How to overcome 5 common tech marketing challenges

Working within the B2B tech industry comes with many positives and can be incredibly rewarding. From offering niche services, to implementing new, innovative products, your hard work helps better the businesses you serve. Although there are some great factors that come with working in the tech industry, there are also some challenges you’re faced with. One challenge in particular being for tech marketers, who are faced with the difficulty and complexity of effectively promoting and advertising their services and businesses.

In this blog, we identify 5 key challenges tech marketers face, and potential solutions you could explore to better your business marketing.

COMMUNICATING VALUE TO BUYERS

It’s important to remember to not focus on how great the solution is, its function or its features. By pushing the sale, tech marketers are failing to focus on the problems that the solution is actually solving. You need to translate the unique value of the products or services you offer into a compelling proposition to your buyers. In other words, you need to sell the ‘sizzle’ not the ‘sausage’. To do this, you need to invest time into market research to ensure you know who your target audience is, or more specifically, the decision makers and key influencers.

55% of industry leaders report that multiple departments influence IT spending

Once you’ve established who your target audience is, we recommend you create user personas. By creating a persona, you can understand your audience on a deeper level, and most importantly, their pain points. When you understand their pain points, you can understand how to communicate with them and adapt your content according to what resonates with them best.

CREATING APPEALING CONTENT

51% of tech content marketers say that creating content that appeals to multi-level roles within the target audience is one of their top challenges

By creating personas to fully understand your audience, you’re more likely to be able to create the right type of content to appeal to them. A campaign can be a great way for you to connect to your audience, and can be adapted to different target audiences and their pain points. 

When this is backed up by good messaging and storytelling, you can really engage your audience and get your values and USPs across. To understand the importance of storytelling within marketing, check out our blog, the art of storytelling in B2B marketing. Another way to ensure you are appealing to your audience is by putting yourself in their shoes; are their pain points really being answered?

Tech is niche, and constantly changing, so if you’re struggling to establish your audience, their pain points, or how to create appealing content, you could outsource experts such as a marketing agency to help. This means you can have several experts by your side who work within the field of marketing every day to give your business the marketing help it needs. 

62% of technology marketers say their organisation outsources at least one content marketing activity. 

STANDING OUT FROM THE COMPETITION 

The tech industry is constantly growing, with new products and services joining the market every day. This can make it harder for you, and many other tech and IT businesses, to differentiate what you do from the rest. The competitive landscape continuously moulds to fit the cracks of opportunity, so marketing for tech companies needs to offer something different than the average B2B marketer. 

The link between your products or services and how you market them play a big role in the success of your business. For example, you could offer a product or service that’s completely different from the competition, but if it isn’t marketed correctly, it can slip through the cracks. Repetitive, jargon-filled content isn’t going to justify your products or services and the pain points it’s going to solve for your target audience. By developing a strong brand identity, it can have a big influence on your audience. To make yourself stand out from the rest, doing something like a content audit can help you understand where you need to improve. A competitor analysis can also help you see what’s common within the tech market, and how you can make yourself stand out amongst other brands.

81% of Top Technology Performers agree that their content differentiates them from the competition.

CREATING URGENCY FOR TECH ADOPTION

Technology is incredibly impactful on businesses. Whether it’s reducing costs in some areas, or streamlining processes, it can have a huge impact. However, businesses face challenges when implementing digital transformation initiatives.

In a survey carried out by Academia, complacency affects more companies than any other organisational barrier cited in our survey, with almost 40% of respondents saying that lack of urgency/no sense of burning platform is the biggest single obstacle to digital transformation.

Who in particular within the business believes there isn’t an urgency for digital transformation plays a huge role in tech adoption. Academia found that the further down the organisational ladder you go, staff were less likely to be satisfied with the pace of digital transformation. Meanwhile, a third of C-level executives and board members, and 25% of managers, think the pace of change is about right.

As covered in challenge one, this is why it’s incredibly important to identify who the decision makers and key influencers are. It’s evident more high-level staff within business struggle to adopt, which is why it’s important to create tech content that addresses their needs and understands their behaviours, as it can help expedite their decision.

MEASURING AND DEMONSTRATING ROI

When you’re creating content to put out into the world, it’s important to know how it’s perceived or performing. 

Is it performing well? Does it appeal to your target audience? What content is bringing you the best results?

The best way to ensure you’re not missing opportunities within your B2B strategy and negatively affecting your ROI is by tracking your metrics. In fact, those who measure content performance say it does a good job of demonstrating the return on their content marketing investment.

50% of technology marketers say that one of their top marketing priorities is data management and analytics.

Have any of these 5 challenges affected your business? Are you struggling to overcome them? If you need some help or simply don’t know where to start, get in touch with us and one of our experts will be happy to chat about next steps.