Key takeaways
• Industrial communication doesn’t require agencies to know every technical detail before the first conversation. The key is asking the right questions to understand what matters.
• Sector experience provides context that helps agencies become useful quickly, without expecting clients to teach them the fundamentals of their industry.
• The challenge is rarely explaining how something works. It is explaining why it matters to customers, journalists, and other stakeholders.
• The best technical communicators often combine understanding of complex subjects with the external perspective needed to make them relevant.
One of the most common questions we hear during agency selection processes is some variation of:
“How do you get your head around complex technologies?”
Sometimes it is asked directly and sometimes it is expressed through concerns such as:
“Our products are extremely technical.”
“You would need to spend some time with our engineers.”
“Previous agencies have struggled to understand what we do.”
What we believe potential clients are really asking is:
“Can you become useful quickly enough to contribute meaningful work?”
Industrial businesses operated in highly specialised markets. Their products, processes, and customer challenges do take time to understand, and many of our clients have previously worked with generalist agencies that ‘just didn’t get it’. They brought creative ideas, but engineers, product specialists, or in-house communications teams often found themselves rewriting the work to make it technically credible. That naturally creates caution when selecting an agency to provide executional support.
PR agencies often lack context, rather than ideas
It’s not a slight on the capability of generalist agencies at all. They’re simply not immersed in the industrial world in the way that specialist teams are, where knowledge and experience build across each new client in the same sector. Every conversation with an engineer, every product launch, and every customer success story adds to that context. Each new client expands the perspective we bring to the next one.
That doesn’t mean we start every client relationship fully informed about their products, applications, and customers, however. It just means that we’re not arriving completely cold and can get up to speed much quicker.
Being comfortable not knowing is part of the process
Even so, it’s unlikely that we will ever know everything about our clients’ technologies. Although our founder and CEO has an engineering degree, the rest of the SE10 team doesn’t and nor do we need to.
Accuracy matters enormously. We need to understand the fundamentals, and we’ve been in enough conversations with engineers and other technical experts not to feel intimidated by unfamiliar concepts or terminology. We’re comfortable saying ‘I don’t understand that yet’ and asking someone to explain it again, differently if necessary. There are no egos involved because asking naïve questions is often how you uncover the clearest explanations.
Understanding the technology is only half the job
But what matters more in industrial communication is not necessarily getting to grips with every single detail, rather being able to ascertain the relevance and impact for the target audience. Rather than simply collecting information, we’re looking for the story.
What problem does this solve? Why does this matter now? Who benefits? What changes as a result? Why should anyone outside the organisation care?
Those are not engineering questions, rather journalistic ones.
Translating technical topics for external audiences
So how do we then explain a technology to others, who like us, many not have come across it before? This is where our position as an outsider to a client organisation helps us.
The people who develop, manufacture, and sell technologies might understand every design decision and technical advantage but proximity can also make it harder to see what needs explaining first and how. Information that feels obvious internally may be completely new or remarkable to an external audience.
We’re close enough to the business to learn about it but also, constantly moving between different clients across different technologies and markets, we’re able to see the bigger picture of what information is relevant to a journalist or customer and how it connects to broader industry challenges.
That external perspective is valuable because we’re asking many of the same questions your audience might ask. If something isn’t immediately clear to us, there’s a good chance it won’t be clear to a journalist or prospective customer either.
Helping experts communicate their expertise
Ultimately, industrial organisations are not looking for an agency that can learn every specification inside out. They are looking for a partner that can understand the fundamentals, identify what matters, and communicate it in a way that makes sense beyond the people who created it.
Our role isn’t to match your technical expertise. It’s to uncover it, challenge it with fresh questions, and translate it into communications that are accurate, credible, and relevant to the audiences you’re trying to reach.
The people closest to a technology will always understand it better than anyone else. Our value lies in helping everyone else understand why it matters.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
