Tech marketing strategy and planning for IT and high tech leaders

Today, tech marketers and managers advocate for IT and high tech both internally in their businesses and externally to their target markets. We’ve got the marketing tools and training you need.

Looking to strengthen your technology company’s marketing strategy? As marketers, we are all striving to apply data and customer insights to our marketing activities. But in the IT and high tech sector, with competition at an all-time high, this approach is absolutely critical. Our tried and tested tech marketing solutions support IT and high tech marketing professionals to plan, manage, and optimize their marketing strategy, and win more customers.

Why invest in strategic marketing for your tech company?

If you haven’t already got an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, now is the time to develop your marketing to compete in the competitive, growing, IT and high tech marketplace.

As McKinsey found in their UK B2B COVID-19 survey, the technology, media and telecom industry suffered the least impact on the demand for products and services. This sector also maintained a strong operational capacity.

So, it’s up to tech marketers and managers now to protect and grow their market shares. We’ve got marketing tools and training to empower you and your team to create a winning marketing strategy and boost your marketing skills in the activities that you know will drive results.

The RACE Framework for IT and high technology marketing strategy

Our popular RACE Framework gives tech marketers a structure to plan, manage and optimize their marketing strategies. This step-by-step approach to optimizing your marketing activities incorporates the effective use of data, metrics, and team performance management.

With the RACE Framework, you can keep up to date with the latest trends and innovations in your sector, opportunities, threats, and competitor benchmarking. So, you can acquire and retain high-value customers across your key markets.

The RACE Framework briefly consists of 25 marketing activities integrated across the five stages of the customer lifecycle – plan, reach, act, convert and engage. Find out more.

Tech marketing to get ahead of the competition and grow your market share

In a competitive environment such as high tech and IT marketing, you will likely already be benchmarking your success against competitors. But are you sure you’re benchmarking the most appropriate metrics and using them effectively to optimize your marketing strategy?

Our RACE Framework allows you to get into the nitty-gritty of benchmarking your marketing activity. It’s no surprise, then, that one of our most popular modules in the RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path is ‘competitor benchmarking with RACE’. By completing this module, Smart Insights business members are upskilling themselves and their teams to master their competitor benchmarking.

How to make your benchmarking actionable

Online competitor benchmarking should feed into your strategic analysis for creating plans, not an end in itself. Our dedicated benchmarking training guides you through four steps to an actionable benchmarking process:

1. Ensuring you’re clear about what you are benchmarking and why: You need to have a purpose, why are you prepared to invest the time or expense? What is it that you want to improve?
2. Recommending relevant insight tools that drive performance: We will show tools that can be used for comparison and improvement.
3. Maintaining benchmarking as an ongoing process: Repeated as part of regular improvements to your website, search, and social media marketing rather than a task that you do once per year or less frequently.
4. Linking to action: As with all situation analysis, if a report sits on your virtual shelf, it was a waste of time. You need to prioritize actions through a SWOT and then review whether your actions are working by reviewing the KPIs through analytics.

Become a Smart Insights business member for support on competitor benchmarking and other crucial marketing activities to build a strong marketing strategy for your IT and high tech business.

We’ve got ready-made templates, reports, and analytical tools to support you in benchmarking and performing data-driven optimization of all the key touchpoints in your customers’ journeys. Find out more.

Our recommended marketing tools and training to grow your technology marketing company

We’ve got marketing solutions to help you grow your business whilst upskilling yourself and your team. All our marketing training is integrated across the RACE Framework, which is proven to generate growth, giving you peace of mind that your marketing strategy is efficient and effective.

How to put your tech products and services in front of the right customers

Our ‘select media investments’ module, in the reach dashboard of our RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path, covers three uses of media to reach more customers – paid, owned, and earned media.

• Paid media gives options for more specific targeting, for example, through lookalike audiences for prospecting or retargeting which can remind previous contacts to follow up on their interest.
• Owned media activities like blogging or email marketing activities can achieve goals of brand awareness, preference, and familiarity, but some businesses do not make full use of this.
• Earned media activities like influencer outreach and public relations can help drive awareness at a relatively low cost compared to advertising, yet they need a dedicated approach.

Interestingly, each tech marketing strategy will utilize these media slightly differently. Our marketing solutions incorporate a range of reach strategies, tactics, and support, empowering tech marketing managers to invest to achieve their goals.

Whether you’re a tech startup, SME, or a multinational corporation, reach will always be a crucial activity for funnel filling, for both B2B and B2C. However, as companies grow and their marketing strategy matures, priorities will naturally shift. That’s why our strategic marketing tools and templates provide practical and actionable marketing solutions to drive the results you need.

How to convert more tech customers

Use our advanced module, ‘conversion optimization’ to ensure your testing (simple A/B tests or complex multivariate tests, depending on your objectives) is helping you boost your conversions. The key to this is asking the right questions, as we explore below:

Why do people come to your site?

Try to understand if visitors are casually browsing or in buying mode. Understanding customer behaviour on your site will have an obvious impact on what you might expect to achieve and how you might set about achieving it.

Where do customers fall out in the on-site conversion journey?

Analyzing dropout rates at key steps in the on-site customer journey using Analytics.
Why do customers drop out at a particular stage?

What stopped potential customers from buying?

This could range across anything from a site usability/functionality issue to a perception issue on the part of the customer e.g. price checking or poor reviews from other customers.

In its most basic form, conversion rate testing means using customer data to manage and optimize your marketing channels and platforms. Although it sounds simple, the key to utilizing testing to improve your marketing activities is ensuring that you run effective tests, and that you make changes in line with your findings.

Our ready-made conversion optimization tools and templates keep our Smart Insights business members on track to meet their KPIs in all aspects of customer conversion. For tech marketing in particular, these resources are an absolute gold mine since demand is high for technology products and services. The customers are there, but is your marketing strategy working hard enough to convert them for you? Find out now.