IT marketing is an industry that has gained considerable popularity over the course of the last few years as our society shift into the digital age solidified.
This field involves using a number of different strategies and activities to entice your target audience, and convince them to purchase your products or services through a cleverly planned sales funnel.
A big part of this involves drawing attention to your brand by building business relationships that help to provide each customer with a personalized experience.
With the forced competitiveness of this industry, however, many IT marketers are losing this, and are instead focusing on doing whatever it takes to stand out in the industry.
While individualism may initially seem like a good thing in an industry as varied as this one, this attitude has created an industry that become disorganized and unclear in recent years.
It’s difficult to understand where this industry is going due to the different directions many have taken in recent years, slowing progression significantly.
We believe that the way to solve this discrepancy is to streamline IT marketing efforts and return them to their former glory using new and updated marketing techniques that allow everyone the opportunity to succeed without derailing the success of others.
Here are all the reasons why we think this is the best way forwards.
Most IT Marketing Efforts Focus On The Wrong Audience
One of the biggest mistakes IT marketing agencies make is marketing towards the wrong people.
For a long time, many IT marketers will target towards technical decision makers as it has always been assumed that these are the people who will make the ultimate decision when it comes to purchasing a product or service.
Though this may once have worked, this marketing method is outdated and could be hindering your IT marketing efforts more than you think.
Instead, you should be looking at marketing towards the CEO or COO at a company, who are the ones really responsible for making purchasing decisions.
Essentially, marketing agencies need to be willing to adopt or risk struggling to stay on top—especially in a market as competitive as IT.
Many IT Marketers Struggle To Understand Their ROI
Marketers in any industry often have to provide ROI statistics to work out the effectiveness of their strategies over time.
According to Digital Authority Partners, however, up to 40 percent of people say that they are unable to prove the ROI of their IT marketing spend.
In other words, many IT marketers presume that their marketing efforts are successful without being able to provide statistics that support these assumptions.
This often occurs because people within the IT industry complicate things, and layer strategies in such a way that it becomes difficult to separate them when trying to distinguish what has and hasn’t worked.
While this might not initially seem like a big deal, it means that marketers and the IT industry as a whole could be spending lots of unnecessary money on things that aren’t bringing them any—or very little—return.
IT Companies Are Releasing A Lot Of Non-Relevant Content
Content marketing has been considered one of the best ways to market your business as it helps people see the value in your products and services, and can be used to create part of a comprehensive customer retention strategy.
In a bid to overcome competitors and become frontrunners within the industry, however, many IT companies have turned to releasing random content to make them seem ahead of their competition.
In reality, this can seem disorganized, and brings the value of the entire industry down as people are not taking time to think over what is potentially a massive marketing tool.
Not only this, but it also negatively impacts the individual businesses, especially if they are B2B, as many other industries will notice non-valuable content and be put off instead of encouraged to make a purchase.
Instead, companies need to keep things simple and go back to thinking about—and providing—the content that their customers are most interested in.
This shows that the business is clear about who they are marketing towards and are dedicated towards providing top-notch services, instead of trying to generalize and gain the attention of people in many different areas.
IT Marketers Are Afraid Of Adapting To New Methods
Many of the original IT marketing methods have become dated with the development of the digital age, but this doesn’t stop them from going through with them.
Perhaps helped by the difficulty within the industry to identify a ROI, these businesses will focus on the marketing tools that worked for them a few years ago, unwilling to adapt to what works now.
A lot of IT marketers will, for example, focus on long form articles. Not only were long form articles good from a SEO perspective, but for a long time, the IT industries target audience were those who sought out longer solutions to their problems.
We live in a time where social media has lowered our attention spans, however, and this suggests IT marketers need to streamline their services to reflect on the way society currently operates.
In fact, according to industry experts CodeToRank, IT marketers should be focusing more on video to get lots of information across quickly.
This addresses the problem of lowered attention spans from the time we spend on social media, as well as making sure you get the points you want to get across about your products or services in a way that is likely to interest your target audience.
More importantly, IT marketers should adopt a data-driven marketing approach. According to ComboApp, data-driven marketing refers to the process of deploying analytics strategies at scale which allow IT marketers to really get a 360 view of their potential buyers. That includes how they interact with a website, what they do next, retargeting them after they leave their website and more.
IT marketing without analytics cannot succeed. You cannot optimize what you don’t track.
IT Marketers Forget About Customer Retention
Something that has been overlooked for several years within the IT marketing industry is customer retention strategies.
According to MobileTweaks, the vast majority of an IT marketers budget currently goes towards raising brand awareness and attracting new clients, with almost nothing going on retaining the customers they already have.
This is a big mistake, as customer retention strategies are the way IT marketers can show that their products or services have value.
It also helps to remind previous customers of why they chose you for your IT support in the past, reminding them of past value in a way that may convince them to make another purchase at some point in the future.
Essentially, the shift away from customer retention is leading to a lot more companies failing to continue growing month on month without spending considerably larger amount of money on marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
It’s clear to see that the phenomenal growth seen by the IT industry in recent years has led to some less than ideal circumstances that are greatly impacting many businesses ability to succeed.
Including everything from not knowing how to create strategies that provide clear analytics to reflect on to sticking to old marketing methods, it’s clear to see that the IT marketing industry needs to be streamlined in order to return to its former glory.
This is a process that will take time, but with simple solutions in most cases, it’s definitely something the industry as a whole could begin working towards today.