
1. Inbound Marketing
It’s no secret that inbound marketing has been the most popular and effective marketing strategy in recent years. Yet, arguably it is even more important and prevalent in technology companies, with key industry players like HubSpot, Moz, and KISSMetrics are just a few examples of those who have a strong inbound marketing presence. In technology companies, you are not selling physical products, and so gaining customer’s trusts can be difficult. This is why establishing yourself as a thought expert or leader of your industry is extremely important.
- Content Development
Inbound marketing is all about consistently publishing relevant, high-quality content. So, content development is the core of the overall inbound marketing strategy.
Again, this can be a complex process on its own, but to start, your content should target relevant keywords with enough search volume, and should have sufficient length. How long? According to Backlinko, content that ranked well on Google averaged at 1,890 words.
- Promoting Your Content
In inbound marketing, SEO is the primary way to promote your content, gaining exposure and reach by ranking well on Google or other search engines.
Besides SEO, we can also use other approaches like social media and influencer marketing to promote our content. You might want to check this guide by Moz here to help you further.
- Lead Capture
Your content reader won’t bring much value to your business unless you can effectively capture them as leads. This is why we should have proper CTAs and lead capture forms. The most common practice here is to offer something valuable, including downloadable content, in exchange for the audience’s email address.
2. Influencer Marketing
While we have discussed how content marketing can be effective in promoting your content, influencer marketing can also be effective in promoting your actual product or service. In this saturated digital world, it is obviously very hard to get your voice heard amidst all the noises. However, influencers -with their loyal followers- can pass that message effectively.
- Sometimes a personal, direct email is all it will take.
- Engage in their conversations (their blog comments, social media conversations, etc.) You can ask relevant questions and provide answers
- Link their content within yours, and notify them
- Offering incentives is certainly a common approach, but make sure to follow the rules to avoid future issues
- Don’t chase for backlinks, aim to get their trust
- Consider micro-influencers, which can be effective.
3. Marketing Automation
In a technology company, the length of the sales cycle can vary greatly depending on many different factors: the complexity of your product, the customer behaviors, and especially, the price tag. If your product costs a mere $10 a month, the sales cycle will be shorter compared to a software costing, say, $1,000 a month. This is even more prevalent if you are a B2B business: the more expensive (and complex) your product, the more decision makers will be involved in the purchase process, which will translate into a longer sales cycle. Yet, both slow and fast sales cycles have their own difficulties in relation to lead nurturing and lead qualification processes: in a fast cycle, you don’t have that much time to qualify and nurture each prospect. In a slow cycle, the process can be time-consuming and expensive. This is where a marketing automation tool can help: automating the lead nurturing and lead qualifying processes so you can focus on the proper, qualified leads. You will need to choose marketing automation tools that also provide a CRM system for this purpose. You can also use marketing automation tools to start a drip campaign or automated email campaign, a very effective marketing campaign that can target the various stages of the buyer’s journey. There are many different marketing automation tools available, so choose the right one(s) according to your needs, business model, and marketing activities.4. Retargeting or Remarketing
Remarketing or often also known as retargeting, is essentially showing your advertisements to audience who have visited your site, or those who have triggered specific actions like searched a specific keyword or visited your competition’s sites, among others. Remarketing can be more effective than usual advertising because the message is targeted to those who have shown interests to your brand, or at least, your industry/niche. The main platforms for remarketing are Facebook Ads and Google AdWords, both feature snippet codes generated by the platforms, which we can put on our site. This snippet code (commonly referred as ‘retargeting pixel’) will capture the user data on your site, and use this data to target your ads. Here are several things to consider in a remarketing campaign:- The more specific your targeting is, the more you can maximize cost-efficiency
- You should maintain the proper frequency. This is not solely to maintain cost-efficiency, but to avoid annoying your audience.
- You should have one landing page for each campaign, and optimize each of them according to the different purposes. For example, you might have one remarketing campaign for upsells, and another one to engage previous blog readers.