An Insider’s Guide To Digital Marketing

1. Know Your Ideal Customer And Create Customer Profiles

Customer profiles are documents containing in-depth analyses of exactly who your product or service is for and relevant details about them.

Your customer profiles should act as a North Star for every marketing campaign – guiding you to create content that’s relevant, emotive, and helpful to a specific audience.

Companies with the most successful digital marketing strategy have an intimate understanding of what makes their customers tick.

Social listening tools and stalking competitor reviews can help you find this information, but you don’t need to stalk your potential customers to find out more about them.

The most meaningful and valuable way to know your audience is simply to talk to them.

Whether it’s a survey, an email, or even an Instagram DM – as long as you’re polite and un-salesy, 76% of customers have no qualms about sharing personal data if they’re going to get a more personalised experience in return.

That’s a win-win.

2. Map Your Customer Journey

The second digital marketing strategy fundamental is to know exactly what happens for a cold lead to become a raving long-term customer.

This is also called the sales funnel or the marketing funnel, and it generally looks like this:

Awareness: Your audience finds out that you exist
Consideration: Prospects begin to evaluate your product or service as an option
Conversion: Customers decide to purchase your product
Loyalty: Customers continue to purchase or renew their contracts
Advocacy: Customers share your product with others so they buy, too

The above steps are universal to tech companies, but the length and complexity of each stage will vary greatly depending on your target audience, industry, and what you’re selling.

For example, the B2B SaaS marketing funnel typically has a long ‘consideration’ stage, as multiple stakeholders need to approve a purchase, and brands generally have to compete against many other providers of the same software tool.

By knowing what decisions your target customers have to make and what objections you need to handle at each stage of the marketing funnel, you can…

3. Develop Content That’s Relevant To Each Stage Of The Sales Funnel

The key to better ad campaigns and marketing messages is relevancy.

Market Saturation

Let’s say you’re selling an accounting software tool that helps businesses track expenses, generate invoices, calculate paychecks, and build expense reports.

To your audience, it’s just one of the thousands of other products that do the same thing.

In a saturated market, having a powerful digital marketing strategy amplifies your product, so you stand out from the noise.

Longer Sales Funnels

If you’re in tech, your marketing funnel is longer because:

Purchase decisions take longer, especially in B2B, where winning a client requires you to impress multiple decision makers
Customer lifetime value is greater because you rely on monthly subscriptions and long-term loyalty rather than one-off purchases

Without a strategy, that puts tech marketers under a great deal of pressure – how can they produce enough relevant content to keep audiences engaged?

Customers Know Their Stuff

Customers are more informed about what they want and why. This is a blessing and a curse for tech marketers.

They dig through the internet to find reasons why they should choose an option and support to back them up in their decision. 89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine.

The research process of a typical customer:

Google searches for the best results for their problem, looking for articles with “top X software” and “the best software for X”
Reads articles that relate to their situation, thought-leading insights, whitepapers, and content that gives them a better understanding of the problem
Posts their issue on social media, where people’s replies serve as testimonials and reviews for products and services

By implementing sales funnels, you can anticipate your customers’ questions and provide the right answers.

The B2C buyer journey is pretty straightforward. Like nipping down to the shop to get a Cornetto.

On the other hand, B2B marketers must take an unexpected journey through Middle Earth…

1. Content Marketing

With 7.5 million blog posts published daily on the internet, what counts as high-quality content?

Content like this separates you from the transactional “you need / I sell” mentality.

Rather than only thinking of your brand when they have a problem, your customers can build an authentic relationship with the value you provide.

Toggl’s blog is an excellent example:

To implement quality content in digital marketing for tech companies, you need to:

Do the basics really well: Put in the effort to discover and refine your ‘why’, customer personas, and USP
Prioritise research and customer interviews: Use insights from interviews to fuel your content marketing funnel, pillars, topics, and channels
Focus on your customers’ version of success: Create content that helps customers with their big-picture goals and challenges
Scale content creation: Avoid bottlenecks and putting your team at risk of burnout by using skilled freelancers and robust documentation

When done right, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3x as many leads.

2. Influencer Marketing

Influencers in the tech space use their social platforms to spread the word about new technology products and services. They can be regular users or tech reviewers with many followers.

But why do customers love them, and why are they crucial to your tech digital marketing?

Because they provide genuine, authentic and undiluted opinions about the products and services, they review or advocate. These opinions make a big difference in helping customers choose which new products to buy.

An excellent example of a tech influencer is Marques Brownlee, who tests and reviews tech products for his followers:

61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations – more than the 38% who trust branded social media content. This is no surprise; customers value transparency and are getting better at spotting fake BS content.

