There is no one size fits all marketing strategy for IT companies because each area of information technology has a different target market, and each company stands out in their own way. But IT marketing plans share some common attributes.
IT Marketing Begins With Your Growth Objectives
- Do you have as many customers as you can handle and simply need to keep the calls coming or are you looking to grow your business?
- How many calls are you getting today from your website? What about your social media?
- What are your most profitable types of customers? What would you like more of? How much is a new customer worth to you? These are important to assess your marketing budget.
- Does your business have a focus? There are so many areas of technology and unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, it is unlikely that you can do it all. Your business needs to tell a story. Perhaps you offer concierge IT support, perhaps your focus is on security and cloud strategy, or maybe you would rather focus on in home service or application development. Think about what you do best as your go-to-market focus
IT Marketing Fundamentals
- Adwords: Most IT businesses are highly competitive. If you Google how you would like to be found and see your competitor’s ads then you’ll need to be there too. The trick with smaller IT companies is that if you are too general with your keywords, you’ll end up competing against huge companies with deep pockets. A long tail, niche strategy is key.
- A Website That Converts: Your website needs to load in 2 seconds or less, look great on mobile and make it very obvious what you do and why you’re different from other IT firms. Being in technology, the bar is even higher for you.
- Local SEO: Your IT company needs to be on the map. This is accomplished by creating keyword rich listings in hundreds of online directories. It is one of the most cost effective and fastest ways to be found and should definitely be part of your strategy.
- A Newsletter & Blog: Find a way to regularly connect with your customer, prospects and referral partners by sharing a monthly newsletter with your blog excerpt, upcoming events, pictures of members of your company in the community or with customers and tips. Remaining top of mind will help with professional referrals and being the company a prospect will call when they have an IT need.
Next Level IT Marketing
- Are you networking? Do you take full advantage of the handfuls of business cards you collect or do they sit on your desk? A CRM system is a perfect tool to automate nurturing those leads. Send customized emails that look like you fired them off from your account personally. Ask for referrals and testimonials, automate aspects of your new customer onboarding. Did an initial consultation not close? Send an automated check in.
- Social Media Visibility: Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Does it have positive reviews? Are you active daily on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Instagram & Twitter?
- Social Media Engagement: Visibility is the first step but you want to network online the same way you network at events. Join business and community online groups, comment on posts, share and make connections. Out in the community? Share pictures! Can you profile clients? Share testimonials? IT companies do well with webinars. You can often get marketing funding from your larger corporate partners.
- On Page SEO: This involves optimizing the load speed of your IT company’s website (like an untuned car it will slow down over time), making changes to the code to be more search engine friendly and optimizing your content for target legal keywords. A proper IT SEO strategy will help your Adwords campaign to perform better and cost you less per click.
- Online Reviews: People really do care what others think, even when it comes to choosing an attorney. The more 5-star reviews you have on Facebook and Google, and the more endorsements on LinkedIn, the more confident a customer will be to retain you. Even if they find out about you elsewhere you can be certain they are checking you out online.
- Videos and Photos: On your website show professional photos of you working with clients. Shoot 1-2 minute videos for your website and social media of you providing legal tips, sharing a story of a customer who did or didn’t do something that either saved them or caused issues, or of a customer saying nice things about you. Visitors to your website or social media should get a feel for what it would be like to work with you.
Diane is an integral part of my team and in some respect is like my CMO – Chief Marketing Officer. Diane and her team truly get the business side of my business and knows intuitively how to market and position nQuery to end users.
Emilio Diaz, nQuery Technology Solutions