The most rewarding part of my work is helping CEOs and sales leaders of optics, photonics and engineering companies grow their businesses. Aside from the opportunity to work with our clients’ very cool technologies, our team guides the engineer turned business leader to create a marketing system that helps grow their business.
Once Burned Twice Shy
Some of the brightest and most talented business leaders in this industry are engineers by training and skeptical by nature. The engineering mindset distrusts marketing’s soft and hard-to-measure nature. One customer called it “fru fru BS” the first time we met. He’s not alone—I often agree. The Mad Men model doesn’t work in Optics and Photonics.
That mistrust can cause paralysis—inaction and missed opportunity. In a consolidating industry, you can quickly become David in the shadow of Goliath.
Approach Marketing Like an Engineer
What happens when you apply the engineering methodology to marketing, though? How do you apply the science and psychology of reaching and engaging the right customer for measureable results?
The engineering process itself when applied to marketing will yield better results:
1.Analysis: Understand the problem, the goals, and what a successful outcome looks like.
2.Feasibility: Set a budget, test for reality. Define, size up, and qualify the target audience. For instance, if you want to reach Lab Directors of universities by email marketing to close 10 $30,000 deals, look at the numbers.
Available Lab Directors 350
People expected to open the email 20% 70
People expected to click through to the web 10% 7
People who take action/call 10% .7
Here, the numbers don’t work. You’ll need to increase the prospect pool, or increase the number of ways you reach this audience.
3. Prototype: Try it, test it, tweak it. Web, social and digital marketing is iterative and measureable. One of the biggest marketing sins I see is paralysis in the pursuit of perfection. Plan to spend a small percent of your budget early in the prototype stage.
4. Production: Execute what works. Leaders at this stage, having worked through the strategy and the prototype, believe their marketing program is under control---for instance, they “do email marketing” because they sent a newsletter once. Design the process for consistent outreach that delivers on your key message and matches your brand—how you want your customer to think of you.
5. Support: Design for the handoff to and feedback cycles from sales and customer service. Social media also makes this easy to monitor how your marketing resonates in your market. Is it working? You’ll know quickly.
Results that Drive Business
Some of the principles of engineering high performing systems also apply to filling a healthy sales pipeline. Here’s a few:
Engineering
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Marketing
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Experimentation
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Design an experiment, knowing how you’ll measure it. Monitor and adjust.
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Like all good marketing, set the goal, hypothesis, and intended results. Measure and adjust. Conduct A/B –divide the contact list into two separate emails, and measure which works better by comparing open rates, click-through rates and web traffic. Modest changes in the subject line, wording or design can mean big changes in results.
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The Rule of 3
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Bad decisions comes from doing one thing, failing, then doing exactly the opposite. Good system design requires brainstorming and developing 3 designs for the most elegant and effective end product.
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In any marketing campaign, expect three concepts. This gives you comparisons to ensure you pick an approach that doesn’t just match what you like, but also resonates with your customer, and meets your business objectives.
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“Be Like Water”
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Christopher Cotton, GM, ASE Optics, says great engineering is like a river to the sea…it doesn’t bulldoze through a barrier, it finds the most natural and straightest path around it.
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Effective marketing reaches the customer through the cracks—the right message in the way they need to hear it, when they need it.
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Use your engineer’s training to avoid the “fru fru BS” of marketing and approach the business of attracting qualified leads with a systems mindset.
