How To Stand-out In Technology Marketing

The Challenge

For marketers working in the technology sector, cutting through the clutter of competing messages across the digital landscape to get noticed is an enormous challenge. You're up against a deluge of messages on platforms like LinkedIn, where nearly a billion users, including 120 million from India, are active.

Then you’ve got 67 million businesses with pages on the popular social networking platform each vying for attention. So, it's no wonder more than 60 per cent of marketers feel the pressure to churn out new content daily.

The rush to be heard often leads to a blur of buzzwords and jargon, making it tough for any brand to stand out. Often, marketing gets bogged down in the nitty-gritty, the specific features, capabilities and benefits of a company’s technology.

But getting noticed isn’t just about volume; it’s about clarity and connection to a relatable story. What works in brand marketing is not getting lost in the details. It's about building a story that cuts through the complexity and directly shows customers how they can think, work, and solve problems in new ways. 

What matters is the bigger picture: how an organisation’s technology genuinely helps customers do better business by solving their most pressing challenges in ways that no other company can.

Lesson 1 – Clarify and align on your Story

 A good market story isn’t just a marketing tool; it's your company’s collective voice.

A market-leading Story combines your company’s vision, category, and strategy. It communicates your company's viewpoint on the market, what the future looks like, and how you’ll take customers there. It boils down the complexity of a company’s technology into a simple idea that’s easier to explain and helps solve a universal problem customers have.

This story should start with marketing but won't fly without buy-in from the top down. When leadership gets behind the story, they use it with purpose, fuelling progress in their domains.

Getting it right might start with marketing but requires participation from the C-suite and leadership throughout the organisation. When company leaders and brand storytellers are invested in the story, they are more engaged, motivated, and empowered to use it as a tool to drive business forward in their respective domains.

To gather diverse input, methods like executive interviews, thorough reviews of marketing materials, surveys for global marketing teams, and collaborative workshops for stakeholder feedback are key. For large corporations with global teams, using virtual collaborative spaces, remote tools, and AI is vital. The goal should always be to combine insights from all business areas, leaders, partners, and customers to create a coherent story. This helps everyone connected to the brand to consistently communicate the company’s mission.

Lesson 2 – Leverage technology to strengthen your storytelling

A common pitfall for large, decentralised organisations is the tendency for a company’s Story to become fragmented and diluted when it gets told in different ways using different terms and brand messaging. This is where technology holds the keys to efficiently maintaining consistency and simplicity, while still leaving room for some personalisation. To achieve this, there are three primary steps:

1. Stay engaged with storytellers at every level: Helping storytellers overcome old ways of telling the Story is critical to its success. Digital tools like a brand portal, training and enablement platforms, and ongoing automated global marketing communications can help educate and guide storytellers.

2. Utilise new technologies to drive adoption: Adopting new technologies offers significant speed and efficiency benefits. For instance, partnering with leading tech companies to pilot an internal AI-driven program can be a transformative move. Train your own internal AI engine on the latest corporate messaging documents and integrate it into word processors and email clients to help not just marketers, but all employees to write in a manner that is aligned with the company’s unified narrative. 

3. Engage customers to stay authentic: Use customer stories to shape a value proposition that illustrates the real-world impact of your offerings. Technologies for collecting customer feedback and testing marketing messaging are becoming more accessible and commonplace. They also offer some autonomy to marketing leaders in specific business units who want to engage with their respective customer bases in a unified manner.

Decentralised organisations can adopt enterprise-wide technologies like these to help marketing teams deliver multi-channel content with more speed and agility that strengthens the company's unified Story. 

Lesson 3 – Data only gets you so far

While data provides crucial insights, actionable decisions are what drive changes. Modern marketers know that data is only helpful when it's leveraged to drive positive change: 

1. Personalise your message: Even with B2B technology, it’s actual people who make the decisions, so treat buyers as individuals, not just numbers. Use data to understand their unique challenges. According to Forresters' 2023 marketing survey, 77 per cent of B2B marketers say customers expect personalised marketing messages.

2. Focus on relevant metrics: Marketers can no longer offer vanity metrics for stakeholder investments. Prioritising relevant metrics, such as conversion rates and content performance versus raw website traffic, is critical. It's crucial to analyse the effectiveness of story content by measuring the impact of targeted audience traffic on your website. 

3.Consider what cannot be measured: Building a solid brand requires consistent storytelling, authenticity, and a deep understanding of the target audience, which may only sometimes be reflected in data alone. According to Gartner, marketers tracking return on objectives support the value of delivering impact against a broader set of enterprise goals.

Conclusion

Technology marketers can break free from the noise and competition with a distinct Story built with authenticity, simplicity, and a strong customer-centric view of the future. Engage internal stakeholders throughout your organisation to shape a unique and powerful Story that simplifies the value your technology brings to customers. Embrace digital tools and technology to empower marketing teams to adopt and use the Story. Finally, focus on data metrics that drive real-world actions and personalised storytelling to nurture a strong, authentic brand that connects with audiences.

Written by: Madlen Nicolaus, Chief Marketing Officer, Hexagon