Creating a no-BS marketing strategy for your engineering company

Your primary marketing goal – awareness vs leads vs sales support

This one is quick, but still important.

You want to be clear on your primary goal.

These questions should help you determine your primary marketing goal:

1. Do you already see enough leads and what you really need is to support the sales team with content that will facilitate the sales process?
2. Do you just need more people to be aware that you exist so that they become more familiar with you over time as needs arise?
3. Or do you need sales ready leads so that your sales team has opportunities to try to win?

These goals aren’t mutually exclusive. There will likely be overlap between the three, which means you stand to get some amount of cross-pollination.

However, the content you produce, and marketing methods you employ, will vary based on which of these three overarching marketing goals you choose to focus on.

Your focus can, and probably should, change over time. But, unless you’ve got several hundred engineers or more, you probably can’t afford to be focusing on all three at once.

My guess is that if you’re a company has less than a few hundred engineers, you’ll probably want to focus on sales ready leads.

Selecting a niche

This is crucial in my opinion.

What do I mean by “niche”?

Essentially, I mean narrowing / focusing how you market yourself as a company in a manner that your potential customers care about.

Why do you need a niche?

Mostly because you want your potential customers to understand why they should consider you over other engineering companies they come across. You basically want to differentiate yourself to reduce competitive pressure.

Let’s be clear: selecting and implementing a niche is an experimental process. You may or may not stick with one of your initial niches in the long run. You test the market to see if you’ve found a sweet spot, or at least a “good enough” spot.

The main factors that’ll likely impact your success with a niche include:

1. Your experience / capabilities in the market,
2. Your understanding of your customers,
3. Your ability to convey information in the form of content.

As a data point for you, here are the results of a poll from RocLogic’s website that illustrates the various reasons that people are hesitant to select a niche:

I know this can be challenging. You’ve got a bunch of engineers that are good at solving problems. They’ve got a bunch of tools in their toolbox. They can build a lot of things.

I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t do work beyond what you market.

What I’m saying is, for marketing purposes, you need to focus your energy on a small number of things relative to the various problems you can solve.

Assuming you’ve got less than a few hundred employees, you probably don’t want to market yourself as just a generic engineering company that can develop X (where X is the high-level world that your company plays in, whether that’s industrial automation, software development, product design, etc). You’ll be swimming in a sea of companies that look just like you.

You may need to go multiple layers deep, and possibly include more than one dimension to create a niche.

You’ll likely wan to select a niche based on your risk tolerance as it relates to:

1. Solving real problems – Where do you add the most value to a significant subset of your customers?
2. Market size – Do you believe there are a significant number of companies that have these problems? Are they willing to pay you enough?
3. Differentiation – Where are your strengths relative to others in your broader space?
4. Passion – Are a significant subset of your employees actually interested in what they’re doing and why they’re doing it?
5. Finding potential customers – Do you have some idea of where to find potential customers within this niche?
6. Engaging potential customers – What do they care about? What do they need / want from you? How can you build trust?

Selecting marketing methods

You’ll likely want to select a single primary marketing method, and potentially one or two secondary methods. This encourages you to focus. As a small’ish engineering firm, there are too many methods out there for you to try to do all of them well.

Selecting a primary marketing method can be as easy or as exhausting as you want to make it. There are lots of options, some of which I think are better suited as secondary methods, while others are likely better candidates as primary methods.

Marketing methods for consideration:

1. Content
2. Partner channel
3. Referral
4. Inbound
5. Organic Search (i.e. SEO)
6. Paid Search
7. Account-based Engagement
8. Email
9. Social media (specifically LinkedIn)
10. Networking
11. Tradeshows

Content

Content marketing is interesting. People talk about it like it’s a complete method on its own.

I disagree.

It’s fundamental to most marketing methods, yet isn’t really complete on its own. It requires some other method to get the content in front of your potential customers. Just creating content and not employing some other method to try to get potential customers to see it is a bad idea.

Of the methods listed, referrals and networking probably require the least content overall, but even they should incorporate minimal content to facilitate validation.

Content is appropriate for awareness, lead gen, and sales support.

See:

1. Pros and cons of content marketing
2. Content marketing for engineering companies

Partner channel

Great when they work. Painful when they don’t.

