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An Insider’s Guide To Digital Marketing

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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.

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:

  1. Search engine optimisation (SEO): Producing and optimising content to boost a website’s search ranking to reach more people
  2. Pay-per-click advertising: Marketers pay a fee to ensure content or ads reach their desired audience
  3. Content marketing: Publishing and distributing material to engage, educate, and retain your audience
  4. Social media marketing: Attracting and growing an audience by posting organic content and ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit
  5. 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:

  1. Knowing your target audience
  2. Understanding the buyer journey from lead to long-term customer
  3. 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.

That means knowing:

  • 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:

  1. Awareness: Your audience finds out that you exist
  2. Consideration: Prospects begin to evaluate your product or service as an option
  3. Conversion: Customers decide to purchase your product
  4. Loyalty: Customers continue to purchase or renew their contracts
  5. 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.

Your audience will only take action if your marketing has…

  • 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:

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Why Does Digital Marketing Matter For Tech Firms?

Digital marketing is essential for tech companies because of:

  1. Market saturation
  2. Long decision-making processes
  3. 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.

This means going beyond just talking about the features and creating unique content that:

  • 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:

  1. Purchase decisions take longer, especially in B2B, where winning a client requires you to impress multiple decision makers
  2. 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:

  1. Google searches for the best results for their problem, looking for articles with “top X software” and “the best software for X”
  2. Reads articles that relate to their situation, thought-leading insights, whitepapers, and content that gives them a better understanding of the problem
  3. 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?

There are three strong drivers behind successful content marketing for tech companies:

  • 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:

digital marketing for tech companies 1

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

  1. Do the basics really well: Put in the effort to discover and refine your ‘why’, customer personas, and USP
  2. Prioritise research and customer interviews: Use insights from interviews to fuel your content marketing funnel, pillars, topics, and channels
  3. Focus on your customers’ version of success: Create content that helps customers with their big-picture goals and challenges
  4. 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.

Another thing to note is the purpose of various forms of content:

  • 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:

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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.

digital marketing for tech companies 3
Influencer marketing helps your brand skip the initial hustle of getting your target audience’s trust because you leverage the rapport that influencers have built to reach a wider audience.

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.

Newsletters and seasonal SMS help you engage customers to become repeat customers, which:

  • 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:

Besides repurposing content from your blogs and other platforms, you can implement emails into your digital marketing to:

  • 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:

  1. Set a clear CTA on your website to motivate your target audience to sign up for your newsletters
  2. Send a welcome email to set the right tone for the relationship
  3. 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)
  4. Include usage data to show your customers how they use your products and tips, so they can implement it and optimise their processes
  5. 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:

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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.

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:

  1. Stay on top of the latest tech digital marketing trends.
  2. Focus on growing your service offering.
  3. 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

To give you a leg up in effectively executing digital marketing for tech companies, we covered:

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