Engineering? In marketing? From first glance, the two terms don’t appear to invoke thoughts about being complementary to one another. For digital marketers, it’s a powerful combination and can be an incredible asset to any agency. “Engineering as Marketing” is building and using tools to reach more people and gain traction by providing value to users.
Creating tools that your target audience finds useful can do wonders for your business in the long-term. Ideally, making this tool free for your users is best for businesses looking to grow rapidly.
HubSpot
A good engineering as marketing case study comes from the marketing automation software company HubSpot. They used the traction channel to improve the quality and quantity of its leads. In the early years of HubSpot, the founder Dharmesh Shah spent quite a bit of time manually scanning through websites to check on the quality of its inbound marketing. Tired of this process, Shah decided to create an application to automate it. Then he made it public as a way to gather emails. Since the app’s launch, Marketing Grader has been used by well over 4 million websites. Also, it can be credited for a large percentage of the leads HubSpot receives monthly. Talk about a win!
The key with the engineering as marketing traction channel is to really pinpoint what service will provide the audience value that you can build off your existing services. It serves as a first step to getting your customers to look into what your business can offer.
GeoFli
Another example to consider is one that’s close to home. In fact, it’s an example taken from within our own agency.
Over the past five years, there has been a steadily growing interest in marketing strategies focused on targeting users based on location. As customer data continues to provide more value to marketers, knowing a user’s location has sparked some innovative and clever strategies in marketing. Such strategies fall under a variety of names: geofencing, geotargeting, geomarketing, location-based targeting, etc. This method of targeting users within a certain geographic radius is applicable across advertising platforms. For example, marketers can serve ads to regions with region-specific ad copy or adjust organic content based on a user’s location.
Taking note of this trend early on we realized there could be a marketing tool engineered to fit this need of marketers. Enter GeoFli, a software as a service (SaaS) product that complements the digital marketing work we do at Pintler Group. GeoFli is a website personalization tool built for marketers (by sympathetic developers!) looking to surface relevant content that lives on their web pages to specific geographic markets. This tool allows marketers to create geotargeted content on their website that adjusts to the viewer’s location.
Say you are a recruiter at a college. With GeoFli, a web visitor from Boston will see different content than a web visitor from California. GeoFli takes away the confusion of coding and web design. Additionally, it makes it easier for those looking to market their content more effectively to different markets.
GeoFli is a complementary tool that we offer through our digital marketing services. However, we do offer visitors the ability to try GeoFli as a free trial in hopes to receive more qualified leads and reach an audience that truly benefits from its value.
Final Notes
Still unsure about how to develop your own engineering as marketing tool? Just remember these parting notes.
-
- Look within your site and think about what tools or widgets would improve your experience.
- Keep it simple and user-friendly.
- Always keep your target audience in mind. Provide a tool that is useful to that audience.
Want to learn more about engineering as marketing? Check out our podcast and video on this topic and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
