Inbound Marketing Guide For B2B Technology

Technology is always innovating. It thrives in a changing environment. It is thought-provoking, creative, logical, and methodical. In the same way, inbound marketing is innovating online marketing, offering the greatest opportunity for success. And when you combine Tech firms and inbound marketing, innovation is bound to happen. In this article, we explore the different factors when it comes to marketing your tech offerings with various inbound service offerings.

Content

What Is Inbound Marketing?
An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Technology
Email Marketing For Technology Firms
CRM For IndustrialTechnology Firms
Mobile Marketing & Chatbots For Technology Firms

Though daunting at first, an inbound approach allows technology firms to market to decision-makers made up of CxOs, ICT techs, purchasing agents, and sector managers. These individuals are always on the hunt for complex and often expensive products and services to meet their needs.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

The inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.

Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.

The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:

1. Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
2. Engage: presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you. 
3. Delight: providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchases. 

These strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience in an inbound way. Below, you’ll see there are specific strategies for each inbound method of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to keep your flywheel spinning and help your business grow better.

An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Technology Firms

Customer expectations are changing rapidly and technology companies – from IT firms and MSPs (Managed Services Providers) to SaaS – need to evolve their marketing approach to stay relevant and competitive. 

To meet the shifting customer expectations in the technology industry, companies need to switch to a customer-centric marketing approach that focuses on building relationships that not only leads to conversion but also improve customer retention.

The inbound marketing methodology, with its emphasis on engaging customers throughout the entire buying cycle, is particularly suited for the technology industry.

Inbound marketing strives to:

• Position your brand as a thought leader and trusted authority to build trust.
• Show up in the right place at the right time with the right message to stay top of mind – e.g., on search results or social media feeds.
• Capture high-quality leads by getting prospects to “self-identify” their roles, needs, and interest levels.
• Nurture leads by delivering targeted content that engages and educates prospects, moving them along the buyer’s journey toward conversion.
• Leverage customer data and tracking technologies to increase the ROI of your marketing spend.

Email Marketing For Technology

Email marketing has the highest lead conversion rate of any inbound marketing tactic. Many technology companies spend a lot of time and money on email marketing, yet they don't get the business results they hoped for. They buy lists of target contacts and routinely email information on their products and services and get precious few responses. The most successful tech companies use email as a pillar of their marketing strategy. In this industry, you have to stay on top of the latest trends and meet customer expectations.

There are three hard-and-fast boxes that need to be ticked when using email marketing for technology firms:

1. Personalisation: Segment your customers and clients from the start and create content for those segments.
2. Automation: This step in the process is about using powerful tools that help you accomplish more in less time.
3. Experimentation: The best way to run a split test is by picking one part of your email that you want to change, making those changes, and sending each variation of the mail to sections of your audience.

The tech industry is changing fast, so we see many of these email trends evolve before other sectors. Keep these tips and mind, and you’ll have no problem ending the financial year with a highly engaged email list and more sales.

Hubspot CRM For Technology

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing a company’s relationships and interactions with all of its customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

A CRM system gives everyone — from sales, customer service, business development, recruiting, marketing, or any other line of business — a better way to manage the external interactions and relationships that drive success. A CRM tool lets you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location — and make information about every customer interaction available to anyone at your company who might need it.

Gartner predicted that by 2021, CRM would be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. Gartner was right. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability.

Why Choose Hubspot?

While there are many excellent CRM software programs, the HubSpot CRM for technology firms is excellent—and it is FREE! The HubSpot CRM automatically saves and logs voicemails and emails, as well as any buyer interactions that have taken place in the interim. With the right context at hand, salespeople can tailor their follow-ups based on what the buyer’s done and what’s already been said. Learn more about this powerful tool and start your industrial inbound marketing for free.

Mobile Marketing & Chatbots For Technology Firms

What is Mobile Marketing?

Smartphones are changing the way your target audience and customers engage with your brand. People visit your website on their phones, open your emails, and buy from your store through their phones. Today, 89% of mobile time is spent on apps while the remaining 11% is spent on websites. This is the number one reason why 71% of marketers say that mobile marketing is core to their business, while 68% of brands have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

Why is mobile marketing so important today? You may not fully be aware, but let’s explore some of the reasons to pay undivided attention to it:

• Reach: When reach is a concern, there’s nothing easier than a mobile phone to reach your target audience.
• Personal: A mobile phone is a personal device. According to a research study, 91% of mobile phone users keep their phone within one arm’s reach throughout the day.
• Instant: If you have to send a message instantly to your customers, what medium would you choose? Mobile. 

The Ins & Outs Of Chatbots In Marketing

Velocity Media specialises in both website-based and WhatsApp chatbots. 

Undoubtedly, businesses have been forced to adapt to a new type of communication, in order to provide a seamless buyer's journey and an excellent experience. They need to be present cross-channel and cross-device, in order to always be available to solve customer queries and questions. That is not always easy due to human limitations. And that is exactly where chatbots come in.

Chatbots are mobile optimised and they provide high user engagement. And users seem to have developed a great liking for them, signalling that they are here to stay!

• 56 per cent of people who would rather message than call customer service and an estimation
• 85 per cent of customer interactions to be handled without a human in a few years
• At least 30 per cent of consumers are enthusiastic about chatbots 

Customers want answers and most of the time, they want them NOW. It’s common after all in the age of instant gratification. Chatbots can instantly manage customer requests with accuracy. To add to this, their demand by customers has increased. By integrating them into your strategy you ensure that customers get the instant assistance they desire, which leads to an increase in satisfaction.