Forgive the pun, but high tech marketing is highly competitive. The stakes are high. Your company is selling highly complex products and solutions, working with a very long sales cycle, and million of dollars are at stake with each contract won or lost. You also probably have a dozen competitors making your life more difficult as well.
Telling your company’s story, how your product and solution is unique and differentiated from your competitors, and how your expertise and offer can help your target audience gain a competitive advantage are all difficult tasks and require a lot of skill.
But although everything seems complex when it comes to marketing for high tech companies, there are some marketing fundamentals that MUST be kept in mind in order to properly execute and drive the highest ROI possible.
- Be clear with your messaging. What does your technology do? Why will it help the customer? Why should they care? Where do you stand in the industry? Why should they believe you? Are others using this technology? If so, how are they using it? How does it work?
- Make sure you’re targeting the right audience. Everyone isn’t an ITDM (IT decisions maker), and you have to provide messaging for more than the developers who may use your products and solutions. Companies buying High Tech have teams of decision makers, and you have to address what each person on that team is concerned about.
- Educate with a story. Get beyond the technical specs and tell people a story of how there’s a problem that they have (whether they know it or not) and how solving that problem will help grow their business or take some sort of business pain away (staying in compliance, streamlining processes, saving money, mitigating risk, etc.).
- Don’t go straight for the sale. Even the largest companies with the best brand recognition have to capture prospect’s awareness, educate them on their products and solutions, get them into the consideration phase, and get them into the sales cycle. For businesses it might take months, and for governmental agencies it might take years. No matter who it is these prospects need to be nurtured, kept engaged, and reminded of how great you are.
- Have a website and landing pages designed to deliver on what the prospect is looking for. If you’re doing awareness-level marketing, then serve up high level educational content. Don’t even ask for a piece of contact information yet. This turns people off and sends them looking for information they are expecting for free. IF you’re being valuable early in their journey then you’ll position yourself as an expect and become their go to resource. At this point you’ve all but won their business. If they’re searching for a specific solution or brand or model number then give them the information they’re looking for and ask them for their contact information. IF the prospect is somewhere in the middle then give them something of value, like a research paper or 3rd party report to educate themselves and position yourself as a reliable solution compared to your competitors.
- Make sure you are tracking everything. Impressions, clicks, target audiences, traffic sources, conversion rates, the amount of time between a form fill or phone call and when those leads are contacted, the conversion rates between lead -> MQL and MQL-> SQL, etc. If you’re not tracking, you’re guessing.
This is where Lift Digital comes in. We have decades of experience marketing for High Tech OEMs and their channel partners. We understand the financials models behind high tech marketing, the marketing lifecycle, product marketing, the sale lifecycle, and how all of these things must be working in concert with the brand in order to deliver a Leadership-pleasing return on investment. Everyone has goals to achieve every quarter, so the pipeline must stay filled while opportunities make their way through the process. Keeping things as simple as possible, focusing on the results, and always iterating so that there is incremental improvement is what we do and how we can help meeting your stretch goals.
Please contact us so that we can begin our partnership.
