New survey on how engineers find information

 

I want to share a research piece we’ve been working on with our partners at TREW Marketing to find out how engineers find information online. We surveyed 580 engineers and asked questions such as:

• How do you interact with enewsletters in your inbox?
• What are the most valuable sources of information on engineering trends and products?
• Who do you trust most for publishing news regarding trends, technologies and products?

The data told us a number of interesting things, including that engineers are almost twice as likely (93%) to find information online as they are to find it at a trade show (58%). In this blog post I’ll dig into a couple of interesting findings.  Then on Sep 28^th I will be hosting a live webinar with TREW Marketing to review the full survey results.  I hope you can join us.

 

Where do engineers go to find information?

 

 

Data showed that engineers are almost twice as likely (93%) to find information online as they are to find it at a trade show (58%). 

Note also from this result that print publications are now considered less valuable than online resources.  This could be because print publications aren’t able to provide as much information since they only publish once per month rather than the constant stream of stories published online.  Or it could be because there is no search engine for print, whereas Google, Bing and Yahoo make finding relevant content much easier online.

This picture isn’t complete without taking age into consideration. Are younger engineers skewing the data by responding more favourably for online sources, and less favourably for traditional channels? When we cross-tabulated age with preference for sources, we found an interesting trend for trade shows (red) and online (blue) media.

 

 

 

While online information sources are seen as the most valuable for all age categories, we were surprised to find that older engineers find online media to be relatively more valuable than do younger engineers.  When it comes to trade shows, younger engineers value them more highly than do older engineers.   We didn’t see this coming.  

If you are curious about what else we uncovered in this survey, please join me and Rebecca Geier of TREW marketing in a webinar on Sep 28 at 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST. 

There is also a press release that provides some more insights here. 

Hope to see you there.

John