A Millennial goes seeking: How and where do engineers engage with marketing content online today?

On July 18th, 2017 IEEE Globalnet put on a webinar called Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector. Speakers included: Linda Uslaner (Director/Product Management at IEEE GlobalSpec Media Solutions), Jennifer Corcoran (Portfolio Marketing Specialist at IEEE GlobalSpec Media Solutions), and Bryan DeLuca (Senior Director, Audience Development & User Experience at IEEE GlobalSpec). I found the webinar incredibly informative regarding engineers’ media usage, specifically in the digital realm. Here’s a few key takeaways I thought you’d find interesting. This summary is of what I consider to be the key takeaways of the webinar. 

To start, they observed the number of websites an engineer typically uses in a work week. On average, 33% of engineers use 2-5 different sites for their work. Although the higher quantity options were not far behind (6-9 being at 22%, 10-19 being at 19%, and 20 or more being at 20%). (Maybe it’s my millennial-ness but it shocked me that an engineers would only use 2-5 sites a week… You?)

    Next they moved into WHY they use the internet. The highest ranking being 68% of usage over the year is for finding equipment, services, suppliers, etc. What caught my eye in this chart wasn’t the sections that got high rankings, rather the sections that got low rankings. Only 20% of usage is spent looking for peer reviews of products or suppliers online; why wouldn’t they go looking for associates that they trust and respect personally. Maybe it’s me (again), but in my age group we’re more likely to trust an online review than a family member. 

    Going forward into the buying cycle, strangely, there really wasn’t any one form of media that is extraordinarily better than the others. Each outlet plays a role in the buying cycle. However, we can look at the purchasing stage and note that the supplier website is the most visited. No shocker there. Again in this graph we can see that general search engines take the lead in both research & analysis as well as comparison & evaluation. In the webinar the speaker noted that the best resource you can have is to be a trusted supplier, and have multiple options for possible buyers to interact with you.

Once providing a better understanding of what type of content these engineering prospects were looking at and where they were looking we learned what platforms they are using to view this content. It’s not shocking that their main platform for viewing content is a desktop at 79%. However, I was very surprised that the percent of smartphones used was higher than the percent of tablets used with phones being at 16% and tablets at 5%. The main reason why smartphone usage is higher is because most people will initially view the content (such as an email blast) on their phone and then wait until they are at their desktop to engage further. 

In short, the webinar encapsulated not only where our prospects are; but also what content they respond to, what platforms they view our content on, why they are looking at our content and what they hope to gain out of it, and how much of their time they will give you. In just under an hour they tackled what some people may take a whole semester to cover. And they did a wonderful job! I would highly recommend finding out when their next webinar will be and registering right away. You can also follow us by getting on our email list and connecting with us on LinkedIn and Twitter, as we’ll be covering these B2B topics and more in our own high tech marketing blog series as well.

This webinar on Digital Media Use in the Industrial Sector can be watched for yourself via recording here and you can also check out the list of upcoming GlobalSpec webinars at http://www.globalspec.com/events/upcomingevents 

*All graphs are property of IEEE GlobalSpec Media Solutions*