Why does inbound marketing work for engineers?

Inbound marketing is emerging to fix the problems we marketers have made for ourselves with outbound marketing.  By outbound marketing I mean telemarketing, print ads, emails, and anything else you can think of to interrupt what a person is doing to get them to pay attention to your company. 

Unfortunately, as the barrage of outbound marketing messages have grown ever louder, engineers have become ever more adept at filtering out those messages.  Instead, they prefer to find out about your solution only on their schedule, which is to say when they are looking for the type of solution your company provides.  Those searches represent one aspect of inbound marketing.

We can thank search engines for teaching engineers to behave that way.  Google allows engineers to believe they don't need to read marketing material, something that they have always secretly believed anyway. 

That’s why the Google search marketing model is part of your marketing program already.  But inbound marketing doesn’t begin and end with Google.  Instead, your goal with inbound marketing is to occupy a place in your prospect’s brain so that they associate your brand with the type of problem they are likely to come across. 

An inbound marketing strategy is a series of campaigns that set your company apart as the experts in a specific area of engineering knowledge.  This can be done with blogs, tweets, videos, white papers, webinars, podcasts or other media.  The point is to create value for your prospect so that you have earned the right to talk to them.