5 roadblocks
that stop tech services companies
from moving forward with marketing

And tips to overcome

What’s the biggest impediment founders face in moving forward on their marketing journey? In other words, where do they get stuck. While I felt like I had a decent handle on the main impediments, I wanted to gain confidence in which reasons were more common than others. So I decided to pose a question to RocLogic’s audience.

I created a poll and put it up on RocLogic’s site (my recollection is that the vast majority of responses came from an article focused on marketing strategy for software development companies. I’m not 100% certain of the exact location because the poll has since been removed.) Of course, this creates all sorts of bias from self-selection and whatnot, and anyone could theoretically respond, but with 180 responses, I feel like this is a useful enough data point.

Poll results

The question was: Founders / presidents: What’s the biggest impediment you face in moving forward on your marketing journey?

Let’s cover the “other” response first, since I don’t really have any tips / suggestions for this because I don’t have additional insights into what the “other” responses were. And while this response isn’t super large (11%), I’m curious to hear from you if you’d select “other” as your choice as well. What would your “other” be? If you’re willing, you can let me know by emailing question@roclogicmarketing.com.

Tips / suggestions on how to get yourself over the marketing journey hump if you’re stuck

If you don’t know what the next step should be

This was the most popular response. And I get it. I started out as an engineer. I can’t imagine having a clue what to do with marketing back then. Marketing is unlike technical disciplines (engineering, development, etc). There’s a high degree of uncertainty, a lot of partially observable variables, and methods /algorithms / platforms evolve relatively quickly.

Overwhelming for sure.

Here are a few things I’ve learned that might help you get started:

  1. Fundamentally you need to be able to answer 3 questions for each aspect of your business (before you get started on activities):
    1. What problem(s) am I solving?
    2. For whom?
    3. How am I going to engage them?
  2. You need a niche. See why you need a niche.
  3. Assuming you head up a smaller company (say less than ~100 people), you’re going to want to select a primary marketing method and a secondary method. You’ll likely spread yourself too thin if you try to execute half a dozen or so methods at once.
  4. Focus on objectives over activities. You can get lost in trying to create X articles per month or put on Y webinars this year. An objective could be:
    1. maintaining or increasing the quantity of sales ready leads,
    2. maintaining or increasing the quality of sales ready leads,
    3. maintaining or improving your organic ranking for specific topics.
  5. Here’s a simple high-level process that might help clarify an approach to trying to obtain sales ready leads:
    1. Find a reasonable niche (or two).
    2. Create / update content.
    3. Start testing.
    4. Assess market feedback.
    5. Iterate / pivot / refine.

And here are a few articles to help you get unstuck:

If you’re intrigued by the inbound marketing philosophy in particular, check these out:

If you don’t have the budget yet

This means different things to different people. There’s really a spectrum that you can trade off between what you get help with and what you do yourself. Of course, your cognitive energy isn’t actually free either. You’ve got limited amounts of it any given week. Use it wisely.

If you mean you can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on ads and tradeshows, that might be ok. If you mean you can’t put any energy into marketing at all, I’d say two things:

  1. You have a fundamental business problem. You need to work through that if you want a sustainable business.
  2. If you’re currently a successful and sustainable business, then you’re probably putting money into marketing somehow, even if you don’t call it “marketing”. Assuming you run a services-oriented business, you’re likely at least putting money into one or more of these:
    1. being out in public somehow
    2. doing such great work that you’re getting referrals left and right,
    3. you’re deeply partnered up with a company that feeds you leads.

If you’re not sure marketing can work for you

If you feel this way, chances are you’ve tried different ways and feel like you’re not getting any traction.

It’s fair to say that there are so many ways for marketing to not work.

There are several dimensions that have to align in order to see results (often defined in terms of sales ready leads in the services world). Some of the key dimensions your company must align with:

  1. your potential customers,
  2. the market,
  3. content.

If you’re selling something that isn’t that useful to your customers, you’re misaligned. If you sell something where there’s are too many sellers and not enough buyers, you’re misaligned. If what you do isn’t discernable from many others out there, you’re potentially misaligned. If you aren’t empathizing with your customer’s needs, you’re misaligned. The list goes on….

If you have too many higher priorities

You might have too many higher priorities for any shorter period of time (where shorter period might be on the order of weeks or a few months). You might be in trouble in the long run if this is your mindset as a general statement.

Maybe the best time to work on your marketing is when you don’t need it. I get that it’s hard to convince yourself that it’s worth putting energy toward trying to get more business if you don’t need more business, but my stance is that ideally you want a machine running in the background, producing sales ready leads. If you’re in the fortunate position of not needing all of them, you can do two things:

  1. Get pickier about who / what you say yes to.
  2. Focus more of your energy on long-term strategic marketing. This could include putting more energy into:
    1. deep content,
    2. new strategic topics of interest
    3. brand building.

A couple tips to help prioritize your marketing efforts:

  1. Find someone that’s good at follow-thru and organization. Assign them the roll of pushing your marketing ball forward inch by inch over time.
  2. When it comes to creating content (especially articles), create a task with a weekly due date to chip away at the article for ~two hours each week. During that time, write. Don’t sit there waiting for the perfect sentence to flow. It may not. If you like lists or bullet points, write lists or bullet points. Those will become sections later. If you like visuals, draw a diagram first, and then speak to that.

Check out Inbound Marketing – what’s the risk of waiting to get started? for more on this topic.

If you haven’t found the right company to help you out yet

This can be hard, especially if you’ve tried several times in the past and felt like you’ve not gotten traction with that company. Some companies just aren’t a match. Some people just aren’t a match.

A few tips to get you closer:

  1. Write down what “right” looks like for you, right now. This can change over time. Write down the 3 most important things to you. Start searching google for that.
  2. Be realistic with yourself. If someone is telling you something that seems too good to be true, it probably is. Marketing is hard, with a large degree of uncertainty. Be skeptical of the oversell.
  3. Check out this article on selecting a marketing consultant.

Next Steps

If you decide you’re ready to unstick yourself and move forward on your journey, check out RocLogic’s services and pricing to see if we’re aligned and then reach out for a chat if you’d like.