Why Most UK Engineering and Manufacturing Marketing Chases the Wrong 5%

A machine shop in the West Midlands rebuilds its website, tightens up the case studies, adds a proper enquiry form. Three months on, traffic is up and enquiries have barely moved. Nothing about the site is actually broken. The problem is timing: on any given day, almost nobody visiting is looking to switch supplier.

That isn't a guess. Marketing scientist John Dawes, working with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for LinkedIn's B2B Institute, found that only around 5% of B2B buyers are "in market" for a given category in any three-month window, with roughly 20% in market across a full year. Dawes is careful to call this a heuristic rather than a precise figure, useful for making the point rather than a number to plug into a spreadsheet. The logic behind it is simple: most B2B categories get replaced on a cycle of several years, so most of the audience for any supplier is, at any one moment, not buying anything at all.

Engineering and manufacturing sit at the slow end of that spectrum. Framework agreements, capital equipment and long-term maintenance contracts aren't decisions anyone makes twice a year. A fabricator or a controls specialist might win a client and then not need to win them again for three, five, sometimes ten years. Which means the overwhelming majority of the people who will eventually buy from a given firm are, right now, not looking. They're not filling in forms. They're not researching suppliers. They are, at most, half noticing whichever names keep turning up.

Budgets don't make that easier to ignore. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, based on 402 marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe surveyed in February and March 2025, found marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue for the second year running, with 59% of respondents saying they didn't have enough budget to execute their strategy, down five points from 2024 but still a majority. That survey skews toward large companies, most with revenue over a billion dollars, so it isn't a direct read on a twenty-person engineering firm. But the direction applies just as much further down the scale: nobody has spare budget to spend chasing an audience that isn't there yet.

Which is exactly what a lot of technical SME marketing does. Gated PDFs, "book a call" pop-ups, LinkedIn posts built entirely around a single offer, all aimed at the 5% who happen to be ready this quarter, all of it invisible or irrelevant to everyone else. When someone from the other 95% finally does start looking, the firm that spent two years being visible without asking for anything tends to get remembered. The one that only ever showed up with a pitch usually doesn't.

Nebula has seen the same pattern in its own review of the sales assets most technical SME websites are missing: firms publishing a steady drip of proof points outperformed ones running occasional lead-gen pushes, even bigger ones. It matches what we found when we looked at how many UK engineering websites actually have case studies to show: the ones still publishing them are the ones still visible when a buyer finally starts looking.

None of this argues against lead generation. The 5% who are in market this quarter still need a form to fill in and a reason to pick up the phone. It argues against mistaking that activity for the whole strategy, and against judging marketing purely on how many of those forms get filled in this month. For most engineering and manufacturing SMEs, the harder and more useful question isn't how to convert this quarter's leads faster. It's what stays visible for the other 95%, for as long as it takes them to need you.