Social media marketing for engineering companies

Trying to use social media marketing for your engineering services or software development company?

Check out this article before you go too deep.

Why?

Because:

  1. it’s really easy to spend a lot of time doing it poorly
  2. you might not pick the right platform
  3. you might be using it to try to obtain SRLs (something I’ll claim most engineering companies should not be attempting).

If you’re more interested in a discussion about why you might want to use social media in the first place, what your profile should look like, and what content you should be sharing, see: Social media for scientists and engineers.

Caution: if you’re just ramping up your sophistication in digital marketing, social media is an easy place to see the outcome of your actions. However, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worthwhile. Quantifiable metrics are not the same as achieving business goals. It’s really easy to spend a lot of time and effort on useless posting and sharing. You have to be clear about your goals.

Which platform should I use?

While there are lots of social media platforms out there, if you work for an engineering company, you’ll most likely want to start with LinkedIn. It’s not that you can’t branch out beyond LinkedIn, but you don’t want to spread yourself too thin by trying to be everywhere. The rest of this article focuses on LinkedIn, but many of the concepts translate to other social media platforms as well.

Be clear about your goals

If you’re putting energy into social media marketing, you want to be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish. Here are your options:

  1. Building 1:1 relationships with future customers (MQLs)
  2. Building awareness of your company
  3. Trying to pull in sales-ready leads (SRLs)

Don’t try to do all of these at once. Pick one. I’d suggest you don’t start by trying to pull in SRLs. That’s an advanced topic that requires having many aspects of your business refined, and potentially a fair amount of budget in place. If you’re mainly interested in trying to obtain sales-ready leads, check out inbound marketing.

What to measure?

What you’ll want to measure ties back to what your goals are.

Building 1:1 relationships with future customers (MQLs)

You need to connect with each of these people 1:1. In the beginning you’re going to want to track what fraction of the people you try to engage actually end up connecting with you. If you’re hitting somewhere in the ~10-35% range you’re doing good. The reason you want to track this rate is you want to refine your message over time to improve it. I don’t care how rigorously you track this, as long as you’re not fooling yourself and think you’ve got a much higher connection rate than you actually do.

You’ll also want to tag these connections so that if years down the road some of them become customers, or refer others to you, you know where they came from as far as lead source is concerned.

Building awareness of your company

If you’re trying to get people to become aware of your company, you want to consider measuring two things:

  1. Engagement rates – this includes both click count and click-thru rates for content you post. I’d say if you’re hitting somewhere less than a ~2% click-thru rate, your audience is not very engaged. If you’re hitting above ~6%, they’re very engaged.
  2. Follower count – this applies to your company page and your individual page. Careful with this metric though. It can quickly turn into a vanity metric. The main reason you want to care about this number is because it’s part of what enables you to reach a larger audience when you post something.

Trying to pull in sales-ready leads (SRLs)

If you’re looking for sales-ready leads through social media, then your metric to measure is very straightforward: sales-ready lead counts. I bet you see a way lower rate than you ever imagined it’d be. Keep in mind that a sales-ready lead has to pass both fit and near-term need criteria, so while it’s usually relatively easy to identify good-fit potential customers, it’s another thing entirely to engage them asynchronously and hope that they have a near-term need. RocLogic is generally not a fan of this goal for social media. Why? Because it’s outbound-focused. That doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way of course. See inbound marketing vs outbound marketing for views on the good, the bad, and the ugly and you can decide for yourself.

What are the different ways to use LinkedIn from a functional standpoint?

  1. Connecting 1:1
  2. Posting
  3. Learning about your potential customers.

Connecting 1:1

If you’re interested in building relationships with potential future customers (MQLs), then you’re going to want to connect with those actual people and nurture them over time.

The mechanical part of the process looks like this:

  1. Find the people that meet your target customer criteria (based on role, industry, company size, geography, etc). Focus on those that you have some prior connecting point to in the analog world.
  2. Invite the person to connect with you.
  3. Share useful content with them.

The non-mechanical part of this process requires:

  1. Tons of empathy – if you’re not laser-focused on being very helpful and very authentic, don’t even bother trying. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re trying to engage. Why should they listen to you at all? What is it they care about? Why should they trust you? Do they know you or your company at all?
  2. Useful content – you got it. if you don’t have a useful perspective to share, just keep your mouth shut. You’ll do more damage than good.
  3. Patience – this is going to be harder than you think it is, so get ready to disappoint yourself. Do you know how many other people like you are trying to do the same thing you are?

Posting – leadership & company updates

Whether your posting on behalf of your company page or as a leader within your company, consider these tips:

  1. Don’t blab. What’s blabbing? It’s anything that amounts to you just trying to be heard. Good examples are statements like:
    • “Come see us at booth 123….” (because we’re there)
    • “We just hired a new employee” (and we want to show you we’re growing)
    • “We just opened a new office” (and we want to show you we’re prosperous)
    • “We won top integrator award for 20XX” (can’t you see why you should work with us?)
  2. Keep the intro to the post short and sweet. One sentence, maybe two.
  3. Limit the number of times you post to when you have something useful to say. Some would suggest you post daily. Accept for a small group of individuals, I’d say that’s too often. I’d prefer to focus on quality over quantity. You?
  4. Make sure to use the right hashtags and mentions for your sub-world.
  5. Encourage employees to engage with the content if they actually like it (with the understanding that some engagement is more valuable and some is less).

Learning about your potential customers

You can do this in two main ways.

First, you can learn an awful lot about certain aspects of your potential customers by analyzing their profiles. You can learn things like:

  1. What they’re good at.
  2. What they care about.
  3. How they view themselves.
  4. Demographic factors that make them more or less likely to engage.

These are very useful insights.

The second way involves listening and engaging with your potential customers within the groups that they belong to. This takes way more patience and sophistication, but can also lead to additional insights that are hard to learn through just looking at profiles. A few things to keep in mind here: (1) you need to stay on topic, (2) listen for a while before you speak up, and (3) you need to be adding value to the conversation.

Paid advertising (company updates and InMail)

Paid advertising is a pretty useful way to get in front of the people you care about most. You can really narrow down / filter your target audience (assuming you know how to describe them). However, you’ll want to have a really good handle on messaging and content marketing before you get into experimenting with paid ads on social.

Social media and inbound marketing

These two methods have some overlap, but are generally quite different. Social media is generally outbound-oriented. In other words, you’re pushing yourself onto your potential customers (obviously not the case for inbound). There are two areas where there’s significant alignment:

  1. Content – both inbound and social rely on quality content.
  2. Learning about your potential customers. Social media can help you learn what your potential customers care most about, which is an aspect of inbound marketing.

Check out the pros and cons of inbound marketing for more.

Next steps

Start by figuring out which of the goals mentioned you want to focus on first. Then get your LinkedIn house in order. This includes updating your headline to reflect what you want people to know about you most. You can’t be everything to everyone, otherwise you’ll connect with no one. Then update your company page info. Again, you can’t be everything to everyone.

Now you’ll need two main things to get rolling: (1) a niche position in the market, and (2) solid content to teach and engage. If you’d like help and you work for a services-based tech company, feel free to reach out for a chat.

Yes, let’s chat

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