Date
8th August 2024
What Are the Best B2B Technology Marketing Strategies In 2024?
B2B technology marketing has changed a lot in the last couple of decades.
Marketing tactics that once relied on cold calls and events to drive brand awareness and close deals have given way to digital-first campaigns, content marketing and thought leadership.
In other words, salespeople don’t chase their leads quite like they used to. But you already knew that. Buyers do their own research, and want to feel in control of the process.
They don’t do it alone, either. Technology buying committees have grown massively in recent years. According to Gartner, B2B buying groups for complex tech solutions now involve six to 10 decision-makers, each bringing four or five pieces of independently gathered information to the table.
The modern marketer needs to use a range of clever strategies to target and win each of those buyers.
In this blog, we’ll cover our favorite B2B technology marketing strategies:
- Content syndication
- Outbound technology lead generation
- Demand generation
- Thought leadership and employee advocacy
- Long term focus: lead nurturing
Why Strategize for B2B Technology Marketing?
Most B2B technology sectors are heavily competitive. It’s the clever marketing tactics that gets noticed by buyers, and the most attentive marketing programs that hold their attention.
B2B tech marketing requires a lot of work to make sure your brand is positioned competitively and your content and messaging resonates with your leads.
Careful audience targeting, intent data harvesting and personalization are the technology marketing services that have most success these days. That’s why tactics like account-based marketing and growth marketing are so popular with modern B2B tech marketers.
Ideally you should be able to track each of your leads through the B2B marketing funnel. That way you know you’re doing everything you can to guide them towards purchase (but without annoying them!).
Good B2B technology marketing companies can help you strategize to make sure you’re meeting all your leads’ pain points, and optimizing all opportunities to engage them.
Tech marketing companies, like award-winning Headley Media, offer a range of technology marketing services from single-touch lead generation through to display advertising and audience intelligence strategies.
Keep reading for our favorite methods of B2B marketing for technology companies.
Tech Marketing Strategy 1: B2B Content Syndication
B2B content syndication is a tech marketing strategy that works well alongside your content marketing strategy.
B2B content syndication allows you to access a huge new audience of sector-specific technology audiences for your most valuable gated content. Such as eBooks, videos, recorded webinars, whitepapers, research reports and case studies.
Your content is hosted on a content syndication platform and used as juicy bait for decision-makers, who give their contact details in exchange for your content. Readers will tick a box to consent to hear from you, and hey presto - they’re eligible to become a lead.
The difference with a reputable B2B content syndication supplier? They'll validate your leads before they deliver them to you.
For example, content syndication works for technology and SaaS lead generation like this:
- You send your valuable content to your B2B tech marketing agency.
- They publish it on one or more of their content libraries. As an example, Headley Media owns 265 content syndication content hubs across 60 countries and in 32 languages, covering the IT, Cybersecurity, Fintech, HRtech, Martech and Electronics industries.
- Every reader who downloads that piece of content gives their business contact details and consents to hear from you.
- Your leads are validated before being sent to you (if you're not sure if this is happening, make sure you ask your supplier!)
You can enhance a content syndication lead generation campaign with SoftBANT, intent data, ABM and audience intelligence strategies to get warmer, more sales-ready leads from your technology marketing company.
Lead Validation: Get Better Quality Leads
Don’t get lead qualification and lead validation mixed up.
Lead validation is checking your leads’ contact details and other information, to ensure you get minimal bounce-backs when you reach out to them. It also involves checking each lead has definitely consented to hear from you - which is a pretty solid lead qualification process itself.
A good quality lead generation agency should validate your leads before delivery, showing you a clear digital footprint of how each lead was generated, as well as proof that they consent to hear from you.
They’ll also check each lead’s details against trusted databases - such as LinkedIn and regional/national business registers. Take a look at Headley Media's Reader Journey page as an example of lead validation in action.
Strategy 2: Outbound Technology Lead Generation
Content syndication is one method of technology lead generation, but there are lots more to consider.
Outbound lead generation is any B2B marketing method where you actively target potential leads, opposed to inbound marketing, where leads come to you.
It’s often transactional, and quite a few methods are short-term, which means you can generate lots of top-of-funnel leads quickly.
Any form of outbound marketing where you persuade prospects to hand over their business details counts as lead generation.
A classic example is exhibiting at a trade show and encouraging people to enter their business card for a chance to win a prize.
A more modern example is a webinar where guests have to give their contact details and consent to hear from you to attend.
Outbound tech marketing strategies include:
- SEO: You can pull in leads by making sure you appear at the top of Google.
- Cold calling: Long fallen out of fashion, but it still gets used.
- Mass email marketing: Spamming a large database and seeing if anyone bites.
- Webinars: Lure in leads with expert advice and live Q&As.
- Free trials and free tools: These usually come a bit further down the marketing funnel, but they’re still fantastic for generating leads.
- Trade show attendance: You can generate and warm up a lead pretty rapidly face-to-face.
- PPC advertising: Measure the clicks on your website from easy-to-budget pay-per-click ads.
