SEO, AIO: too much supply, too little demand

Suppliers to deep tech markets are in a bind. On the one hand, engineering decision-makers consistently say that a brand’s technical authority is one of the most important factors determining whether they are chosen as a vendor - this is a finding of the latest B2B International survey of purchasing decision makers. On the other, attracting engineers’ attention for thought leadership and other material which establishes technical authority is becoming harder and harder.

The importance and reach of most traditional B2B engineering publications is declining. And the volume of technical marketing content self-published online is so high that a typical search by an engineer in product or vendor research mode can produce results from any of thousands of sources.

This is why many marketers end up feeling as though achieving results from SEO and AIO is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Producing a sufficient quantity of tightly keyword-targeted content to juice the algorithm is practically almost impossible for all but the biggest companies, which ironically benefit less from a high SEO or AIO rating than small or medium-sized tech companies do.

How to bypass search engines and AI bots

SEO/AIO might just be the wrong battle to fight.

Semiconductor companies and other deep tech brands should instead be thinking about bypassing the random search process, and building subscriber lists which repeatedly draw tightly defined audiences to the content that they care about via email notifications and in-app alerts.

This requires a new mindset on the part of the content creators at semiconductor companies: from being the mouthpiece of a product line, business unit or C-suite, to meeting the information needs and desires of audiences through the provision of dedicated ‘channels’. Like a podcast creator or Substack author, brands can become the go-to content source for specific micro-audiences.

It’s often the case that a semi company which supplies a particular niche — something as specific, for example, as the technology in the rear light clusters of passenger vehicles, or the drive circuit of brushless DC motors — knows about the direction in which the design of these applications is headed before its customer does. As the B2B International survey shows, design engineers want to know this information, but today it is often inaccessible, locked up in the heads of semiconductor company experts, or — if published anywhere — it is lost in the sea of undifferentiated content online.

Building channels to micro-audiences is the new way for semiconductor and other deep tech companies to find and retain the audiences that matter — and this calls for the development of ‘programmatic content’. Learn in depth about this concept in this white paper.