When it comes to conducting B2B technology marketing, there is nothing sexy about it. In fact, it can be incredibly hard. Getting a decision maker to actually sit down and answer survey questions or be interviewed for enough time to get insight is rare.
Although marketing research is hard work in this particular field, once you get it, it can be gold. Emphasis on the can. If marketing research isn’t conducted with an end goal in mind, a marketer can simply end up with a bunch of useless data and a depleted marketing budget.
Part of designing marketing research with an end goal in mind is not only thinking about how a company’s stakeholders will appreciate your company’s solutions, but all users. For example, at 4it, our solutions help the bottom-line of companies, which make the stakeholders happy. But oftentimes, it’s our client’s staff that deal with our technologies, so our marketing research has to include them as well.
The other part of designing marketing research is taking into account what information your own company’s stakeholders need, and what questions need to be asked to get the answers. Recently, I created a marketing plan to push our security awareness training, KnowBe4, to the financial services industries in Miami. When conducting research, I decided that I needed to analyze the different kinds of financial services firms, the amount of money lost on phishing attempts in each field, the average amount of users, and so on. If I would have simply shown my boss the percentage breakdown of financial firms, then it wouldn’t be enough data to determine if we were going to push the right campaign. Because I knew what my CEO needed to know in order to approve my campaign, I was able to design my research accordingly.
