Tech services companies often use similar techniques for customer outreach. They rely heavily on a strong sales team with a loose strategy. There is little to no focus on inbound marketing. However, there are other things your business could be doing to support your sales team.

Marketing should support your existing sales process. This article explains how you can integrate digital marketing to complement the sales strategy for your tech services company: First, you define a strategy based on your marketing. You then need to establish a baseline in order to measure your results and continually improve over time. By using this strategy, your revenue goes up while your marketing costs go down.

Current Focus

Here are the strategies your business probably has in place already.

Business Development

You form partnerships with other companies and your local community to build awareness of your services. Your existing customers provide word-of-mouth recommendations, as well as writing reviews and talking about their experiences on social networking sites.

Sales

Your sales team spends a lot of their time and resources with in-person networking and industry events. A cumbersome outside sales process fuels most of your strategy. The members of your sales team are great at what they do, but you don’t feel like your technology services company is reaching its full potential.

Why Are These Strategies Ineffective?

You’re using a one-to-one sales method rather than a one-to-many. Your salespeople can only touch so many people, and anything beyond that is outside of your capacity. However, if your sales workflow relies on extensive in-person interaction, you may also limit yourself geographically.

But your technology services company can’t scale under these conditions. Hiring more salespeople may help in the short term, but you can only achieve linear growth by using this strategy. If you want your company to become truly successful, you need a way to expand exponentially.

Lack of Marketing Strategy

If you lack a marketing strategy, your sales and marketing teams remain disconnected. They work in silos rather than using their expertise, resources and data to support each other. In addition, your business needs standardized processes for many common situations. For example, how do you react to customer decisions, such as a sign-up, a request for cancellation or an inquiry about your services?

Do you have consistent messaging across your channels? Changes in your value proposition, voice and even branding colors could lead to client confusion and a lack of trust. The only exposure to your brand message is based entirely on what the sales team chooses to convey.

Is there a set procedure in place for following up with past and present clients? What resources does the sales team have in place to improve retention and win back former customers?

Also, what steps are you taking to reach new audiences? You need new client pipelines to fuel your growth and build awareness of your offerings. If your methods are ad hoc and undocumented, coordinating with other promotional efforts is impossible.

Your revenue goes through peaks and valleys based on your sales team performance, internal and staffing issues, and even small market fluctuations. The disruption to your cash flow can make it difficult for your technology services company to grow and thrive.

The Benefits of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing gives you a way to measure every touch in the client lifecycle. With a sales-centered approach, the only thing you know is that the account was won or lost. Marketing also gives you deeper insights and full control over the purchase process. You learn exactly when and why a customer abandoned the sale, how much you spend on your client acquisition, and what channels generate the most leads. Thus, you gain more control over the sales cycle and pipeline.

Digital marketing creates a steady stream of leads coming directly to you, without your sales team putting in a significant amount of their time and energy. The result is that your cash flow smooths out and you achieve a sustainable growth rate without a massive investment in recruitment.

An Improved Approach

You reach a point in your growth where you run into a ceiling with your current sales and marketing process. You didn’t build for scaling, so you’re stuck hiring an ever increasing amount of sales staff for your technology services company. Even if you could find skilled talent every time you grow, you still won’t have a sustainable approach. Here’s how you take your processes to the next level.

Social Media

Social media channels are excellent for finding new qualified prospects and increasing your brand awareness. You get a good platform for building relationships before they contact you about your services, so your sales team has warmer leads to work within the pipeline.

Social media sites exist in many forms, from general purpose networks to niche specific groups. LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Slack and Quora offer many opportunities to reach your target audience. Your potential audience could be highly concentrated in these areas, giving you an excellent return on the time spent on these platforms.

However, don’t immediately jump in and start posting. Each community has its own audience, written and unwritten rules, and way of doing things. For some sites, the experience is drastically different depending on which subcommunity you visit. Reddit is a prime example of this, as it’s divided into subreddits with their own focus. The startup subreddit can be an excellent place to connect with business owners needing help with their IT, but the one focused on cat gifs may not be the best lead generation location.

Avoid spreading your resources too thin. You’ll always find one more social media site to add to your marketing plan, but adding too many makes it impossible to use them effectively. You hinder your efforts when you can’t give each channel the attention it deserves. So, limit yourself to learning two or three social media sites inside and out. Some may end up unsuitable for your needs even after you go through this evaluation process. Simply pull up the next likely option and start over. You may need to go through a few rounds to discover a good mix of social media sites for your company’s marketing efforts.

