Smart Marketing for Engineers

I saw Rebecca Geier talk at NI Week a few years ago. She was promoting her new book Smart Marketing to Engineers. I picked up a copy but didn’t get around to reading it until last year. I found it very insightful.

The book starts off with some typical marketing talk. It talks about finding a niche and differentiating yourself. It talks about creating personas or ideal customer avatars. If you already know a fair amount about marketing this is probably old hat, but if not, it will be useful.

The most useful part of the book is when it starts to get into how marketing to engineers is different than general marketing. She talks about how engineers consume content and how they like technical content ( shouldn’t be too surprising). She gives a lot of tips and tricks on producing technical content.

She talks about how engineers are very persistent when it comes to google search and will go 3 or more pages deep to find what they are looking for. She recommends not going for common search terms but rather long-tail search terms.

The whole book is centered around inbound marketing. Instead of going to tradeshows and chasing people down, put effort into your website and web presence and use it to attract people to you. At some point, she refers to your website as a 24-7 employee whose sole focus is to drop people into the top of your marketing funnel.