In the landscape of technology companies, it can be a challenge to not only market a complicated product with a long sales cycle, but to also clearly differentiate your company. Your content marketing is one way this can be accomplished because it “allows you to put your solution into any ‘story’ and get all of those critical messages [about your product] across,” writes Business 2 Community. 
Are you still trying to convince your boss that content marketing is the way to go? It’s critical for every business to have a documented strategy in place if they want to succeed and prove the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Developing your strategy will help you to clarify and manage your marketing goals with organizational objectives. Follow these tips to set your company up for success.
Mastering The Basics
All effective content marketing strategies start with the buyer persona in mind. Clearly define who the personas are for your company. Technology or software purchases typically involve multiple stakeholders, so each of these stakeholders, and their unique questions and needs, should be assigned to a persona.
Once you have your personas in place, you can look at how to address their needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Remember, most people will do a majority of their research before getting in contact with your sales team. This is why content is so important. You want to be part of the conversation and education surrounding a problem, not just focused on selling your product.
Use Content To Differentiate
Content is how you can build trust and establish credibility for your brand. The better you understand your buyer personas and their unique journeys, the more you will be able to focus your marketing efforts on their needs and work to become a thought leader in your area, “instead of just putting lipstick on the same old content pig,” writes the Content Marketing Institute. In addition to blog posts, tech buyers will be looking for more in-depth information through white papers, case studies and ebooks, which you can leverage to help nurture your leads.
Quality Over Quantity
Simply producing a large quantity of content is not enough to generate qualified leads. Although it is true that blogging regularly produces better inbound lead generation results, content that is irrelevant or badly put together will not work and ends up being a waste of time and money. Since you are using your content as a way to differentiate your tech company, it needs to be of high-quality and optimized to stand out among the rest of the “noise” online. Remember, this is not about you. Content needs to support your potential customers, and not just try to push your product. Make sure your team of writers understands your company’s product and your customers.
And once you’ve produced all of this great content, don’t forget to promote it! Sharing your content on social media, through email, or other channels is a step that can’t be skipped. You can (and should) also reuse old technology blogs as part of your strategy.
Make Analytics Your Friend
The metrics you measure will show how all of your marketing efforts are working together. When you understand which channels work best, you can better invest your resources. Monitoring analytics will demonstrate how well you are contributing to your goals and where your campaigns have succeeded, as well as where there is room to improve. Paying attention to your analytics and what is working (or not) will also help you to prove the ROI of your content marketing.
Tech companies are marketing a complicated product, so use your content strategy to make it so that people easily understand the value you provide to them.
