B2B Tech Firm Marketing Tactics That Work
B2B marketing is an entirely different animal than B2C marketing. Throw in the cutthroat nature of the tech industry on top of that and you can well imagine how competitive the tech marketing landscape is.
Technology marketing in the B2B sphere often means not just reaching your audience but also educating them about fairly complex topics and then nurturing those leads through a longer-than-usual sales cycle. We spoke with 18 of the most highly regarded Tech Marketing Experts and they agreed to share what is working for them and their clients. Take note and take action!
1. Provide Solutions to your Non-Techie Audience
“The most valuable resource in marketing for technology type firms is the ability to create thought leadership and forward thinking articles on topics that your solution or business can solve, and why those are issues for folks in a non-tech jargon fashion. Those types of articles can then be used in multiple ways, such as media relations and placement in trade publications, content for social media and perhaps most effectively, native and syndication. Tools like Outbrain, Netline and Brandzooka are fantastic and relatively inexpensive ways to share that content. Our best recommendation? Don’t go it alone, hire a PR and marketing firm to do all of this for you.”
By Rodger Roeser of The Eisen Agency
2. Publish With Decision Makers in Mind
“For B2B technology products and services, there tends to be many decision makers, in multiple offices, each using a few devices, making their purchase decision over many months. It’s impossible to know precisely what has contributed to a sale when there’s this many factors involved. In 2019, forward-thinking B2B technology companies should focus on frequent publication of high-quality content that speaks to their target market’s decision makers. They will make it easy to find this content with smart design, SEO, and marketing automation. They will gather data where they can, but will not prioritize what is measurable over what is just smart marketing.”
By Devin Rose of eBridge Marketing Solutions Inc.
3. Make Voice Search A Priority
“I think the biggest potential in B2B digital marketing at the moment is voice search. With Alexa and Google Home sales hitting all time high and certain researches showing that the third most popular place to use voice devices is at the office, not to mention that speaking with a device is 3 times faster than typing and which business exec would not love to save some time? My recommendation would be to stop chasing popular keywords consisting of a word or two and really niche down to long tail ones to aggressively target featured snippets for those keywords.”
By Teresa Bartaseviciute of Automated Payment Transfer Ltd.
4. Offer Some Sort of Upfront Value
“A critical component to understand about B2B marketing is that the process of making a business decision—especially when it comes to technology upgrades and other more-involved purchases—takes much more deliberation. Potential buyers are going to weigh your products against your competitors to make the smartest decision for their company. To succeed in a competitive B2B marketing sphere, you have to stand out and prove value. Offer an online sample of your product or service, a trial period, or an online tool that shows customers the value in your business and sparks their demand for your services. Even something as simple as the free tools we offer on our website has delivered consistent leads at a minimal cost.”
By Taylor Hurff of 1SEO I.T. Support & Digital Marketing
5. Mine Your In-House Data for Low Hanging Fruit
“First and foremost, use your data to see what strategy brings you the best results, e.g. what type of content has high engagement and conversion rates. Then you can identify where there is potential for you to gain quick results, for example – high search volume keywords that you rank on page 2 or 3 in Google results. There you can work further to optimize your content for these keywords in order to improve your rankings. With a combination of these 2 approaches, understanding and using your data to know what strategies work for you and focusing on low-hanging fruit keywords, you can build a winning online marketing strategy for 2019.”
By Leslie Carruthers of The Search Guru
6. Magnetic Content for Improved B2B Marketing
“With each passing day, business to business online marketing is evolving more than ever now. The rise of new marketing tools and methods, video contents and podcasts have reached a whole new level. Many businesses do an amazing job of explaining what they do but fail when it comes to showing how they can help by implementing dynamic content like blogs, videos, and infographics.
Tech firms should start with this, begin telling their story in various formats.
- Content Marketing For Lead Generation (Blog posts, Infographics, Podcasts, Reports/Case Studies)
- Email Marketing ( The right kind of marketing using relevant content)
- Social Media Marketing (Promoting relevant and valuable content)
- Blogging( Best way to drive website traffic by providing information that they are looking for)
According to IronPaper research, 6.53% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective lead generation tactic.
So without thinking further, start creating and promoting magnetic content for better B2B online marketing.”
By Brett Helling of Gig Worker
7. LinkedIn Sponsored Ads
“One of the best areas for tech firms to advertise is through LinkedIn sponsored ads. You can target locations, specific companies, industries, job functions or even job titles. From regular text ads, to sponsored content, to email marketing to retargeting. Many of the clients I have gotten for my own digital marketing company have been through LinkedIn advertising. While it's much more expensive than say, Google Adwords advertising, you can target much deeper and the entire social media platform caters to businesses looking to connect with other businesses and the end result is worth much more.”
By Jeff Moriarty of JMoriarty Marketing
8. Leverage the Power of Video
“These B2B firms should get involved in video. Have professional videos made about the company. Have employees on camera talking about the work they do and why they do it. These firms should show the faces that make up their company. Videos help a company build trustworthiness by letting customers into their daily operations and by showing that the company is made up of real people, just like them.
Videos are also a great social media advertising tool. Don't only add your videos to YouTube, but promote them on Facebook and LinkedIn to showcase your business to a new audience.”
