Marketing is perhaps the most crucial operation of every business.
It helps you reach your potential audience. It helps the audience become aware of your presence. If you wish to make your product or service work, you need good marketing practices at your fingertips, irrespective of the industry.
Now, marketing for several industries can get a little less complicated. Not for the tech industry.
Many find it extremely overwhelming when it comes to marketing their tech company. Also, many are under the impression that marketing their startup/tech company is going to be a costly affair.
If you are one of them, your myths are about to get busted.
You must understand that marketing your tech company will take additional effort and time, not money.
To start with, you need to establish your brand and yourself as an authority. Whether you are offering PaaS, SaaS, an app, or other tech-based products or services, it is crucial for you to showcase your knowledge, skill, and abilities. And this doesn’t really require big bucks.
Today, consumer habits have evolved. They want to be able to trust a business and witness its credibility before they make the decision to purchase. We are in an era where traditional marketing practices will hardly work. The good thing is that new marketing strategies are not only proving to be fruitful, but they are also pretty cost-effective.
If you are not too convinced about the fact that you can actually market your tech brand on a budget, you are at the right place.
Here are top marketing strategies on a budget that small tech companies can leverage to compete against the big leagues.
Set your goals
Setting goals is indispensable.
Without goals, planning your marketing strategy, including your calendars and messaging, will be extremely tricky. You need to know what you want to achieve to set your expectations right.
When setting your goals and expectations, try your best to not be vague. Give your marketing goals a measurable number.
For instance, let’s take the conversion of visitors to your website. Suppose you have 200 unique visitors every day on your website. Out of these, you are already converting 50% of your visitors to members. Then, you are converting 50% from members to users.
Here, you should be spending your time bringing more visitors. The more visitors you have at this conversion rate, the better.
However, if you reach a point where you don’t need new visitors, you can then shift to your next goal, which is improving conversions or moving users along the funnel.
Thus, you need to figure out where you stand and where you want to reach. Be as specific as you can about that goal. If you are not sure about your goal, it can get very difficult to find the right direction of your messaging and strategy.
Solve problems using blogs
Today, customers are surfing the web for one thing: solutions. Whether it’s the pronunciation of a word or finding help with coding, surfing the web is the first instinct. Gone are the days when books or libraries were the go-to sources.
Think of your blogs as a digital replacement for physical books. In this era of digitalization, blogs act as honey to your website, and consequently, your brand.
Of course, we all like high-quality pure honey. Thus, when I say blogs are great, I mean value-packed, problem-solving blogs.
When working on content strategy, make sure to keep your customer’s journey in mind. You should have blogs that are relevant to different stages of the funnel.
For customers that are at the top of the funnel, your blogs can be buyer-centric and informative.
As your customers move to the middle of the funnel, they might want to know about all the updates or the new features you are adding.
For the bottom of the funnel, however, you should be selling hardcore. You need to show your customers how your product/service is better at solving your customer’s problem than anyone else’s.
Yes, growing your blog organically can take a lot of time and effort. It also needs you to continuously analyze your insights and keep a check on the algorithms. But blogs work the best in the long run. You can promote these blogs on different channels to expand your reach.
Apart from the blogs on your own website, you can also try guest posting. It’s a great way to reach out to the audience of other website owners. If you are not sure how you can go on about this practice, you can find an agency that offers blogger outreach services.
Pros of Blogs:
- Helps direct the purchase decision of the consumer.
- Act as a great problem-solver for users, thus helping gain their trust.
- Blogs are needed to optimize websites to rank at the top of the SERPs. You can hire an SEO company to help you with the optimization. This will help in better reach of your website.
- You can keep your users hooked by sharing blogs on their emails.
- Repurpose blogs and convert them into social posts without putting in a lot of effort.
Leverage email marketing
Emails are a very integral part of corporate life.
We have access to everything related to an email in our palms, on our phones. Why not leverage this technological advancement for your tech company?
It is one of the most successful marketing strategies in today’s time. It’s a great instrument for communicating about your brand, selling your products or services, and also to just build relationships with users.
But you need to be very careful when planning your email marketing strategy.
This is mainly because there are tons of businesses that already have a marketing strategy in place. To compete, you will require a well-planned and well-executed strategy.
The first step towards marketing strategy is gathering data. If you don’t have data, you cannot run this campaign. Who will you send the emails to? Now, to collect this data, you can get a form filled using content offers as bait, offer a free trial in return for an id, or maybe give your users a chance to opt-in for newsletters.
Then comes crafting a gem of an email. You must understand that words are extremely powerful. It matters what kind of words you are using to communicate about your brand.
It’s best to set up a 5-email series. Not everyone will open or reply to your emails, thus, you need follow-up emails for backup. That’s where the 4 additional emails out of the 5 will come into the picture.
Also, make A/B testing an unavoidable step. You need to test your email variables, one at a time, to figure out what’s working for you and what’s not. This is because if your open rate doesn’t improve, your emails won’t be solving any purpose for you.
