By 
To assume there is a generic marketing campaign template that all businesses in all industries can use would be a huge mistake. While there are certainly tips and tricks that can be used across the board, there is also the opportunity and need to customize the marketing plan in order to meet that industry’s needs and customer base. For engineering companies, there is plenty to consider as you work to form your marketing campaign and chances are some of your efforts will have fantastic results, and others won’t prove quite as positive.
So, what marketing tips would make the most sense for engineering companies to embrace? Which would give the ideal return on investment, helping to grow their customer base and thereby their profits? Here we’ll break down a handful that can be put into play and that will start to generate the kind of results companies hope to see.
Ensure You Have a Robust and Engaging Website
The first step is ensuring you’re able to appeal to the masses in a digital format. The best way to do so is with a robust and engaging website that is optimized for desktop and mobile use. Potential customers need to be able to seek you out, browse your offerings, and get a sense of what the business is about in a digital manner.
If the company already has a website, now is a great time to start monitoring traffic and figure out what areas of the website are doing well, and which areas are failing to hit the mark. It may be time for a re-fresh of the site in order to capture peoples’ attention.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when creating or updating your website:
- The user experience is the most important aspect. All pages need to load smoothly and quickly or you will lose visitors extremely fast.
- The website needs to be simple to navigate, which typically involves pull-down menus, a search tool, and clear messaging.
- Keep the design simple but eye-catching. This is a very fine-balance to strike as you don’t want to go overboard and make the design too busy, but at the same time, it needs to catch the attention of visitors. Experts recommend using complementary colors to ensure there is contrast, but in the right way.
- Use a variety of media, not just text. This includes such things as embedded videos, audio, podcasts, photos, charts, and so forth. It helps to add interest to the page, and can make information clearer.
Explore Social Networks and Use Them to Your Advantage
This is an absolute must in today’s digitally dependent world. The more visible you can be online, the better the results will be for your company. Where it used to be that having a great website was enough, today that is merely the first step in a digital marketing campaign. If companies truly want to be competitive, they need to embrace social networks and take full advantage of them.
A good first step is to set up accounts for your engineering company on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. These are the most popular social networks and have the highest amount of users, so it’s a great place to focus your efforts.
In terms of posting content, there are a few tips to follow. First of all, you want to be sure you’re posting on a regular basis. If you aren’t posting often, your accounts will grow stale, and that will make it hard to grow your list of followers. The next tip is to make sure your posts are engaging, interesting, and something that will ideally will be shared. The more retweets and shares your posts get, the more your following can grow.
Experts also recommend that, as with your website, you use various media in your social media posts, which can include pictures, videos, and audio. It’s a chance to share short snippets of information and content with followers.
Create a Blog on the Company’s Website
Another great tip is to create a blog for the company’s website. Some of the most notable benefits of doing so include:
Position Yourself as an Industry Expert: Blogging gives you an opportunity to really position yourself as an industry expert by focusing on current events, trends, best practices, and so forth. You can also bring in guest bloggers who are already-established industry experts, thereby adding even more weight to your blog.
It Helps with Internal Linking: Blogs also give you a way to build your internal links, which helps drive traffic to various areas of your website. Don’t forget to also use external links, which can help to grow your audience.
Boost Your Search Engine Ranking: If you need a way to boost your company’s Google Search Engine ranking, blogging can be the solution. Most business owners are all too aware of what happens if you don’t appear on the first page of the search results – chances are people just won’t find your company.
It Helps to Give Your Brand Authority: Not only does it position you as an expert in the field, but it also helps to give your brand authority and credibility, something that can lead to sales.
Include a Call to Action: Blogs can also be the perfect way to include a call to action which ends up resulting in a sale, or having the reader share their contact email information so you can build your database.
With that all said, it’s important to understand that a blog still needs to be relevant, interesting, and engaging content. Simply slapping anything together for the mere fact of getting a blog up just won’t cut it. Content needs to appeal to the readers in some way, and prompt them to visit the page and stay there.
Informational style blogs tend to be one of the most popular types out there, and it’s one well worth embracing. Readers will actually learn from the blog, and feel compelled to return for additional content in the future. You can click here for a great example of an information blog in the realm of engineering management and operational management. The post is formulated in a way that it appeals to a wide range of readers, and provides them with real tangible information that they can learn from. It is content that is relevant, timely, and interesting.
Conduct Market, Competition, and Customer Research
It’s also very difficult to set forth an effective marketing campaign if you don’t fully understand the market and your clients. Making assumptions and guesses won’t cut it, and won’t give you the leg up on the competition. Instead, it’s critical to conduct thorough market, competition, and customer research. The information you uncover can help to determine what your marketing goals will be, and therefore how you go about achieving them.
This entire process is quite in-depth, and for that reason, it can make sense to hire on a company that has skills and experience in this area. They will understand what information to collect, the best way to do it, and then how to analyze the rather large quantity of data. They can then present the results in a way that makes sense to you, and clearly lays out the findings.
Once the research is done, the efforts shouldn’t be scrapped; instead, it’s a good idea to keep monitoring these various factors so that you can not only keep up with changing times, practices, news, and trends, but ideally, you can stay ahead of them and react in a proactive manner.
Make Branding Consistent
The final tip is to ensure your branding is strong, understandable, and consistent. Branding may not seem like a big deal, but effective branding typically results in higher customer levels. Branding helps to create authority and professionalism. The branding needs to be consistent on your website, social networks, mailers, and anything else that is customer-facing.
One of the most important criteria in your branding efforts will be your logo. Logos are meant to be identifiable and should reflect the company’s vision/purpose. This can act as the constant across all print and digital materials. People will eventually learn to recognize the logo, and even look for it, which means your efforts have been successful.
If your company doesn’t have a unique, eye-catching, and effective logo design at the moment, now is the time to remedy that situation. Logos not only have to reflect the brand, but they also need to make a good impression. They should use colors that grab a person’s attention, the font or logotype needs to be easy to read, it should be easy to scale up or down, and it needs to stay simple. Although it’s a lot to be mindful of, the end results will be worth it.
So, as you look to market your engineering company and you begin to feel a bit in over your head, you can refer to these tips and use them to get real results.