Note common types of content used on each platform, as well as the posts getting the most attention. Are the users fairly casual with each other, or do they stick with a formal approach? Feel out the typical technical expertise level of the audience in this community. You don’t want to use a posting style with too much tech slang if the posters don’t have a lot of familiarity with these terms.

After you spend a period listening to discussions, post some content to gauge interest on each social media site. Tailor it around the findings for each community and track engagement. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t nail the tone, style or voice on the first try, and don’t get the engagement you hoped for. Continual improvements help you get more and more out of these social media sites.

You also want to monitor discussions around your industry to stay on top of the latest trends, gain more insight into your clients’ pain points, and find useful content to share. Social listening tools and keyword alerts allow you to respond quickly to relevant conversations.

Another excellent place to engage with prospects is a business forum. The decision makers that you need to reach gather here to talk about many aspects of the industry and the challenges they face. In many cases, when they bring up technology, they have a specific need in mind. For example, they may ask about reliable Web hosting services, need assistance fixing a security issue, or be panicking about disaster recovery. Since the forum is geared towards business owners, you aren’t competing with countless other technology services companies for business.

Your sole focus in any social media interaction is to provide value. Answer the users’ questions and be genuinely helpful. You can link back to content on your own site or blog to introduce them to the brand, but don’t go beyond that for self-promotion. Additionally, make sure that those links are allowed in the community you’re participating in, because the rules of some discussion forums discourage or forbid self-promotion.

Paid Ads

A paid ad drives qualified traffic immediately to your website. Many digital marketing techniques take time to ramp up and show results, but this method has the advantage of speed. It does, however, come at a cost, but the investment is well worth it.

Create a campaign centered on a few pieces of key content. Keep in mind that the content works best when you target a specific demographic niche or buyer persona relevant to your customer base. For example, if you’re a managed IT company targeting college universities, create content explaining how your IT services benefit their organization, staff and overall student experience. A segmented approach is much more effective than saying “We help all types of businesses do everything related to technology.”

The next step in your paid search strategy is retargeting. This tactic reaches visitors who have clicked through to your targeted content or visit your website directly. Their device gets a cookie that allows you to serve them with ads, encouraging them to come back to the site. Don’t try to push for the sale yet. Send them to other articles that overcome sales objections, answer their preliminary questions, and establish your company as an authority figure in the technology services industry. This trust-building stage is critical to turning them into a client.
The final step in this strategy is directing visitors to a sales landing page with a direct call to action. When potential customers get to this page, they are familiar with your brand, services and the possible solutions to their most pressing problems. The landing page focuses on the information necessary to convince them to buy now and eliminates any outside distraction.

Boosted content on LinkedIn is statistically best for B2B marketing, making it an excellent addition to your paid search strategy. The audience on this social network has their minds on their businesses. They may even be talking about their IT problems and how frustrating it is not to have a reliable infrastructure. By promoting useful content in this space, you have an excellent opportunity for building brand awareness.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in your inbound marketing kit. You close pending deals faster and identify which prospects are more likely to close, allowing you to focus on those opportunities. There are a few reasons why email marketing conveys these benefits.

Email subscribers have opted in to receive your marketing. They are interested in what you have to say, and email has the benefit of reaching many mobile users. They may sign up to receive a free promotion or another incentive, but quality content can build these users into a highly engaged audience.

Email marketing is a long game. You don’t use this strategy for quick wins. Instead, you focus primarily on educating customers or improving existing relationships over time through drip campaigns. The value your prospective clients receive from each email should be clear.

The sales team can use email marketing for prospects already in the sales funnel. The messages can nurture the potential client every step of the way, particularly in areas that are highly technical. These emails also offer the opportunity to introduce current customers and prospects to other relevant services they may not know about.

Once the prospects get close to making a purchase decision, incorporate incentives to close them faster. Create urgency through special deals, discounts or limited-time offers. If your email marketing does a good job of answering all their questions and overcoming their objections, they just need that last push to get the conversion.

The sales cycle doesn’t stop once you sign someone on with your technology services company. Learn more about your customers’ business goals and IT needs to determine other suitable services. Proactively recommend solutions that solve a current problem or work well alongside their services.

