Help Tech Marketers Engage With IT Buyers: Channel Strategy

January 16, 2017

by Sandra Wilkins

3 Scenarios that will Help Tech Marketers Better Engage with IT Buyers Part 1 Channel Strategy Charlotte NC Pinckney Marketing.png

If you’re a tech marketer hoping to get some visibility and action with IT buyers, you’re probably experiencing quite the uphill battle.

IT buyers are complex, they do a ton of research, and their business function has and will continue to morph from reactionary to innovative.

This unique profile can sometimes make it difficult to talk to IT professionals, especially when you’re trying to get their information and/or sell them something.

But there’s a distinct sophistication in their profile that, when engaged properly, will allow you to forge a relationship based on educating your buyers and positively affecting your bottom line.

How do you do that?

Consider the first scenario below. Tech marketers face this challenge all the time and I’m here to provide some food for thought.

(These scenarios are real but I changed the names to provide a little anonymity.)

Scenario 1: Your channel strategy needs a little tweaking.

Mark has an inbound strategy that includes paid search and social media advertising as traffic drivers. Although he’s seeing great engagement rates with social media, landing page conversions just aren’t stacking up when compared to the number generated from paid search. As a result, his manager advises him to take resources and media spend away from social media. What should Mark do?

A little context:

Mark is where we’ve all been at one point or another: “how do I successfully refine my channel strategy to reach IT buyers?”

This is because IT buyers are super picky regarding where they get their information. While they use social media to read articles and engage with colleagues, social tends not to be their channel of choice when researching for consideration and decision stage content.

Solution:

Before pulling the plug on social media, I would check out which channels are driving assisted conversions.

What are those? Assisted conversions are the interactions that someone has with your website or channels leading up to the final interaction (conversion).

Results:

In this particular scenario, after taking a look at the assisted conversions report in Google Analytics, Mark found that while their social media interactions weren’t last click, social media was still an important step in guiding IT buyers along the path to making important conversions on their website.

With this insight, he switched up his social media strategy.

Instead of promoting consideration and decision stage content on social media, he promoted his blog articles and third-party reviews on channels like LinkedIn and Facebook. He sponsored and boosted these articles to a specific target audience. For Twitter, he also published this type of content, but he only promoted tweets that garnered great engagement rates.

This simple tweak in channel strategy continued to increase assisted conversions and even provided a boost in conversions from paid search and organic.

Doing this research not only allowed Mark to find out what content to promote where, but understand the IT buyer’s journey from awareness to making conversions on his website.

I hope you were able to grab a useful nugget of information from this post. What tweaks have you made in your channel strategy to speak specifically to IT buyers? Leave them in the comments below!

In the next scenario, I’m going to talk about the right way to appeal to IT buyers by switching up how much content you gate vs. leave unagted. Stay tuned!