Guide to B2B Technology Marketing in 2022

The past few years have put businesses through the wringer in many ways. The global pandemic, inflation, remote working, supply chain constraints—you name them. If you’re going to exceed your goals for lead acquisition and revenue streams this year, you need to update your B2B technology marketing playbook.

As a technology company, you’re hungry, innovative, and serving a very diverse set of clients. Whether in managed services, SaaS, cloud solutions, or value-added reselling, inbound B2B marketing is the ideal way to build brand awareness, improve lead generation, and maximize revenue. 

Dharmesh Shan, CTO, and Co-Founder of HubSpot captured the spirit of Inbound marketing when he said,

“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.” 

How to Make Inbound Marketing Work

Inbound marketing is a marketing model that focuses on attracting customers rather than proactively reaching out to them as in outbound marketing. This attraction is primarily attained through valuable content and engaging experiences to draw in prospective customers.

Inbound marketing is especially effective in technology marketing for several reasons:

• It is highly cost-effective and has the potential for high and long-term returns.
• It appeals to critical decision-makers and portrays a sense of industry expertise.
• By delighting customers, it drives long-term momentum and growth.
• IB offers technology companies a way to tell their story and define their brand in what is currently a very crowded and fragmented industry.

If you are familiar with the sales funnel methodology. Inbound Marketing is shifting from the old funnel model to the agile “marketing flywheel” methodology.

The Flywheel Model

While the sales funnel focuses on attracting and converting as many prospects as possible, the flywheel builds momentum by delighting existing clients. 

The flywheel is all about input, not output, making the customer the accelerant for your brand’s growth. This strategy works great for technology companies because it forces them to integrate marketing activities and concentrate them at one point. 

Like pushing on a flywheel, this concerted effort generates momentum that powers growth. Here are five practical ways to enhance your B2B marketing in 2022 to take advantage of these significant new developments.

#1. Find Your Authentic Brand Personality and Voice

Crafting a unique and consistent brand personality is the first hurdle you have to conquer on B2B marketing success.

The biggest brands to date, such as Apple, have an instantly recognizable and likable persona. Apple is simple, creative, innovative, passionate, yet surprisingly personable. Its persona communicates the idea of dreams and aspirations, and people engage with that.

In the same way, you need to find your brand voice and shape it around your brand values and mission. A NY Times best-selling author, Michael Hyatt, once said that “marketing is sharing your passion.” 

To be able to create a brand personality that your target market likes, you need to do these three things:

Understand your Target Market

Market research is critical to marketing success. Technology is a highly fragmented and competitive industry. The Inbound Flywheel strategy demands that you delight your customers, but you can only do that by understanding and solving their unique problems.

You should double down on market research and create accurate buyer personas. These help you put yourself in the same frame of reference as your audience to understand their pain points and speak their language.

Refine Your Brand Messaging and Positioning

Your brand’s message tells your story, mission, and values. However, it should also speak to your audience and help them relate to your brand from their perspective.

A good brand message should be:

• Simple—avoid jargon and use accessible language
• Cohesive—consistent across multiple channels
• Grounded in your brand’s values and mission
• Reflect a unique personality
  
  

Understand Your Competition

The third challenge is to understand your competitors. You can start by performing a SWOT analysis—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

You can do this by investigating the sales tactics, product offerings, and marketing content the competition is using. SWOT analysis helps you quickly identify gaps and opportunities in the market that you can quickly leverage to gain traction.

#2. Create a Nice Website

Your website is your digital foyer. You’re probably missing a lot if you haven’t upgraded or overhauled your site since its launch. Customers will get their first impression based on their experience. 

A lot goes into making a website top-notch, but it all boils down to this: make it easy to buy.

In growth-driven website design, web developers work to improve concepts that are already proven to work with customers and do away with everything else. 

