Getting your product chosen at the design stage is imperative to move from initial design selection, through design-in to design-win. You need to be seen wherever an engineer looks, at the time they choose to look, to ensure your brand is top-of-mind when that time is right. To do this, electronics companies need to use the full marketing mix – to make their brand, or their solution – visible in whichever medium the engineer is using.
In electronics content marketing and PR, this means trying to dominate the established trade media with press releases and articles, to establish brand awareness and product preference. Engineers are also using the newer, digital channels when searching for information, such as social media, email newsletters, and more often than not, search engines.
In order to retain visibility across social media channels, companies need to post frequent updates. But companies can only produce a finite amount of bespoke content – press releases, articles, blogs, etc. – and so many choose to share additional third party content that their audience will find of interest – news from their suppliers, partners, customers, or more general industry relevant news.
Email marketing enables sending updates direct to your prospects’ inboxes, and the use of marketing automation enables these updates to be distributed at the right time to maximise open rates, coincide with buying cycles, and take into account visitor behaviour on your company website – with promotional messages that relates to content that the prospect has already shown an interest in. The downside to email marketing is that you need to already know your prospect, have captured their email address, and send your emails at just the right time.
Search engines (and more specifically, Google) is the always-on, always-ready, means of being seen at just the right time that your target wants information, but to do so you need to be at the top of the search results. To do this, you need to identify those magic phrases that an engineer will type into a search engine when ready to start designing.
Blog posts and articles are key weapons in the armoury of SEO as these enable you to target the multitude of fact-finding questions that may be posed to Google in the initial research stage:
- low power 32-bit MCU
- compact 30-amp DC/DC converter
- etc.
Such relatively short phrases (“head terms” in SEO terminology) produce vast numbers of search results, and competition is fierce. In addition, these more generic phrases are likely to occur during the initial research phase – the engineer is still assessing his options and has not yet shown the intention to buy.
By targeting more specific phrases – by including key product specifications and functionality (known in SEO as “long-tail” searches) – you reduce the levels of competition, thereby enhancing your chances of ranking higher in search results, and capturing visitors with a different intent – now they know what they want, and are in the buying stage.
According to SEOmoz, long-tail search comprises 70% of search traffic, and somewhere between 18% or 20% of these are extremely long-tail, meaning Google has never seen them before.
This causes a problem. There are so many variants that could be used in this long-tail search that creating optimised web pages that includes each possibility isn’t an option.
Herein lies the opportunity for product datasheets. Datasheets contain all of the product parameters that an engineer might use to qualify their search, and despite what you may think, Google can read the majority of PDFs (as long as the text is embedded correctly, not as an image).
The question then is how to get your datasheet seen first? The answer is to optimise your PDFs for search.
We’ve created a checklist of tips to help optimise your product datasheets for search ensure it sits at the top of the search results when an engineer types in one of the myriad of specifications that relate to your product.