For example, Intel doubled down by partnering with YouTube tech reviewer Linus Tech Tips to help build a gaming PC for TikTok influencer Kris HC.

3. Email And SMS Marketing

By repurposing content, you can turn one blog post into a series of email newsletters and SMS updates that engage, nurture, and educate your audience.

To boost engagement, you can personalise your emails and target several audience segments with different emails based on what they are interested in.

Why?

Keeping your customers engaged → better customer lifetime value → more repeatable revenue.

One company that does this well is Trello, with email newsletters that contain snippets of their blog articles and redirect you to valuable content:

A template for your email marketing strategy might include these five steps:

Set a clear CTA on your website to motivate your target audience to sign up for your newsletters
Send a welcome email to set the right tone for the relationship
Follow up with weekly emails featuring top blog posts that matter to the customer (segmentation might help you share the right articles with the right audience)
Include usage data to show your customers how they use your products and tips, so they can implement it and optimise their processes
Match email campaigns to your customers’ current stage in the funnel and align emails with your campaign goals, including promotion, re-engagement and customer delight

Also, try sending emails that allow your target audience to select how they prefer to communicate. This gesture shows your customers that you value their opinion.

Like this:

Here, HireVue sends automated unsubscribe emails, so they’re still showing audiences they care even if they’re saying goodbye – who knows, it might even rekindle their interest!

But that’s just the beginning.

With emails, ensure you’re constantly tracking your results and tweak your comms accordingly to get the best results.

Get On TikTok

Short-form video content has taken over and become the star player of many tech digital marketing strategies.

Short-form videos generally last between 20 seconds and 2 minutes, depending on the platform.

For example, Instagram allows creating 1-min short-form videos while TikTok allows up to 3-min videos.

Are you guilty of this common toxic trait among B2B content marketers?

It goes something like this:

Shoving sales pitches in every bit of content – especially a CTA at the end. As if any prospect is going to read a top-of-funnel blog and whip out the company credit card…

The smartest and most effective way to leverage short-form video is to use it as a content repurposing tool.

If you’ve created a massive whitepaper, written an in-depth blog, or created a major case study, summarise the most important insights in a short video.

It doesn’t have to be fancy – even just a confident salesperson or customer talking to the camera or reading out the script (always remember subtitles) will make an impact.

Just Value, No Features

Using marketing to promote your product’s features quickly becomes boring and disconnected – your brand will quickly get lost in the noise of alternative tech brands saying the same thing.

Instead, focus on being helpful and relevant.

Show your customers how those features will help them achieve whatever success or happiness looks like to them.

Sometimes, in the case of ExpressVPN, that means talking about the things you don’t do:

Sales enablement tool Gong has mastered the art and science of content marketing for B2B tech.

What makes Gong stand out is its refreshingly candid, cheeky, and community-minded approach to organic posts on LinkedIn.

From using hilariously relatable sales memes on LinkedIn…

Or, in Gong’s case, it means using your social media platform purely to share thought leadership, and not talk about the product at all:

So, why do sales leaders enjoy engaging with Gong’s content?

Because it’s highly valuable.

Let’s Get Quizzical

A quiz provides users with an engaging, entertaining, and satisfying series of questions that provides them with a reward – which could be a personalised product recommendation, an educational or meaningful insight about themselves, or a discount on selected products.

It’s a marketing tactic that’s taken the tech world by storm, with brands across B2B and B2C sectors using it to generate leads, learn more about target audiences, and build raving communities.

Remember the stat we mentioned earlier about personal data?

Most of your customers would LOVE to tell you about themselves if it means they get a more tailored experience with your tech brand.

Is it vanity?

Is it loneliness?

Is it too many of those damn personality tests?

Who cares – quizzes are a tech marketers’ secret weapon, and a prospective user’s dream come true.

Here’s why:

Quiz benefits for tech users
Quiz benefits for tech brands

Get instant personalised recommendations and insights

Receive a discount

Feel part of a community

Learn something meaningful

Free access to entertaining and addictive content

Engage with customers and prospects via the most shared piece of marketing collateral

Get tons of qualified leads quickly

Segment leads into focused marketing funnels for email and SMS campaigns

Gain insights for further marketing and product development

Productivity tool and habit tracker, Fabulous, is a classic example of meaningful quizzes being used to fuel marketing in wellness tech:

Before users sign-up for the app, they’re taken through a series of questions about their daily routine and life goals – the questions are short and sweet, but still meaningful and relevant.

Once users have followed the questions, they’re told to sign-up to unlock their personalised profile and start achieving their goals.

It’s a genius way to attract new users and learn more about what’s driving users to download the app.