Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The Marketing Minute: When Everyone Is a Thought Leader, No One Is

There is no shortage of expertise in the electronics industry.

If you spend just a few minutes talking with someone who has been designing circuit boards, running a manufacturing facility, or troubleshooting assembly lines for 20 or 30 years, you will likely walk away knowing something you didn't know before.

Yet, somehow, much of the electronics industry’s marketing fails to highlight that expertise.

Tony Uphoff recently tackled this problem in a recent column about B2B thought leadership.¹ His argument is worth paying attention to, particularly for those of us marketing highly technical products and services. Uphoff says that B2B marketing has become exceptionally good at producing content. The problem is that producing content and producing something worth reading are not the same thing.

Marketing automation, analytics platforms, generative AI, and an endless supply of publishing channels have made it easier than ever to create more. More articles. More emails. More LinkedIn posts. More white papers. More everything! 

He argues that somewhere along the way, scale began replacing judgment. We optimized the things we could measure (clicks, downloads, traffic, volume) without necessarily asking whether the content itself was earning trust.

You’ve Already Done the Hard Part
Electronics companies have something that many B2B marketers would love to have: actual subject matter experts. Our industry is replete with engineers, technical salespeople, quality professionals, and executives who have spent decades solving extremely specific problems.

That is a marketing gold mine.

Unfortunately, we often take all that expertise and sand down the interesting parts. For instance, an engineer will explain a recurring manufacturing problem. By the time the information travels through approvals and becomes a LinkedIn post, we get something like:

In today's rapidly evolving electronics landscape, manufacturers face increasingly complex challenges requiring innovative solutions.

You could put that sentence on the website of practically any company in this industry.

Specificity Is the Advantage
Uphoff offers a particularly useful test for content: Could a competitor publish the exact same thing with its logo swapped in? For electronics marketers, that question should be taped right next to our monitors.

If your company has spent 40 years manufacturing PCBs, there are things your people know because they have made mistakes, solved failures, watched technologies come and go, dealt with customers, and learned what works on a production floor.

Tell your marketers those things. Tell us what designers routinely misunderstand about manufacturing, why a specification that looks perfectly reasonable on paper creates headaches in production, or which material trend everyone is excited about that your technical team thinks deserves more scrutiny.

We’ve seen this work firsthand at I-Connect007. A company has deep expertise, and rather than watering it down into generic marketing content, we help capture it in a book, and then build the conversation around it through podcasts, key takeaways, editorial coverage, social media, and email. The expertise stays at the center; we simply create more ways for people to find it.

The expertise is already there. Find it, amplify it, and put it where the industry can hear it.

References

1. “B2B Thought Leadership and Content Marketing Are Broken,” by Tony Uphoff, Substack, Aug. 31, 2026.

Brittany Martin is the digital marketing manager at I-Connect007 and the author of Marketing in 17 Minutes.