Jeff Curie shares additional market research about the behaviors and activities of online engineers. Learn what engineers are working on when they conduct online research, the information they are looking for, and the types of online actions they take that you can use to measure marketing and sales success.
Thanks, Sarah. In our last presentation, we talked about who the engineers were that are online, what size of companies they came from, some of the demographics, and how influential they were, and how much authority they had to actually design in the parts in their products.
Today we're going to continue with that. We're going to look at how to help engineers succeed with the basis that in marketing, sure, we want people to do things for us, but in order to do that, we need to do things for our audience. So, what do these engineers want? How do we make them successful in their jobs?
Then we're going to look at what information they are looking for out on the Net, and we're going to look at the rewards for marketing, and also for sales.
So, marketing online is great. As Karen Breen Vogel had presented, marketing online is very different than other forms of marketing. It's not push. We're not trying to push messages to our audience when we feel like it; it's pull. We want to be there when they're looking and we want to answer the questions that they have.
It's interesting to look at what these people are doing when they come to do research, and this picture is actually research from SupplyFrame. So, we see about 1.4 million unique people come through our system every month and we do these surveys and we ask them: What were you doing when you came here? What were you in the process of doing?
And it's very interesting to note that 21% of these folks were designing a new product.
26% were updating existing products, which probably is going to grow. I think today, with the pressure on pricing, there are probably a lot of products that people are relooking at and saying: how can we make this product cheaper than it used to be?
13% were researching options on a new product.
And 27% were working on products that are already in production, so they're probably trying to look for products that have been made obsolete, and how are they going to keep that product going or move it up to RoHS compliance. Being online gives marketers a great opportunity to be at the right place at the right time. At the moment this person is making a decision, you're there with your information.
The next question is: what are they looking for? Well, the answer is, they're looking for technical facts. Engineers aren't looking for editorial comment. They're looking for information to do their design that we just spoke of.
One of the key pieces of information that they're looking for is datasheets. It is worth looking just at datasheets and asking how often these engineers are going out to look for the specific technical details behind a part.
We can see that 33% of the engineers told us that they look for datasheets several times a day, this is a huge amount of research that they're doing. So we want to make sure that we can make this easy for them. We want to give them datasheets in a very simple way.
51% look for a datasheet several times a week. So, here you've got 84% of the engineers out there that are looking several times a week, or more, for datasheets for the parts in their designs.
They also look for a considerable amount of other information to help them do their designs. One of the big ones is reference designs. 30% of them would like to get easy access to reference designs, 18% to selector guides, and 13% to design tools. There's a lot of information that engineers need to make their decisions, so as marketers we really need to know what they're looking for and how easy it is that we can get this to them and answer their needs and make them successful.
This is the reason that SupplyFrame developed our content distribution strategy where we take manufacturer's content and we syndicate that out all over the web to the places where the engineers are, so that it is very, very easy for engineers to find the information about your products and your companies without a great deal of searching and hunting and trying to learn new websites.
So, how do we make engineers successful? Our goal, of course, is that they all get promotions, they're put in charge of more designs, they do bigger designs, more of their designs go to production, and more of our products get bought.
One of the big factors in engineering is time to market and speed. There is a lot of pressure on engineers to do things faster, and so what we look at here is: how much time do they spend researching components? And this is a key area to help these guys out.
Twenty plus hours a month are spent researching components by 22% of the audience that comes through our site. So that's a big chunk of time. We only become more successful by making that a smaller number. 20% spend over eight hours a month. That's one work day a month spent just researching products on the Net, so anything we can do to help reduce that, make it faster and easier to find the information they want, make sure they get the right document, right away, all of this is really important to making an engineer more happy and more likely to use our products.
Again, in a competitive environment, if they find your product information in five seconds, and it takes them an hour of hunting to find your competitor's, you're probably going to win because they gave up on the other one. So, being easy to find and satisfying the user is key.
And there are rewards. What's in it for sales and marketing? Well, all of the items below are key precursor activities that happen before a design-in, and ultimately a sale. So these are the key conversions steps that we want to measure, and understand: did my site, did my online presence contribute a conversion that helped me towards making more money?
What are the big online actions engineers have taken over the last two months? 20% of them ordered samples online, 20% of them purchased components online - those are nonsample components - and almost 25% of them requested a quote. So these are great precursor activities. Obviously, this is an audience that is very interested in buying, getting ready to buy, and doing key design work.
Others, you can see, 5% ordered a development kit. Of course, that's gated by how many development kits are actually available that they'd want. 15% subscribed to an online newsletter, which is a great indication that they're interested, they want to stay engaged; an opportunity for you to then push marketing to them.
And surprisingly, over 15% requested that sales or an FAE contact them for technical support. Often you think on the web that people don't want to talk to sales. Well, here we have a counter-indication that says when they want to talk to sales, they'll initiate the call. That is good for the sales people and it's a good indicator for you to move them towards that sale and engage that customer.
So, in conclusion, online research, as you can see, is part of the day-to-day work these engineers need to do. In order to redesign, in order to research new designs, they're on the web. They're looking for this information.
Delivering technical component information very quickly can be a key differentiator and certainly can make you more successful because it's time consuming for the engineers to do this. Plus, there are key sales precursor activities. Important conversions that are happening online that you can measure today and you can see how this is helping and leading to sales.
That's the end of our Survey Series.
Thank you, Sarah.
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