How A Successful Marketing Strategy Can Accelerate Buying Decisions For Technology Consumers

In the race to market and sell the latest technologies, Predictable Marketing has established that it’s not how much you say, but how effectively you can target key customers with relevant and clear messaging that will generate genuine leads and close a deal.

When purchasing technology, outside of renewing a service or subscription, customers are selecting something they hope will ultimately change an aspect of their personal or working life for the better. It therefore makes sense that your customers will seek to inform themselves before buying. This creates an opportunity for tech companies, to help their customers in their research by providing relevant, helpful content.

Many companies over-create content, to cover as many bases as possible. This approach however leaves sales teams and customers confused or the content too focused on the products, solutions or services and not providing the answers the customer is seeking. It is essential to create a content plan that takes the customer through the journey of awareness, research, building trust and making a buying decision.

Start by creating a profile of your existing customers and those you wish to target, diving into their needs for your product, level of understanding and what implication purchasing from you might bring. At Predictable Marketing, we encourage our customers to actually print out pictures of their target personas and define their personalities. From here they can then create content with these customers in mind. Review your content from this customers perspective and approve the content only if you feel it would add value to this prospect.

Establishing A Need

The first step is to create a creating a profile of potential or existing customers based on what they might be looking to achieve. The first question to explore is why people should implement a new technology? There are many reasons potential customers are looking at new technology; they might believe it will make their workflow easier, save them money, improve customer experience, meet compliance objective, grow their business without increasing costs or beating competition.

An example of this can be seen in the number of companies that are investing in automated processes to save their workforce time which can be better spend within the business. Knowing your customer’s needs and expectations can then help you select what aspects of your technology you want to highlight first to drive interest.  Your marketing at this stage should resonate with the needs of your customer or their business, showing them how your software offers a solution to the problem they have highlighted. You can get this message across most effectively with infographics or a short demonstrational video.

Further Research

Once the need for change has been highlighted, potential customers will now research the options available to them. A marketing team must focus on which unique selling points are going to appeal to which customer profile and what platform to use to reach them. If a customer can’t find this key information it will trigger a knock-on delay in a purchase or result in them looking to another supplier.

This is where a marketing team needs to have materials ready that will best help consumers understand your product. Through the use of informative content like whitepapers, datasheets and demos customers can get a real feeling for your product and what it brings to the market.  After researching and accepting the need for change, your customer is now ready to practically think about how the change will be executed. At this point, when the customer is thinking about how they can implement a new technology, your marketing can move to its next stage, starting to talk about the pricing options and levels of support available.

Making a Decision 

Now that you have a very engaged lead you can work to bring the sale over the line. Customers will make the final decision based on the credibility and trust you have built up with them, and that you have built up with previous customers. This is where you produce materials that demonstrate previous success stories, these can include testimonials, business case studies.

Interactive demonstrations of your product, such as in webinars and workshops, are also good to give customers a hands-on experience of your software and answer any remaining questions. Many times, your customer will now be working to convince their bosses or stakeholders to invest within your software. It is therefore important that you make yourself easy to contact to field any questions they might come back to you with or to provide support to build a business care for other stakeholders in the company. Marketing can help by creating easy to use contact forms and chat functions on your website and through emailing and engaging regularly with a client.

Start Now

Once you have planned your customer’s journey and created content for each stage it’s time to sit down and relax…..not!  This is where the optimisation process begins. Marketers should continuously monitor feedback in terms of engagement rates and responses to calls to actions and make changes based on the data collected throughout the customer journey. For example, if you can see most visitors drop off at your landing page it’s time to make some changes to it!

Your new campaigns and content must focus on; presenting and addressing the need customer have expressed an interest in. The language of your campaign is also key to selling your technology, too technical and you will confuse buyers but too simple and you will undersell yourself and your product.

Once you have a content piece that connects with customers and you are getting the responses you want, consider scaling assets.  This involves creating similar pieces of content with differing variations for social channels or addressing different audience personas. This ability to have similar materials within a campaign is essential to marketing each unique selling point effectively across multiple channels.

Armed with a new sales strategy, back up with a solid marketing campaign, you can now enact your plans and target new customers, achieving greater results. Remember however to update plans, rework content and not be afraid to delete elements as your technology and its customers evolve. This process of re-focusing your marketing and sales plans will be time-consuming initial but it will soon pay dividends as you develop a deeper understanding of your customer’s behaviours.

If you would like to talk more about how an effective marketing strategy could help accelerate your customer’s buying decision, please get in touch.