The energy sector is one filled with both technically brilliant and innovative work.
Difficult engineering challenges are being solved, new technologies are allowing diverless solutions to deliver work more safely than ever before. Yet if you look at how this feat of capability is being presented online, you might never know it.
Over the years of working with energy businesses, the same issue has come up repeatedly. The expertise is there, but most of it hides behind vague language, highly controlled content or just the underlying assumption that ‘everyone already knows what the business does’.
But that assumption is only going to become increasingly risky.
Buyers are researching long before they make contact
Relationships are important for any sector, people buy from people. So events, introductions, reputation and traditional media will all continue to play an important role in the energy sector. But they are no longer the only ways to build influence in buying decisions.
A recent study showed that B2B buyers are 61% of the way through the buying journey before they feel ready to make contact. Ask yourself this: Do you think the presence your company has online, through your own website, 3rd party sites and even what AI says about you, would get you confidently past that point in the journey? Are your case studies strong enough, are your best people visible enough, or do you think you’d risk being left on the table?
If your business is absent, difficult to understand or appears inactive during that research, technical capability alone may not be enough to earn a place on the shortlist.
Column inches matter, but so do pixel inches
As we enter an AI era, AI needs to understand what you do as a business. If your releases are not online on trusted news platforms, but your competitors are, then you’ll not get cited above them in AI results and recommendations.
But it’s not just about satisfying AI search. The problem in general lies when digital is the campaign afterthought. The release itself is not the entire marketing strategy. The aim is not simply to appear somewhere. It is to build recognition over time.
It’s too easy to ‘just’ post a link once on LinkedIn, but the release should be part of a wider plan where you are thinking about your audience first. What’s the best way to share this on social to drive maximum engagement, how can we get several supporting angles from employees for personal profile posts to maximise reach, email communications, sales conversations? Every output gives you another chance to be discovered and understood.
Your expertise should not be a well-kept secret
The energy sector is steeped in decades of knowledge, but very little of it is discoverable online.
Your engineers, project managers and technical leaders are answering valuable questions every day. All of that can be turned into useful content, articles on 3rd party sites, or LinkedIn, social media content for both personal and company pages. The knowledge can be turned into content that is building credibility and building preference with potential clients long before the tender request is issued.
Being known is no longer enough
In a niche sector like energy, it’s easy to believe that everyone already knows what your company does. Some people probably do.
But things change daily. Markets change, decision makers move, younger professionals are making more decisions, companies enter new regions and target complimentary sectors. Existing contacts may know the business for one service while remaining unaware of everything else it now offers. Just ask your sales team how often someone says, ‘I didn’t know you did that’ and you’ll challenge that thinking.
Reputation needs to be reinforced with information that buyers can find themselves easily online.