Business leaders and enterprise decision makers often look to others who are experts in their field when evaluating new technologies to purchase and implement. Technology companies are increasingly partnering with influencers to up their credibility and social media reach.
But companies today struggle just to be seen or heard amidst the constant noise of others trying market their product or service. Tech buyers are also becoming increasingly smarter and more desensitized to the marketing they see receive daily.
As such, they are increasingly relying on others whom they trust or admire to share their experiences with an enterprise solution, platform, product or service, before they consider it within their own organizations. This leaves an incredible opportunity for companies to leverage influencers, who have built a loyal following and credibility within an industry, to market to enterprise decision makers.
If you haven’t already, the first step is to develop several buyer personas for your solution. Likely you’ll have one for CEO, and other for IT, and maybe another for Sales & Marketing. Know what their goals and challenges are, what kinds of content they prefer, and who they’re likely to follow and engage with online.
Next, you’ll want to identify the peers, bloggers, publications and industry experts that your target buyers are following. The easiest way to start is by connecting with some of your target prospects (and existing customers) on LinkedIn to see who they’re following, and what groups they participate in. Also, follow some of your target buyers on Twitter, and see who they’re following and retweeting.
A critical part of influencer marketing in the enterprise technology space is establishing yourself as an independent thought leader. Influencers won’t be willing to engage with you if they sense all you’re looking for is some free social media visibility. That’s why developing high-quality content such as whitepapers, blog posts, and webinars is critical for laying the foundation to get influencers on board.
Once you’ve developed this content, share it (along with other useful content you may come across), on social media and within the groups and message boards that influencers frequent. The important things are to be knowledgeable, add value, and have a perspective.
The great thing about influencers is that they’re usually sought after in terms of live events, speaking engagements, and conference appearances. That puts them in a unique position to bridge the gap between your digital marketing efforts and live, physical interactions.
If you can collaborate with an influencer on a presentation at a live event, for instance, you can allow people access to those slides after the presentation in exchange for their contact information (known as “gated content”). You can then leverage that info to place those prospects into a marketing automation system for ongoing nurture campaigns.
In addition to these steps, there are a number of tools that can help you build your network with influencers. Here are some perfect ones:
FollowerWonk allows you to search terms to find Twitter profiles sorted by the number of followers and tweets. This lets you quickly find influencers on Twitter who you can follow and begin to engage with. Once engaged a little, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone.
A great tool to find influencers, connect and manage your network of influencers. BuzzStream is a robust tool for influencer marketing and can help you build a real strategy for making the right connections count.
Upload any piece of content and Onalytica’s algorithm will find the top related influencers for that content. Identify key influencers, engage them, and measure the results and impact of your influencer marketing activities.
GroupHigh helps you find bloggers and other social influencers, manage those relationships and even measure the value of your content.
MuckRack helps marketers find relevant journalists and bloggers, receive alerts, and build media lists. It also helps journalists, bloggers, and editors showcase their work, track shares, and grow their following. A great tool for better Public Relations which is an impactful influencer strategy.
Discover influencers including contact information and social profiles, create personalized outreach messages, automate follow-up, and track results.
BlogDash is the most efficient, effective platform by which you can reach 200K+ bloggers and growing every day. These bloggers have specifically opted in to connect with brands like yours and help you achieve web-wide recognition.
Traackr’s IRM platform is your system of record to manage, expand, validate, and scale your global influencer marketing.
Building your influencer network and leveraging them can be a full time job, but worth both the effort and investment.
3. High Value Content
The amount of digital content being generated today is astounding. And it ranges from high-quality, unique content all the way down to content mills and “click bait” that people don’t necessarily get much out of. The same is true for content in the B2B technology marketing space.
No matter what your industry, there’s likely a multitude of competitors vying for eyeballs, some of which probably don’t put a lot of time and effort into their content. What smart enterprise tech companies of the future will do is stray away from this kind of short term thinking to simply generate click-throughs, but to develop a consistent program of high-value content that will foster long-term trust between your target buyers and your brand.
It’s a struggle for companies to bite the bullet and invest in providing content that does not always mention their name or provide for “quick wins.” Content creation can be very expensive. But two things tech marketers need to realize apply when it comes to high-value content: The Rule of Reciprocity and the growing struggle for companies to be heard.
