Three Free Research Reports for Engineering Marketers

 

There is no denying that marketing is becoming a data science.  That applies to the world of engineering marketing as much as to any other industry.  Every year there are many important pieces of research that help the engineering marketer better understand what campaigns are working.

With that in mind, here are a few recent reports that no engineering marketer should be without:

 

1.  Engineering360 (now part of IEEE) takes a broad look at marketers spending patterns in their report titled 2015 Trends in Industrial Marketing. The report delves into:

• the goals and metrics marketers are using
• specific approaches such as content marketing and social media
• how marketers allocate budgets.

Source: IHS Engineering360 2015 Trends in Industrial Marketing

They have been doing this research for a number of years, so they are able to highlight trends.  For example, they noted that the social media trend has now levelled off, indicating a maturity in how industrial marketers are using social media.

Note that Engineering360 is a digital media company, so their analysis pays more attention to online campaigns than offline. 

 

2.  ENGINEERING.com runs a similar survey every year. The latest is called the Engineering Marketers’ 2016 Campaign Plans Research Report. There are a couple big differences between this report and the one from Engineering360 that make this report worth downloading.

First of all, this report analyzes off-line campaigns as well as online, so if you want to know how other engineering marketers are allocating budget to trade shows, this is probably the only place you can find that sort of information.

Source: ENGINEERING.com’s 2016 Campaign Plans Research Report

Secondly, the research is supported by analysis from a number of engineering marketing experts including from Tiecas, ThomasNet and TREW in addition to ENGINEERING.com.   That analysis delves into differences between top performing marketers and laggards, which can give you a heads up as to which trends to emulate.

 

3. The Content Marketing Institute also releases a detailed study on manufacturing marketers spending patterns. Their latest study is available on slideshare. It’s called B2B Manufacturing Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

 As their name implies, the CMI has an overwhelming focus on content marketing so you won’t learn about offline budgets in this report, or even about other online approaches.  With that said, the CMI report is the most comprehensive one I’ve seen on the very important topic of content marketing. 

Let me know if you think I’ve missed an important one.

Thanks for reading,

John