Marketing plans for engineering companies

Marketing plans can cause as many problems as they solve

Reality check: I’m generally not a fan of marketing plans.

Here’s why:

1. It gives you a false sense of security.
2. For a marketing plan to be of any use, you need a corresponding marketing strategy (see Creating a no-BS marketing strategy for your engineering company for more on that).
3. The plan will likely start to become less relevant within a few months of creating it. If you’re doing marketing well, you should be constantly adapting / iterating (I’ll show you a high-level process for your consideration below).

In my opinion, a marketing plan isn’t super useful for those that have a solid understanding of the specific type of marketing they’re performing.

Having said that, if you’re newer to the type of marketing you’re trying to implement, it can be a useful exercise to help you understand what tangible actions you want to take and where your tactical gaps are.

Specifically, things like:

1. what content is missing,
2. how you plan to try to engage potential customers,
3. what metrics you plan to monitor.

Don’t be fooled by the word “plan”

Since you’re looking for a marketing plan (and because you’re probably also an engineer 😊), I’ll make the assumption that you’re looking for a tactical, step by step process to follow.

The problem is that the word “plan” is probably giving you a false sense of security.

Marketing plans are dramatically different than say an engineering design doc.

A marketing plan doesn’t provide any significant level of certainty.

You don’t take inputs, turn the crank, and get outputs. Well, you do, but those outputs are activity-focused (e.g. case studies, webinars, landing pages, articles, ad campaigns, …).

Marketing in the engineering services world is about experimenting and exploring. You test the market, monitor progress, and iterate / pivot.

Are you really interested in creating a marketing plan, or a marketing strategy?

People in the marketing world like to talk about strategies and plans separately. I’m not totally settled on how I feel about this.

Marketing strategies are generally higher level and take place over a long time horizon (several years).

Marketing plans are often focused on actionable steps.

For large organizations (i.e. several hundred to thousands of employees), I can see how the distinction between plans and strategies can make sense. There are so many moving parts to the machine of a large company.

However, for organizations with less than a couple hundred people, the distinction is less useful, and the plan itself is less useful IMO. Marketing plans can also hinder one of your natural competitive advantages over large organizations: the ability to be nimble.

Your engineering marketing strategy should define these three key elements of your marketing:

1. Your niche of interest,
2. Your primary marketing method of choice,
3. Whether your primary goal is more focused on leads, awareness, or sales support.

You’re going to need several players to implement your marketing plan

Marketing is very much a team sport. It won’t do you a lot of good to come up with a plan if you don’t know who’s going to do what. Situations vary, but you generally need people that:

1. Understand your marketing method of choice.
2. Can add / tweak content on your website.
3. Can operate the advertising and social media platforms you select.
4. Have deep knowledge of your business and its customers (and a willingness to share that knowledge).
5. Can maintain / update your website’s infrastructure (e.g. integrations, plug-in updates, look and feel).

A no-fluff marketing process to follow

Since you’re looking for a plan, chances are you want to know what sorts of steps you should take to implement your plan.

The way that I generally like to view this is:

1. Find a reasonable niche.
2. Create / update core content. This generally includes landing pages, case studies, articles. It could also include webinars or calculators.
3. Start testing. The marketing methods you’re leveraging (e.g. inbound, paid search, SEO, social media, referral, partner channel, email, ABE) will drive this step. Starting a test could mean kicking off a Google Ads campaign, publishing an article, posting on social media, etc.
4. Analyze market feedback. Market feedback can come in the form of various marketing metrics (e.g.  clicks, ranking, engagement metrics, SRLs).
5. Iterate / pivot / refine. Deciding how and when to iterate (or pivot or refine) is a judgment call. It’s influenced by metrics you’re monitoring, but also by experience and market observations.

A niche marketing plan template

If you’re going to go through the exercise of creating a marketing plan, I’d generally suggest you do so at the level of a niche. In other words, each niche should have its own plan.

The value in creating a plan is less about the output and more about adding clarity to your thought process. If you’re newer to marketing, it can give you a gut check as to what gaps you need to fill to experiment.

Here’s some useful info to capture.

A few caveats:

1. I generally don’t try to capture all this info in one place,
2. sometimes some of these live in my head,
3. not all of these are always important,

but if you’re newer to thinking these things through, it may help you on your journey.