Marketing 2.0: Expert advice for your technology business
At Sookio, we’re no strangers to marketing the latest industrial technology, along with a host of other cutting-edge products. Here’s how we make it happen.
Wondering how to market a new technology product? It’s likely we’ve tackled something similar and picked up a few tricks along the way. The benefits of working in the technology industry, providing marketing for Cambridge’s top innovators, include an endless scope for learning.
Read on, and discover our approach to creating content to support the fourth industrial revolution (that’s industry 4.0 if you’re feeling fancy). Fact is, the planning is as important as the execution.
Planning your technology marketing campaign
Marketing technology demands a careful balance of accuracy and clarity. This needs to happen in the planning, strategy, and pre-production phases of your content marketing campaign.
This is the time to get a diverse mix of voices in the room to pool ideas and decide on an overarching vision for the project.
Separate audiences ruthlessly
In any sector, it’s best to profile your audience. In tech, it’s simply non-negotiable. With hospitality for example, everyone in an organisation will be reasonably familiar with the product they’re dishing up. But in tech, the gulf in understanding between areas of a business can be huge.
We often see product owners and technical experts identified as two distinct tribes within a technology company. Each have their own goals and needs. Each speak their own language. Each deserve special attention.
Every organisation differs, of course. But all early-stage conversations need to break down audience profiles in way more granular detail than other sectors.
Plan around how your product gets used
When you’re pushing the boundaries of the possible, it’s understandable you’d get excited about it. But think critically about how much your audience is invested in the technology powering your products. In most cases, the tech isn’t the star of the show.
The more complex the science behind your product, the more you need to focus on how that science is applied to the real world. Plan content which focuses on use cases.
A great client of ours worked in digital operations management, with hardware and software which were both at the forefront of the field. We barely mentioned it. Instead, we focused on the day-to-day challenges facing operations managers. The campaign worked.
Know your rich media
Written content articulates ideas with utmost precision. Video lets audiences visualise complex concepts more clearly. Podcasts tell the story of the people behind a product. Each distinct art form performs a precise role.
Choose media which accentuate your positives and hide your weaknesses. Choose channels which are best attuned to delivering those media. And here’s the crucial bit: focus on how different media cause you to be perceived differently.
It’s timely to talk about US Presidential debates right now. In 1960, John F. Kennedy faced Richard Nixon in the first televised debate. Most radio listeners thought Nixon won by coming across more statesmanlike. But the majority watching on TV thought Kennedy won by appearing more dynamic.
Creating content marketing for industry 4.0
When it’s time to execute your master plan, your project structure needs to change accordingly. Strip the feedback process right down to one subject matter expert and one project owner to ensure your content isn’t killed by committee.
From there, you can take all your good planning work and make sure it’s given room to pay for itself.
Make your briefs less brief
Having planned your master strategy, you need to brief content creators so the work can happen. In some sectors, you might want a light touch brief after an initial kick-off meeting to let your videographer or copywriter flex their creativity without distractions.
This ain’t one of those sectors.
Marketing technology demands context, especially when we’re showing complex products being used with precision. Ideally, you want a whole section of your briefing template purely for links to external resources.
These resources will have been approved by subject matter experts, so provide as many as possible to give a clear steer. With a weak brief, good content creators will just come back to you for more information. Bad ones will take their best guess and produce something catastrophic.
Lean on intuitive knowledge
Going back briefly to the technical-vs-product dichotomy we talked about earlier, is there any way to bridge that gap? In some cases, speaking to two audiences with two wildly different core competencies is unavoidable, especially for brand awareness stuff or high-level product messaging.
Thankfully, both audiences are full of human beings. There are plenty of shared experiences we can draw on to make complex ideas more understandable. If a product saves water, how many cups of coffee does it save per month? If it saves time, how many episodes of the Simpsons could you watch in the time it saves?
Analogies work, they’re a fixture of our psyche; we view X only by its relation to Y. They also have the benefit of clearly being illustrative examples, so a lot of nit-picking points get forgiven.
Talking like a human makes the tech superhuman
You want to be speaking in a clear, conversational tone in any sector. But in tech, it becomes vital for one important reason; you’re still going to be using a lot of relatively complex words.
You have to call things what they are, and that means calling a holoreplicator a holoreplicator. But when you really double down on a friendly, approachable tone wherever possible, a funny thing happens.
When you’re strict, and I mean ruthless about cutting out jargon unless absolutely necessary, you build trust with your audience. They always appreciate and respect the time you spend crafting a clear, engaging message.
So when you then name-drop your latest development, they give you the benefit of the doubt and actually believe you when you tell them it’s a big deal.
How is technology changing marketing?
Of course, we’d be remiss not to mention that while marketing shapes the success of a tech company, tech also affects marketing. It’s now easier than ever to optimise content for a precise demographic and boost it until someone sees it.
Lots of people think that’s their ticket to talk in grand, sweeping terms about their company vision and values to nail a sector-wide audience. Sure, that’ll happen if you throw enough money at the internet. But is it the best way?
As time goes on, we see the big global players, your Microsofts and Apples, continue to saturate the big-picture narrative space. Any regular business pushing the ‘vision and values’ approach as the flagship of their marketing is simply going to get priced out of that arena.
That means if you can go niche, start doing so now. Focus on solving real-life problems for real people. Even if only a fraction of a marketplace has a use for your product, you have the microtargeting technology to reach them.
The biggest tech-driven change to marketing is our ability to get in front of an audience. Once you’re there, the secret to delighting them is still a very human matter.
Sookio: The digital marketing agency for tech companies
You’ve seen how effectively selling a high-tech product takes an end-to-end marketing approach. It helps to work with a team who bring decades of combined experience to the table.
By sheer good fortune, you happen to be on that team’s website. Now, see how we can help.
