Marketing Tactics Which Every Tech Company Needs To Use

Like countless other entrepreneurs in 2016, you may have bought into a certain technological niche because you heard that the demand was massive. Despite the reportedly colossal customer pool, you may have found that stimulating your business’s sales was much harder than you expected. Contrary to what some blogs and journals would have you believe, every business needs marketing in some form, and if you’re not putting enough effort and resources into yours then your company is sure to fail. If you want to generate more of a buzz about your tech company, and maximize its potential, here are some exceedingly helpful pointers for you to follow.

First of all, try to write and publish highly informative content at a regular rate. Pretty much every business owner understands the massive influence that blog posts, guides, whitepapers and videos have on their bottom line. Despite this, there are many who simply aren’t publishing often enough, or publishing content of a sub-standard quality. Whether you’re offering specialized services, hardware, software, or anything else in the tech niche, you need to make sure you’re putting out content that both engages and educates your target market. Make sure that you’re answering the common questions they’ll have, assisting them to make the right purchases, and use the tech they’ve purchased to its full extent. Everything you post doesn’t have to have a strict focus on your business. However, it does need to hold some kind of relevance to your industry, and cover a subject that your ideal customer is going to be interested in. Let’s say you were selling cloud services in partnership with an MSP platform.

You should take steps to make sure your content is helpful to those who are thinking of switching to the cloud. You might want to publish a guide for initially setting up, some case studies about cloud security threats and how different businesses overcame them, or a video showing people how to deal with some of the common technical issues tied to the cloud. Sure, this won’t push people to immediately want one of your services. However, it’s more likely to get a good rank in SERPs and attract visitors who are on the fence.

Once you have a steady stream of informative content, you can augment it by withholding some of the best posts in exchange for email addresses. Content is a valuable asset, and no one’s saying that you have to give it away for free. When you email-gate your content, and require an email address for certain content or guides, you can get some valuable access to your target market’s email inboxes. Let’s say you’re running a business that manufactures networking hardware, and write a detailed guide to using it within a certain business. It could be a smart move to restrict this to users who provide a valid email address, company name, name, or all of these. After they’ve entered the details you need, you can set it up so that they’re automatically put on your mailing list, or made the recipient in a drip campaign. Although there’s no guarantees, seeing your other valuable content pop up in their inboxes every now and then can keep your brand at the front of the prospect’s mind, and motivate them to come back to your site and convert.

Another good marketing tactic, which a lot of tech CEOs unfortunately overlook, is contributing content to other websites. The importance of link-building within SEO is something no one can deny. However, the best way to go about it still manages to elude a lot of would-be success stories. If you’re getting sick of spending hours upon hours sending out emails to other business owners, then it’s time to change things up slightly. Often, getting a high-quality link is as simple as giving websites and blogs something that the higher-ups feel they need. That could be an original blog post, or some other resource which they’ll find useful. Let’s say you sell photo processing or editing software. You could pitch a post to a prominent photography or graphic design blog on improving the quality of your images. After slipping in a single, subtly placed link, it could result in hundreds more from photographers and designers who find your software interesting. Like the content on your own site, this has a large impact on the strength of your future SEO efforts. The more links you have going into your website from quality sources, the more authority your site will have in the eyes of the Google crawlers. This will make it easier to rank for the queries your target customers are going to be searching for, which in turn leads to more traffic and conversions. Of course, not all blogs and journals are going to have the same value for link building. To find the ones that really make a difference, you’re going to have to make a lot of pitches and go through a lot of strenuous trial and error. Once you find the best blogs though, and build up a good relationship with their owners, getting leads will become easier than ever.

My next pointer is actually a warning: don’t neglect email marketing! Today, with all the emphasis on cutting-edge SEO techniques, video ads, guerrilla marketing and so on, email campaigns are seen as a little dated by a lot of companies. If you’ve bought into this attitude, then you’ve got a lot to learn! Despite what some people say, email marketing campaigns can often have an incredibly high ROI. The investment taken to set up and maintain an email marketing campaign is incredibly small, and yet the potential for success is massive. This links in closely with my earlier point about withholding your best content for email addresses. Once you’ve built up enough subscribers who want to get updates from your business, you should start to draft a good email marketing strategy that aims for frequent, dedicated content from those subscribers. Educate them, share valuable tips, talk about recent news from within your industry, or send out anything else that will grab their attention. Just make sure that the quality of your content doesn’t slip after you kick-start your campaigning. Emails that are linking your customer base to content that genuinely grabs their interest will generate leads at a healthy and sustainable rate. However, if the quality starts to go downhill, then the emails that keep appearing in their inboxes are just going to come off as spammy. Spam, as I’m sure you’ll agree, sucks! Your customers are already sick of pushy sales emails, so make sure you’re making it a natural part of your content marketing strategy, rather than simply another ad that’s being dangled in front of them. Drip email campaigns are another potentially effective strategy which you should consider using. Rather than the traditional model, these campaigns seek to “drip” pre-written marketing emails to addresses that are a part of a specific contact list. If you were selling software, for example, you might want to start a drip campaign that sends out a series of emails on how to get the most out of your software. This will be immediately valuable to the people on your subscribers list, and will keep them coming back for more and more content.

Finally, consider employing on-site forms to up your number of leads. A lot of tech business owners falsely believe that that they have to rely on a single email address, phone number, or contact form in order to harvest the leads they’re looking for. This is another misunderstanding that has cost countless firms countless dollars! There are a lot of different methods which you can apply that will make potential subscribers or customers want to connect with you. One common method is adding pop-ups to certain pages of a site. While these are immediately attention-grabbing, users can be hostile to them, and find them intrusive or irritating. I’m sure you want to come off as professional and helpful to your target market, rather than bothersome! Your next best option is usually a contact box that’s visible and accessible from every page on your site. This means that people with a genuine interest in your company will always be able to get a hold of you, opt into newsletters and so on. If you’re trying to do some market research, then you may be tempted to put a lot of different fields in this box, such as gender, location and so on. While I see the logic in this, it’s important that you don’t go overboard and chase potential leads away. The modern web user is very impatient. If they see that you’re going to take up too much of your time, then they’re liable to bounce off of your page and onto your closest competitor’s.

I hope that some of the advice in this post has helped you to inject some hard results into your marketing strategy. The world of marketing is multi-faceted and often confusing. However, understanding it is necessary for any business owner who wants to stimulate growth!