How to promote your engineering consulting business with content
Marketing your engineering consulting business is difficult. Unlike product companies, you’re selling services comprised of concepts with intangible value vs. physical goods. Not to mention, your service offerings are expensive, require extended sales cycles, and rely heavily upon preexisting relationships.
Today, you likely depend on the following strategies to generate leads and fuel business growth:
- Referrals
- Professional networking
- Event sponsorships
- Conferences
- Credibility and authority associated with your brand
The problem for engineering firms
Referrals are effective, but they’re few and far between. You can’t rely on them as a dependable and predictable growth strategy.
Similarly, professional networking, event sponsorships and conferences are useful, but they’re expensive and time consuming. It’s nearly impossible to forecast the ROI you’ll see from the time and money you invest.
Credibility and authority associated with your brand is absolutely critical. However, it’s difficult to convey your firm’s expertise to new leads you’ve just met at a networking event or in passing at a conference booth.
Differentiating your value proposition
As an engineering firm, your greatest asset is your ability to skillfully solve complex industry problems in timely and cost-effective ways. That’s your competitive advantage, and ultimately how and why you land new business.
Differentiating yourself in a highly competitive landscape — like contract engineering — can be a significant challenge, especially when all of your competitors are pitching the same or similar service offerings.
So, how can you standout and make it evident that your firm is different?
Savvy engineering firms have begun to embrace the power of digital narratives. In short, digital narratives are stories published and promoted online that are designed to shed light on viable solutions to complex problems. They’re effective because people are inherently drawn to stories. Stories are relatable, compelling, insightful, and prescriptive. They can be instrumental in how you go about differentiating your firm and generating new qualified leads.
Yet more often than not, most engineering firms use the same types of content made up of the same generic claims.
“We recently published this white paper.”
“We recently received this certification.”
“We recently completed this project for client A.”
This content helps with credibility and authority, but it makes it nearly impossible to rise above the noise.
Additionally, very few engineering firms have their own content marketing strategies in place. Instituting a successful content marketing strategy involves consistently and reliably generating unique and valuable content. Doing so amplifies your firm’s credibility, generates more leads and helps nurture them through your sales funnel over time.
Instituting an effective content marketing strategy
There’s more to content marketing than simply publishing “more content.” It’s about systematically building measurable assets that educate your prospects and help inform your clients over time. It requires a proven strategy made up of repeatable systems that are measurable and can be optimized. Without a strategy, you’ll waste a great deal of time and money, and at the end of the day, you’ll have very little to show for your efforts.
When done well, your engineering firm’s content marketing strategy will earn you credibility and trust among your prospects over time. It will establish you as a thought leader. By enabling your prospects to sample your expertise with content, you’ll more effectively nurture them through your sales process and into signing big-dollar contracts. For optimal success, your content marketing strategy should become a component of your comprehensive sales process. It’s not a cookie-cutter, one-off, ad hoc solution; it should be tightly integrated into your sales system.
When you combine your content marketing strategy with your traditional sales tactics, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with. The engaging content you consistently publish will complement your referrals as well as the conferences and networking events you attend. It will tee up more productive face-to-face meetings, strengthen your reputation, and foster closer professional relationships based on trust.
With all of that being said, instituting an effective content marketing strategy isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and requires the right team with the right skill sets. The reality is, most engineering firms simply aren’t built to be content marketers.
Finding the right content partner
Content marketing isn’t about tactics and ephemeral campaigns. It’s about strategies and systems. When it comes to instituting an effective end-to-end content strategy, make a realistic evaluation of your available time and resources.
What can we handle in-house vs. what should we outsource?
What content marketing expertise do we have internally? Writers? Editors? Designers? Social Media Managers? Content Strategists? What are we missing?
Will we be able to craft engaging and valuable content consistently and reliably long-term?
Will we be able to measure, iterate and optimize our systems over time?
As an engineering firm, creating content yourself often has the lowest ROI: it prevents you from investing your most crucial resources — employee time and energy — into your service offerings and your business’s growth. It’s difficult to be chief content creator and grow your business at the same time.
The whole point of content marketing is to resonate with your best prospects at a deep level and to do it consistently in order to build trust. That requires a sharp focus, ongoing commitment, and an incredible amount of in-depth research to back up your promise and educate your prospects.
There are many agencies out there that can help with different pieces of your content strategy. However, they aren’t built to execute against your strategy from end-to-end, and consequently, you’ll still be required to do much of the heavy lifting yourself.
That’s why our digital agency handles every piece of the content marketing process for you. We carefully design and implement potent end-to-end content marketing strategies that are best-suited to build your engineering firm’s audience and grow your customer-base. This makes us unique and ultimately more effective.
How your engineering firm can win at content marketing
Content marketing is proving to be an effective growth strategy in today’s digital landscape. For engineering firms, in particular, it pairs nicely with existing lead generation mechanisms (i.e., referrals, professional networking, event sponsorships, conferences, etc.) and helps instill credibility and authority into your brand.
Through the use of digital narratives, your engineering firm can skillfully highlight your team’s subject matter expertise and convey how and why your value proposition is different.
When it comes execution, ad hoc tactics aren’t enough. In order to see an ROI, there must be an end-to-end strategy in place that’s comprised of repeatable and measurable systems. Not only that, but your content strategy should be tightly integrated into your sales process to ensure warm leads don’t go cold.
At the end of the day, instituting an effective content marketing strategy is time-consuming, resource intensive and distracting from everyday business operations. That’s why it’s important for your engineering firm to make a realistic evaluation of your ability to invest in it yourself or outsource to a team of content marketing experts.
When done right, content marketing can be a massive win for your business.