By Keri Lindenmuth of The Kyle David Group, LLC
9. Authentic Relationships Beat Marketing Automation
“Technology runs our lives more than ever but it is relationships that drive business and commerce so people will find more ways to connect in person to build trust and strengthen connections. Make sure you offer several ways to talk with them and get to know them. Algorithms can only tell you so much about a customer, transactions are driven by relationships. Use automation where you can but do not ignore the power of the personal touch.”
By Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls
10. Stay On Target
“Before you start your marketing campaign, consider your audience. If your focus isn’t narrow enough, or your marketing strategy is too broad, you’re likely to lose a lot of your potential business. Figure out who your customers are, separate them by categories, and then market to each of them accordingly. Having a targeted marketing strategy is one of the best ways to ensure the highest possible ROI.”
By Nate Masterson of Maple Holistics
11. Apply For Industry Relevant Awards
“From working in B2B for a while, my top B2B marketing tip would be to make sure you enter as many awards as possible in your area and sector. Not only do they give you free press coverage and backlinks from websites, but if you do end up winning or making it to the final, it's a good trust signal you can use on your site. You can also legally use the term “award-winning” on your site which helps greatly with sales and conversions when pitching.”
By Sam Carr of PharmaVaccs
12. Custom Marketing Automation Systems
“B2B tech companies primarily struggle with reaching the right decision makers on the right channels to increase their sales funnel. To be lean and efficient, I believe influencer marketing and marketing automation tech stacks (MarTech) will bring the most bang for the marketing buck in 2019. Building a sustainable and predictable revenue model requires MarTech systems for collecting, nurturing, and producing sales ready leads. Some advocate for using the fully packaged systems like Marketo, but I’ve found that custom building your own MarTech systems modularly can save money and cut some of the tech bloat that comes with all the bells and whistles. In my opinion, it’s better to spend budget storyboarding every little detail of a leads journey pathway as this will lead to a more personalized experience, which can result in reduced sales timelines.”
By JD Parkman of Marketing Media Wizard
13. Out-Bound Lead Generation
“We break our sales process into 6 steps. Find, Interest, Validate, demo, pitch, close. This has exceptional results where-by more than 80% that pass the validate stage proceed and become paying customers, this also enforces good product fit and reduces churn.
We get the fastest results using out-bound lead generation. We do this by sending a series on scripted/custom emails to potential leads – discovered on-line using LinkedIn and Google Search. We use automation software to help send emails and track results.”
By Martin Webb of Tudodesk
14. Uncover New Industry Relevant Data
“We ran a survey and turned the answers into a big, comprehensive study. This way we were mentioned by large online magazines and many smaller blogs quoted our stats.. All you need to do is to create an interesting survey with questions your potential clients would ask, promote the survey and transform the data into a report and publish it. After that, make sure to pitch relevant journalists and bloggers.”
By Tamas Torok of Coding Sans
15. Understand that All Website Visitors are not Created Equally
“Don't think that all website visitors and leads are ready to buy. A popular topic of 2017 and 2018 was CRO (conversion rate optimisation) and marketers spent countless hours to increase Visit-to-Lead conversion rate. By doing this they assume that all visitors who come to the website and all leads that submit a lead capture form are ready to buy. A better question to ask is how can I direct website visitors and prospects who are ready to buy to book a demo and how can I provide more information to leads, who are not ready to buy yet. With tools like VWO, you can create separate flows for website visitors, depending on their demographics and behaviours.”
By Pavel Gertsberg of Disciple
16. Send Visitors to a Relevant Landing Page
“B2B companies should focus their efforts on using relevant landing pages that are coherent to what their consumers are searching for in order to see the best results. B2B companies should also be clear about what their value proposition is and they why should they buy from you. Eliminate the guess work, be clear about your business and what you offer.”
By Dale Broadhead of Conversion Hut
17. Account-Based Marketing
“If your company hasn't already implemented Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in the way they do business, then they should strongly consider it. ABM is no longer just a buzzword. Over the past couple of years, we've seen marketers directly grow revenue by successfully executing ABM programs. ABM offers two advantages over traditional lead generation.
First, ABM allows for marketers to directly target the right buyers in high potential accounts with personalized multi-channel campaigns. Instead of capturing low-quality leads and qualifying them, ABM starts with identifying target accounts and the relevant roles that are part of the buying group. By executing personalized campaigns to buying groups within those target accounts, marketers can see a significant lift in pipeline conversions.
Second, ABM helps align sales and marketing interests together. By concentrating on the accounts that the sales team is focused on, marketers are able to run campaigns that add value to the sales process. Rather than simply handing over a list of “marketing qualified” leads, from day one, sales and marketing are working together to identify target accounts, execute multi-channel campaigns and measure the impact of those campaigns to the pipeline. Shared campaigns with shared results – that's what true revenue alignment looks like.”
By Andre Yee of Triblio
18. Focus on Content Marketing
“These days ‘Content Marketing' is a buzz word that is often used but isn’t often applied. One of the best ways to market B2B in the modern business landscape is through content. Figure out what questions your customers have in your space and provide those answers in the form of high quality content online. Using education as a marketing tool is a great way to build trust and position yourself as a thought leader in the industry. Share your knowledge with your customers and in return they will reward you with their business.”
By Jimmy Rodriguez of 3dcart