Plus, if your open rate does improve, you wouldn’t know what led to this change. It’s important for you to make sure that you are testing one variable at a time.
Yes, email marketing is a time-consuming process. It needs patience and continuous effort. But it is highly effective once you hit the nail.
Pros of Email Marketing:
- You get 50% more qualified leads at lower rates, according to HubSpot.
- Use email marketing to utilize calls to action to the fullest. It’s a great method to bring sales.
- It is a cost-effective strategy. You can create emails and landing pages easily as well.
- Email marketing helps bring 3800% ROI.
- For every $1 spent, your well-planned email marketing is capable of generating $44 in ROI.
Don’t miss out on Public Relations
Public relations has proven to be a great marketing tactic for tech companies in the past few years.
The best way to bring valuable and improved ROI is by blending your public relations strategy with your social media (paid/organic) or SEO strategy.
Just like blogs, you can use press releases to establish authority and promote yourself as the thought leader in the market. This allows you to compete against the big names in the market.
To leverage this method, you can use different forms of content such as magazine articles, newspaper articles, or send out press releases. These pieces of content can talk about your milestones, achievements, or any progress you’ve made in the recent past.
If you are not sure how/if you can do it, you can always take help from a PR agency.
Or, you can do it without spending a single penny by taking the DIY route. All it will need is your effort and time away from making your product become a popular choice in the market.
If you hire someone to do it, the price varies according to the size of the agency, the duration of the project, the number of deliverables, and more.
If you are just starting out and don’t have in-house resources, it’s best to find agencies that are of the same levels as yours. It will help keep the cost minimal.
The main reason to put in this much effort is the trust and credibility you’ll gain. Gaining the trust of your customers is very important if you wish to sell your product or service.
Just make sure you are publishing compelling stories. You don’t want to bore out or spam your customers with irrelevant content.
Pros of Public Relations:
- Establish yourself as a thought leader.
- Make your users aware of your product or service as well as your achievements.
- Press releases can attract more opportunities like being a guest speaker, interviews, attending webinars, and more.
Personalize your LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the best social platforms to be on.
However, many believe, since it’s a professional platform, LinkedIn is just for talking about the business. But if you only talk about your business and your company, individuals will find it difficult to connect with you or your brand.
In today’s time, people want to learn from your experiences. They want to know your journeys, your successes, and your failures. They are looking to build a connection with you first and then, with your brand.
Hence, it’s crucial for you to personalize your account. Share stories with your users, both on your successes and your failures. Help them understand how certain things work. You can also solve a few problems or answer questions that your users might have by using your LinkedIn profile.
But personalizing doesn’t mean you’ll leave out the corporate side. Your content should be a mix of it all.
The concentration of tech professionals on this platform is remarkable. It’s important you leverage that. Approximately, 71 percent of individuals make decisions based on the recommendations that are given by their social network. It’s best to leverage that.
Make sure you’re using features like group chats to build your own community on LinkedIn. It’s a great start to building relationships and networks.
Pros of LinkedIn:
- Build personal connections with fellow professionals and the audience both.
- Use LinkedIn to promote your press releases. It’s a great way to build authority and become more credible in the eyes of the users.
- Share month-old blogs from your website on your LinkedIn. This will help improve website traffic and try a website checker to do web analyses.
Use other social platforms
Apart from LinkedIn, you should also be using Facebook and Twitter.
These two platforms have also proven to be a great asset for tech companies, especially those that are just starting out.
For Facebook, make it a point to create an official page of your tech company. But make sure you are not leaving it stagnant. There are plenty of businesses that have Facebook pages in place, but they never use them.
You must ensure your posts are providing value to the users. You can also use this platform to answer the questions and queries of your consumers. This helps establish you as an authority. It helps consumers understand you know what you are doing.
As for Twitter, you have to be very careful. Twitter is a platform that can distract you easily. You need to be focused and create a list of followers carefully.
Engage with the content that others are sharing. Talk to people through DMs. You should be using Twitter to build a network. It is this network that will help you climb the ladder of success. Drop valuable comments and replies on those posts that are relevant to your tech company.
You can use Twitter to establish yourself as a thought leader by sharing a mix of educational, promotional, and personal content.
Pros of organic platforms:
- Available to use for free.
- It will help expand your reach exponentially if you attract the attention of the right people.
- You can make your content bite-sized, interesting, and professional at the same time. It’s exactly what the audience is looking for anyway.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, we can say that marketing for tech companies is not a one-time process. It is ongoing and requires continuous efforts. But it surely is not an expensive affair. You have plenty of free tools to use at your disposal.
You need to stay active on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to ensure you are establishing yourself as an authority while building your own community. Use public relations to give your social proof a boost.
You can even reach the masses by staying well within your budget by using email marketing properly.
Yes, these processes can get time-consuming. But they are all worth every second spent.
