Why Engineers Should Understand Marketing?

Did you ever have experience like this? You use your excellent algorithms to build a nice analytics website, and you think the website provides great contents and it is a very useful tool for your audiences; but somehow not too many people use it.

The reason behind it is marketing. There are two goals that any engineering products should meet:

First, engineering talents can get their start-up traction directly by building tools and resources that most likely their target audiences will use.

Second, plan some digital marketing strategies to get the tools in front of potential audiences, and then use these tools to generate leads and expand the audience base.

Engineers and marketers are working in their own silos.

In the article called  “Why More Engineers Ought to be in Sales and Marketing” by Achinta Mitra on the IMT Blog, Mitra stated that “it seems Engineers are from Mars, Marketers are from Venus.” That’s true, most engineers do not understand how to promote their tools and most marketers do not understand the technical languages used by engineers.

I agree that “marketing is much harder than engineers realize.” because “marketing defines what engineers should be built to make the company enough money to stay in business and keep the engineers employed.”

Many engineers hate marketing work

“Engineers and marketers mix like oil and water”. Engineer is good at technical language; but they don’t seem to have the same level of skills in using “plain language”.

An article called “Why Do Engineers Hate Marketing?” has given a very interesting example to explain why engineer does not like marketing work. Does it sound familiar? If you are an engineer, after a public presentation or briefing, did your audience ever tell you “everything you have told me is technically correct, but the fact is I am still lost”?

In another article by Achinta Mitra’s called “Marketing to Engineers is a Big Challenge” on Customer Think website stated that engineers don’t respond to marketing like others do. As such, It is very difficult to understand the market when the marketing target audience is primarily engineers .

The Marketing Culture is Changing

As the engineering culture seeping into marketing, marketers are becoming more tech-savvy. An article called “7 characteristics of engineers that great marketers should have” published in CMO.com suggested that great marketers should learn from engineers:

1. Engineers love to problem solve!
2. Engineers have been taught the right approach to problem solving.
3. Engineers love data!
4. Engineers are bi-lingual.
5. Engineers love trying out new technology!
6. Engineers are pragmatic.
7. Engineers like building things.

Engineers are trained to make things; marketers are trained to make strategies. We need both engineering and strategies to produce something successful. The marketing culture is changing. How about the engineering side?