Unless you’ve been on a very long sabbatical from industrial and manufacturing marketing, you very well know that your website should be the hub of your online marketing.

Why should you care about your company’s website? Probably the best reason I’ve read is by Linda Rigano, Executive Director of Strategic Services at ThomasNet. She said,

“Treat your website as if you were hiring a six-figure salesperson. If you were going to put them on the street, what would you do? You’d arm them with information about the marketplace. You’d arm them with information about your products and how people use them. Then you’d put that person in front of the audience and check with them.”

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Contrary to popular beliefs that engineers are consumers too and therefore one must market to them as people first, I believe marketing to engineers is different. Sure, they are human beings like the rest of us but they have very different emotional triggers and needs when it comes to making work-related decisions.

I should know — I am an engineer too. So I’m not only familiar with an industrial marketer’s target audience, I am the audience or at least a member of it.

Having worked closely with many manufacturers and companies from the industrial sector, I have learned several valuable lessons about what works when it comes to marketing to engineers and technical buyers. Here are my top five industrial marketing lessons:

Lesson #1: Save them time
Most engineers, especially design engineers are already overloaded with work. Anything you can do to help them find the right information quicker will score big with engineers. Having a search function on your website is no longer an option, it is a requirement. You need to move beyond the free Google Custom Search tool for websites.

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