Your marketing plan is arguably the most important aspect of your business.
It helps you determine who to market to, how much money you’ll spend and where you’ll spend it. And it’s the key to achieving your financial goals.
Yet many entrepreneurs never take the time to create a marketing plan until they need one – and then they’re scrambling to put together a plan and execute it before their competitors steal all their customers.
Marketing is an important component of any company, but it can be hard to figure out what steps are necessary for your company to find success. Especially since some products are easier to sell because people are already familiar with them or know what they do, others take more creative work.
In this blog post, you’ll find 5 different marketing ideas that can help your technology business stand out and reach new customers.
Engage Customers in the Product Development Cycle
One of the keys to marketing success for tech products is getting feedback. And not just after the product is fully developed and launched to the market.
You need to solicit feedback on your product throughout its development stage.
At the ideation stage, you can launch a survey asking people for their pain points and needs. And remember to get user-testing as you develop your product.
With enough feedback from real users, you’ll reduce the chances of a negative reception when your product goes live. A well-made product that’s built with the customer in mind will help increase both customer satisfaction and sales.
Another important benefit is that gathering feedback through the product development phase allows you to plan for modifications and improve your product more as time goes on.
Showcase Your Company with Content Marketing
Content marketing is focused on providing valuable and relevant content to a target audience. The objective of this type of marketing is to produce content that your potential customers will find interesting. The goals of content marketing are varied; you want to drive sales but focusing on higher search rankings, more traffic, and more engagement are also valid goals.
Content marketing can be done through various methods such as blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media. It’s a long-term activity that you need to work on from the outset. While this topic deserves its own post, you can use the following points to get you started:
Learn about your customers. Create a complete buyer profile that includes demographic information, interests, and more.Using SEO tools and your own research, determine the keywords that people use in relation to your product and industry.Based on the information you get, create helpful blog posts and articles. It’s good practice to include the right keywords and phrases in your posts so that people and search engines understand that your content is relevant.You need to create content regularly and also track its performance with SEO and analytics tools. An analytics plugin will provide reports on things like popular posts, demographics, user flow, and more, which will help you create better-performing content.
Content marketing is a critical marketing strategy that no business can afford to neglect. You can expect to see outcomes only after weeks or months of effort, so it’s important to get started on it at the very beginning.
Leverage Influencers
The tech industry has a number of experts and influencers providing quality content to their following.
If you want to grow your business fast, it’s vital to work with an influencer who has a high profile and an engaged audience. By working with such a person, you can tap into their networks and instantly reach new customers.
However, you have to come up with a campaign idea that is thoughtful and relevant to the audience you’re targeting. You could ask an influencer to use your product for free and leave an honest review – which can be risky since you might get a negative review.
You can also partner up with an expert and offer their audience a significant discount on your product in exchange for airtime and other rewards.
Use influencer marketing tools and SEO tools to identify major influencers in your area of interest. Then reach out to them individually with customized emails to pitch your marketing idea.
As long as you offer clear value to the influencer and their following, you’ll stand a solid chance of growing your audience fast.
Create ‘lite’ versions of your product
For customers, asking them to invest in a new product is asking them to undertake risk. They not only have to spend money on your product, but they also have to rely on it to meet important goals.
It’s understandable that people will be reluctant to work with you when they know very little about what your brand and product do.
A great way to overcome this feeling of risk is to create a free or lite version of your product. In my business, we offer free versions of our contact form, SMTP plugin, and other tools for WordPress users.
This helps us to build our leads and it also gives our audience a chance to know what our product is like. They get to use a product version with limited features and play around with its interface. As they get comfortable and see how the product works, they’re convinced to upgrade their accounts and pay for premium full-featured tech solutions.
Use the best marketing tools
Your marketing strategies and content creation will only be as good as the tools that back them up.
You need solid marketing tools to inform your marketing decisions and measure how well your work is doing. Here are some of the tools you need to have:
CRM tools. Customer Relationship Management tools help you collect data on your customers and manage your interactions with them across multiple channels. As a result, you’ll be able to personalize your interactions and provide better service.Social media management tools. When you promote yourself on social media, you need to post multiple times a day and across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so many more. A social media management tool will help you schedule and post content to multiple platforms at once. And you’ll also get social listening and analytics to support your marketing.Lead generation tools. You need forms and optin popup plugins to collect your audience’s email and other information. It’s only when you have direct contact with your audience that you can personalize your content and nurture them into paying customers.Analytics plugins. You can get useful reports for free from your Google Search Console. The only issue is that it’s not the most user-friendly tool out there. Adding an analytics plugin to your website can help you learn more about your traffic and the performance of your content.
These are just some of the marketing tools you can use to grow your tech product. You can grow your business even more effectively with push notifications, social proof tools, social feed plugins, and more.
Conclusion
As a tech company, you face tremendous competition from businesses around the globe. Your best chance at success is to create an awesome marketing strategy that makes you stand out from your competition.
I’ve shared my five best tips for you to take your tech startup to the next level. Apply these tips and you’ll see meaningful growth in a very short time.
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