How to Electrify an Engineering Audience
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010What device did Harold P. Brown invent in the late 1880s to help Thomas Edison publicize the dangers of alternating current?
If you know the answer to this question, and you are an rf or wireless engineer, you would be part of the way towards entering a drawing for a Kindle.
For one of our semiconductor clients we’re running a campaign that features a number of brain-teaser questions like the one above. It’s part of a broader celebration of a significant milestone for the company, and our job is to help turn out the right audience.
Less than halfway through the program, we’re about to hit our overall campaign goals.
How did that happen? Well, we can’t reveal all the special sauce, although Jeff Hardison would be glad to discuss them with you one-on-one.
But here are some of the things that are going right.
- Knowing the audience – engineers are smart, competitive and of course geeky. Technical trivia questions are naturally alluring to them.
- Using an integrated effort – with our broad marketing toolset, we are able to strategize the campaign, develop the microsite, design and run ads, produce and distributed eDM messages, and get the word out on social media channels. Let’s see your specialty agency try that.
- Having some fun – the theme, look and tone of the piece are somewhat more playful than the day-to-day communications from the client. But we’ve learned that engineering audiences enjoy a little humor, as long as it’s done intelligently.
Once the campaign is over, we’ll create a case study of this program and put it with our other case studies on our website. You can read all about it then.
Oh, and the answer is the electric chair.