Frustrating when the partner changes the rules on you or makes you jump through too many hoops.

I’d generally consider this as a secondary channel for lead gen and awareness.

See partner channel sales & marketing tips.

Referral

Referrals are my favorite type of lead. And they probably should be yours as well. However, there’s only so much you can do before you’re essentially pushing on a rope.

I’d consider this as a secondary channel for leads.

See How to encourage referrals when the work you do isn’t super remarkable.

Inbound

This is generally RocLogic’s favorite method, especially for lead gen, and somewhat for awareness.

Why?

More than anything because it encourages thoughtfulness and long-term thinking. The goal with inbound is to position yourself to be helpful, so that when someone has a need or wants to know about something, you’re there to help. The risk of being annoying is low, and you get to feel good about being helpful.

Inbound can encompass both paid search (e.g. Google Ads) and/or organic search (i.e. SEO).

See:

1. Pros and cons of inbound marketing
2. Inbound marketing for engineering companies.

Organic Search (SEO)

Organic search (i.e. SEO) is a great concept, and one of my preferred methods (a subset of inbound). The basic idea is so simple: people search for something and hopefully you show up in the search engine’s organic search results when it makes sense for you to.

If only it were that easy.

Search algorithms are wildly complex. It’s a gigantic, machine learning, black box. The algorithms evolve quickly. It’s important to try to keep a pulse on how search engines are evolving.

Organic search is worth considering as a primary method for awareness and lead gen.

See:

1. Pros and Cons of SEO
2. Lead-focused SEO for engineering companies

Paid Search

I have a love-hate relationship with paid search (a subset of inbound).

The cool part is that you can usually gather feedback from the market much quicker than with organic search. It’s also convenient that you can turn it on or off quickly.

The downside is that it’s gotten pretty expensive (particularly Google Ads). It can also be very frustrating when the platform pulls the rug out from under you, making sizable changes to how things work.

Paid search is worth considering as a primary method for lead gen.

See:

1. Pros and Cons of Paid Search.
2. Advertising for engineering firms

Account-Based Engagement (ABE)

ABE is a great concept. You figure out a small number of ideal customers (actual numbers can vary, but assume something on the order of 10 or so as a starting point), and you target them directly.

This is great in theory. You know which companies you’re set up to provide the most value to and you try to engage them so that you can help them.

However, ABE is more appropriate for companies with sophisticated and strategic sales, marketing, and leadership in place, or for those that have strong relationships with a partner channel that has such capabilities. If one of these scenarios applies to you, or you’re feeling super ambitious, it’s worth considering for lead gen and sales support. Probably as a secondary method to start.

See ABE vs inbound.

Email

I’ve got mixed feelings about email.

On the one hand, you’ve got an earned audience that you’re communicating with directly. Maybe you can build a community(?). On the other hand, you’re just another email in their inbox, interrupting your potential customer from doing whatever it is that they actually want to be doing at that moment. You’d better be careful, and don’t waste their time.

I lean toward considering it as a secondary method, mostly focused on building awareness.

Social media (specifically LinkedIn)

I’m not a huge fan of social media.

I think LinkedIn as a platform is great.

I like the concept of getting people with common interests and problems talking to each other. I think that’s a good thing.

The problem I see is that there’s too much noise, which causes people to start behaving in a more sensational “eye catchy” way to stand out from the crowd. Often times (especially in engineering) it’s the quieter, more thoughtful / deliberative people that have some of the most useful things to say.

LinkedIn is worth considering for awareness as a primary or secondary method.

See Social media for engineering companies.

Networking

When you’re first starting out and it’s only you and a couple other engineers, I think networking can be great, assuming you’ve got the right personality that easily engages people and doesn’t suck the life out of you.

In this scenario, it’s worth considering as a primary method for lead gen. After you grow beyond a handful of people, it’s probably not very scalable.

Tradeshows

I don’t have much to say about tradeshows.

I think they can be great for large companies for building awareness.

I do think it’s important to keep in mind that the cost of having a booth designed will likely only be a small fraction of the total cost of producing the content, preparing for the show, and bringing several people with you to the show.

Case studies