In this episode, Aphrodite Brinsmead, Director of Product Marketing at Duro, shares insights on marketing to engineers and the importance of community building and agility in marketing. She emphasizes that marketers need to be adaptable and creative in order to stand out in a noisy content environment and that community engagement is essential in creating accessible content.
Aphrodite Brinsmead is a Product Marketer at Duro, a Product Lifecycle Management platform for hardware engineers. With a background in technology vendors, analyst relations, and consulting, she brings extensive experience in messaging, market intelligence, customer communications, and sales enablement. Aphrodite’s expertise also includes market forecasting, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and strategic product messaging. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:
- Duro’s target market is hardware engineers who design and engineer rockets, robotics, consumer electronics, and IoT devices.
- Marketing to engineers is challenging, but Duro is experimenting with various strategies, including videos and community building on platforms like Reddit and Quora.
- Community building and facilitating customer interactions can give your brand credibility and get you involved in conversations that would be difficult to access as an outsider.
- Marketing is a giant experiment that requires adaptability and creativity.
- To stand out in today’s content environment, marketers need to be agile, creative, and accessible.
- Community engagement is crucial in creating accessible content that stands out.
- Free and cheap online tools are available and can be useful for small businesses.
Resources:
Connecting with Aphrodite Brinsmead:
Connecting with Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 01:53 – “So our goal is really to make the lives of hardware engineers easier. So what that means is the people who are engineering and designing rockets, robotics, consumer electronics, IoT devices, the people behind the scenes who are there kind of figuring out how to make that work. And we want to help them manage their product data, so they don’t spend hours and even like days in Excel spreadsheets, like copying data from one system to another, like checking things are up-to-date, like sending emails and waiting for responses.”
- 11:15 – “Our customers are like, pioneering ways to do things faster. And so the types of companies that we’re working with want software that kind of fits with that same strategy. So when they’re looking at us, they want something that’s quick to deploy, they can make a decision quickly, and it’s not gonna kind of disrupt their day-to-day process.”
- 17:58 – “That’s definitely a challenge for marketers moving forward is how do you differentiate and how do you create trust in an environment where that’s harder and harder to, to identify, right. Not only is authority hard to identify, but you have tons of folks out there putting out content that may or may not be fact-checked. So not only now do we determine did it come from the authentic channel where it sort of belongs, but is it accurate and then is it relevant? And then is it helping me, you know, move down the buyer information cycle?”
- 18:30 – “I mean, all of that is outrageously challenging in today’s environment, and it’s only going to get worse. The easier it gets to create content, the harder it’s going to be to stand out with your content. Right. So Exactly. I think it’s, I think that that stay agile and stay creative are important, important lessons, and they will be continuing moving forward.”
- 17:04 – Brian: “It’s the accessibility that’s a big part of that. And I think to your point that community engagement’s a part of it for sure.” Aphrodite: “Yeah. And I suppose like one, one final thing that I’ve kind of been learning a lot is that when you don’t have as many resources as some of the big kind of enterprise companies, you’ve gotta be creative.”