Marketing to engineers is different from marketing to almost anyone else, and the difference comes down to one thing: engineers don’t take claims on faith. They’ve been trained, professionally and by hard experience, to ask “yes, but what actually works?” and to distrust anything that can’t answer.
This isn’t hostility. It’s a quality standard, and it’s actually good news, because it means the things that win an engineer’s trust are things a genuine, capable business can readily provide. The trouble is that most marketing does the opposite, reaching by instinct for exactly the polished, generic, claim-heavy style that engineers trust least. Here’s what the research says technical buyers actually trust, and how to give it to them.
Key Takeaway
The trust gap, in hard numbers
The research here is unusually clear, and worth knowing because it points straight at what to do.
TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec’s study of engineering buyers found that anonymous vendor marketing content scores just 2.16 out of 5 for trustworthiness. Named engineering experts at a vendor, by contrast, are rated very or extremely trustworthy by two thirds of engineers. And generative AI content sits right at the bottom of the scale, trusted by around one in ten. The gap between a named human expert and an AI tool is the widest in the whole dataset.
Sit with that for a moment, because it overturns a lot of common practice. The instinct in marketing is to speak in a smooth, consistent corporate voice, to keep individuals out of it, and increasingly to lean on AI to churn out content at volume. For an engineering audience, every one of those instincts is pointed the wrong way.
By The Numbers
What they trust: named experts
The single most trusted thing you can put in front of an engineer is another named, credible engineer.
When your technical people are visible, named, and allowed to demonstrate genuine expertise, an engineering buyer has something they can actually assess and believe. A named expert saying something specific and true is worth far more than the same point delivered anonymously in a corporate voice. This is why hiding your best technical people behind a polished brand is such a costly mistake: you’re removing the most trusted element you have and replacing it with the least.
The practical move is to put your engineers front and centre. Let them write, or be quoted, or explain things in their own words. Attach their names and their real expertise. It feels less slick than a unified brand voice, and that’s precisely why it works.
What they trust: specific, checkable detail
Engineers trust specifics because specifics can be verified, and they distrust vagueness for the same reason.
Concrete claims give an engineer something to evaluate: actual tolerances, real capabilities, named sectors served, genuine case studies with real outcomes, honest discussion of where something does and doesn’t apply. Vague superlatives, “industry-leading”, “world-class”, “unrivalled”, give them nothing to check and, worse, signal that you’re hoping they won’t look too closely. To a sceptical technical reader, an unsupported superlative isn’t persuasion, it’s a small red flag.
The message here is to swap adjectives for facts wherever you can. “The best precision engineering in the Midlands” says nothing. A specific tolerance, a named certification, a real example of a hard job done well, says everything.
What they trust: independent proof
Engineers don’t just want to hear it from you. They validate through sources they consider independent.
That’s why industry publications, technical directories and peer recommendations carry so much weight in this sector. Research consistently shows engineering buyers rely heavily on independent sources during their evaluation, cross-checking what a vendor says about itself against what the wider world seems to think. A business that shows up credibly in those independent contexts, and whose own claims survive that cross-checking, earns a level of trust that no amount of self-promotion can buy.
This is also, incidentally, part of why AI search matters so much now. AI tools are, in effect, doing that cross-checking at scale, and they’re more willing to name a business that the wider web appears to corroborate.
Quick Tip
What quietly puts them off
It’s worth naming the flip side directly, because these are the default settings of most marketing.
Anonymous corporate voice puts engineers off, because there’s no one credible to trust. Vague, superlative-heavy copy puts them off, because there’s nothing to verify. And obviously AI-generated fluff puts them off badly, because engineers detect it quickly and read it as a signal that you couldn’t be bothered to have a real expert say something real. Using AI as a tool behind the scenes is fine; publishing obvious AI filler in front of a technical audience is actively damaging.
Why this is good news
Here’s the encouraging part. Everything engineers trust is something a genuine, capable engineering business already has in abundance: real experts, real technical depth, real examples of hard problems solved.
The businesses that struggle with engineering marketing usually aren’t short of substance. They’re just hiding it, behind anonymity, behind vagueness, behind gated PDFs and corporate gloss. Winning an engineer’s trust is less about producing something new and more about getting out of the way of what you already have, and letting your genuine expertise show.
A few common questions
Does this mean we shouldn't use AI at all in our marketing?
Not at all. Using AI behind the scenes to work faster is fine. The point is not to publish obvious AI-generated filler to a technical audience, and never to let it replace genuine, named expertise, which is the thing engineers trust most.
Our engineers don't want to be the face of anything. What now?
Isn't specific technical content giving away our advantage?
Rarely. Engineers trust businesses that demonstrate expertise, and the detail that builds trust is seldom the same as the proprietary knowledge that constitutes your edge. Demonstrating that you understand the problem deeply is what wins the work.
Sources: TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, State of Marketing to Engineers (2026); industry research on engineering buyer behaviour (2026).
About the author
Richard Stinson
Founder, Brookstone Creative Ltd | Leicestershire
Richard built his career across engineering and industrial sales, starting on the shop floor and working through CNC machining, CAD/CAM engineering, technical design, project management and technical sales management across aerospace, automotive, fabrication, cutting tools and specialist manufacturing. He has been the procurement manager researching new suppliers and the sales manager trying to reach those procurement managers. He has seen this shift in buyer behaviour from both sides of it.
