How Do You Market to Engineers?

Why Do Engineers Ignore Most Marketing?

Engineers ignore marketing that asks them to take a claim on trust, because their name is on the recommendation if the product doesn’t work, and slogans or brochures that hide the numbers give them nothing to check.

They also do most of the evaluation before they talk to anyone, and in the 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers survey from GlobalSpec and TREW Marketing, two firms that sell marketing services to companies selling to engineers, the 709 respondents who answered the question said 62% of the buying process happens online before they contact a vendor¹. It surveyed over one thousand engineers and technical professionals worldwide, mostly in engineering or R&D roles at companies with 250 or fewer employees, and doesn’t publish when the survey ran.

When respondents first contacted a salesperson, the most common reasons were questions about pricing and inventory (26%), validating what they’d found online (23%) and a technically complex solution (21%), and only 10% said they’d rather not talk to salespeople at all, among 708 who answered¹. So engineers will talk to sales, but they arrive with the evaluation mostly done and a specific question in hand, and in our experience they call the suppliers whose information they used along the way. In the same publishers’ 2025 edition, which drew 792 answers to this question and also doesn’t publish when it ran, an informative, well-maintained website scored 4.0 out of 5 as a sign of a credible supplier, against 2.8 for prominent trade show sponsorships².

Who Makes the Decision When You Market to Engineers?

When you market to engineers, you’re often selling to two people: the engineer who decides which products could work, and a manager, owner or purchasing team that decides whether to spend the money. The engineer can rule you out without anyone else knowing, and the approver can overrule the engineer on cost or supplier risk, so a buyer description that names only one of them misses half the sale.

What the industry calls an ideal customer profile, and what we call an IMPACT Prospect, should name both people. We write it in four parts:

1. The kind of company and the situation that makes it ready to buy, such as a new product line, a component that keeps failing or a plant expansion.
2. The person who specifies and what they’re judged on, such as whether it works, fits and passes testing.
3. The person who signs and what they’re judged on, such as cost, schedule and supplier risk.
4. The signs of a poor fit, written plainly enough that sales can turn those buyers away early.

The IMPACT Prospect step walks through finding that buyer in your data, and how to create an ideal customer profile shows how to write the description, and what is industrial marketing shows how to rank industrial customer groups by what each is worth.

What Information Do Engineers Want Before They Contact a Supplier?

Engineers want what they’d otherwise have to ask a salesperson for: specifications, dimensions and tolerances, materials, test and certification data, application examples, CAD models and, where you can share them, price ranges and lead times. The quickest way to find what’s missing from your site is to ask the people who answer engineers’ questions today.

1. Collect the questions your sales and applications engineers answer in early conversations with new prospects, from emails, call notes and quote requests.
2. Sort them into questions you could answer publicly and ones that depend on the customer’s situation.
3. Publish the public answers on your product and application pages, as pages engineers can read and search rather than PDFs behind a form.
4. Organize part of the site by the problem being solved, such as the application or the operating condition, because engineers often start from the problem before deciding which kind of product fits.
5. Name a technical contact on those pages, an applications engineer or a direct line, with a reply time you can keep, so an engineer who reaches the limit of what’s published can ask someone who knows.

Pricing deserves its own decision, since pricing and inventory questions were the most common reason respondents in the GlobalSpec survey first contacted a salesperson¹. If your price depends on the configuration, a starting price or a range saves both sides a call, and in our own advertising, showing the starting price turned away buyers who could never afford it.

Should You Gate Technical Content When Marketing to Engineers?

Keep the information engineers need to shortlist you open, and ask for contact details only in exchange for something that takes real work to produce and fits their project. Engineers will fill in a form for the right thing: in the 2026 GlobalSpec and TREW survey, 85% of the 787 who answered said they’d share their information for technical content they find valuable, and only 15% said they’d never fill out a form¹.

The content most likely to get them to do it was an ebook or guide (47%), a white paper (37%) and a CAD drawing (34%)¹. So the trouble with a gated brochure lies in what’s behind the gate, because a form in front of a datasheet loses engineers who would have shortlisted you, while a form in front of something tailored to their project, such as a sizing calculation, attracts the ones with a live project. In ProfitPaths® that kind of offer is a Prospect Magnet, which the Prospect Magnets step shows how to build, and do lead magnets work? shows how to judge one.

How Do You Reach Engineers Before They Contact You?

Reach engineers where they research before any vendor is involved: search, the technical publications and newsletters they read, and named accounts approached with something useful to their project.

• Search: aim at the application and the problem as well as the product name, and send the click to the page that answers it.
• LinkedIn by job title: reach the engineers who specify and the managers who approve, each with content for their role.
• Named accounts: for high-ticket industrial offerings, we’ve seen a short list of the right accounts, each with its own landing page, do better than broad advertising.

The approach changes in three situations:

• When your product is technically similar to a competitor’s, familiarity tips the decision: 70% of the 708 who answered said they’d be likely to choose the better-known brand between two technically similar solutions¹, so specs earn you a place on the shortlist and staying visible between projects helps you win.
• When purchasing runs the decision, as with standard parts bought repeatedly, price, stock and delivery matter more than application detail.
• When the engineer is also the owner, as at a small engineering firm, the two-person description becomes one, and the same pages have to answer the technical and the commercial question.