Is your manufacturing company getting noticed by engineers?

As an industrial job shop, your primary objective is to be the optimized solution provider for your customers by helping them get their job done with the greatest degree of expertise that makes them look good. That being said, your target consumer is most likely an engineer. They not only work with your products or services, they also significantly influence their companies’ buying decisions for your big-ticket items like fabricated parts, materials, machinery, software, hardware, and more. You are really selling them your ability to solve their specific problem using your particular products, manufacturing methods, and expertise.

According to a recent engineering survey, 86 percent of all engineers from a variety of industries (aerospace, defense, medical devices, semiconductor, energy, government, consumer products & electronics, natural resources, construction, machine tools, and more) spend 9 hours or more per week reading digital engineering content.

Since they are your target market, what more can you do to catch an engineer’s eye and keep them engaged with your company? Build better engineering resources for them. How do you do that? Here are some tips!

Make your resources as accessible as possible

Engineers spend a lot of time researching online. One of the best ways to reach them is to make sure that your content is relevant to them and is easily accessible no matter how they want to see it. Your content needs to be on your website and shared across a variety of social channels. Also, be sure that your website has been optimized for mobile devices.

This also means that your content should not be hidden behind lengthy data-requests. Of course you want to get their emails for future direct marketing efforts, but you want to make your content easy for them to access. You are the expert in your field and your content needs to reflect that and if an engineer cannot easily get to your content how will they know to come to you? When you provide value to your potential engineering customer, prior to gaining them as a loyal customer, they are more likely to return and increase their engagement (and spend money) with you.

Not all content needs to be long

Engineers are busy people and like most of us they prefer shorter articles, posts, and videos to longer ones. Typically engineers will steer clear of lengthy and time-consuming content like live industry events, streamed video of events, and podcasts. Of course we are not talking about items that NEED to be longer, such as white papers or case studies; those should be as long as they need to be to properly illustrate the story and technical nature of those documents. This also doesn’t mean you should cut other content that they would find helpful just to be sure that it is “short”, it simply means that the majority of content (blogs, quick articles, helpful tips, social media posts, etc.) you put out there should be on the shorter side.

Make sure to include interesting visuals

No matter what subject your content is presenting, good quality images, diagrams, and video (or links to videos) help illustrate your concepts better and improve the overall readability of your written content. Images include things like product photos, close-ups, demonstrations, graphs, charts, performance metrics, flow charts, comparison tables, and more. Images draw the eye. They improve the overall readability and comprehension of your content by breaking up blocks of text and making concepts easier to visualize quickly.

Make sure that your content has been optimized for search engines

Engineers make the bulk of their buying decision (60%-70%) through online research without ever contacting anyone directly. Most of their research is done through websites, videos, white papers, blogs, and other content on the web. That means that your content needs to be easily found when an engineer is doing a search for it. As we touched on a bit earlier in this article, engineers don’t have a lot of time on their hands plus they tend to know what they are looking for before they start a search and are likely to pass anything that doesn’t meet their exacting standards. They are simply not going to spend too much time clicking past the first few pages of search results, your content needs to be on page 1 or 2 to be seen by your target audience.

To do that you need to:

  • Make sure that all of your content has well crafted meta-descriptions that accurately reflect the content you are presenting.
  • Include targeted keywords and key phrases.
  • Craft multiple pieces of content around your targeted keywords to ensure you will rank with at least one of the pages.
  • Make sure that your subject lines/titles are attention-grabbing.

Your ideal customers, engineers, are both creative as well as analytical and are constantly looking for new ways to do their jobs more efficiently. Since you are in the business of providing optimized solutions to engineers, you serve them best by providing them plenty of content to help them get the true picture of how you are the expert they are looking for.

Engineers are actively searching for content that will help them produce their product or part in the easiest and most efficient way possible. They want to work with companies that have the resources and technology to produce what they need efficiently, on-time, with great communication, and awesome customer service. Make sure you are providing what they need.

All industrial – all the time!

With over 30 years of experience, The Rico Group specializes in helping industrial manufacturers and job shops grow their business and diversify their customer base. We know how engineers think and what they are looking for. We know your processes, equipment, and materials. We also know that you have very little time to take away from your production and getting your customer’s orders delivered.

Interested to see what your current digital marketing efforts are really doing for your company?

We offer a free comprehensive analysis of your company’s online marketing to give you insights into what your true digital footprint is and how you can improve it. The report also comes with an in-depth competitor analysis and a free expert consultation to review the report with you and answer any questions you may have.

Get your free report here> http://www.thericogroup.com/FreeAudit/

Also, please grab a free copy of our comprehensive digital marketing success guide to help you accelerate your job shop’s growth. The guide walks you through the process of generating more qualified leads for your industrial manufacturing company.

Grab your free copy now: https://www.thericogroup.com/industrial/

Grow your business with better marketing with The Rico Group.

www.thericogroup.com

 (805) 497-7401