If your startup sells B2B technology to customers, you would like high-quality marketing content.
Instead of constructing a sales pitch, more B2B buying teams want to explore your brand, product, and fit without having to talk to anyone. Evidence of this trend is recent Gartner study this shows that 75% of B2B buyers now want “rep free” sales.
This signifies that once your customers are in the market, they expect to give you the chance to read your case studies and blog posts, watch your webinars, and see exactly how your solution meets their business needs. They also expect engagement, entertainment and conversation at a level appropriate to their experience.
B2B buyers don’t need to have to dig through generic (and potentially AI-generated) information on your website to find useful information.
This is very true for startups that want to win cybersecurity content marketing or other technical product marketing campaigns corresponding to billing systems and IT solutions. Nothing will irritate a tech-savvy buyer greater than generic or blatantly false marketing content.
Bypassing these filters can seem scary for young startups that won’t have the budget to hire internal marketing teams focused on demand generation. Fortunately for smaller B2B tech startups, they really have a secret weapon. Development-oriented startups already have a powerful marketing asset in their company – a technology team.
Your developers, technical product managers, and anyone on your team with industry experience will have a vast pool of experiences, insights, and opinions that could be turned into amazing content marketing assets. These people, and probably you too, are subject material experts (SMEs).
My experience working with B2B tech startups confirms this. From firms with relatively little seed funding to those who have passed through multiple rounds of fundraising and eventual acquisitions, successful B2B content marketing campaigns all the time engage SMEs.
SME evaluation will assist you to:
- Clearly communicate the advantages of your product.
- Find the elements that your competition is missing in their awareness and lead generation campaigns.
- Make sure your marketing assets pass the “sniff test” conducted by technology purchasing teams.
By leveraging SMEs in early-stage marketing, you possibly can provide your startup with a unique POV that larger competitors often lack.
In marketing, it is easy to get bogged down in different channels, strategies, and processes, but ultimately, brands that have authentic expert voices in their content will probably be heard.
How startups can engage their technical teams in content marketing
This is the process I like to recommend to any startup looking to engage their tech team in content marketing.
Start slowly, with specific marketing questions
Your technical team is not and never will probably be your marketing team. They have a million other things to do before they begin coming up with content ideas, so throwing them into your weekly marketing strategy meeting is not going to win you any friends.
A greater idea is to schedule an hour a month with the right people, with a specific marketing invitation to the meeting. For example: “Does this angle for a blog post make sense?” or “Can you spare an hour to make sure our latest SEO blogs are technically correct before they go live?”
Based on these specific questions, you possibly can build more open content marketing processes with your SMEs. Just remember to treat their time with respect. Ultimately, you would like your SMEs to participate in regular strategy sessions; you only have to slowly get there.
The ideal endpoint is an environment where your SME will send you (or your marketing team) content ideas, corresponding to their opinion on a recent technology category or why your brand should talk about a specific IT incident that recently hit the news. front pages of newspapers.
Elevate thought leaders
For developers and non-public figures, the advantage of participating in marketing activities is getting their names in front of others. For them, it is an impulse for profession development, and for you, it is an increase in sales. Encourage thought leadership.
To do this, cite your authors in your blog posts and submit guest articles (which could also be written by your marketing team) on their behalf to third-party magazines and blogs.
This is a great motivator to get more support from your tech team, and it also increases the likelihood that they’ll want to distribute your content themselves.
Share your results
If your tech team is involved in your marketing efforts, they must also see what’s working (and what’s not).
Especially for larger startups, sharing the results of marketing campaigns could be a useful way to break down business silos.
If your developers understand that their marketing contributions help attract customers and grow the business, they will probably be more likely to contribute in the future.
Get ready for honest conversations
Once you begin encouraging technical input into your marketing campaigns, you will get feedback. Some of those opinions will probably be positive, and some will probably be positive NO be what you would like to hear. In my experience working as a contractor for firms ranging from young startups to Fortune 100 firms, tech employees could be very direct when it comes to feedback.
When you begin using SMEs in your content, you would like to be prepared for criticism. In particular, you would like to be willing to listen, and just as your SME explains technical nuances, you furthermore may need to explain how marketing works and why certain sorts of opinions and comments are not useful.
Getting information from a startup’s tech team takes a lot of labor for everyone involved. But do it right and it’s really value it.