Morgan Norris
To be a successful technical marketing manager, you must understand how to apply marketing best practices in the context of a nuanced technical audience.
If you’ve hired a technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help your new staff member understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations!
Here's a jumpstart to your job: State of Marketing to Engineers. This research from hundreds of engineers shows how they search for information and how they want to interact with marketing and sales.
These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning, website plans, content marketing strategy, awareness, and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful marketing manager in a technical, B2B engineering company:
Marketing Planning, Branding, and Website Development
1. Create a Successful Marketing Plan
Without a strategic marketing plan, how will you know what to do, and when? Having an effective strategy and following it will be critical to your success as a technical marketing manager. In busy times, the tendency is to rush and complete any marketing tactic that looks promising at the moment, without taking into consideration your marketing strategy and goals. So, take the time to truly define your marketing goals and measurable objectives.
2. Position and Brand Your Company Creatively and Carefully
Your brand is of utmost importance to your company, as it conveys who your company is and your unique value proposition. Positioning your brand well will be critical to the long-term success of the business. In marketing terms, your brand is personified both visually – through your company logo and branding style guide – and contextually – through words, such as your mission, vision, and positioning statements; core company and product-level messaging; and company and campaign taglines.
Related Resources:
- 5 Tips for Creating a Tagline that Sticks
- Smart Brand Positioning and Messaging for Engineers
- Brand Marketing
Mechanical Solutions highlights customers pain points then positions their products and services as the solutions in their brand messaging.
3. Holistically Evaluate Your Website to Maximize Your Future Time and Spend
Your website will be at the core of your marketing efforts, so before you make any major changes to it, audit your web site so that you can prioritize how to go about making changes and additions to it in the future.
Evaluating your site holistically will help you create a better web experience for all visitors to your website no matter where they are in the buying cycle – those researching your business, learning more about your products and services, preparing to buy, or returning for another purchase.
For more detail on building your web strategy, watch our on-demand webinar, Build a Better Technical Website.
Content Marketing Strategy
4. Show Your Products or Services in Practice with Compelling Case Studies
Customer case studies are a great marketing and sales tool. By reading about how customers benefit from using your products and services, prospective clients know they are not the first to choose your company, and can hear from real customers to supplement what they’ve learned from reading your content. To succeed as a technical marketer, you’ll need to know how to prioritize the most important applications for case studies, tell your customer’s story clearly, ask for permissions from the customer’s company, and streamline and leverage your work.
Related Resources:
- The Engineer's Guide to Writing and Promoting a Case Study
- Case Study vs White Paper: What's the Difference?
To get started with content strategy, read our guide, Getting Started with Content Marketing: Year One
5. Offer the Technical Data Your Customers Need
Because your company is trying to generate leads, create opportunities that engage customers, and ultimately close sales, it’s imperative that you offer the data, insight, and information that your prospects need and want. Offering quality content will cause your customers to see your company as an expert in the industry or technology area in which you work, and direct them to your products and services as solutions to their challenges. In addition to case studies, targeted presentations, and white papers that cover relevant topics will build credibility, show your company’s experience, and convey a memorable message.
Related Resources:
- COURSE: Learn to Write Content that Converts Technical Audiences
- How to Create a Corporate Pitch Deck for Engineering Companies
- How to Write an Effective White Paper for Engineers
6. Engage with Your Prospects by Making an Investment in Video
Here’s a statistic that will make your head spin: according to Zenith’s Online Video Forecasts 2019, the average person spent 84 minutes per day watching online video. The amount of time people spend viewing online video has grown rapidly across the world, at an average rate of 32% a year between 2013 and 2018 And, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine on the planet, just behind Google. Web visitors are drawn to video, so you should be creating videos as a technical marketing manager to add a dimension to the web that text and imagery alone cannot achieve.
Related Resources:
- 10 Marketing Videos that Engage Technical Audiences
- A Great Video Starts with a Great Script
- Video Shouldn't Be So Complicated
7. Optimize Your Content Marketing with Content Re-Use and Topic Clusters
One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, amplify it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper with tags and meta data that search engines will see. Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts. And, topic clusters are the newest strategy to optimizing your site to perform well on search engines. Topic clusters help you develop a content marketing strategy that is supported by search engine optimization best practices.
Related Resources:
Loyalty and Awareness Campaigns
8. Increase Customer Engagement Regularly with Email Newsletters
Staying top-of-mind with prospects and customers is a challenge you’ll probably always face. Email newsletters are a great way to maintain a conversation with your target audience, promote valuable content, and help nurture your lead base to increase customer loyalty and move prospects closer to the sale. A corporate email newsletter, done right, can be one of the most effective and strategic marketing activities a company undertakes. You need to understand all aspects of email newsletters, from design to content to mailing lists, in order to create ones that build your brand and bring new leads to your company.
Related Resources:
Knowles Precision Devices uses monthly email newsletter campaigns to stay top-of-mind with customers.
9. Get more Blog Traffic and Grow Your Potential Customer Base
Blogging is a great way to bring more visitors to your website, so you’ll want to constantly seek to get more blog traffic (and in turn, get more prospective customers to your site). It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience, but the payoff can be worth it in the long run. Maximize that investment by understanding the potential of your blog, getting discovered, converting readers into subscribers, and finding advocates for your blog.
Related Resources:
10. Grow Awareness and Traffic With Media Coverage
News coverage generates awareness about your company and its products and services, boosts organic search for your company, and drives traffic to your company web site. Quality news coverage starts with strong, longstanding relationships with journalists, so you’ll want to begin building those contacts. Overall, your interactions with the press should be productive if you’re willing to consistently contribute strong and relevant information that they can use to better inform their readers. They’ll come to appreciate your insight and value your relationship as an industry expert as much as you value their ability to widely publicize your company or product name.
Related Resources
Want deeper insight?
Are you the lone solo marketer at your technical engineering firm? Read this blog post that gives 7 Tips for the One-Person Marketing Team.
If you're looking to level up your writing skills or get your team on the same page with a proven writing process, check out the our writing course, Content Writing, Engineered.
TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.
Morgan Norris
Morgan believes that the process of brand positioning and messaging powers companies by aligning corporate leadership, building a story that fuels staff and engages customers, and creating a foundation for consistent content – and she’s seen these results come true for TREW clients time and again over the last decade. She holds degrees in Public Relations and Spanish, with a minor in Business from The University of Texas at Austin. Morgan, her husband, and three kids recently moved from Austin to downtown DC, where they enjoy walking the city, visiting the local museums, and playing a guess-who-is-in-that-motorcade game.
About TREW Marketing
TREW Marketing is a strategy-first content marketing agency serving B2B companies that target highly technical buyers. With deep experience in the design, embedded, measurement and automation, and software industries, TREW Marketing provides branding, marketing strategy, content development, and digital marketing services to help customers efficiently and effectively achieve business goals.