When it comes to popular marketing tactics, every industry has to make their own way and figure out what works for their unique combination of products, services, and customer preferences.
Some industries do better with lifestyle type content that will help them live a healthier, more efficient, and fun life while others prefer the technical how-to guides that include videos or pictures on how to handle the products being sold.
The key to inbound marketing is to engage your audience with information that is useful to them exactly when they're thinking about hiring a service like your or buying a type of product that you sell.
But what about tech companies? It's much more difficult to make an engaging lifestyle article or how-to video about software and even high-end equipment is a bit complex to explain in detail to the majority of your audience.
While learning from popular inbound marketing formats that have worked for other industries, tech companies each need to design a custom inbound marketing strategy to make your products and services more relatable and easy to talk about.
Where to Start
One of the biggest hurdles in tech company inbound marketing is knowing where to start. In most cases, you'll start by explaining what the product is but as many technicians have experienced, even the words used to describe your product may, initially, be over the heads of your target audience.
Explaining that your product is a secure HIPAA compliant cloud-based web platform for data collection and analysis sounds, at best, like a lot of Buzz-word techno-babel. Instead, start with what your product does for clients.
"This platform makes it easy to store and analyze your customer data. The results can be seen through the online dashboard"
That statement is a lot easier to understand because it starts with what your client knows about: their customer data, and offers them something useful: analysis on a dashboard.
It not only meets the client at their safely assumed understanding, it also highlights the value of your product in one quick and easy statement rather than a paragraph of complex technical definitions.
What the Customer Wants
Every product has a niche, a need in the customer that the product or service can fill. Hiring services, for instance, fill the need of companies to quickly fill positions without filtering through thousands of applicants on their own. CRMs fill the need of sales and customer service reps to keep track of their customers.
What need does your tech company fill? Document management or cybersecurity? Perhaps something unique to a particular industry like logistics software for vehicle fleets.
If you want your inbound marketing to both reach customers when they want your product and appeal to their desire for improvement, write articles and make movies about how your product fulfills customer needs.
This way, when a customer searches for solutions (using keyword phrases) to these particular needs, they will find your articles and the inbound marketing will have served its purpose.
Use-Cases are Always Engaging
Another great take on the same angle is to go with real-world use-cases. Tell the stories of previous clients or situations you've heard of from other professionals and how your product either did or could have helped each person.
The more realistic detail you include, the closer your target audience will relate to the characters, companies, and needs in the story.
Use-case articles can even be fictional examples as long as they are realistic and help your audience understand how your product can be used to their benefit, the problems it solves, and the benefits that can be gained from your solutions.
Highlighting the Value of Partnership
The vast majority of tech companies work primarily with B2B services, as there is always a call for better and more advanced business data management systems.
Even if your company also sells smaller packages to consumers, a partnership with a local company is often one of the better opportunities you can create for an up and coming tech company.
Always keep one eye open for partners and consider writing a few of your inbound marketing articles to highlight the benefits you could bring to potentially profitable partnerships.
From vendor deals to joint marketing campaigns, don't forget that you may have two forms of client, private customers and business partners that pay you.
Make Video About Real-World Applications
There are two ways to make a video for a software-based tech company. You can either capture your screen for a UI-tour How-To video or you can take the camera around a few venues that use your software and show off the efficiency you can offer in the real world.
The first option definitely has its uses and you will absolutely get a certain number of views just from clients who need a quick guide through your software, but these are practically documentation rather than promotional assets.
For content you want to get popular and possibly even go viral, keep the camera on real objects and people using and benefitting from your products.
Inbound marketing a tech company can be done in many different ways, often depending on your industry and specific target audience.
If you're talking to sysadmins and programmers primarily, tech jargon and process details could be exactly the expert edge you need but if your target audience is closer to the general public or non-IT industry professionals, the best way to market is by relating what your software does to its effect on the real world.
For more great tips on how to inbound market your tech company, contact us today!
