Tech Marketers for Business: Trends, Challenges, and Solutions

If you’re keen on investing in your business, you should consider prioritizing:

• Continuous Lead Gen Pipelines
• Spending Time on ABM
• Consistently Including Content Syndication

This is where Tech Marketers can help you.

Here’s what Todd Berkowitz, MVP at Gartner, says about the importance of tech marketers:

“A technology product marketer is often the ‘glue’ of the go-to-market team, engaging with numerous internal and external stakeholders. Maintaining the status quo is not an option.” 

Before welcoming tech marketers to the scene, let’s walk through some ground-breaking trends impacting them in 2023.

What Trends are Impacting Tech Marketers in 2023?

There are three significant trends currently affecting technology product marketers. 

Firstly, despite the emergence of new analytics and techniques, showcasing the return on investment of marketing activities remains a crucial challenge for tech marketers. 

To showcase their organization’s impact on top business objectives, tech marketers must devise effective methods to measure and communicate marketing ROI. 

Secondly, due to the hot hiring market and record-low unemployment rates, marketing organizations have been experiencing difficulties in retaining and recruiting competent individuals for many tech marketing roles. This trend is expected to continue in 2023. 

Lastly, while existing customers account for 64% of sales leads for large tech providers, new prospects and sales pipelines often receive more attention. However, forward-thinking tech marketers will seek to balance this by focusing on customer marketing and other customer-centric activities such as:

• Creating personalized customer experiences using data and analytics to understand their needs and preferences better.
• Providing exceptional customer service through various channels such as email, phone, chat, or social media ensures customers are satisfied and engaged.
• Developing customer advocacy programs that incentivize loyal customers to promote your brand to their networks.
• Building communities around your products or services to facilitate conversation and engagement among customers.
• Conducting research and gathering customer feedback to identify improvement and innovation areas.
• Developing and delivering educational content and resources that help customers better use and understand your products or services.
• Using social listening and other forms of market research to understand customer needs and preferences better and to stay up-to-date with trends and changes in the marketplace.

While the trends look promising, there’s a sincere case of challenges tech marketers face. Let’s dive deeper, shall we?

What are the Challenges Faced by Tech Marketers?

One of the biggest challenges of any mid-sized and enterprise-level B2B firm is they believe they have all their marketing figured out. Whether via ads, paid collaborations, buying an email list, or calling everyone who can buy their product.

But today, customers are looking for more than just the product. 

This is where the biggest challenge arises for tech marketers. 

It is different from what the end customers want but what the clients are willing to do. 

Disconnected Marketing Metrics

One challenge facing tech marketers is that they often rely on standard metrics that do not indicate the value and impact of their marketing efforts on business objectives. 

Solution: 

• Tech marketers must identify the appropriate KPIs that align with business strategies.
• Showcase how marketing can advance the organization. 
• Apply agility to KPI and performance management by customizing dashboards to prioritize business needs. 
• Use narratives to reveal marketing’s value.

Unbalanced Focus on Customer Growth

While renewals generate more enterprise revenue, most large tech providers allocate their marketing budgets and advanced operations to prospects. As a result, they overlook valuable growth opportunities from existing customers. 

Retention is key. 

Solution: 

• Tech marketers should establish a dedicated customer marketing organization. 
• Leverage their current marketing technology capabilities and reports to a centralized marketing function. 
• This approach can drive growth and expansion within the existing customer base.

Once we try to see beyond the challenges, tech marketers have their own pain points to deal with. 

Four Crucial Pain Points Faced by Tech Marketers 

Marketing is no longer one atomic cell phenomenon. Instead, a whole nucleus at play involves strategies, playbooks, dynamism, and a concrete market understanding. 

It is the value an organization will derive at the end. 

Here’s what Jason Heller, McKinsey’s Global Leader in Marketing Operations, says about tech marketers’ pain points: 

“Platformization of marketing is a very real phenomenon already. We have leaders on the scale of Adobe, Oracle, and salesforce.com making near $1bn acquisitions and creating massive scale. But can they keep up with the market and change the behavior of consumers?…”

1. Scaling Marketing Operations 

The speed with which marketing trends are evolving is beckoning tech marketers to constantly embrace new technologies, approaches, and processes and keep pace while leading companies toward better decision-making. 

Wading through the complex internal web of an enterprise environment, business groups, stakeholders, and existing platforms is making the job of a tech marketer more difficult. 

Breaking through new barriers to scale marketing operations with everyone on board is one big pain point for tech marketers. 

2. Crafting Compelling Messages 

B2B companies must invest in split testing to see a significant increase in their CTRs. More often than not, tech marketers need help communicating the importance of experimenting with the messaging to different stakeholders. 

With a heavy Gen-Z user base and solutions to increase engagement at all levels, tech marketers must find a semblance between traditional and new-age marketing techniques. 

Businesses realize the importance of transparency that social media platforms entail. But to be wholly invested in it is quite another story. 

Hence, it has to be a mix of information, entertainment, and sales. 

3. Content Syndication 

We cannot work in silos anymore. 

To make it in the market, you must be hypervigilant and analyze what the market is looking for. Content creation and distribution play a crucial role in creating an impact.

Every product decision can sometimes involve up to 20 stakeholder buy-ins to sell one product or service. 

Therefore, the prudent use of storytelling, case studies, whitepapers, thought-leadership content, internal stakeholder interviews, and customer experience (CX) use cases go a long way in positioning a product as a market leader. 

B2B content syndication can help build relationships and engage potential customers to a product’s USP, ultimately driving sales. 

4. Pushing Hyper ABM Solutions 

Tech marketers have a tough time gaining a company’s confidence, especially if they have been happy with their results.

Most B2B companies have a specific target audience or account they focus on. This will generate leads but at a slower pace than 5 years ago. 

With hyper ABM, B2B companies can target specific personas within high-value accounts. This requires intensive exercise to create those high-value propositions and a more granular approach to craft an offer that will address the exact pain point. 

Hence, shifting mindsets to expand their reach and invest in a focused approach as part of their marketing plans takes time and effort. 

You’re Viewing the Tip of the Iceberg

These are a few core issues that tech marketers face while working with B2B companies to create a strategic lead gen pipeline. 

It is a demand-gen-driven market, and tech marketers must address each problem with a specific solution to break through it. 

The most comprehensive solution lies in addressing the entire marketing function and breaking it down as per the demographic, account size, industry, and consumer persona. Convincing the stakeholders with numbers based on a predictive model helps them look at an upward growth trajectory. 

Customer personas, budgets, and internal subject matter experts are other pain points that look tech marketers right in their faces. 

As per Content Marketing Institute (CMI), ‘nearly 62% technology marketers say their organization outsources at least one content marketing activity…’

Viewing B2B marketing and its pain points from 30,000 ft. today is hardly an effective action plan. However, a cohesive and collaborative approach will help us inch closer to the underlying issues to ensure the business objectives and revenue plans are always on track.