What makes a technical brand credible in AI-driven search?
I have spent most of my career around technical businesses, and one thing has always struck me. They can be incredibly good at explaining what they do to each other, but explaining it to the market is a different challenge.
It’s understandable. If you spend every day immersed in a product, technology or process, you build up a level of knowledge that your customer may not have. Things that seem obvious internally aren’t always obvious from the outside.
For me, that’s why technical businesses need something slightly different from a marketing agency. The people doing the marketing have to understand what they’re marketing in the first place.
Motion grew out of technical marketing
Before starting Motion, I spent more than nine years in IT distribution marketing. During that time, I was also involved with PACE Networks, our family business working in power grid and rail electrification.
I would help with marketing advice, collateral and branding alongside my main job. When I left full-time employment, PACE became more of a focus and other projects started coming my way through people I had worked with over the years.
Those early projects covered fibre optic networking and cyber security as well as the work with PACE. More contracts followed and eventually it became obvious that this was more than a collection of projects. It was an agency.
Matt White and Chloe Bunce had worked with me previously in IT distribution and we were keen to work together again. Motion grew from there.
So our technical niche wasn’t really a conscious decision to specialise. It naturally came from what we knew, the people we knew and the work we were already doing.
Technology and industry aren’t separate worlds anymore
One of the things I particularly like about Motion is the mix of technology and industrial clients.
Marketing has traditionally been more advanced in IT technology than in industrial sectors, and the budgets have generally been higher. But industry itself has changed considerably.
IoT, Industry 4.0, MES and connected equipment mean industrial businesses are creating and using huge amounts of data. That data has to be analysed, moved, stored and protected. There is simply much more crossover between the two worlds now.
Our technology background has been useful when industrial clients are taking new technology-led solutions to market. It works the other way too. Our IT clients value the fact that we understand industrial environments because those environments are increasingly important markets for them.
We get to see both sides, which is a useful place to be.
You need to understand the detail before you decide what matters
We have people at Motion with backgrounds in chemical engineering, computing, manufacturing systems and product design, as well as experience across life sciences, telecommunications, data centre infrastructure and data storage.
We also share offices with sister companies working in power grid, rail electrification, cyber security and managed IT services, so we are surrounded by technical people.
If we walk into a manufacturing facility, data centre, substation or cleanroom, we are not starting completely cold. There will always be things we need to learn, of course, but we can usually get up to speed quickly and ask more specific questions.
That’s important because good technical marketing isn’t about cramming every piece of technical detail into the copy.
You need enough understanding to work out which detail matters to the person buying.
Engineers and technical decision-makers generally want useful information quickly. What does it do? Why is it relevant? What problem does it solve? What’s different about it?
Our job is to find those answers without losing the technical credibility behind them.
Good products can still have a messaging problem
This is one of the conversations we are having with clients a lot at the moment.
A business has a strong product or service and internally everyone understands its value. Once you take it outside the business, however, the customer doesn’t always see the same thing.
Perhaps the benefits aren’t clear enough. The customer doesn’t immediately recognise the need or understand what makes the solution different. If they don’t grasp the value, it becomes much harder for them to justify the cost.
We see businesses investing in websites and campaigns when the underlying message still needs work. It makes everything else harder.
That’s why messaging and positioning have become such an important part of what we do. We’ve seen those projects help marketing teams, give sales teams a clearer story and, in some cases, influence wider business strategy.
I have always been a big believer in getting the foundations right, and your messaging is one of those foundations.
A lot of technical marketing is ABM, whether you call it that or not
I often say that we have been doing a form of Account Based Marketing for years.
Most of the technical businesses we work with have a very specific ideal customer. They may be targeting a relatively small number of organisations with a particular challenge, application or requirement.
You need to know who those organisations are, what matters to the people within them and what you can say that will be genuinely relevant.
We use plenty of different marketing techniques and channels to do that, but the thinking behind them is often very similar to ABM. It’s targeted marketing for a niche audience.
When your audience is niche, relevance matters far more than simply reaching lots of people.
AI is useful, but you need to know where it falls down
We have been actively using AI at Motion for a couple of years, with quite a bit of research and experimentation before that. At one stage we had three people in an internal AI team looking at applications and sharing what we were learning with everyone else.
There are plenty of areas where it helps us. We can do more research, look at client competitors, test theories, use it as another layer of proofing or simply throw an idea at it and see what comes back.
We have also used it enough to know where it falls down too. It gets things wrong. It can make content bland, and getting something genuinely useful from it still depends heavily on the person using it.
That matters even more when you’re marketing something technical. Someone still needs to know when an answer is wrong, when the language doesn’t ring true or when the important point has been missed.
We are also doing more work around AI search for clients. Google remains hugely important, but people are increasingly asking questions through AI tools and using more conversational searches. Businesses need to think about whether they’re visible there as well as through traditional search.
It is a natural progression of search, and I am happy to say we are making that visibility happen for our clients.
Just drop us in
There’s a phrase I use quite a lot when talking about Motion: just drop us in.
You can drop us into a manufacturing facility and we’ll have a decent understanding of what’s going on. We will ask questions to top up that knowledge, but we can normally get there pretty quickly.
Put us in a design office and we can understand why the team has made certain design decisions, or at least have enough background to ask sensible questions. The same goes for a data centre or other technical environments.
I think the same idea works for the marketing side.
You can drop us into an existing marketing programme and we will work out where we can help. It might be the strategy or positioning. It might be copy, creative or digital. Or we can take the whole thing from the initial idea and concept through to campaign delivery and looking at the results.
Having consultants, copywriters, creative, digital and development expertise within the team means we can do that without losing the understanding we’ve built up along the way.
We don’t need to make everything complicated. We need to understand the business, understand the audience and work out where we can make a difference.
That’s really what Motion has grown into over the years: a group of marketers who enjoy technical subjects, like getting into the detail and care about whether the marketing actually works.
So, if you are wondering where we might fit into your marketing, my answer is usually pretty simple.
About the Author
Rob Cullum
Lead Consultant
Rob is the Co-Founder and Lead Consultant at Motion Marketing, bringing a wealth of experience across design, technology, and marketing. With a foundation in product design and a successful track record in IT marketing, Rob focuses on launching disruptive technologies. He often shares his knowledge through insightful blog posts covering marketing strategies, ROI, and more. Beyond marketing, Rob enjoys Formula 1 and outdoor pursuits.