“The Rule of Reciprocity is that when you provide something of value, the recipient feels the need to give something in return. This may not happen right away. But eventually, the more value you provide, the more prospects will rely on you for high-value content and give you their time in return.”
Brittany Rothnem, Principal at Rothnem Integrated Marketing
And because so many other companies are striving for attention, getting past that initial point of entry makes high-value content even that much more necessary. But once get past that point, and earn trust with your target buyers, you’ll be in a better position to complete sales than competitors that have been taking the cheap, low-value approach.
Whether you develop content in-house, or decide to outsource to an agency or content platform, here are five traits that all your high-value content should share:
Tell Better Stories.
Every article, blog, or piece of content tells a story (even clickbait). They key is to tell better stories than your competitors. Take the time to analyze what others in the space are doing, and work to develop more unique (and more useful) stories than what’s currently out there. Remember, helping your audience is more important than helping yourself.
Some of today’s biggest brands tell great stories of how their solutions solve customer problems, impact customer lives or just provide an entertaining view on their business and culture. Think about how you would want to consume information. A B2B technology company can appeal to the humans they are selling to through powerful and even emotion-evoking content.
Rethink how you are telling your current stories and if they could be redefined as a documentary of a customer’s journey, a powerful interview or a day-in-the-life of an employee helping customers solve challenges.
Personalize for Each Stakeholder.
Again, your high-quality content strategy should flow from your buyer personas. You might put out a few great stories to begin with, but they’ll probably resonate with some roles over others. Not all your content will be accepted by everyone, and that’s ok. What you’re trying to do is build credibility and thought leadership for each stakeholder individually, so in the end they’ll come together and agree upon your solution based on their own intrinsic motivations.
It’s important that when you create strategies and editorial calendar that you develop an Audience Matrix that defines each person at a company who could be involved in researching or deciding to use your product. For each of those stakeholders, you can define their pains, goals and motivating factors – building a persona for each target customer is a must-do first step.
Centralize Your Content Experience.
While individual pieces of content should be personalized, they should all come together in one centralized digital experience that’s connected to your brand. Having a “Resources” page on your website, for example, will drive everyone into one experience yet people will be able to find the stories and information that’s most useful to them. This goes for your social media accounts, and video channels like YouTube as well.
Building a platform for content delivery that is connected with increase prospect confidence with each new story they interact with and improve their knowledge during the sales process. Built properly, these platforms can funnel leads through to conversion and into your overall marketing ecosystem.
Deliver Real Value
Most important to any tactic is to deliver real value. First, if the audience doesn’t get value they will not convert to the next stage of your marketing process whether a signup, download or buy. Even if you can get a lot of people to find your content, a lack of value will repel them from moving further which is the ultimate goal.
Second, when you deliver real value, it creates a positive brand impression. Your audience will lock in their minds that you are the expert subject matter and when they need help, you are the best resource to talk to. A positive brand impression can last for when you reach them through other marketing channels and increase the likelihood of conversion there.
So, what is real value, well, it isn’t just the surface level info a visitor can get anywhere. The challenge here is to get over the fear of giving away too much – which many companies are afraid of. On the other hand, you would rather give away a couple secrets to gain new customers than hold onto them and not acquire new leads.
The best place to look is within your own company. What tools do you use, what questions do your customers have and what secret tactics or methods do you covet. Giving away a lot can ballon you over the competition and significantly increase prospect confidence.
Make Content Extremely Unique
And lastly, make it unique in some way. Today, people are inundated with information and content because the tactic has significantly grown in popularity. Whether the information is unique or the delivery, it must stand out.
Consider different media such as video, animation or apps – maybe even consider past tactics such as direct mail. If you can make the information valuable and unique while delivering in an unexpected way, it will pay off in spades.
“In our weekly editorial meetings, story pitches have to pass a basic litmus test: Has this story been done before? If so, has it been done well? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, it gets rejected.”
Joe Lazauskas, Contently Editor in Chief
When To Use What Type of Content
The following graphic represents what content can be used in different scenarios. Companies should have a wide range of content to reach people of different personalities, consumption preferences and stages of the sales cycle.
The following graphic shows the type of content from left to right based on where they are in their buying stage while the top to bottom displays the engagement experience type.
4. Live Event Integration
It might seem counterintuitive, but with so much emphasis being placed on digital marketing, face-to-face interactions are becoming that much more important. While much of the time enterprise solutions can build a case for themselves solely via digital channels, many tech buyers want to get to know their partners in person to separate contenders from pretenders.
