🤨 Wait, so… What Do You Actually Do?
A while ago I had to write some social media posts for a SaaS agency – they were a client of ours. Now, I like to think of myself as smart, or at the very least not stupid; I can interpret and read lines of copy designed to entice, engage, and inform the consumer. But when I went onto this client’s website, no matter how much I read their ‘About Us’ page, no matter how much I watched the adverts created to, well, advertise themselves, I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell their company actually was.
I, of course, thought I was being stupid, that it was me who was missing the very obvious points they were making. But it turns out, it was not just me. And in fact, this very problem is a prevalent one on both the B2B and tech sides.
Brand to Buyer, LinkedIn’s eighth biggest tech buying and marketing research, surveyed over 1,500 tech buyers and tech marketers, and what they found were five trends that could help tech vendors connect with their buyers much more.
📺 Content, Branding, Customers: The Three Amigos
Here we go, it’s stats time, everyone’s favourite part of an article (right?)
Content is at the very heart of all marketing and advertising, no matter what industry you’re in. But it turns out that B2B tech brands could do far more to properly stand out or differentiate themselves in this ever-evolving tech space, and it all starts with the content. 73% of buyers said that the content they come across doesn’t actually demonstrate a good understanding of the organisation’s problems; there needs to be more detail, specifics, and creativity at the heart of it all.
Branding is also a mahoosive part of the equation, with 63% of tech buyers saying they prefer to work with bigger, more established brands rather than risk buying from an unknown, and 89% of them are prioritising values when deciding to buy. When you compare those percentages to the 29% of tech marketers who said they’ve increased their spend on social media, and the 26% saying they’ve spent the same on SEO… it becomes quite clear why buyers are feeling the way they do.
And then, of course, there are the customers themselves, the tech buyers. It turns out that TV ad campaigns are apparently amongst the least useful during the purchasing decision process. In actuality, it’s the influencers that are doing the majority of the heavy lifting, with 34% of buyers saying that they’re the main source of information.
🤔 What Do Now?
(I know I’ve used this gif before. Sue me. I love It’s Always Sunny.)
Honestly? B2B, SaaS and tech companies need to really start unleashing their full creative potential whilst also making sure they’re communicating clearly and efficiently what exactly they do. This shouldn’t be a difficult thing, and yet it seems as though it’s constantly proving to be so.
It can be difficult to explain your work to someone who doesn’t know what it is yet, because you’ll have spent so much time on it that you could go on and on and get deep into the intricacies of it all. But whether you like it or not, you need to figure out your marketing and advertising – you need to figure out a way to communicate it to potential buyers clearly, concisely and informedly.Â
Otherwise you may as well pack up and call it a day.Â
But also, don’t make it boring.
Sam Hollis is a Writer for Fame, SaaS Marketer, as well as his own fictional short stories. He lives and works in Birmingham with his three cats and his dog (way too many pets, if you ask us)