If you run an engineering company and you've decided it's time to hire a marketer, first of all, well done. You've made it further than a lot of your competitors. The problem is, what happens next.
We've seen it time and time again. Engineering companies, even smart, well-run ones, get this catastrophically wrong. Not because they don't care. But because they fundamentally misunderstand what marketing actually is, and what it actually takes.
The Swiss Army Knife Job Ad
Curious about what engineering companies are actually asking for, we had a proper look at some live job ads. The results were illuminating. Not in a good way.
One role, at what appeared to be an offshore wind company, was looking for someone with around three years' B2B experience. Reasonable so far. Then came the list. Email marketing. B2B social media. Creating graphics and marketing materials. Updating websites. Creating video content. Managing attendance at industry events. Experience with HubSpot, Canva and WordPress. Oh, and formal qualifications in software development or offshore wind marine operations, just to round things off nicely.
That's not a job description. That's a list of everything the company can't currently do, stuffed into one role because they've decided they can only afford one person.
Think about it from an engineering perspective. If you were hiring an engineer and you said you needed someone who was a chartered structural engineer, a chartered mechanical engineer, a chartered electrical engineer, a chartered instrumentation engineer, and who could also weld and bolt things together, you'd be laughed out of the room. Nobody would take that seriously for a second. And yet that's exactly what these job ads are doing.
What you get from that kind of advert is not a brilliant all-rounder. What you get is people telling a load of lies on their CVs, winging it through the interview, and then spending the first six months slowly discovering that they can't do everything the job requires. Everything they produce will be half-baked, because they're being asked to be moderately good at a dozen things rather than excellent at one or two.
The Zero Effort Problem
There's something else going on in those job ads too. They suggest someone has sat down, thought about all the things they don't have, and assumed there must be a single human being who can provide all of it. No real thought has gone into what's actually needed, or what good marketing even looks like for that business.
To put it in context, our video specialist, who works with us across client projects and our own marketing, that's pretty much all she does. Video. Full time. And even then there's always more to do. Expecting a junior marketer to produce quality video content alongside running email campaigns, updating the website, managing social media and attending trade shows is not a strategy. It's hope dressed up as a job description.
And it's not just video. SEO and design in one person is an exceptionally rare combination. If you find someone who claims to be genuinely strong at both, one of two things is true: they're not being honest, or they're not very good at either of them.
What Actually Happens Next
Here's the pattern we've watched play out more times than we'd like. A company posts the impossible job. Honest candidates look at the spec and self-select out, because they know they can't do everything on the list and they're not prepared to blag it. Slightly less scrupulous candidates apply, tick as many boxes as they can, and get hired.
They arrive, do the things they're good at, muddle through the rest, and somewhere between 18 months and two years later, they leave. Either because they're frustrated, or because the company's frustrated with them, or both.
Compare that with the engineer who's been at the same company for 25 years. They arrived, they did a clearly defined job, they were given the resources to do it properly, and they built a career. The marketing person never had that chance, because the role was set up to fail from the moment the job ad was written.
And the company? They look at the revolving door and conclude that marketing is a pile of nonsense that never delivers results. When in fact what they've done is set every single person up for failure from day one.
The Agency Maths Nobody Wants to Do
There's a version of this conversation that comes up a lot with the companies we work with. They're paying us a decent monthly retainer, and at some point someone in the business asks the obvious question: couldn't we just hire someone for that money?
It's a fair question. And the honest answer is: it depends what you actually need.
When a company pays a monthly retainer to an agency like ours, they're not just getting one person. They're getting strategy and search from people who've been doing this for years. They're getting a video specialist. They're getting developers who can do genuinely impressive things with code. They're getting a designer. They're getting a content writer who actually understands their industry. They're getting all of that expertise, from people who are properly good at their specific thing, without the holiday pay, sick pay, pension contributions, desk space, or the two-month recruitment process.
A company that recently started working with us had never worked with a marketing agency before. In fact, they’d never done any proper marketing at all. What struck them immediately was the breadth of what they suddenly had access to. They would never have got close to that by trying to hire one person and handing them an impossible list.
The Right Answer (And It's Not What Most People Think)
This doesn't mean you should never hire an in-house marketer. It means you need to be honest about what you're actually asking for.
There are essentially two sensible models. You hire a relatively junior person to handle the day-to-day execution, the posting, the scheduling, the updating, and you bring in an agency to do the strategy, the planning, and the specialist work. The agency guides the junior person, trains them, and makes sure what they're doing is actually pointing in the right direction.
Or you hire an experienced senior marketer to own the strategy, the planning and the direction, and you use an agency for the execution, the technical SEO, the development, the design work that needs to be done properly.
What you can’t do, or rather, what you can do but shouldn't, is hire one mid-level person and expect them to do both.
The AI Time Bomb
One other cautionary note. Data from the USA shows that one in three companies is reducing entry-level marketing. We saw the same trend when we did our unscientific review of job ads. Most roles were for marketing executives with 2 or 3 years' experience with very few entry level marketing jobs evident.
Anecdotally, we hear that companies are using AI to take on a lot of the typical junior level tasks such as crunching numbers and drafting social media posts. However, what happens in three years time when nobody has had the chance to gain that basic experience that qualifies them for the marketing exec role? If you are looking to expand your marketing department over time, remember to invest in training the next generation.
If You're Not Taking It Seriously, Don't Bother
There's a tendency in some engineering businesses, particularly those still run by their founders, to treat marketing as the poor cousin. Sales brings in contracts, engineering delivers them, and marketing is the thing that gets sorted out when someone has a spare Friday afternoon.
The engineering companies that have worked out that good communications, clear branding, and consistent marketing actually enable better sales? They tend to do better. Not as a rule without exceptions, but as a pattern you see often enough to take seriously.
If you're thinking about hiring a marketer, it's worth spending a day actually working out what you need before writing the job spec. Because if the spec asks for someone who can create a strategy and do email marketing, video production, SEO, design, event management and website development all at once, you're not going to find them. And if you think you have, you haven't.
We're Red Evolution, a B2B digital marketing agency working primarily with engineering, technology and industrial businesses. If you want to figure out what support your marketing team needs, give us a call or drop us a message.
