Your tech company has finally achieved product market fit, increased customer traction and recently raised funding to further accelerate growth. As the CEO, head of sales or newly hired VP of Marketing, you're ready to expand your sales and marketing efforts, but trying to decide how best to build a scalable foundation for growth.
You know what got you this far, won't get revenue where it needs to go next. But you're not sure where to begin to build a consistent, repeatable marketing engine to generate awareness, drive traffic and generate enough qualified leads to fill your sales pipeline to help your growing sales team meet your aggressive new revenue targets.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, follow our proven marketing playbook and repeatable marketing process to develop and execute a high-growth marketing strategy, maximize the impact of your new marketing budget and make the most of recent funding to build a scalable foundation for growth.
Whether you are building out your internal marketing team or researching B2B technology marketing agencies, it's important to align your marketing strategy with the goals of internal stakeholders and understand the needs of your ideal customer profiles, while differentiating your company and product offering from competitors.
1. Spend Quality Time With Sales
No one in your organization knows more about your customers than those in the field. By aligning your efforts with sales early on, you’ll learn which messages are most effective, understand which materials are missing and determine which activities generate the most qualified leads in order to establish your short-term sales goals and balance your long-term marketing objectives.
2. Reach Out to Product Development
Include your engineers and product developers in your research activities to gain a valuable perspective on important technical details and intellectual property patents. Their technology background, product knowledge and domain expertise can help you understand the significance of key features and benefits and form the basis of your company’s unique differentiators and overall competitive advantage.
3. Understand the Needs of your Customers
Many technology companies spend too much time focusing on the products they are selling instead of identifying what their customers are most interested in buying. Avoid this disconnect by reaching out to your best customers — as well as lost prospects — to develop a deeper understanding of why your company won the deal or what could have been done to improve the sales experience.
4. Keep Tabs on the Competition
Know what your competition is doing online, what kind of content they are producing, where they are generating media coverage, etc. By combining this knowledge with your customer insight, you can address significant threats, exploit potential vulnerabilities and identify positioning opportunities to successfully differentiate your company, products and marketing efforts.
5. Read Up on your Industry
Research web sites, blogs, trade publications and industry analysts that cover your industry and identify specific reporters, bloggers and social media influencers. Set up Google Alerts for your company, competitors and keywords and monitor social media to see what topics are being written about and which hashtags are being discussed in order to recognize new trends and uncover opportunities for greater market traction.
Market research is more than a one-time activity. It's important to build regular feedback and ongoing insight into your marketing process to improve awareness, uncover opportunities and influence sales performance.
It's often tempting for venture-backed tech companies to just move forward without taking the time to understand the market dynamics at play in their industry. In an effort to move fast, foundational elements of a high-growth marketing strategy are often overlooked. Without understanding your company's strengths, identifying your competitor's weaknesses and aligning them with customer priorities, your overall marketing strategy, budget and impact is far less effective as well as investor's capital.
"Calling your best customers to dig in and really understand what you could do that no one else does is essential for creating a marketing strategy and message that has impact." - John Jantch, Author of “Duct Tape Marketing”