Depending on where your solution, and organization, stands in the marketplace you’ll likely have a different focus when attending live events.
Here are four reasons to integrate live events with your digital marketing efforts, depending on your core marketing needs at any given time:
Branding and Awareness.
Especially for early stage startups and tech companies, your main challenge may just be getting noticed in the marketplace. Take live events as an opportunity to showcase the one or two “wow” factors about your solution, as well as share the history behind yourself and your company. The goal is to simply get the word out there, so when prospects do finally evaluate solutions like yours, you’ll be in the running.
Lead Generation.
For businesses in a more mature stage, it may be more of an imperative to generate sales leads face-to-face. Planning is critical, so make sure to reach out to key prospects well in advance to drive attendance to the event (and your booth). Have systems in place for collecting contacts, qualifying leads, and setting up follow-up sales appointments either during or after the event.
Customer Engagement.
Live events are a great way to meet and greet current customers in a more fun, low pressure format. Since they’re already customers, you’ll be able to get to know them on a more personal level, casually discuss their success with your solution, and discover if there are any potential up-sell opportunities.
Education.
Some of the most effective live event marketing that enterprise tech companies do comes in the form of educational content and workshops. This is great for drawing in both current customers and new prospects, especially decision makers on the technical side. Again, you’ll want to collect contact info upfront prior to any training session and follow up to see what they got out of it and if they’re a potentially a sales-qualified lead.
Ideas for Collecting Leads At Events
If you have a booth, have a draw to collect cards – whether a contest, offering discount services or have people register for an upcoming webinar.
To add on to the first point, make sure your sales team doesn’t have chairs, cell phones or excuses to stand behind a table. Get them meeting people and asking for cards.
If you have a workshop or presentation, offer slides and other related content on a landing page that requires them to enter their contact details.
Hold a happy hour and invite the best prospects – just make sure it doesn’t interfere with the event.
Get reciprocal – tell attendees about other booths that are good or offer to introduce to a speaker (make sure you meet them early). If you send people to other booths, they will often do the same.
Create some partnerships – do joint follow-ups with other booth companies or partner with a speaker to sponsor a slide or their follow up.
Nurture Those Leads
Collecting leads is important, but too many companies don’t utilize them correctly after the event. It is a waste of time and money, if you don’t see the process through.
As soon as or during your event, leads should be entered into your marketing automation (the next chapter in this e-book) or CRM software. often at the event you should have a distinction set for leads that want direct follow ups versus those who are collected. Following up too hard on attendees who submitted a card or came to a workshop, will just turn them away.
So, setup a sequence of follow up e-mails and event direct mailers that are not too pushy – any leads from a slide download page can be put into this segment as they come. This process is called nurturing and should provide the lead with value while conveying your key brand messages.
Some ideas for soft follow-ups right after your event are:
Send a summary of the highlights of the event with quotes from speakers and resources they may not have gotten.
Shoot video at the event and provide a similar summary, but more engaging.
Provide relevant articles, videos or tools (checklists, calculators) that follow the theme of the event or the main keynote speeches.
Collect all the speakers slides, domains and some of their key content and send a series of e-mails to give greater depth.
The key here is not to jump into selling, but instead show your prospects you are knowledgeable, engaged and care about providing them value. Doing this first and then building up to a demo or call, will open the gate rather than quick rejection from a hard sales approach.
5. Marketing Automation Tools
A critical part of staying on top of, contacting, and nurturing leads for enterprise tech companies is employing marketing automation tool. To build a sustainable, and predictable, revenue model you’ll need to have automated systems for collecting leads, building a marketing pipeline, segmenting contacts, and marketing to them on a consistent (and intelligent) basis.
Marketing automation helps B2B enterprise companies nurture, qualify and pass leads over to sales when they’re finally ready. This is essential in the technology space, as both pre-sales and sales cycles can last weeks, months and even years. What tool you use will depend on the size of your company, as well as the nature of your solution and target buyer.
Here are three of the most popular, and effective, marketing automation tools that you should consider implementing within your organization (if you haven’t already):
Marketo.
