Friday, November 28, 2014

Technical Marketing ideas for Engineers

When Andy, Steve and I set up Technical Marketing Ltd in 1999, b-2-b marketing communications were primarily display advertising in the trade press, exhibitions, mail shots, telemarketing, PR and product literature. The world wide web and email was slowly gaining traction, but use and acceptance was patchy at best.

We had arrived at TML  from running a global marketing team for a leading company in the entertainment technology sector. We had set up email piecemeal. The R&D teams in London and Los Angeles had an email set up which we linked up with a marketing network. Eventually the rest of the company realised the benefits of email and a company system followed. Web sites were not that impressive in the early days and print which was quite sophisticated was thought superior. Even then few people had PCs on their desk, mobile phones, or more often, car phones were still fitted into cars, or at least to some company cars.

It was into this background that  Technical Marketing Ltd was launched to introduce the emerging Internet technologies and indeed use them to run a 'virtual' business ourselves. In 2000 we launched a book - Technical Marketing Techniques - through Entertainment Technology Press which itself used then pioneering 'print on demand' methods. Fifteen years on, the Internet is an essential enabling technology for marketing - web sites, email and social media for a start. Updating the book became essential to recognise the massive changes in marketing possibilities. 

Because we started from an engineering background and many of our clients are smaller engineering companies, the new title - Technical Marketing Ideas for Engineers - is now preferred. The original book started with marketing theory, worked through product development and marketing communications before concluding with predictions for the future, including making the case for web sites, email marketing and e commerce. The new title retains the marketing theory introduction, but now includes digital marketing as a mainstream subject and includes much more discussion of the evolving marketing space. 
Look out for further announcements.

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