marketing in the engineering realm (vs the consumer product realm) harder than you might prefer:

1. Human behavior – humans are messy and complicated. Trust is crucial and nuanced. Emotions can be challenging to communicate.
2. Correlation vs causation – assuming you’re dealing with relatively small numbers of customers or website visitors (which you likely will be if you’re in the engineering world selling to other businesses), you’re likely to be data-starved.
3. Partially observable information – attribution is limited in scope. You might see some of the “what”, but you’ll rarely know the “why”. It’s usually impossible to capture all of the touch points along the journey of a potential customer.
4. You’re trying to make capitalism work – marketing (in the context of companies involved with engineering) is essentially making the connection between a need and a solution, within a competitive environment.

You get to experiment!

That’s right.

You get to leverage your analytical desires and create marketing experiments.

To be fair, the experiments are messier and less sound than from your engineering past, but the overarching thinking still applies.

You must be willing to live more in the grey zone as opposed to black and white.

Most of your experiments will at least loosely follow this flow:

1. Select a reasonable niche.
2. Create / update content.
3. Start testing.
4. Assess market feedback.
5. Iterate / pivot / refine.

Patience is your friend.

Engineering mindsets tend to be on the more patient side, at least in situations where they feel comfortable. However, when you venture into areas where you feel less comfortable or less confident, patience decreases.

My sense is that this patience usually comes from having your expectations set properly.

As you’re new to marketing, you won’t know how long to be patient for the more important aspects of marketing. I’m not talking about how long to be patient when creating an article or landing page or webinar. That’s the simple stuff.

I’m talking about things like:

• how long to be patient to achieve a particular ranking in search results,
• or how long you should be patient to see a sales-ready lead come in,
• or how long to be patient to get a certain number of people to take a poll,
• or how long to be patient to get a certain number of people to sign up to receive emails from you.

A couple suggestions for these aspects of marketing:

1. Consider each of these as an open-ended experiment with multiple iterations. You’re going to get to a point where you’ll either decide to continue, do more of something, or cut it off and pivot. But you won’t know until you get to the end of each iteration what the next decision should be. Don’t bother trying to decide overall in advance.
2. If you have a baseline to compare against, you can use that to help guide you. However, as the similarity between the baseline and the current experiment diverge, so too does the utility of the baseline data point.

Instincts are more important in marketing than they are for much of engineering.

Think about the most uncertain aspects of engineering (e.g. quick response proposals, debugging, system integration and test).

Now multiply the uncertainty by a factor of 40. This is more in line with the level of uncertainty you’re up against in marketing.

Engineering generally teaches you to follow the science / data. However, some of the best engineers know how to follow what’s often referred to as “engineers’ intuition”.

You know…. When you’re trying to debug some code or trying to find the root cause of a hardware failure.

These are your engineering instincts. They take time to develop.

Now you’ll need to develop and refine your marketing instincts.

Even more so than for engineering, because the data is sparser and there’s more variance in the underlying models (driven by human behavior).

You’re moving into the land of low probabilities

This one is particularly hard for engineering mindsets.

When you set out with an objective in engineering, assuming you’ve done a decent job designing and allocated an appropriate amount of time and money, there’s a very high probability that the objective will be met.

This is not the case in marketing.

Marketing lives in the land of low probabilities.

Ideally you’d want a large percentage of people that have a need that your company can address to:

1. find you,
2. engage with your content,
3. reach out,
4. and do business with you.

The reality is that you’re dealing with low probability at each phase, and each phase multiplied together ends up being a low probability.

You’ll need to come to terms with this. It’s just reality.

The main elements that must work well together for your marketing to stand a chance include:

1. Problem-solution matching.
2. Market alignment.
3. The trust barrier.
4. The cost-of-inaction (or urgency) barrier.

Causality is out, correlation is in.

You’re looking for patterns in a very noisy data set.

Nothing more.

If you assume causal relationships, you’re probably asking too much of your marketing.

Get the images of consumer-based marketing out of your head.

You’ve seen a lot of marketing in your life. Most of it on the consumer side. And it’s probably leading you astray.

Much of the marketing you see out there in the consumer world is focused on generating demand by appealing to raw human drivers such as:

• ego,
• social acceptance,
• quick fixes / laziness,
• and status.

Those are fundamentally different motivators than what motivates a company to do business you’re your company.

Your potential customers will usually be motivated by a functional need. For example, needing some custom software to help their business operate, needing a custom piece of equipment for their manufacturing plant, or needing help developing a piece of hardware that will go into their product.

Their decision will be strongly influenced by fundamentally different criteria: trust / credibility, and your position in the market.

Just because your technical doesn’t mean you need to understand the algorithms as thoroughly as you would if you were designing them

Yes, if you’re doing inbound or organic search marketing (SEO), understanding the essence of search engine algorithms is important.

And yes, if you’re doing social media marketing, you want to understand how LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards and punishes certain behaviors.

However, if you’re too technically focused, you’ll end up trying to game the system.

You can’t beat the teams of engineers at the various platform companies working on these algorithms daily.

Nor should you.

Your focus should be on better market-problem-solution matching. Empathy. Not cat-and-mouse games.

You’re usually better off going deeper on a smaller number of topics than shallower on a larger number.

You have limited resources (time, money, people) that you can apply to your marketing.

If you want your marketing to be effective, you need to rise above the market noise.

Do you think you’d be better off spreading your energy into content across a dozen topics, or compressing that energy into a couple / few topics?

You need to identify which niches to go after. This is an iterative process that takes a long time to settle out (how long depends strongly on the niche of interest and your current position in the market).

See:

1. Why you need a niche
2. Niche selection obstacles

You’ll need to select a small number of methods to dig into.

There are too many marketing methods out there to try to spend time on all of them.

They’re not all applicable or preferred for every business.

Some potentials that you’ll want to narrow down from:

1. Inbound – see Pros and cons of inbound and Inbound marketing for engineering companies.
2. Outbound – see Inbound vs outbound marketing.
3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization, i.e. organic search) – see Pros and Cons of SEO and SEO for engineering companies.
4. SEM (generally paid search (e.g. Google Ads), although sometimes conflated with organic search) – see Pros and Cons of Paid Search and Advertising for engineering firms.
5. Social media (likely LinkedIn) – see Social media for engineering companies and Social media for scientists and engineers.
6. Email marketing.
7. Account-based engagement (also sometimes goes by account-based sales and account-based marketing) – see ABE vs inbound.
8. Trade shows.
9. Networking.
10. Referrals – see How to encourage referrals.
11. Partners – see partner channel sales & marketing tips.

Note that I didn’t include content marketing in this list. That’s because content is so fundamental that you need it for any of these methods. See Content marketing for engineering companies.

Also note that I didn’t list anything called “digital marketing”. I don’t find the term super helpful. It’s too broad at this point, and almost a given. Several of the methods listed above are types of digital marketing: inbound, SEO, SEM, social media, email. While the others (account-based, trade shows, networking, and partner channels) are highly likely to contain digital marketing aspects.

You’re here to teach. You’re here to help.

Engineers often go wrong by going into “sales mode” or “marketing mode”. This makes them try to put on the hat of what they perceive as a sales or marketing person.

Don’t do that.

You’ll likely sound fake.

You need to be authentic.

Instead, focus on teaching your potential customers things that they want to know about. This shift in mindset can be huge for engineers that struggle to get into real marketing.

It’s important that you’re trying to teach the right people the right things.

Keep coming back to this. It’ll take time to absorb. It’s easy to default back to “sales mode”.