Are You ‘Heads Up’ Or ‘Heads Down?’

B-To-B magazine recently published an article titled “How To Market To Engineers” that discusses the challenges engineers face when trying to find sources and services like your machining business. The focus of the article is on a survey conducted by CMP Media with 4,000 design engineers in the electronics industry. The reason for this survey is to determine how and where they get their information.

According to the article, there are two types of information that engineers use.

Heads-up information is “higher altitude” or “relaxed mode,” such as technology and product news, the competitive environment of an industry and general industry happenings.

Heads-down information is more specific to an individual’s immediate needs, when they are more actively engaged or motivated by necessity, product performance specifications or highly technical information on how to solve problems.

What’s important to understand about your site’s role and what it should communicate is that these engineers say they use the Web mostly for heads-down information. They get their heads-up fix from other sources, such as print, that are best suited for the “leisure” aspects of their jobs. However, when they want to solve problems like finding an acceptable sourcing alternative for five-axis machining, they go to the Web.

Improve your chances of serving these advanced needs by focusing on credibility. In other words, how good of a job does your site do at not just saying, but showing how credible you are as a technology and sourcing solution for an engineer in search of one? Check out the this B-To-B article titled “Aim For Credibility In Targeting Engineers.”