As a marketer, you can message engineers at each stage of their buying journey : Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
You will have more success turning those engineers into leads if you match your content to the stage of the buying journey that the engineer is currently experiencing.
For example, if an engineer is at the awareness stage, they are still trying to define the problem. They are open to a wide range of possible solutions to that problem, possibly including yours. This is not the time to send them a price list.
The Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is, however, an excellent time to target them with keyword searches that recognize the issue they are facing. At this stage, engineers search for terms like: troubleshoot, issue, resolve, risks, upgrade, improve, optimize and prevent.
This is relevant in building your landing pages, email copy and subject lines, etc. The keywords you use should change along with the content for each stage of the journey.
Keywords are also relevant to the content that you offer. At the awareness stage, engineers are open to content that helps them frame the problem by answering the questions inherent in those search terms. Your best bet is to offer educational and thought leadership information that helps them diagnose their problem.
The Consideration Stage
At the consideration stage, engineers are considering potential solutions to their problem, but not yet vendor specific solutions. They are ready for a higher level of commitment to get the content that will help them narrow their search, so you can gate consideration content.
Good examples of this sort of content are solution comparisons, whether in white paper or webinar format, expert editorial and product videos. If you want to boost the SEO value of your landing pages, consider search terms like: solution, provider, service, tool, device, and software.
The Decision Stage
At the decision stage, engineers are now ready for vendor and product comparisons, case studies, trial software and downloads, product literature and price lists. And what are the key terms they search for? In the decision stage engineers look to comparison type terms like compare, versus, comparison, pros and cons, benchmarks, review and test.
The format of the content also changes with each stage. There is more information here about matching your eBooks, analyst reports, videos and articles to stages of the buyer’s journey.
If you need help reaching engineers at any of these stages, please consider ENGINEERING.com’s content amplification, webinar and lead generation services.
Thanks for reading,
John
