You may have heard of the term inbound marketing but you may not be familiar with the benefits it can bring to your tech or IT business. According to a recent study, 74% of marketers worldwide are using inbound marketing as their primary approach. Why you may be asking yourself? 89% of modern-day consumers start their purchasing journey via a search engine, making it more critical than ever for your business to be at the forefront of those search results. With inbound marketing, you can enhance your business’s visibility and build a steady stream of prospects and leads resulting in sustainable growth for your business.
What is inbound marketing for tech businesses?
For those of you who don’t know, inbound marketing is a marketing methodology constructed around providing valuable experiences for those who interact with your business. Inbound aims to attract new prospects to your business as opposed to conducting outreach activities that are often costly and interrupt the user’s experience.
Inbound marketing strategies are often content-focused, their success relies upon a business’s ability to provide a consistent level of high-quality content to its visitors. By attracting users to your website through quality content you’ll begin to establish your business as a trusted knowledge source, one that encourages users to engage and come back for more.
By delivering this high level of ongoing value you’ll ultimately enable your users to find success, asserting your position as an expert in the tech industry.
How inbound marketing can work for your IT business?
There’s one thing about the IT and tech industry that we can all agree on, there are commonly a number of questions, challenges and problems that can arise. No matter how experienced or affluent with technology you are. Without a doubt, we have all taken to Google at some point to do a quick search to find out how to do something whether that be a video tutorial, blog or guide.
Being a content-led strategy, inbound marketing helps build your business’s visibility in search engines. By conducting thorough keyword research and persona development you can explore the most frequent questions asked by your target market. Discovering what challenges they have, what solutions they need and uncover what products or services your IT business can provide to these users.
By providing high-quality content that aligns with your user’s key pain points and overall buyer’s journey you can effectively nurture your prospects and leads through to becoming paying customers.
The best inbound marketing tactics for your IT business
So you’re convinced that inbound marketing is the way to go but not sure what tactics you need? We’ve compiled a list of the key marketing tactics that will be most effective for your IT company. Whilst this list isn’t exhausted, we recommend the following channels to get you started, try to avoid spreading yourself too thin. You can always build out and expand your inbound strategy further down the line, don’t run before you can walk!
Blogs
A no-brainer to begin with. Blogs help establish your business as a thought leader in your sector or niche. As outlined previously, search queries relating to IT and technology are significantly high but are also highly competitive. There are huge opportunities here for your tech business to capitalise on.
To do this effectively you’ll need to create valuable and above-all, unique written content. You should also consider using tools to explore what content your competitors are producing. Use this research to not only gain inspiration but establish gaps within their content catalogue, spearheading new and innovative ideas is a great way to secure top spots in search engine results.
Video Marketing
Another great tactic for tech and IT-related sectors. Video marketing enables you to engage your audience and commonly for longer periods of time, improving the chances of brand recall. In fact, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video as opposed to when it is in a written message.
Specifically to tech and IT sectors, your users will likely find value in video tutorials. Studies have found that 96% of users watch explainer videos to learn more about products and services when conducting purchase research.
Video marketing doesn’t need to be a costly venture either, with modern technology, we’re all equipped to be videographers with the use of a smartphone. You can use video marketing across the entirety of the buyer’s journey too. When considering the inbound approach, you can attract users with top-level explainer videos, engage them with product demos or reviews and delight them with tutorials. There is a multitude of opportunities to explore here.
Email Marketing
Email campaigns should be firmly embedded within any inbound marketing campaign. With email marketing, you can communicate the right brand messages to the right people at the right time throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Depending on your business model, whether that be B2B or B2C, there are a variety of ways that you can implement targeted email marketing campaigns that influence action. With an ever-changing industry like IT and technology, it may be worth considering creating a monthly newsletter, updating your subscribers with industry updates.
SEO
A must-have in your inbound marketing toolbelt. The IT and tech industries are significantly crowded marketplaces making it increasingly difficult for your business to get the visibility it deserves. With the support of SEO and high-quality content, your brand can enhance its visibility and dominate positions on search engine results pages.
Use keyword research to determine your user’s key pain points, challenges and needs, these insights will formulate the foundation of your SEO strategy.
Social Media
Every brand or business should be leveraging the power of social media in some capacity. IT and tech businesses tend to orientated towards B2B markets, if your brand is the same, consider using professional social media platforms such as Linkedin. Use this platform to build up and nurture a community of loyal followers. You can increase the reach of your business by pairing your organic posts with sponsored content. Platforms such as Linkedin offer a variety of audience segmentation tools to really drill down into audience targeting.
Loop Digital Inbound Marketing Agency
At Loop Digital, our team plan, implement and optimise a number of inbound marketing strategies that support our clients to grow. We develop bespoke inbound marketing plans to suit your business, maximising your return on investment. Discover your powerful inbound marketing solution today. Get in touch with our team today.
