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How manufacturing content marketers can reduce stress on engineers

How Manufacturing Content Marketers Can Reduce Stress on Engineers

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Manufacturing content marketers can really help reduce the stress on engineers. I’m not being facetious or trying to be clever with my headline. Don’t believe me? Let me explain how.

First, let me give credit where credit is due. I’ve used three resources for citations in this post. They are:

  1. 6 Digital Essentials for Selling & Marketing to Engineers & Architects, published by CADENAS PARTsolutions
  2. 2021 Pulse of Engineering Research Report published by GlobalSpec
  3. Manufacturing Content Marketing, 2022 Insights published by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)

Why are engineers stressed at work?

The simple fact is that engineers are time-challenged. I’ve written about this issue in my previous posts. Here’s a direct quote from the CADENAS report…

“Engineers in today’s environment are faced with countless challenges. For example, shorter production times coupled with an increasing in demand for unique solutions multiply the workload for engineers. To exacerbate the situation, engineers are constantly under pressure to cut costs in the design process as well as simplifying the manufacturing of their designs by sourcing off-the-shelf components (COTS).”

The data from GlobalSpec’s Pulse of Engineering report corroborates the above quote. They reported the following:

  • 58% of engineers surveyed said that the competitive landscape is global and competes 24/7
  • 73% said designs are becoming more complex/sophisticated
  • 64% said time-to-market pressures have increased
  • 58% report that design cycles are shrinking

The time-crunch problem is not new but has grown over the past few years. In addition, the pandemic has worsened the situation in the last two years.

How can manufacturing content marketers help alleviate the problem?

There are several things you can do to help engineers and technical professionals. One of the top items on my list would be offering a robust online library of downloadable CAD and BIM files. This strategy will save them time, improve design accuracy and eliminate some repetitive tasks engineers hate doing anyway.

Component manufacturers also benefit from offering downloadable CAD/BIM files. Look at this chart to see how they translate directly to sales. Hard to argue against these numbers.

CAD?BIM files used by manufacturing content marketers

Manufacturing content for educating less experienced engineers

Engineers and other industrial professionals regularly search for and want high-quality technical content they can rely on. They consider technical documentation, software and development tools, product specifications, and datasheets necessary in doing their work.

Younger and less experienced engineers have a strong desire to learn about the latest trends in their field of work and keep their technical knowledge up-to-date. Sometimes they also need mentoring since they lack the hands-on experience of senior engineers. In-house resources have become scarce because of retirements and cutbacks.

The GlobalSpec survey found that only 39% of manufacturers had formal practices for senior-level and specialized experts to train, transfer, mentor, or pass on their knowledge to younger engineers.

As a result, these younger engineers look to their suppliers to fill the internal knowledge gap. Manufacturing content marketers can help by creating online training courses, webinars, e-books, guides, and white papers.

Knowledge gap in industrial and manufacturing companies

See my post, Marketing to Millennial Engineers, for more on this topic.”

How can manufacturing content marketers produce results?

As a manufacturing content marketer, you need to prove ROI to get budget approvals. While reducing stress for engineers is a worthy goal, that alone won’t get you too far with upper management.

Downloadable CAD/BIM files are strong sales enablers, but what else can you do to generate results? Videos and webinars have proven themselves over the past 12 months. That was one of the key findings from the report published by CMI.

“Videos and virtual events/webinars were big over the last 12 months with the manufacturing marketers we surveyed. In addition, 85% expect continued investment in video in 2022, making it the top area of predicted investment.”

Videos and online events are popular for industrial content marketing because they are effective with the technical audience. Results speak for themselves. Look at this chart from the CMI report for proof.

Use of videos and webinars in manufacturing content marketing

As you can see from this post, there is a lot manufacturing content marketers can do to reduce stress on engineers while producing tangible and measurable results.

Achinta Mitra

Achinta Mitra calls himself a “marketing engineer” because he combines his engineering education and an MBA with 35+ years of practical manufacturing and industrial marketing experience. You want an expert with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s objectivity who can point you in the right direction immediately. That's Achinta. He is the Founder of Tiecas, Inc., a manufacturing marketing agency in Houston, Texas. Read Achinta's story here.
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Comments:

  1. Always so wonderful to read your insights. Do you have suggestions of videos that are good examples? We are developing our strategy and I would appreciate any advice (interviews with experts as videos? show a process? how long should they be?) We provide a service to manufacturers – testing machine oil for reliability of equipment.

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