BLOG

April 21, 2021

by Usman Sheikh

• B2B
• Blog
• SEO Blogs
• Video Marketing

Taking A Deep Dive: Marketing Technical or Complex Engineering Brands (With Examples)

Technical companies usually think their marketing problem is that the product is hard to explain. It almost never is. The product is explainable. The problem is that the people deciding do not all understand it, and they are deciding anyway.

Forrester’s 2026 study of nearly 18,000 business buyers found an average of 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 external participants influencing a purchase. Some of those people are engineers who can read your spec sheet. Most of them are not. There is a finance person, a procurement lead, a plant manager, a health and safety officer, a lawyer, and somebody senior who will spend four minutes on this decision and cast a real vote.

So you are not writing for one reader. You are writing for a room where technical depth persuades a third of the people and actively loses the rest. That tension is the whole discipline, and this page is about how to hold both sides of it.

Start by accepting that the engineer is not the gatekeeper

A common mistake is treating the technical evaluator as a hurdle on the way to the real buyer. A 2026 study of 750 engineers by EETech found 84 percent are decision makers or strong influencers. They are not clearing you for somebody else’s approval. They are voting.

The opposite mistake is just as expensive. Writing only for the engineer means the four people who control the budget see a page they cannot follow, and they will not admit that in a meeting. They will just find a reason the timing is wrong.

What the website actually has to do

One page, two jobs, and they cannot be blended into one paragraph.

Above the fold, state the outcome. Not the mechanism. Uptime, yield, scrap rate, cycle time, compliance exposure, cost per unit. The senior person who gives you four minutes needs to know what changes in their operation if they buy this.

One click down, give the engineer everything. Tolerances, materials, certifications, failure modes, installation constraints, what it is not compatible with. Do not make them fill in a form to get a spec sheet. A form in front of a datasheet is the single most reliable way to lose a technical evaluator, because their alternative is a competitor who did not ask.

Name what you are bad at. The fastest trust you will ever build with a technical buyer is telling them the application where your product is the wrong choice. They already know no product wins everywhere. The company that admits it is the company they believe on everything else.

Publish the thing only you can publish

Most technical content marketing fails because it explains things that are already explained. There is no shortage of articles about how a centrifugal pump works.

What does not exist anywhere else is your data. The failure analysis from your own returns. What you learned across 200 installations about the mistake customers make in month three. The comparison you ran internally when you were deciding which material to use. The reason you changed a design.

That content is uncomfortable to publish, which is exactly why it is valuable. It cannot be copied by a competitor, it cannot be produced by an AI writing tool, and it is the only kind of page that a serious evaluator bookmarks.

There is a second reason this matters in 2026. When a buyer asks an AI assistant which supplier to consider, the assistant assembles an answer from what it has read. Being the most complete and most clearly sourced explanation of a problem in your category is now a distribution strategy, not just a content one. Generic content does not get cited. Original data does.

The authority is already in your building

Technical companies pay agencies to sound credible while sitting on more credibility than the agency could ever manufacture. The process engineer who has commissioned 80 lines. The quality lead who can explain why a certification exists. The field service technician who has seen every way the product gets installed wrong.

Put those people on camera and in bylines. It is cheaper than content production, it is more convincing than anything written by a copywriter, and it has a recruitment benefit that most manufacturers do not price in. Skilled trades and engineering roles are hard to fill. A company whose own people visibly know what they are doing is a company engineers want to join.

We took Midas Safety past 56,000 LinkedIn followers organically, with no paid promotion, largely by putting the people who make the product in front of a camera.

A number that should change your plan if you sell in Canada

There are 51,353 manufacturing establishments with employees in Canada. Only 344 of them have 500 or more people.

If large manufacturers are your market, your entire addressable universe fits on a spreadsheet you could read in an afternoon. That has consequences. Broad awareness spending is mostly waste. Naming the accounts, learning who sits on each committee, and being consistently visible to those specific people is not a campaign, it is a list. Treat it like one.

If you sell consumables, MRO or components into a much wider base, the opposite applies and reach genuinely matters. Work out which one you are before anyone buys media.

Channels

The honest position on channel selection for industrial companies is that there is no credible neutral research ranking them, because everyone who would fund that research sells one of the channels. I have written about that at length, along with the three I would actually use, in social media channels for technical brands. The version specific to manufacturers, including what to post and who should make it, is in social media marketing for manufacturing companies.

What to measure, and what will get you fired

Industrial sales cycles are long. The 6sense 2025 buyer study put the average B2B buying cycle at 10.1 months with first contact happening around 61 percent of the way through, and that sample was weighted toward software. Capital equipment is worse.

Which means if you report on monthly leads, you will be shut down before the work matures. Report on the things that move earlier and predict the rest: share of voice against named competitors, unaided recall inside target accounts, inbound activity from accounts on the list, and the proportion of deals where you were already known before the enquiry.

Then hold the line for two years. The single most common reason industrial marketing fails is not bad strategy. It is a good strategy cancelled in month nine.

Sources

1. Forrester, The State Of Business Buying, 2026. Survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers, fielded 2025.
2. EETech, Buyer Journey Study 2026. 750 engineers, recruited from EETech’s own communities, so treat its channel findings as indicative.
3. 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report. Around 4,000 responses; manufacturing was 14 percent of the sample, so the cycle length is a floor for industrial rather than a benchmark.
4. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Canadian Industry Statistics, manufacturing (NAICS 31-33), reference year 2025, drawn from Statistics Canada data.

If you want to see how we apply this inside a technical operation, that is our manufacturing practice.

Last reviewed 19 September 2026.

Usman Sheikh

Oil and gas. Manufacturing. Retail. Private equity.

Qualified as a CPA in Canada and the United States. Twenty years across financial planning and analysis, agency ownership and marketing leadership. Previously Senior Director of Performance and Growth at Equiton, a private equity real estate manager with nearly $2 billion under management, running both the retail and the wholesale channel. Earlier, oil and gas, and campaigns across pharmaceutical, insurance and industrial manufacturing.