49% of engineers spend less than 1 hour per month in print magazines researching components. B2B marketers must master online marketing to reach today's engineer. Hear the facts from SupplyFrame's latest survey on the companies online engineers represent, the buying influence they have, and the topics they research most frequently.
Thanks, Sarah. Today, marketers have to be very focused on the performance they are getting out of every marketing dollar they are spending. So, it is really important to understand who is out there online today and how much money and time should they focus on these people. So today, in this presentation, we are going to look at some survey results that should help marketers answer the questions - are there prospects online, what are they researching, and how influential are these people?
So, the first slide is the result of a survey we have been conducting in the last quarter, Q4 '08. And the survey was done at the moment people were actually doing product research in the electronic space, so these numbers are probably representative, not just of the electronics industry, but of most manufacturing industries.
And what they are saying here is that the engineers that are out there researching products, they come from a very broad set of companies. You can see here, in terms of company size, whether it is by number of employees or how much annual revenue these companies make, they range from the very small to the very large.
So, one really nice thing about research or doing marketing on the web is that you can reach all the people that you want to reach, whether it is the little guys or the very large guys. They are all there equally on the web.
The other thing that is really important is how much time do these guys actually spend doing research on the web? And w at we see here in blue is that the amount of hours that they are spending on a monthly basis, online versus on print, is quite different at this point.
Just a couple of years ago, these numbers would have been flipped around backwards, but now clearly the dominant time spent researching products is happening on the web. So, in a lot of cases, you have say to yourself, "How can't you be on the web very heavily at this point and working on expertise in online marketing?"
Another interesting subject in our research is, what do these people actually research? What are they looking for?
And this is obviously electronics information, but we look at millions and millions of searches that go on through Google and through our system and through some of our partner systems and categorize what the products were that these people actually looked for.
What you find here, looking through this list, is the pieces that are most common are also the parts that are most common on every board.
So, it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that parts that are only on some boards or selective, expensive parts, like a digital signal processor, for example, they aren't searched nearly as often as standard logic, which is on every single board.
But, this isn't to say that they aren't searched a lot. This is very much of a long tail market, so you see very popular used products that are searched a lot, but then there are millions and millions of products that go down through the long tail of search every day out on the web.
The other interesting thing is whether or not engineers are just researching, 'I just need facts about particular components that I am trying to use in a new design or do I need to stay on to of what is happening out in the world?' And this is very telling.
We asked these folks how important it is for them to stay current on new components and new technical capabilities that are coming to market, and you can see here that 72% of them said it is either very important or important that they stay on top of these new products.
The other key and last slide here is - so these are great people, they are doing a lot of research, they are all online, but are these people influential? So we asked the question, "Do you specifically decide which manufacturer gets picked on the boards that you are designing?"
And 72% of them said yes, they do. Only 28% of them weren't involved in the actual specification of the manufacturer for the parts, so clearly these are a very influential group of people that you want to market to and influence to select your products.
So, in conclusion today, it is pretty clear that the engineers, they have moved online. They have moved away from print. They are very much an on-demand audience, seeking information to do their day-to-day work on their designs.
They are representing all regions of the world, all types of demographics and sizes of companies, and they are very highly influential in the design win process.
So, in the next presentation that we will look at, part two of this, we will look at more survey information to look at what the engineers were actually working on when they were doing research, what information they were looking for, and what actions do they take. And these will all be very actionable items for the marketer.
Thanks, Sarah, and thanks everyone for joining us today.
