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Overcoming the Biggest Challenge to Marketing Innovative Technology
John Himes
November 17, 2023
How do I show businesses that they need a technology if they don’t yet know it exists?
Whether you’re a scrappy startup or part of an innovation team at a leading enterprise, educating potential customers about your tech is a huge challenge. You’ve developed a solution for a real problem, but nobody is looking for it because they don’t even know it exists!
What you need is demand generation.
You want to start selling your product and generating revenue, but you need to hold your horses.
In the short term you can create a few case studies to support sales, but if you want long-term growth you’re going to need to think about generating demand through brand awareness.
Some definitions:
- Demand generation is educating potential customers on their problems. It starts the process of showing how your solution can help.
- Brand awareness is about building positive associations with your company.
This is foundational work. It’s not the beautiful bay windows or granite countertops that home buyers salivate over; it’s the structural integrity upon which everything else is built.
Content marketing builds brand awareness
When most people think of marketing, they think of outbound marketing. Namely, they think of advertising: interrupting potential buyers to show off a product. If this wasn’t effective, Google wouldn’t have brought in $224B in ad revenue in 2022.
The caveat is that advertising is most effective for established brands.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is a better tool for building brand awareness and generating demand. Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) let you talk about your customers’ problems first and foremost, and that’s what’s going to get the clicks.
Ask yourself: what is my customer typing in their search bar?
Think about the article that you’re reading right now. Are you struggling to get the word out about an unknown technology? I’ve created this content for people like you because I understand your problem and I want to give you value by talking through it with you.
A common mistake is getting ahead of yourself and talking about your product and its features. Content marketing isn’t a pitch deck.
For instance, I’m not going to talk about my specific content writing techniques. I’m not going to talk about my packages, my strategy, my success stories, or anything else related to me. That’s because nobody cares at this point.
It can be hard to hear that nobody cares about the features you’ve been grinding hard to develop. But, at least when it comes to brand building, it’s the truth. Nobody cares.
What your customers care about is themselves, their businesses, and the problems they’re facing. They want someone to (a) recognize that struggle, and (b) give them something useful RIGHT NOW that they don’t have to pay for or jump through hoops to access.
The B2B technology buyer’s journey
Let’s dive a little further into your customer’s psyche. Conventional marketing wisdom teaches us that buyers typically go through a three-step process:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
If you want to learn more about customer journeys, check out this article from HubSpot. For now, we’re going to focus on awareness and how the B2B tech buyer’s journey is different from other markets.
The most obvious difference is the number of stakeholders involved and the length of the sales cycle. According to Gartner, “The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers.” They also found that “77% of B2B buyers state that their latest purchase was very complex or difficult.”
We also need to think about what “awareness” even means when applied to innovative technology. It’s not like a fashion brand; I know I need shoes, but I just don’t yet know that I want those shoes. Your buyer may not even realize that they have a problem, let alone that there’s a technology to solve it.
Start by getting to know each other before trying to take things further. In other words, demonstrate your understanding of your customer’s situation before trying to sell them anything.
Ryan Serhant summarizes this nicely in Sell it Like Serhant ([New York: Hachette Books], 49): “People don’t like being sold, but they love shopping with friends.”
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Practical application: How B2B technology brands generate demand and create awareness
In an ideal world, your overall content strategy should address every different marketing persona at every different stage in the buyer’s journey. That’s the final destination, but that’s not the starting line.
We have to start somewhere. Are you a startup with limited time and money? How are you going to get the most marketing bang for your marketing buck?
You need to be laser focused on that first stage of the buyer’s journey, awareness. The variation comes in for the different personas. What this means is that your first content pieces should build brand awareness by speaking to the problems encountered by different stakeholders at the companies you want to sell to.
Write about the problems the CEO and other business leaders face. Discuss the issues of CTOs and technical teams. Drill down to as granular a level as you can by factoring in company size, priorities, etc.
Then create content that shows you’re an approachable expert who understands their problems.
B2B tech marketing is a marathon, not a sprint
As I alluded to at the beginning of this article, sales is really what needs to come first. That’s why so many companies choose to build out case studies as their first content offerings.
But once you have the collateral in place to support your sales function, it’s time to start building that brand!
Remember that you’re not marketing the latest Shark Tank widget. Nobody is going to see your product on social media and immediately click “Buy Now!”
B2B tech buyers don’t impulse buy. Instead, they’re going to think about you later when they encounter the problem you address in your content.
They’re going to come across that issue in their work, and they’ll remember you. Then they’ll return to your website or contact your sales team.
The next step will be for them to figure out why YOU are the right option for them. Time for some consideration phase content! But that’s another subject for another day.
START HERE:
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