The most successful tech brands are the ones who cut through the noise by sticking to their principles in everything they put out there.
Every social media post, case study, and TikTok.
Yes, even TikTok .
If your marketing department is feeling overwhelmed (even slightly jaded) as we get to the end of the year, don’t worry: it’s never too late to start making an impact with your audience.
Here are some go-away-and-do-it tips to help you add some wow factor to your tech brand’s marketing strategy.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing Strategy: The 3 Fundamentals
Why Does Digital Marketing Matter for Tech Firms?
3 Proven Digital Marketing Strategies for Tech Companies
3 Marketing Trends You Should Know About
The Smart Move: Turn to a Digital Marketing Agency
So,
After you.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is promoting a brand to target audiences via online channels, which amplifies advertising campaigns to anyone with an internet connection.
These days, pretty much everything happens online anyway, so you could argue that calling it “digital” marketing is a bit silly. Surely it’s just ‘marketing’?
But, for the traditionalists out there still succeeding with radio jingles and newspaper ads, the distinction remains .
Digital marketing is an umbrella term covering many sub-categories, such as:
Search engine optimisation (SEO): Producing and optimising content to boost a website’s search ranking to reach more people
Pay-per-click advertising: Marketers pay a fee to ensure content or ads reach their desired audience
Content marketing: Publishing and distributing material to engage, educate, and retain your audience
Social media marketing: Attracting and growing an audience by posting organic content and ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit
Email marketing: Nurturing leads or existing customers with a series of newsletters sent via email
Digital marketing can be inbound, which means you’re putting content out there to attract leads to come to you of their own accord.
For example, creating a podcast that people might find on Spotify.
And it can be outbound, which means you’re applying paid methods to target specific audience demographics in the form of ads.
For example, a PPC campaign on a specific keyword to make sure your website is the first on the SERPs.
Digital Marketing Strategy: The 3 Fundamentals
Behind the success of every tech brand is a powerful digital marketing strategy.
And while trends and ‘hacks’ will come and go, the foundational best practices will always be the same:
Knowing your target audience
Understanding the buyer journey from lead to long-term customer
Aligning your marketing efforts with the buyer journey
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.
What their values are and what truly matters to them
What success looks like for them, in their career and in life
What their priorities are and why
How they speak
What they find funny, impressive, annoying, etc.
The problems or challenges preventing them from success
Their buying patterns
The obstacles in the way of their decisions or purchases
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.
Found the relevant person
Said the relevant thing
Appeared at the relevant time
That’s where your detailed marketing funnel becomes the framework for your digital marketing strategy.
Like this:
Why Does Digital Marketing Matter For Tech Firms?
Digital marketing is essential for tech companies because of:
Market saturation
Long decision-making processes
Knowledgeable customers
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.
Tells a story
Builds a community
Provides education
Leads the way forward
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…
3 Proven Digital Marketing Strategies For Tech Companies
Having a solid tech digital marketing strategy is vital so your marketing team doesn’t end up like this in Q4:
A solid tech digital marketing strategy helps you:
Understand the needs and value drivers: What problems are you solving for your target audience?
Learn the progression of the decision process: Keep in mind that it may not be the same across your resources or products
Establish credibility: Illustrate, don’t tell
Speak to your prospect’s needs, not yours: Link your technology features to their business and how it will benefit
Reflect that your customer’s time has value: Make every communication additive, relevant, and compelling, and speak their language to drive engagement
Before you skim, here’s a TL;DR table for strategies you can use in digital marketing for technology companies:
Strategy
Key Points
Content marketing
Content that builds honest conversations with your prospects
Go beyond the transactional “you need / I sell” mentality
Influencer marketing
Leverage the community that influencers have already built with your target audience
Clearly define your campaign goals and determine your target audience before seeking an influencer
Email and SMS marketing
Personalise your emails and target several audience segments based on their interests
Newsletters and seasonal SMS help you engage customers to become repeat customers
1. Content Marketing
With 7.5 million blog posts published daily on the internet, what counts as high-quality content?
Be seen
Be helpful
Be remembered
High-quality content cuts through the noise by offering inspiration and education to your target audience and supporting their big-picture goals.
For tech companies, quality content means going beyond the problem-solution binary by diving into the honest conversations that your customers think about daily.
Instead of just “4 ways a project management tool helps remote team”, you should cover valuable high-level topics like:
How to manage your remote team
10 ways to motivate remote workers
How to manage multiple projects
7 ways to prevent scope creep in projects
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.
To build authority – case studies and whitepapers
To improve engagement – blogs, video, and social media
To drive customers to take action – website copy and landing pages
You can get better insights on using this strategy from our comprehensive guide on mastering content marketing for B2B tech companies.
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.
Here’s how you can include influencers in your tech digital marketing campaigns and get the best results:
Seek influencers within your niche/industry: Start with micro-influencers (people with 5,000-20,000 followers). Micro-influencer accounts boast a 60% increased engagement rate compared to macro influencers.
Refrain from being too restrictive: Allow talented influencers to craft your campaign in a way that gets their audience to engage best. Don’t forget that it’s a collaboration, and you can get exciting ideas that drive your marketing goals.
Clearly define your campaign goals: Determine your target audience before seeking an influencer makes the process easier.
Key metrics to consider when choosing an influencer include their:
Audience demographics
Engagement ratios
Prices
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.
Costs less than acquiring new customers
Wins you advocates for your brand
Builds trust in your brand and leads to repeat customers spending 67% more than new customers over the long term
One company that does this well is Trello, with email newsletters that contain snippets of their blog articles and redirect you to valuable content:
Announce seasonal discounts and promos
Release news on the latest partner collaborations
Disclose information on new product sales and pre-order opportunities
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.
3 Marketing Trends You Should Know About
Now that you know about strategies that you can apply, let’s look at marketing trends.
Many people look at trends with apprehension and with cause, too. Some marketing trends have failed to generate long-term results and have left many with a big hole in their pockets.
However, a point to remember is that each successful channel and strategy used today started off as a trend.
Here are some current trends that are going to stay and we recommend that you adjust your marketing strategy to include them:
Short-form video content
Value-based values instead of feature-based
The power of the quiz
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…
Easier to remember
Eliminates fluff to deliver bite-sized value bombs
Showcases brand authenticity
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.
Product updates: Announcing new academic-related features
Authentic stories: Collaborating with student influencers to drive engagement
Industry commentary: Correcting commonly misspelt words
Thought leadership: Posting effective alternatives to overused words and phrases
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.
The Smart Move: Turn To A Digital Marketing Agency
Many tech companies try to do it all right off the bat by hiring and creating an in-house marketing team.
But sometimes, you need an expert team of marketers who can jump in and get results quickly.
Focus on what you’re great at and delegate the rest to a digital marketing agency for tech companies that can use its industry knowledge and experience to help you establish your brand.
The best technology marketing agencies help you:
Stay on top of the latest tech digital marketing trends.
Focus on growing your service offering.
Analyse and monitor your marketing campaigns to maximise success.
And if you’d love to get your hands dirty by handling digital marketing yourself, you can access our Digital Marketing Academy for helpful learning resources.
Digital Marketing For Tech Companies That Yields Results
Strategies
Trends
Agencies
From building personas to delivering content, successful digital marketing strategies are always customer-centric. While trying out trends, ensure that you measure the right metrics to analyse the efficacy.
Check out our free Digital Marketing Strategy Template to develop a practical strategy that works for you. And if you need more help with digital marketing, don’t hesitate to schedule a call for us to support you.
If you want to know more about current trends, here’s our take on podcasts and their importance in digital marketing.
Find out how we can help your online presence reach new heights! Get in touch
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