Brand Marketing + Engineering Firm > Yuck^3.

Agreed?

I know.

That’s how I felt for many years as a marketer.

And in some ways, I still feel that way.

But here’s why my views have evolved:

1. LLMs
2. I started to recognize that doing certain aspects of brand marketing is not the same as trying to do everything that encompasses branding.

Let’s bound this discussion a bit before we dive in further. When I say engineering companies, I’m mainly referring to small’ish engineering services oriented companies (as opposed to those that sell mainly products) with less than ~150 employees.

Also, my bias: I was an engineer for years, and then got into marketing. But, a specific type of marketing. Namely, I’ve been focused on lead generation (i.e. helping companies try to get sales-ready leads knocking on their digital door) for years, so branding is certainly not my area of focus. Point being, my interest in branding is mainly in ways that I feel it can help engineering services companies obtain better or higher quality sales-ready leads.

To be fair, I haven’t hated the concept of brand marketing for years, at least not the way I view it. Here’s how I define brand marketing: any attempt to influence how certain groups of people perceive your company. That perception matters most for your ideal clients, but can also matter for people that influence your ideal clients.

A few examples of what I consider to be useful brand marketing for engineering companies

1. Getting mentioned for your expertise on an influential website
2. Getting mentioned for a project you did for one of your clients on LinkedIn.
3. Efforts to disambiguate your company from another company with the same or similar name.
4. Advertising in a niche and well-respected publication, conference, or tradeshow.

A few examples of brand marketing that I don’t believe are worthwhile for engineering companies

1. Participating in a general business event to become known in your community at large.
2. Posting on LinkedIn that you just opened a new office.
3. Brand advertising to large generic groups of people with no obvious fit for your company as a potential client.

Does it matter if you’re inbound marketing focused or outbound-focused?

Not really I’d say. The goals are to (1) make a positive impression and (2) to have potential clients be able to validate your company. Both of these goals are applicable to various inbound and outbound strategies.

Is it worth trying to attribute the amount of impact each marketing activity has?

No, not for small companies. For larger companies (those with say 1000+ employees or over $100M in revenue), yes, I’d say it’s worth trying at a high level. For smaller companies, the lack of data and cost of assessing make it not worth the effort IMO.

Having said that, you probably do still want to measure overall brand awareness at a basic level.

Where to prioritize brand marketing goals

I could be wrong, and maybe your company is the exception, but I’m guessing that as a small engineering company, you can’t afford to have brand marketing be your #1 marketing focus. Your #1 focus is probably on getting more or better sales-ready leads.

You’re next choices are sales support and brand awareness. Consider ranking these based on how well your sales team can articulate to you:

1. What type of content they believe would be most effective in helping them close more deals.
2. Why they believe this content would help them close more deals.

If you can work together to make sense of these, then good, otherwise your likely stack-ranked priorities will be:

1. Sales ready leads
2. Brand awareness
3. Sales support

Some things you’ll need in order to work on your brand marketing

1. Ability to find opportunities to get published
2. SMEs that are willing to contribute to content
3. Ability to measure brand awareness patterns and trends