Strategy 2: Outbound Technology Lead Generation
Content syndication is one method of technology lead generation, but there are lots more to consider.
Outbound lead generation is any B2B marketing method where you actively target potential leads, opposed to inbound marketing, where leads come to you.
It’s often transactional, and quite a few methods are short-term, which means you can generate lots of top-of-funnel leads quickly.
Any form of outbound marketing where you persuade prospects to hand over their business details counts as lead generation.
A classic example is exhibiting at a trade show and encouraging people to enter their business card for a chance to win a prize.
A more modern example is a webinar where guests have to give their contact details and consent to hear from you to attend.
Outbound tech marketing strategies include:
- Webinars: Lure in leads with expert advice and live Q&As.
- PPC advertising: Measure the clicks on your website from easy-to-budget pay-per-click ads.
- Paid social ads
- Free trials and free tools: These usually come a bit further down the marketing funnel, but they’re still fantastic for generating leads.
- Trade show attendance: You can generate and warm up a lead pretty rapidly face-to-face.
Strategy 3: Demand Generation
The opposite of outbound marketing is inbound marketing - and that’s where demand generation comes in.
It’s all about attracting leads to come to you, rather than you reaching out to them - at least not in the obvious way.
It’s a slower process, but it works because of those self-sufficient, content-hungry buyers who are searching the internet for solutions to their business needs. Put your brand in front of them, give them answers to their problems, and you will generate demand for your business organically.
These are our favorite demand generation strategies:
- Ungated technology content marketing: Blogs, guest blogs and other articles that are freely available to read.
- Social media posting: Helpful updates and insights on industry news and relevant topics - and why not show off your personal side?
- Display advertising: Your brand presence enhanced across the digital landscape with ads.
- Speaking at events: Show off your business knowledge by speaking at a trade show.
- Content syndication: This doesn’t just work for outbound lead generation. Putting any content in front of large audiences will have a demand generation effect.
Strategy 4: The Power of Personality
We mentioned speaking at events as a great technology demand generation strategy.
But actually any member of the team being able to share useful knowledge of their business is fantastic for B2B technology marketing all round.
There’s broadly two categories of this: thought leadership, and employee advocacy.
Thought leadership is any content that comes directly from the brain and mouth of a a subject expert from your team. Traditionally this would have been a senior member of staff but in today's social media world, anyone can become a thought-leader online. Thought leadership takes several forms - from your Head of Product Development authoring a blog, to one of your team members giving a seminar at a trade show.
The name of the game with thought leadership is offering authoritative, genuine and personal insight. If you get it right, it’s a fantastic B2B technology marketing tool for building an audience and positioning your brand above the competition. SemRush argues that great thought leadership comes with strong opinions - so tell your team members not to be shy!
The other strand to this is employee advocacy. There isn’t only one expert in your team - any of your employees can become ambassadors or voices in the industry to help build your brand.
Employee advocacy is fantastic for tech marketing. A study from Hinge Marketing found that nearly 64% of advocates credited employee advocacy with attracting and developing new business.
As a B2B tech marketer, you can get named members of the team to help with writing blogs and other content, and put their name on it so they’re more likely to share it on social media. You can help them compose LinkedIn posts and find events that it’s worth them attending.
Strategy 5: Lead Nurturing
Any B2B technology marketing you do should be supported by a strong lead nurturing program.
Lead nurturing is the long-term strategy that will pull your leads through the funnel and increase the longevity of all your other technology marketing strategies.
It really works for marketers: 71% of participants in Demand Gen Report’s Lead Generation 2023 Benchmark Survey said that their lead nurturing efforts are producing warmer, sales-ready leads.
It’s all about feeding your top-of-funnel leads with carefully-chosen content and messaging to encourage them first to become familiar with your brand, then to see the potential of your products and services.
There are several different types of lead nurturing campaign that you can use at different stages of the marketing funnel:
- Welcome: The initial thanks-for-converting email has one of the highest open rates of any kind of email marketing campaign.
- Top-of-mind: Drip-feed content at regular intervals to prevent lead decay.
- Re-engagement: Target your inactive leads; they might be ready to reconsider your brand.
- Product: Further down the funnel, start to highlight the solutions your product presents.
- Promotional: Bottom-of-funnel tactic - offer a special discount or free trial.
- Upsell: A campaign for existing clients - there may be other products of yours they need.
More info about lead nurturing tactics in this Salesforce report.
Your B2B technology marketing company can offer you lead nurturing services as well, ensuring the leads you pay for are already Marketing Qualified Leads by the time they get to you.
Free Download: B2B Lead Generation Planning Toolkit
Our free B2B Lead Generation Planning Toolkit has everything you need to get started on your B2B technology marketing for 2024-25. Or read our guide on choosing the right supplier for your B2B tech marketing needs.
The Complete Guide to B2B Technology Lead Generation 2024
Explore everything you need to know about B2B technology lead generation in our complete guide. Within the guide you'll find the latest advice on how to generate B2B leads, as well as best practices for B2B lead nurturing.
