Marketing technical products requires a well-developed strategy. Rather than speaking to the masses, you need to appeal to tech-savvy consumers who are searching for innovation. You’ll also need to distill the complexities of your product into smaller, consumer-friendly concepts. Here are seven tips to help you develop a marketing strategy for your technical products.
1. Provide Product Education for Your Team
In order to effectively market your product, everyone on your team needs to have firsthand knowledge of it. Your onboarding process should include in-depth, hands-on product training for new hires. It will be much easier for your team to create authentic marketing materials when they’ve used the product themselves.
This is particularly important for your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, as they will be working directly with customers. This training should also be available to third-party contractors and service providers. For example, if you’re outsourcing content production using technical writing services, those professionals will benefit from product education.
2. Understand Your Audience
Before you can develop your marketing strategy, you’ll first need to understand who your audience is. Conduct market research to learn more about whom your product best serves, as well as their priorities and pain points. Tactics like surveys and A/B testing can give you a better look at your customers’ mindset.
Just because your product is technical doesn’t mean your marketing has to be dry. You should still address your audience on a human level and empathize with their needs. Understanding the personality behind the consumer will help you create marketing campaigns that resonate.
3. Position Your Brand as an Industry Expert
When shopping for a technical product, consumers look to brands to teach them. To win audience members over, you’ll need to position yourself as an industry-leading expert. Not everyone shopping for technical products has a technical background, so they’ll need to be able to trust you.
One of the best ways to do this is with your content marketing strategy. Focus on sharing helpful, educational insights, rather than just promoting your products. Each piece of content should provide value to the consumer, regardless of whether they buy your product or not. Content types that work well for this strategy include blog posts, white papers, and video tutorials.
4. Give Marketing a Human Touch
When marketing technical products, it can be easy to get bogged down in jargon or dry, detailed descriptions. These will be overwhelming to the consumer, particularly if they’re just learning about your product for the first time. Save the detailed descriptions for your educational materials, which customers will read as they get closer to — or even after they’ve made — a purchase.
Instead, aim to give your marketing a more humanistic feel. While you don’t need to dumb down your marketing strategy, aim to use inclusive and accessible language that’s still relevant to your brand. Including anecdotes from past customers and storytelling elements will help make your marketing more appealing to a wider swath of your target audience.
5. Connect Your Marketing to Relevant Industry Trends
One way to keep your audience engaged is to let trends and hot topics inform your marketing campaigns. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and technical audiences like to stay on the cutting edge of innovation. Addressing trends that are relevant to your industry puts your name in the conversation.
A great example of this is the current artificial intelligence boom. Consumers are very intrigued by the potential of AI and want to know more about this exciting new technology. If your product contains AI or machine learning elements or integrates with AI tools, now is a great time to promote those capabilities. If your product provides an alternative to AI technology, you can discuss that, too. Touching on hot topics will get a discussion going among your audience.
6. Appeal to Different Learning Styles
Technical products should come with detailed educational materials. This will help buyers make the most of the product. Since everyone learns differently, these educational materials should be available in multiple formats. This makes your product more inclusive for those with different learning styles. Be sure to promote your product’s educational materials. They can be a huge selling point for potential customers who might be hesitant about trying a new technology.
In addition to written materials, include audio and video guides or even interactive demos. In some cases, you may even benefit from offering hands-on training sessions with your team. For example, B2B software companies will often include in-depth onboarding for their clients. This is key to retaining clients when you’re marketing a technical product.
7. Track Your Marketing Performance
Tracking your campaign performance will help you determine whether or not your marketing strategies are effective. With hard data, you can identify what strategies are resonating most with your audience and which need attention. A high bounce rate on a how-to video could suggest that retooling is needed, for example, while high time on page could indicate a blog post has struck a chord. Having such information will help you determine where to invest your marketing budget in the future.
Marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and HubSpot can help you collect and monitor campaign data. Besides bounce rate and time on page figures, you’ll be able to track organic traffic sources, paid advertising clicks, social media followers, and more. These tools also use visuals to help you better analyze the data.
Final Thoughts
Marketing technical products goes beyond basic mass market sales techniques. You’ll need to convey industry expertise and establish your company as a leader and educator. These marketing tips will help you build a strategy that resonates with a technical audience.
