What the EETech Engineering Insights Report Is Telling Us About How to Market to Engineers in 2026
Every year, when the results of the EETech Engineering Insights Report land on my desk, it’s a little like getting a fresh set of X-rays — suddenly you can see exactly what’s happening beneath the surface of the engineering market, things you suspected but couldn’t quite confirm. This year’s results, the subject of a joint webinar together with our long-time partner Steve Cholas of EETech, may be the most important edition yet. The market is shifting fast, and if you’re a B2B marketer selling to engineers, several of these findings suggest some very pivots to how you do marketing.
Who Did EETech Survey?
Before we get into the findings, a quick word on methodology: this study covers more than 1,000 qualified engineer respondents across multiple disciplines, globally. North America and Europe represent about 60% of the respondent base, with the remainder distributed across other key global markets. Company sizes are well distributed from small to large, which makes the data projectable as an average across the market, rather than skewed toward enterprise-level firms. It’s a very robust study — and one of the reasons I’ve made it a fixture of my annual research diet for many years.
The Generational Shift Is Now Majority Rule
Here is perhaps the most structurally important finding: Millennial and Gen Z engineers now represent approximately 60% of the global engineering workforce (outside of China). This isn’t a trend to watch for the future. It’s happening right now, today, and it affects almost everything — where engineers go for information, what content they want, how they make buying decisions, and how they use AI in their engineering work.
Millennial and Gen Z engineers stand out from their more seasoned colleagues in a few notable ways. While electrical engineering remains the dominant specialty across all age groups, younger engineers show a stronger pull toward AI integration, control and automation, and data and analytics, displaying preferences where they diverge most visibly from career pros. They are also more fluid in their brand preferences, having not yet built the deep supplier loyalties that senior engineers tend to carry. And they are meaningfully more active in online engineering communities and social media, with over 30% reporting they discover new products and companies through social channels. If your marketing strategy is still optimized for the more senior/Baby Boomer engineer who has used the same supplier for 20 years, you are marketing to an increasingly smaller share of your actual audience.
The Biggest Finding: Manufacturer Websites Are Now #1
This is the one that stopped me cold. For the second time in a row — and this trend solidified last year’s results — manufacturer websites have risen above search engines as the top destination where engineers go to find new products and information.
Let that sink in for a moment. Google, the search engine we have spent years building SEO and PPC strategies around, is no longer the first stop for the engineer who is actively looking for product information. Your website is.
What that means practically is this: if your website isn’t “site ready,” you’re wasting a large portion of your marketing investment. Engineers are coming to you directly. What do they find when they get there? Is your data sheet on the product page, one click away? Are your application notes and reference designs easy to locate? Do you have live chat and a functional knowledge base? Engineers are time-starved, and the rule is simple: don’t waste their time. If they have to hunt for the spec sheet, they’re gone.
The other implication here is for content. The study shows clearly that articles and blogs on manufacturer websites are the second-ranked source of information for new product discovery, right after data sheets. If your company blog is a ghost town of press releases from 2022, you have work to do.
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Engineering forums and communities now rank above traditional search engines as an information source engineers use for finding technology information. This makes a great deal of sense when you think about it: engineers have always been a collegial group that trusts peer input above all else. The data backs that up — colleagues and co-workers rank consistently high as a trusted source of information, particularly among the Millennial Z group, with more than 50% cite colleagues/co-workers as a primary resource.
What are the marketing implications? Your brand needs to have a presence in the engineering communities where engineers actually talk to each other – LinkedIn, Reddit, EETech, Sparkwire, and others. Not just an ad, but genuine participation. Technical content that earns citation. White papers and articles that get shared and recommended. This is the “word-of-mouth” channel of the engineering world, and it’s alive and well — it’s just moved online.
Social Media for Engineers? The Numbers Will Surprise You
I’ll be honest: this finding surprised both Steve and me. More than 31% of Millennial Z engineers are using social media to find new companies and products. That is not a secondary or experimental channel. That’s a primary marketing channel for a significant cohort of your audience.
