Tech B2B Marketing for Dummies

If you’re a tech CEO, tech founder, there’s no shame in not being a marketing expert. You’ve got a lot on your mind, making your business work and being deep into the technology and expertise that you have. And marketing isn’t exactly straightforward. You can see out there, there’s so many different opinions and options about it. Here are four basic ideas that if you understand them, I believe you will have a much better starting place and a good grasp of how marketing can and can’t help your business. Keep it simple.

Focus on relationships
First, at its core, marketing is about relationships. For you to attract your customers, they have to have a reason to interact with you. And you do that by creating meaning in your conversations with them and essentially building relationships. The end of the day, if you had to only remember one thing about marketing, that’s what marketing does… is create relationships. It’s especially true for B2B because it’s less transactional, right? It tends to be a longer term relationship that you are creating with them. And in the technology world, it’s so tempting to go to the data and go to the numbers and the acronyms and the specs, which is not typically helping you create that relationship.

Purpose/market fit
Second thing to keep in mind, this almost always starts with what I’ll call the purpose market fit. You know, the product market fit. And this is really just another version of that saying, your magic recipe, your secret sauce that’s going to make marketing work in your business is having a clean and strong connection between what you do, your purpose, why your business exists, what you’re special about, who you do that for. That’s your market or your ideal prospect. And make that as sharp a specific group as possible. And what is it that they get from being in relationship with you? What’s their value of knowing you and using your products? You start with that and everything else can, can fold out of that.

ID Customer journey gaps
Next, given that purpose, market fit, map out what you want to happen, what experience you want your prospects to have from the very beginning when they don’t even know you, through to having bought from you for a long time, and love you as a vendor. However many steps how detailed is less important than thinking it through, and focusing on what would happen for those that to happen successfully and for people to find you, accept you, commit to you, love you, et cetera. Then go back through that same process and evaluate what reality is versus what it should be or you want it to be. The difference between reality and ideal is the gaps that marketing potentially can help you with. This exercise is hugely important to define the priorities for your marketing efforts, and it allows you to make the marketing investments you make be purpose driven, focused on solving a specific problem in a specific point in that customer journey. 

Fill most important gaps
Then choose the top two to three of those issues and focus on making a difference with them with marketing tactics. So if you’ve done it in this order, this exercise of choosing from all the different kind of marketing activities you can do becomes much more manageable and straightforward and quantified because you’ve already decided what the results you need to happen, and now it’s just a matter of finding the right marketing activity that will deliver that result, and then check to see if that happens. Measure and repeat.

There you have it. Obviously there’s a lot more to marketing than that, but if you have that framework and that understanding of its purpose and how to map into the priorities that will deliver that value, you’ll be better off and not get, overwhelmed by marketing in your business.