Keep communication open with prospects and current customers. Remove any barriers that are making it difficult for clients to reach out to you. Look at your most-used communication channels and whether you receive requests for others. Being responsive and accessible goes a long way to converting new customers and retaining your current ones.

Measuring Results

You put all these new inbound marketing strategies in place, but how do you know what you’re doing is working? Implementing a digital strategy is not a one-size-fits-all approach — what works for one technology services company may be highly ineffective for another. This is why you need a system to measure results so you can build upon your successes and learn from your failures. Minor adjustments can have major results, both good and bad. So here’s how you measure marketing performance to find out what’s going on.

Social Media

Track impressions and click-throughs on your social media posts. Many platforms, such as Twitter, have built-in tools to gather this information, or you could use a third-party analytics tool. Once visitors land on your website, analyze their on-site behavior by using Google Analytics or another tracking package. Do they consume other content when they reach your site? Are they signing up for your email list or sending a question to the sales team? All of these details are relevant to improving your marketing strategy.

In addition, adjust your social media posts to be more appealing to your audience and to engage new people. A certain content type may come out far above the others, while others may fail to resonate with your readers. By focusing on these top-performing content pieces, you reduce the costs of your content creation while increasing your overall ROI.

Pick out the most active users and influencers in your target audience. Then, follow and engage with them by sharing their posts, commenting on their content, and building your relationship slowly. You increase your brand awareness with that prospect and their social circle at the same time. When they run into an IT concern, your company is the first name that comes to mind in their decision-making process.

Paid Ads

Pay close attention to key performance indicators, such as your cost per click, cost per acquisition and conversion rates. A poorly performing paid ad campaign can cost your technology services company money that would be better spent elsewhere.

Additionally, experiment with different platforms, because the audiences vary significantly between LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other websites. That is why a lukewarm response on Facebook, for example, could be your best campaign to date on Twitter.

Most ad platforms provide demographic and location targeting tools. Compare the performance of different audiences to zero in on ideal prospects. Once you identify this ideal set of prospects, you move into the next testing phase: A/B or split testing. This tactic measures the performance of two ads by sending this traffic source to both. The visitors are split so one group sees the first ad, and the other group sees the second. The audience is a constant, so you can see whether your ideal prospects respond better to a particular version of your paid ads. You can test anything from the ad copy to the colors to see what brings you better results.

Finally, as with every other strategy, never stop improving. These measurements are a part of every paid ad campaign you run. Use the insights gained from your last set of tests to continually adjust, adapt, and enhance to drive more traffic and reduce costs.

Email Marketing

Who are your most active subscribers? Do you see any trends in the emails they engage with, the calls to action most likely to draw their clicks, or any other unifying features?

It’s important to create customer segments based on their activity, preferences, services, interests and engagement with your company. Don’t be afraid to make highly detailed sections. If you defined buyer personas or another ideal client profile, use this as the foundation for some of your segments. Your current customer list also acts as an excellent reference for these segments, as you can look for the clients with the highest lifetime value and retention. Prospects respond better to personalized content, as it’s highly relevant and doesn’t waste their limited time. The more detailed the segment, the more likely you can pique the reader’s interest.

Active users frequently open your emails, read through your on-site content and engage with you via email, social media or another communication channel. These prospects need a direct sales approach, so use what you know about their specific business to build a custom campaign. Your sales team can take over at this point to land the account. Your salespeople don’t need to walk alongside leads from the second they enter the funnel to the end. This marketing strategy allows your sales team to come in at the end of the process, enabling them to close many more deals due to a better use of their time.

Non-active users lack engagement for any number of reasons, from being too busy to open their email to not having sufficient awareness of your company or the IT services they need. So, you need to drip educational content to these users. Start with more general content that helps them understand the problems they face and the available solutions your company can offer. Make your team available to answer any questions to move the clients along the sales funnel.

The Bottom Line

When you use marketing to support your sales process, not only do you find more prospects and close more deals, but you also add an ongoing stream of new business to your pipeline. You can hit your customer at multiple points across various channels, complementing your existing processes. For example, word-of-mouth becomes even more effective when the client engages with other content you have written on your site. As you can’t reach your growth goals with a sales strategy alone, incorporate digital marketing to get the most out of your available resources.

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