One of the most powerful, and popular, marketing automation systems on the market. If you’re currently using SalesForce.com for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), then Marketo is almost a no-brainer due to its seamless integration. Marketo is great for managing and segmenting lists, as well as delivering rapid-fire email content. However, Marketo hits it’s limit and begins to slow down if your web page experiences high amounts of web traffic, or leads in the database exceed 750k.
Eloqua.
Recently acquired by Oracle and now under their Marketing Cloud umbrella, Eloqua is a robust B2B marketing automation platform that outperforms Marketo with large databases. Eloqua also has what is considered the best customer and prospect insights engine, giving marketers detailed and granular analysis of how users are reacting to marketing emails they receive. The major downside to Eloqua is that is has so many capabilities, that the user interface is often non-intuitive and easy to execute. Eloqua can do more than 99% of marketing automation systems out there, but the learning curve can be steep.
SilverPop.
Now part of IBM’s marketing cloud, SilverPop is a competitive enterprise marketing automation solution that differentiates itself with more mobile, text and SMS marketing capabilities than the competition. It has an intuitive UI, easy to work with database structure, and allows for relative ease of email creation. On the downside, Silverpop doesn’t have as many native and seamless integrations as Marketo and Eloqua, and tends to slow down when processing large data sets.
6. Existing Customer Re-Marketing
One of the best, and often most overlooked, ways that enterprise technology companies can increase revenue through marketing efforts is their current customers. By having systems, processes and programs in place to re-market to active customers, you’ll be able to build out an infrastructure that facilitates consistent retention, upsell and cross-sell of additional products, features and services.
Efforts and investments here can pay off many times over. Not only can you increase the spend of existing customer, but by staying top of mind with them you create an army of advocates building referrals. Most companies miss the opportunity by not putting a serious and thorough plan specifically for customer re-marketing.
Here are three of the main ways that you can re-market to increase the lifetime value of current customers:
Customer Portals.
If your customers are having great success with your solution, they’re probably logging in daily, if not more. How you design and maintain your customer portal can contribute to ongoing marketing efforts to your current customers.
Once a user logs in, you can design the portal as an “information hub” that acts as a central location where you can do things like announce new products, alert them to live events, or ask for suggestions on how to improve your solution. These are all “top of the funnel” marketing activities that can eventually lead to up or cross sales.
Nurturing Programs.
The last thing you want to do after you onboard a new customer is to remove them from your marketing automation program. However, it’s a common mistake that many B2B enterprise tech organizations make. What you want is to design separate nurturing programs for existing customers.
The amount of touches might be more infrequent, and the messaging will be much more consultative. Your existing customer nurturing program should include things like webinars, customer success workshops, and live events in their area. By seeing the topics of webinars customers attend, for example, you’ll gain some insight into what their ongoing needs are and if there are any additional features or services they might be interested in purchasing.
Customer Communities.
Building out customer forums and communities is another great way to keep current customers engaged with your brand on a consistent basis. In general, people engage on communities to disseminate new information about their industry, “talk shop” with their peers or to collaborate with other professionals.
While customers will work with each other (and your employees) to maximize the value they receive from your solution, from a marketing standpoint you want to use communities to continually establish thought leadership through high-value content.
If you have a new whitepaper or eBook coming out, customer communities are a great place to announce it to get the conversation going, and to see which customers are interested in that specific topic.
Any customer marketing program should utilize multiple channels and tactics, be measured and adjusted over time to work best for your specific customer base. Below are two graphs that show what existing marketers focused on customer retention and marketing do and what channels are found to be most effective.
If you do not already have a customer marketing program, this data might help you choose where to start:
Existing Customer Marketing for SAAS Companies
Whether enterprise technology, enterprise software or SaaS – customer marketing works. For SaaS companies specifically where MMR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) at higher volumes of users, there can be even more at stack with high churn rates.
If a typical SaaS business loses about 2 to 3% of their customers each month to churn, the business must grow by at least 27% to 43% annually to maintain the same revenue.
Drift Relationship Marketing
Churn can be deadly for a SaaS and high churn is often a signal of issues whether from market fit, features, user interface or support.
The challenge here is that if you are losing a percentage of customers each month, it takes significant new customer acquisition just to maintain growth. This puts a lot of pressure on top of the funnel marketing to gain awareness and conversion at often unsustainable rates.
That being said, if a SaaS business focuses on existing customer programs and marketing, they can minimize churn and reduce the need for often frantic new customer acquisition tactics.