B2B MARKETING - TECHNOLOGY MARKETING

Less jargon more business

The IT industry has always loved jargon and acronyms. “The WAN’s connected to the LAN, with NAS on the side and a little WTF thrown in for good measure”.

But it’s not about understanding the jargon or indeed the technology itself, it’s about understanding the business challenges the technology helps address. A useful analogy: do you buy a drill because you want a drill? Do you buy it because you want to make holes? Or do you buy it because you want to hang a coat? Technology brands need to focus on hanging coats!

Consider these points:

• If you’re in the IT department of a bank do you consider yourself to be in the banking or IT industry?
• If you’re making or influencing purchasing decisions in IT are you doing it in isolation or as part of a decision-making unit (DMU)?
• Does everyone in the DMU speak IT?
• Are the members of the DMU concerned about IT or the business issue they are looking to address?
• When a business is focused on “improving customer insight”, what is the IT department asked to do?

Understand the issues your audience are focused on and the perspective that each member of the DMU will be concerned with. Then engage them with content that is relevant to it. Generic arguments about how your solution will help improve efficiency, increase productivity and lower costs won’t cut it. Every brand in the sector promises this.

There will of course still need to be discussion and content at a technology level, but a tiered / segmented approach to content allows audiences to access the most relevant information from their own perspective.