Why facts alone are not enough when marketing to technical audiences
As a marketer within the scientific manufacturer and technical space, I am often asked a rather fundamental question.
How do you market to scientists and sceptics who can spot marketing jargon a mile away?
It’s a fair question, and one that I wrestled with often enough myself over the years, particularly when I moved from geology into marketing. If I look back at my own journey, my early writing was purposefully stripped and devoid of emotion. One could even go so far as to call it semi-clinical.
Moving into my first marketing role, which included responsibility for internal communications, I quickly discovered the rather obvious truth that facts alone don’t move people. They certainly don’t make for engaging employee newsletters.
While this might be glaringly obvious, it was a lesson that took some time for me to adapt to, injecting personality and emotion back into my writing and work after it had been quite convincingly stamped out during the duration of my degree.
Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with engineers and product teams who are convinced that scientists are only interested in the minutiae.
The reality is that scientists are people too.
People with senses of humour, frustrations, and ambitions. They might crave the accuracy and require it to justify their work, but they also respond to meaning, relevance, and stories that reflect the real challenges that they face.
The precision trap
There is a common belief in technical and scientific industries that if the data is sound and the facts are correct, then the job is done and dusted.
You are, after all, marketing to scientists, engineers, or technical individuals who “just want the details”, right? Sure, that logic sounds reasonable. Yet, it’s important to factor in whether it will engage people and earn their attention.
After all, if the scientists don’t pause long enough to connect with the message you are trying to get in front of them, they won’t see the infinite detail you’ve been working on.
When every message focuses purely on specifications and proof points, it might be factually flawless, but let’s be honest, it will be emotionally flat …... like a pancake.
The audience knows what the product does, but not why it matters to them. Like everything in life (and on the internet), when everything sounds the same, nothing stands out.
Marketing then becomes a translation exercise rather than a communication one.
Try this: Next time you write or review a piece of content, read it as if you were the customer. Does it help them see their challenge more clearly, or does it simply prove you know your subject? If it is the latter, you might be showing expertise without building the connection that matters.
Connection through human storytelling
Good marketing does not dilute complexity, but leverages it and translates it into meaning.
Scientists do not need you to simplify the science, but they do need to understand why it matters. And further, what it means for them to achieve their goals.
That is where good storytelling comes in. Not about gimmicks, glossy campaigns, or fudging the facts, but introducing the context, empathy, and relevance that connects.
In practice, this means shifting the focus from what your product is and does, to what it helps people achieve. All that while speaking the language of the customer’s day-to-day reality: the frustrations of a failed experiment, the pressure of time, the satisfaction of finding a simpler way to get results. The excitement of finding the path towards a discovery that could lead to a Nobel prize.
Those are the human moments and aspects that build trust and engagement.
Storytelling is what helps gives accuracy a purpose. You can have both logic and warmth, evidence and emotion. One without the other leaves a small void that you didn’t even know was missing.
Try this: The next time you review a campaign or presentation, ask one question: Would a human being care about this story, or only a scientist? If the answer is “only a scientist within your product team”, you have an opportunity to bridge that gap.
Balancing fact and feeling
The best marketing engages technical audiences by better understanding the human problem that customers are looking to solve.
Facts make you credible, but it’s the feeling that makes you memorable.
If you want to market effectively to scientists, you need to think less about distilling the facts and simplifying them, and more about humanising. Keep the proof, but connect it to stories that make that proof really matter.
Scientists are trained to look for evidence, to challenge and hypothesise: yes, of course! But they still also respond to curiosity, pride, and relief.
Emotions that are not a distraction from logic, but the very motivators that move people to act upon it.
Try this: Before your next campaign or meeting, test the message with someone outside of your immediate field. If they can grasp both what it does and why it matters, you are on the right track.
Finding the human in the technical
If you take away only one thing from this newsletter, let it be this: while precise data points build credibility, it’s the story around it that builds understanding. That understanding is what turns attention into engagement, and then action.
Facts still matter; they always will. The power, however, comes in how those facts are framed and how they help someone else see their world slightly differently.
So keep the data, keep the rigour that comes with it, but remember to leave space for the human spark.
That is where real connection begins.
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