Digital Marketing for IT services

Marketing IT services is challenging. The sales cycle is long and complex, the sales price is high, and you’re selling services more so than products.

Here’s what you want to keep in mind for digital marketing in your small/medium-sized IT company:

  1. You need to build trust.
  2. Focus on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
  3. Don’t focus on providing the level of technical information that you want to. Focus on providing the level of technical info that your customers want.
  4. Shift your thinking toward sales-ready leads.
  5. Don’t look at digital marketing methods and tools backwards.
  6. Find a niche.

Building Trust

You’re selling what doesn’t exist. You’re customers are buying a capability. This is quite different than buying a product that has spec sheets and something tangible associated with it. There are two main elements to building trust:

  1. Proof points
  2. Knowledge sharing

Proof points include case studies and any metrics around the past work you’ve done. It takes a fair amount of effort to create these proof points, but it’s just that, work. No magic.

Knowledge sharing includes talking about topics that your customers care about that relates to the world that you’re in. This doesn’t mean you should be focused on sharing the nitty gritty details of what you do as a company. Rather, you should be focused on the topics that your customers care about that overlap with your business.

Focusing on LCV

LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is a very important metric. It may not be your favorite metric or only metric to go by, but I bet it should be one of your top 2 or 3 business metrics.

A couple business priorities that may steer your focus a bit from LCV:

  1. A strategic opportunity that helps you get into a new application area that your company wants to penetrate.
  2. “Fun work”. Whatever this means to your company. This could be customers that are easy to work with, technically challenging work, or lower stress work.

No matter what, you’re going to want to include LCV into your digital marketing thought process. Why? Because:

  1. Understanding what your LCV is helps inform your digital marketing approach(es).
  2. Being able to roughly predict the potential LCV of an account/division helps you decide:
  • Where to focus your digital marketing efforts.
  • Where to focus your sales efforts.

Provide the info your customers want, not the info you want them to have

This takes empathy. You’re not your customer, and they aren’t you. Stop blabbing about things they don’t care about, including how your company evolved or useless statements like “rest assured…” or “we want to partner with you…”. Just because you believe something to be true, doesn’t mean you should say it on your website.

You need to learn more from the market, and less from what your employees think (unless those employees are relaying info from conversations with your customers).

It’s real easy to fall into the trap of just blabbing about all the things you know about in gory detail. There are cases that this can make sense (eg. to build your authority), but if you’re not careful, you may just be providing info to DIYers, which isn’t your goal.

Some places you can gather feedback:

  1. Your customer-facing employees (e.g. sales people and project leads)
  2. Your analytics tools
  3. Your customers – interviews and surveys

Always keep in mind who you’re speaking with: a CIO vs an IT manager vs an owner vs a product manager. Care-abouts and attention spans vary.

Moving toward sales-ready leads

Move away from focusing on activities (e.g. how many webinars you did or white papers you created this year) and vanity metrics (e.g. likes, shares, visitors). It’s not that you won’t be doing activities. You will. They just shouldn’t be the core of your focus. You should be focusing on obtaining sales-ready leads (SRLs). The vast majority of what you do should have an explainable connection back to that objective.

So what is a sales-ready lead? Sales-ready leads usually meet 3 criteria:

  1. appear to be a reasonable fit for your company,
  2. have a need,
  3. and have expressed interest in talking to someone from your company.

There can be exceptions to this of course, based on your overall strategy.

Focusing on SRLs takes discipline and common goals for stakeholders. If you’ve got no historical basis to start from, you’re going to have to take a stab at some intermediate leading indicators of progress (reach out if you’d like to chat more about this).

Don’t look at digital marketing methods and tools backwards

There’s too many methods/tools/platforms when it comes to digital marketing for your IT company. The good news with that is that you shouldn’t start with methods, platforms or tools anyway. You should start by answering a few fundamental questions, which in turn ought to drive your digital marketing methods, platforms, and tools. The fundamental questions to answer are:

  1. What problem(s) am I solving?
  2. For who?
  3. How do I engage them?

Questions 1 & 2 just take some work and a bit of iteration to get to a usable starting point. Question 3 can be more challenging. If you’d like some thoughts on these as it relates to your scenario, feel free to reach out for a chat.

After you have at least educated guesses on these questions, it should become more clear which methods/tools/platforms will make the most sense (if not, feel free to reach out). Start small. Don’t try to tackle content, inbound, search, social, account-based, referral, and email all at once.

You need a niche

There are a LOT of IT companies out there. You need to figure out where you fit in the mix, and dive into that from a digital marketing perspective.

It’s not that you can’t provide general IT support services (you can, and probably should), it’s just that you’ll want to proceed with caution if you’re competing digitally solely as a generalist (if you want to go there, there are 2 main considerations before you even dip your toe in the water). You may need to narrow your focus, and do so from the perspective that people care about enough to seek out specifically, or at least care enough about when they see it that it’s worth being found for the general topic and then qualifying out those that don’t match your specific niche.

See Why you need a niche and what to do about it for more on this topic.

Next Steps

Ready to get more serious about digital marketing? Reach out for a chat.

Yes, let’s chat

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