New Year, New Beginnings
It’s a new year, which means the start of new endeavors for many of us. For Digital Marketing for Engineers, the upheaval is greater than most, as John Hayes bid us farewell. While I will miss working with John, I’m also excited for what comes next for this blog.
Digital Marketing for Engineers was created with the goal of sharing the insights engineering.com was able to derive from serving more information to more engineering professionals than any other digital platform. That won’t change. In fact, it’s my goal as the new leader of DMFE to increase our output of wholly original resources for marketers.
In that vein, if you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to download your copy of How Engineers Find Information 2019. The findings of the report, based on a survey of over 1,500 engineering professionals, will help you decide what platforms to focus on, what content to produce, and most importantly, where you should be spending your marketing budget.
Speaking of which…
The 2019 Marketing Budget Story
If marketing is all about getting the right information into the hands of prospects and customers, then How Engineers Find Information does a great job illuminating that process from the engineers’ perspective.
What about from the marketers’ perspective? What do we think is necessary to connect our products and services with decision makers? Are we being recognized and given the necessary resources to feed growth? What worked for us last year and what challenges do we anticipate facing in 2019?
These are the questions we hope to answer in the 2019 Budget Trends in Industrial and Technology Marketing Research Report. To write that report though, we need your help.
But why should you contribute? I’m glad you asked.
Budget Trends Report: Insights & Why It Matters
There is a very simple but practical benefit that arises from this research. It answers the question, “Are budgets in my industry, targeting the same prospects I’m targeting, going up?”
Last year’s report found that 22% of marketers were seeing their budgets increase by between 1% and 10%, while another 23% were seeing increase of 11% or more. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in manufacturing, where 54% of marketers were seeing their budgets rise year-over-year. In contrast, only 33% of marketers in software saw their budgets rise last year.
The more marketers who provide feedback, the more precise we can be with the final results, and the more valuable those results will be for all of us.
And let’s be real, there aren’t many questions more valuable to a marketing department than knowing what’s going on in your industry. Knowing you’ll be under more or less competitive pressure in the coming year will help you solidify your plans, and hopefully convince the powers-that-be to increase your own budget to fuel the campaigns you’re going to come up with to drive results.
One of the most important questions the report should answer is on what we can expect to happen with content in 2019. Last year’s report found that for the first time ever marketers recognized that content creation was their number one challenge, among many other content-related findings.
Clearly, the marketers who participated in last year’s study were very perceptive. How Engineers Find Information found that in the one-year period between the 2018 survey and 2019’s, engineering professionals’ demand for content, as measured by hours spent consuming, rose 24%.
This year’s survey will provide answers to several pressing content questions, such as:
- What types of content are marketers prioritizing?
- Where do marketers find inspiration for their marketing content?
- How are marketers balancing creation and distribution?
By aggregating responses from as many marketers as possible, we’ll gain a greater understanding of best practices for reaching engineers and driving marketing ROI. This should help each and every one of us produce even better content in 2019!
The survey is comprised of 15 questions, and 14 of them are designed to help marketers achieve their goals. That 15th question isn’t about your strategy or tactics. Its answer isn’t going to ‘supercharge your marketing’ or help you ‘convert and engage.’ Rather, it asks how you are evaluated.
Pooling this information is important in helping each of us grow our careers. It allows us to determine whether how we’re being evaluated is normal for what we’re tasked with. More importantly though, it allows us to see if there is a gap in the responsibilities we’re being trusted with and grow our careers.
Imagine being able to go to your boss and saying, “look at all these other marketers who are being given responsibility for revenue generation, let me prove out our value and show you what my team and I can do.” That’s powerful stuff to increase your influence.
This question also allows us to determine the relative importance of marketing in similar organizations, by looking at how much or less we’re being collectively held responsible for.
For the last 3 years, we’ve seen the number of metrics marketers being measured on rise across the board. That would indicate that the overall importance of marketing to most organizations is also increasing. More responsibility, more authority. More good news for our career prospects.
Home Run or Strikeout?
So, there are 3 compelling reasons to participate in this year’s survey. Hopefully they were a home run for you, and not swings and misses.
Last year, more than 100 marketers with total budgets exceeding 41 million dollars participated. I’d love to see both numbers go up this year. 72 of your peers have already participated, and it took them on average less than 8 minutes to complete the survey. I know we’re all busy, but you can spare 8 minutes, right?
Oh, and of course, by participating you have the chance to win one of three $100 Amazon gift cards, so there’s that too.
Thanks for listening to my pitch. I hope you’ll take a swing at the survey and pass it along to your fellow marketers.
Until next time,
Andrew
