A big part of a tech marketer’s role is understanding the tech buyer – their intent, preferences, and evolving needs. But this is easier said than done. The ‘tech buyer’ is not one person – it’s a collective of diverse technical and business roles within the organization – anywhere from six to eight roles on average. And this number changes based on the size of the organization, the complexity of the solution being sought, the degree of investment, industry vertical, and even geographical regions! Tech marketers need to shift from an individual centric approach to engaging a collective of influencers.
Campaign optimization too is more challenging than ever. Even as each member of the buying collective looks at the purchase decision from their own unique lens, almost 70% of the buying journey gets completed without any sales engagement with the brand. With more new channels in the mix; more ways for buyers to research, evaluate, collaborate, and arrive at a decision; and more ways for your competitors to build deep relationships with buyers at each stage of the journey, influencing the buying decision efficiently and effectively needs not just ‘knowing the buyer’, but truly understanding the buying collective.
For these reasons, many tech marketers prefer to partner with a strong B2B agency who can help them identify, reach, engage, and influence members of the buying collective throughout the buying journey – which can stretch from weeks to several months, and even years, from discovery to decision.
Here are three ways B2B agencies can help tech marketers better understand their audiences:
- Identifying the audience: this may be just the first step for the tech marketer, but getting it right is vital for the entire customer acquisition and retention process. It’s a crowded and confusing space, with several agencies claiming to offer data that can help tech marketers identify in-market audiences via intent data. The challenge is that the spectrum of what qualifies as ‘intent data’ can vary greatly – despite the fact that intent data undoubtedly fuels core B2B marketing processes such as creating ICPs, targeting accounts, placing ads, and sourcing leads. It could range from third-party data based on limited sources such as content consumption or ad clicks, to higher-quality intent data based on more diverse and credible first and third-party sources. While most agencies can deliver data at scale, the context and depth tend to suffer. Data based on limited interactions, from limited sources, or without context based on compelling signals may not indicate that the ‘audience’ is actually in-market for the solution.
A strategic agency partner will steer their client clear of sub-optimal ‘inferred intent’ and avoid compromising on the quality, diversity, and scale of the data needed to fuel successful marketing initiatives. The agency will instead partner with the marketer to build a strong best-in class intent data strategy for a higher degree of certainty about buyer intent. High quality intent data also provides strong context to truly understand the nature of the account, members of the buying collective, and the nature of the buyer’s mindset as they progress through their journey. - Understanding key stakeholders: due to the increasing complexity of the buying collective, the vendor’s visibility into the account is cloudier than before. To understand the identified audiences and build relevant plans to engage them, brands need a wide understanding of the account and in-depth visibility of key stakeholders and their priorities. While different roles get involved with the process at different points of the buying journey, the one constant in the buying collective is the presence of IT. The ITDM (IT decision maker) is involved in the buying decision from start to finish; they determine and document business needs into product specs, and take the lead in evaluating and recommending solutions or vendors to other stakeholders in the collective.
B2B agencies can play a key role to help tech vendors understand key stakeholders in the collective — especially the ITDM, who is central to the purchase decision. For example, a cloud solutions vendor would value an agency which can provide insights about specific factors that concern key members of the cloud buying collective and offer advice on how that should impact the marketing effort. This sort of detail requires access to best-in-class first and third-party data. Such data is arrived at from a range of diverse sources where buyers leave compelling behavioral signals about their intent, as well as richer context about what they want from their solutions.
- Reaching and influencing the ITDM: while understanding key audiences is critical to driving acquisition, it’s not enough, especially for SaaS tech vendors who depend heavily on customer retention and lifetime value. The tech marketer will aim to build sustained advantage by establishing a deep and meaningful relationship with key stakeholders in the buying collective. As the ITDM is pivotal to the technology purchase decision, deployment and adoption, engaging and influencing them is the priority during and after the sale.
The agency plays a central role in providing the brand access to spaces where ITDMs spend time professionally, in a work mindset. This includes conversations behind the firewall, community forums and discussions, and exclusive editorial properties. For example, the Spiceworks Community and Toolbox are popular forums for marketers to reach stakeholders in IT, marketing, HR, and finance, because that is where this audience goes for exclusive content, trusted community conversations, access to business apps and tools, and other resources. These diverse interactions offer continuous and contextual behavior signals, and more precise insights about purchase intent. A more complete picture of the business sentiment and mindset ultimately enables tech marketers to deliver not just a winning pitch but unbeatable customer experience.
Best-in-class or intelligent intent data will not just help know, understand, and influence customers, it will also help agencies with full funnel campaign execution capabilities run the most efficient and optimized campaigns. For example, knowing that cloud buying collectives prefer high level summaries during the discovery phase, conversations with solutions architects during the research phase, and information about regulatory compliance and ROI/TCO calculators when closing the decision helps invest in the right content for the right phase of the journey.
Similarly, a deep understanding of the preferred buying channels of ITDMs helps optimize campaign spend across platforms. For example, knowing that over 60% of cloud tech IT buyers prefer email, followed closely by video conferencing and phone calls can save disproportionate spends on display. Similarly, having a pulse on how the shift to hybrid and remote work has altered contact preferences of ITDMs in different regions of the world can significantly impact campaign decisions and outcomes.
As B2B buyer profiles and priorities continue to evolve, B2B agencies must evolve to offer a wide set of connection points and enable deep direct relationships within accounts, including the growing demographic of millennials, many of whom are already ITDMs and influencers. Intelligent intent data from a trusted partner like SWZD can help B2B agencies serve their technology clients with data that’s informed by the widest range of sources. Most important in the context of ITDMs, SWZD is the only way to access contextual intent signals from behind the firewall – community conversations, feedback from the usage of apps and tools, and content consumption on owned platforms. This rich first and third-party data offers insights that connect the dots from the server room to the board room, and is quite simply the most accurate, scalable, and customizable data available to agencies as they strive to best meet their client’s needs. To learn more about how your agency can access SWZD Intent Data for the most successful technology campaigns, contact us.