Q&A: Bob Jones, Technical Marketer & Originality B2B Founder

With over 30 years of marketing and PR experience in B2B electronics with clients including Arm, Cadence, Ericsson, Intel, Mouser, NXP, Silicon Labs, Sony, and STMicro, Bob Jones is a fountain of knowledge for the technical marketing sector.

As Covid-19 continues to change the way that businesses and their marketing strategies work across the world, Bob gave us some excellent insights into how different markets have been affected across the electronics and engineering sector, and how to turn frozen marketing budgets into an opportunity.

Can you start by giving us a background of how well electronics and engineering marketing strategies were adapting to technology across the world prior to 2020?

I think there’s been a huge strive towards technology, but one of the challenges for international marketers (most of the companies I have worked with are international) has been in trying to understand the different cultural ways in which media is used in different countries. There hasn’t been digitisation across Central and Southern Europe in particular, but there have been digitisation of marketing channels in North America and Northern Europe and to a lesser extent, but still to a large extent in the UK. In Germany, they are adapting quite well. The challenge they now face is in the wealth of data coming back from various channels, some of which are closed like Twitter and Facebook where you can see generic data but not who’s doing what. They are overwhelmed with data, and making sense of it has been the biggest challenge. Digitisation is working - there are also some things like direct marketing and email marketing, where you can measure clickthroughs from individuals and capture email addresses that are working very well in a deterministic way.

There’s a lot of data out there, which is actually causing more confusion than clarity. 

Sure and that’s what marketing attribution tries to solve right?

Yes and marketing attribution tries to determine which marketing expenditure has the most effect on achieving a desired outcome. That desired outcome might be, in an electronics company, to download a data sheet, or download a white paper, it might be to order a development kit or place an order, particularly for distributors who are serving small companies. I think that’s the most deterministic data you can have, but also you have to figure out at which part of the buyer journey did they decide to come to your website and place that order - did they see a printout, a blog post, or see something in the media? It’s very difficult to determine those things.

Various models have been developed to try to help marketers understand where those touchpoints might be; the problem is that the dominant attribution model is the last click. The last click is where they last clicked before placing that order, and it’s driving a lot of decisions and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. So as that becomes more competitive, the price increases. Here in the UK, we’ve heard from Google that the government is adding an additional 2% tax that is going to be passed on to customers advertising from Nov 1st 2020. It’s getting more expensive and undervaluing the other channels because it’s more difficult to measure their effect in the buyer journey. 

You have to figure out at which part of the buyer journey did they decide to come to your website and place that order - did they see a printout, a blog post, or see something in the media? It’s very difficult to determine those things.

How can we improve our understanding of the user journey?

I think this is where AI will have a big role to play. Across the user journey, there are so many interactions with your brand that are probabilistic. For example, if we did a big advertising campaign in Dorset, UK and if you get a lot of people registering on your website from Dorset, there’s a fighting chance that a good number of those people may have seen that campaign. So you can determine the probability there, but you can’t be absolutely certain that any one individual saw that advertising. Managing probabilities across multiple channels and multiple variables is the big challenge and where AI can help. Some of the tools coming along now are using AI in a way that will help us understand which channels are having the most effect. To date there have been certain models like time decay, or first touch and last touch - a u-shape model where you allocate 40% to the first touch and 40% of the last touch and spread the rest of the value in between - but even then it’s still guesswork. I think this is where good machine learning and neural networks come into play over the next few years. Marketing attribution software vendors are peddling a lot of snake oil at the moment!

Are there any regions that are taking on marketing attribution better than others?

As in most cases of software, there is a tremendous amount of activity in the US. There are a number of companies in the UK well ahead of the game in this too. Last time I looked, there were about 40 and it varies from the huge companies like IBM and Nielsen to innovative startups, who are coming at it from different angles. It’s a multibillion-pound market, so there are a lot of people piling into this as a cloud platform.

So looking back at the last six months now, many countries went into immediate lockdown in Spring, meaning marketing had to go solely digital. How did the increase in digital strategies affect markets across the electronics and engineering sector?

For North America, I don’t think from a digital marketing strategy point of view that it made much difference. In Europe, particularly in Germany, there’s a particularly strong print market. There’s something in the psyche there where engineers still like to use paper.

Bear in mind that the average age of senior decision-makers in electronic engineering is probably 50+ - they’re relatively traditional and not great users of social media, though that is changing all the time. Print media was typically delivered to company offices, so where people have been moved to working from home, they’re not going to see that print media in the way that they were previously. That must have impacted that market significantly. 

In Europe, particularly in Germany, there’s a particularly strong print market. There’s something in the psyche there where engineers still like to use paper.

Many marketing budgets have either been frozen or revised in light of Covid-19. What can global marketers do to make the best use of a situation in which their budgets are frozen?

Whenever marketing budgets get tightened up, it’s always an opportunity to sit back and take a fresh look at the strategies that we’ve deployed. The electronics industry has had many many years of good, consistent growth, and it’s been a remarkable period for them across the last ten years or so. There’s always a degree of complacency and waste that creeps into marketing budgets. I came across a company recently that said to me, “Our webinars are generating all the leads we can cope with, PR is going very well…. So where should we advertise?”. So the first question I’d ask there is, “Why would you advertise if you are already getting exposure through your PR activity, your inbound is working well and you are generating all the leads you can cope with?” Just because you have a channel available doesn’t mean you have to use it.

So I think it’s an opportunity to step back, look at the marketing objectives overall and see which activities are achieving the most with those objectives.

Are there any other opportunities for growth during this time?

The most recent research that has been useful is called ‘The Mind of the Engineer’ run by Aspencore. That’s a division of Arrow Electronics. They just published the research paper and it shows the channels that engineers are using, and it struck me just how many there are, and you should make sure you are up to date with the channels that engineers use. This piece of research separates out results into tenured engineers, beginning engineers and everyone else in the middle, and separates it all out regionally as well so that you can get a good idea of how to adjust your strategies across the globe on the different channels you are using. 

The other thing that struck me this year was the growth of podcasts for engineers, it’s almost up there with video now as a channel.

In the long term, what should marketers be focusing on to ensure survival for their brands in the next few years?

I think the overall thing for me is that markets have got to continue to educate their bosses, their CEOs and CFOs - not everything in marketing can be measured immediately in the same way that email responses can. There are things you do to build a brand and trust in the brand is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer for your company. Building trust in the brand will increase the response rates to those deterministic activities, like email marketing, going forward. We still have a job to do as marketers to convince our board how important it is to build longer-term brand activity, even if those can’t be measured in the very short term. 

We still have a job to do as marketers to convince our board how important it is to build longer-term brand activity, even if those can’t be measured in the very short term. 

Do you have any tips for building trust in your brand?

This is where PR and inbound marketing is very important, I think companies need to be a lot more open to the content they put on their own website. In practice, if you only have an engineering audience. These engineers only have two problems in life: how to choose the right products, components or technologies and the second one is how to apply them. Companies will forever build their websites with superlatives, bragging, and all the data that an engineer needs. They’re reluctant to mention competitor products in case the potential customer finds out about their competitor, but of course 9 times out of 10, they’ll find out about the competitor anyway through Google. So why not be honest and open about the solutions you sell, where they are best suited and perhaps where your competitor is best suited? Building trust in the brand is about openness and open communication, and not pretending that all your stuff is wonderful and the rest isn’t!