We’ve seen plenty of companies treating their LinkedIn presence as an afterthought — reposting the occasional press release, maybe a trade show photo. The data is telling us that’s not enough. Social media for the engineering audience requires a commitment to real, technically credible content. Engagement. Authenticity. The engineers who are using social media to discover products are not looking for corporate announcements; they are looking for content that helps them do their jobs.
AI: No Longer a Future Bet
The study confirmed something I think we all knew intuitively but now have solid data to support: AI has become embedded throughout the engineering design process. It’s not a curiosity or a pilot program; it’s not just a content writer. It is how technical and design work gets done, particularly for Millennial Z engineers.
Where are engineers using AI? Across code generation, design assistance, documentation, test and validation support, and more. The dominant tools are large language models, Copilot, and Gemini — with code generation and design assistance leading the pack. Nearly 4 in 10 Millennial Z engineers want LLM capabilities integrated directly into the manufacturer tools and platforms they use.
What does this mean for marketers? Two things. First, your own content strategy needs to account for how AI is changing search. We now know that roughly 58% of searches end without a click, which means engineers (and everyone else) are getting answers at the top of the page and not visiting your website. Getting your product information, specs, and content included in AI-generated answers is no longer optional. It’s table stakes. About 95% of the AI-driven traffic we see coming to client websites is coming from ChatGPT. If your company isn’t showing up in those responses, you have a serious visibility problem.
Second, the AI-generated email blast era is already on its way out. Engineers can spot it, sales teams are building guidelines to avoid it, and the response rates reflect the problem. Authenticity and technical credibility remain the currency of engineering marketing.
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The study asked engineers what types of content and tools matter most. Not surprisingly, data sheets, application notes, and reference designs dominated the list. But here’s the part that I keep coming back to: reference designs are consistently hard to find on manufacturer’s websites, and engineers consistently say they want more of them.
If you make reference designs available for your products, make sure they are front and center — not buried three levels deep in a resource library. And if you haven’t invested in reference designs yet and that’s part of your company’s buying process, this data should make a compelling internal business case.
Beyond content, engineers want:
- CAD models
- design files
- pricing and availability tools
- bill-of-material support
These features are not bells and whistles. They are the tools engineers use to do their jobs. If your website is not equipped with them, you’re sending engineers somewhere else to finish their research — and that somewhere else might be your competitor.
The White Paper Debate
Here’s an interesting finding that the data puts a spotlight on: career pro engineers (the older, more experienced cohort) value white papers more than Millennial Z engineers do. Does that mean white papers are dead? Not exactly. But it does reinforce something we’ve been saying to clients for a while now: the market is gravitating toward middle-of-the-funnel content that uncovers engineers who are already in the buying process, not just top-of-funnel awareness pieces.
The line between a white paper, an in-depth technical article, and a written tutorial is increasingly blurry. What matters is the formula: problem plus solution, written at the technical level the engineer expects, without product-push language. Whatever you call it, that type of content is what earns credibility and trust.
The Bottom Line for Marketers
Here is my summary of what this study is telling us to do right now:
- Make sure your website is site ready. Fast, easy to navigate, loaded with technical content, free of unnecessary registration walls, and built to serve engineers who arrive with a specific question. Your website is now the #1 destination. Treat it that way.
- Invest in engineering communities and forums. This is where peer conversations happen, brand preferences are shaped, and product recommendations are made. Be present with credible, helpful content.
- Take social media seriously as a technical content channel. Especially for reaching younger engineers, the numbers have crossed the threshold from nice-to-have to must-have.
- Build a strategy around AI-driven search. Your specs, case studies, application notes, and product information need to be optimized for inclusion in AI-generated answers, not just traditional search results.
- Go after Millennial Z engineers with urgency. They are now the majority. They have not locked in brand preferences. They are reachable — but only with the right content, in the right channels, with genuine technical credibility behind it.
The engineering marketing landscape is changing faster than at any point in my 30-plus years in this business. But the data from studies like this one are invaluable guides. Use them. The full EETech Engineering Insights Report is available at our site, I highly encourage you to download it.
