Marketing for a small or mid-sized technology company can often be a difficult task for the average marketer. In comparison to B2C or other types of B2B purchases, IT services are costly to purchase and implement for most companies. Also, the fact that many buyers do not know or truly understand the benefits of IT for their businesses doesn’t necessarily help either.
A common problem with smaller technology companies lies in their inability to relay the benefits of their IT solutions in a way that is clear and direct to prospective clients. Sometimes the content is not simplified enough for the average decision maker, who may have the power to purchase but not the education to understand the complexities of IT. For a technology company to attract, convert, and close clients, a content marketing strategy needs to be developed to educate and gain the trust of prospective clients.
In today’s marketing environment, most small technology companies know that they have to produce content, but they struggle to even start developing a game plan or a structure for content marketing. For struggling IT companies, I recommend identifying and demonstrating a few key items that will help them in developing marketing messaging that will help in developing content.
Establish Customer Pain Points
Most businesses do not voluntarily seek out external IT services. At the end of the day, IT is an added expense to their bottom line. It takes an issue to arise for a company such as my employer, 4it, to be contacted. If small IT companies can identify the common pain points of their clients and their businesses, then they can create content around those pain points to draw in similar clients opposed to waiting to be contacted. When analyzing our current clientele, we noticed that there were three specific pain points that our clients experience and we have a unique way of addressing those pain points.
- Our clients do not have the right tools to proactively manage their systems. Proactive alerting is the only way to prevent an outage. We solve that by allowing clients access to our comprehensive toolset.
- Our clients do not have a need for a full-time specialist in areas like firewall, virtualization, Azure, AWS, and more. In our services, we offer clients access to specialists at any phase of their project or contract.
- When our clients lose an employee in a crucial IT role, it usually takes a while to fill the role and it leaves their company vulnerable to attacks, downtime, or stalled projects. For our clients, we will fill in and support the operation until the position is filled.
Some ways to find common customer pain points is by using social media, interviews, and research. Once you figure out customer pain points and how your company solves them, you can create content such as website copy, blog posts, or white papers that cater to those specific pain points and draw in interest to your business online.
Differentiate Yourself from Competitors
Once you understand what your clients are seeking from an IT company, it’s time to figure out what sets your company apart from competing ones in your space. This is not meant to bash a competitor, but a way to be specific about where and how your company succeeds in IT versus others. For example, at 4it, we have a strong team of engineers and project managers that our direct competition in Miami lack. We have also been at the forefront for many new and exciting IT developments such as cryptocurrency and cybersecurity, which made us thought leaders in these categories and heavily sought after for insight. At the end of the day, your customer will go through a series of comparisons between companies while they consider buying your services; make it easier for them to understand the difference between your IT company and competitors to your firm.
Develop A Unique Value Proposition
This intertwines with the other sections because you need to understand your customers’ pain points and how you stack up against competitors to build unique capabilities/proposition into the content you develop. As a “unique value proposition,” you should not highlight the technology you use as part of your services, but how they impact the customers business. Many business owners just want to know how your services will impact productivity, decrease risks, and ultimately keep costs under control. Focus on the end result of your technology solution rather than the intricacies of it. Highlight the value your company offers in an easy-to-understand way by using blogs, eBooks, case studies, white papers, infographics and more. In fact, according to Hubspot, case studies help convert and accelerate the most leads (Source). For 4it, we are building case studies of clients in different verticals and sizes to show that we offer comprehensive and scalable solutions that match the compliance needs of all sectors.
The marketing messaging for your content marketing should not only establish solutions to problems that your clients regularly encounter but differentiate yourself from competitors and supply a unique value that clients can only receive with you at the helm of their IT services. The more specific and understandable the messaging, the more successful your content will ultimately be.