In addition to keeping a fast, secure, responsive, and user-friendly website, you also have to keep your brand messaging consistent throughout your digital presence. Your landing pages, blogs, and social media pages should all reiterate and reinforce the same message and make it stick.

For this, we recommend working with niche website developers. Your website copy, site layout, and navigation must be tailored to your target audience. You should be able to identify the different stages of the buyer’s journey and communicate with them at each point.

Most importantly, have a blog. Not only does it help your website rank better and attract more organic traffic, but it also helps to convince new leads that you are the right people for the job. In other words, blogs help lead the customer through their journey and foster trust.

Finally, have a contact page to make it easy for prospects to reach you. If you’re looking for something a little more sophisticated, a 24/7 bot-assisted chat function will also help to keep your “reception” open even on nights, weekends, and holidays.

#3. Integrate Marketing With Sales

One of the main reasons the flywheel strategy works so well is that it brings together these two critical business operations. One can’t exist without the other, but traditional business practices tend to silo both and create a disconnect between them.

Data, information, and ideas should flow smoothly between the two teams for maximum efficiency. More importantly, though, it reduces friction and confusion for the customer.

Integrating marketing with sales helps technology businesses increase customer delight because:

• The lead process flows smoothly. B2B marketing requires constant interaction with prospects, and an integrated team allows you to give them a seamless experience and undivided attention.
• The sales team knows what they are selling. They don’t make promises that you can’t keep.
• Both teams have a fuller idea of what the customer needs. Since the sales team interacts directly with customers and understands their desires, they can help the marketing team create more effective strategies.
• Integrated sales and marketing shares goals, KPIs, and successes. It keeps all teams on the same page. Everyone works together in the same direction, driving momentum to turn your marketing potential into dollars.

While you are at it, remember to consolidate your marketing technology tools. Having many software platforms such as CRMs, analytics and tracking, communication, analytics, and advertising can create serious disconnects between sales and marketing. 

An all-in-one platform such as HubSpot’s suite of tools ensures that your team and your customers remain joined at the hip.

#4. Create Unique Content

Content creation is a costly and time-consuming process. It is tempting to favor generalized evergreen content to save on recurring costs. While that makes sense, content is your most significant driver of inbound leads and needs to be refreshed regularly.

In particular, creating highly targeted content tailored to niche customers ensures that you bring in high-quality leads. In such a segmented industry, the only way to compete is not to compete. Find your niche and focus on it with highly targeted messaging.

One-size-fits-all content might bring in a lot of traffic, but those prospects eventually bounce off either because they aren’t satisfied enough to trust you or your product offering is the wrong fit for their needs.

This also means that your unique value proposition must be tailored to that particular niche. When you have figured out what verticals you’re pursuing, use SEO and social media to find those customers.

#5. Advertise on Google and Social Media

Social media sites such as Google, Facebook, and Clutch are superpowers at hyper-targeting. Be sure to advertise on these platforms with highly tailored and unique ads.

For starters, PPC advertising on Google helps you generate a large number of leads over a short time and offers all the tools you need to analyze and track the performance of your marketing campaigns. 

PPC marketing is beneficial because B2B businesses deal with high-value customers. If the lifetime value of one customer is $100,000, you can afford to spend $10,000 on a PPC campaign with a 2% conversion rate that gets at least 1,000 clicks.

But even with the proper budget, performance marketing like PPC requires having a team of experts to help you bid successfully and see the campaign to completion.

Paid ads on other social media platforms such as Clutch also help you to increase your reach and engagement. 

To maximize the returns from these paid advertising campaigns, pair them with good market research, great content, landing pages, and a passionate sales and marketing team.

Strategic Partnership With the Right Agency 

These five strategies come full circle to reinforce each other and maximize the value of each. This is the power of flywheel B2B marketing strategy.

At Propr, we aren’t just about pretty websites. We invest time learning and understanding your business, industry, audience, and unique business needs to create a copy. That is the kind of integrated brand design and marketing that our team excels at.