Marketing Technology to Businesses is Different…

Marketing technology is fundamentally different than marketing other types of products. When your prospect is another company, it gets even more complicated. Companies can spend anywhere from thousands to millions on a single purchasing decision — creating a unique sales cycle, with unique marketing challenges. You can’t take the type of marketing that applies to soda, washing machines or cars and expect the same techniques to work. Here at B&J, we focus almost exclusively on technology clients, and have cataloged a few key differences that makes tech marketing special:

Technology is complicated
No question about it, technology can be confusing. Many products and services have dozens, if not hundreds, of features. Enter Solution Marketing, the overused description for rolling all those features up into a compelling message about “solving your problems.” Marketers have to not only understand what all the features do, but what business problems they work together to solve.

The audience is sophisticated
The phrase “bleeding edge” comes from the tech world, with good reason. There is no more overexposed audience out there — tech gurus are reading industry news, consuming RSS, participating in online community, twittering, blogging, IMing, you name it. Not only do you have to make your tech interesting, you’ve got to insert yourselves artfully into this virtual fire hose of daily information.

Sales cycles are long and require many people to make a decision
No company drops a few hundred thousand without thinking about it first. As tech marketer, you have to survive six months of committee meetings before anyone mentions making a purchase. Consider this: the average tech deal requires, at a minimum, approvals from the IT Implementer (the guy/gal who has to install, configure and support), the Line of Business Manager (who has the business problem they need to solve) and the Economic Decision Maker (he who holds the budget.) You have to market to all of them, and they all care about different things.

Sales people ultimately close the deal
At the end of the day, most tech solutions can’t be bought online with a credit card. You’ve got to settle on licensing terms, negotiate an SLA, bundle installation services, and so forth. That takes feet on the street, and as a marketer, all you can do is put qualified leads into your sales teams’ hands. The key is to avoid sending garbage, but keep the volume high enough to keep everyone busy — solid qualification rules and processes are a must.

It’ll be interesting to see how the marketing of tech products evolves. With advent of SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings like SalesForce.com and others, it becomes less about getting the big upfront sale, and more about turning a free trial into a long term customer. Altogether a different kind of challenge…