Webinars: Marketers are Going where the Engineers Are

 

We surveyed 1,589 engineers to understand how they get their news and information.  More than ¾ said that they planned to attend a webinar in 2016. 

The fact that engineers say they are going to webinars matches the anecdotal evidence we have seen both at ENGINEERING.com and what I hear from other publishers – engineering marketers are signing up for more webinars than ever. 

In this post we’ll look at the increased commitment to webinars, what sorts of webinars marketers are running, and dig into more detail about the engineers who attend them.

 

More marketers are committing more budget to webinars

Our 2016 survey of engineering marketers showed that marketers are paying attention to the fact that more engineers are gathering their information from online events.  In the three years that we have run this survey, the proportion of marketers who are committing budget to webinars has been steadily increasing, as shown in this chart.

 

Why are marketers turning to webinars? 

Marketers have at least two good reasons to use webinars. 

First, they are an excellent tool for filling the top-of-funnel by demonstrating thought leadership and building your brand among your target audience.  These sorts of webinars tend to have two parts.  The first part is hosted by an industry analyst who discusses trends that can impact the prospect’s business.  (At ENGINEERING.com, we have recruited lots of industry analysts to speak on behalf of our advertisers.)  The second half of the webinar often features a testimonial – one of the advertiser’s customers speaks to a challenge they faced and the results they achieved by using the advertiser’s product.   

Second, they can be very effective for nurturing leads.  According to Rebecca Geier of engineering marketing agency TREW marketing, “Webinars are a low-cost middle-of-the-funnel content type…this type of content is critical to filling the sales pipeline since prospects that do attend are, by their actions, indicating a strong interest in your company and are likely qualified leads for sales to follow-up with.”

These types of webinars tend to be more product-focused than the first type.  Manufacturers will include a presentation from a sales engineer about the applications for their products while software vendors use this opportunity to do a demonstration. 

Webinars also afford the marketer the opportunity to ask questions of their prospects through webinar survey tools.  These questions can range from the type of problems that attendees are trying to address to asking about product features they value the most. 

 

Older engineers are more likely to attend more webinars

As a marketer, you might consider younger engineers to be more digitally native.  If so, you might expect that relatively more young engineers would attend more webinars as compared to their older counterparts.  This chart shows clearly that this is not the case – older engineers attend more webinars than younger engineers.

In this graph the youngest engineers are on the left of each grouping of responses (0 webinars to 5+) whilst the older cohorts are on the right side.  You can see that in the “0 Webinars” category, the left most bar / youngest ages are more likely than all other age groups to attend no webinars.  On the right most grouping of 5+ you can see that the older age groups are more likely to attend the most webinars.

More important than the age groups is the finding that 62% of engineers plan to attend multiple webinars in 2016. If you are marketing to engineers, this is an important finding.

Thanks for reading,

John