Unleash Your Potential: The Ultimate Guide to Market Your IT or Technology Business Online
In today’s day and age, having a great product or service just isn’t enough.
It’s unfortunate, but that’s the truth of it. Marketing has become an increasingly vital function in every business – IT included.
You need to stand out somehow, in increasingly saturated markets full of people clamouring for your customer’s attention. Marketing serves to place your business in front of the right person, at the right place and at the right time.
But – it doesn’t have to be complicated.
In this article, we’re going to go over our top no-nonsense strategies to start effectively marketing your IT business online, today.
Content Marketing
In our opinion, the single most powerful tool today for any ideas-driven business is the content market.
By ideas-driven, we mean businesses where the product or service you’re selling is inseparable from the intellectual ability of the people producing it.
There are millions of people out there who can write code, for example, but how many truly exceptional coders are there?
Content marketing accomplishes two incredibly important things, especially for new companies:
- It establishes trust. By demonstrating the ideas behind your services or products – people can get a tangible idea of the quality of your services. Not only that, but by setting yourself up as an authority in the industry, they’re more likely to trust you.
- It drives traffic. Content marketing ties into SEO and other traffic generation strategies perfectly. Two birds, one stone (if you’re writing your content on rocks, that is).
Written Content
The easiest place to start is usually written content.
Blogs – such as this one – are an amazing tool for both SEO and general content marketing. You can drive highly relevant traffic to your site by writing content that answers query your customers are searching for.
This again lets you demonstrate “thought leadership” in your industry – by setting you up as the person with all the answers.
Video Content
Video content is another great strategy – for many of the same reasons as above.
It’s more challenging to make good video content – but when done well it’s much more engaging to a modern audience than long-form text could ever be.
For a start – adapting the types of content you’d turn into a blog to video form is often a great place to start.
Informational videos are relatively easy to produce – and can have great returns when you target their topic well.
Social Proof
If a stranger on the street told you that they’re a wizard, would you believe them?
Probably not. But what if all of your close friends and family told you that this stranger is a wizard?
Still probably not – but you’d consider it way more seriously.
That’s the concept of social proof at work.
Anything you tell your customers always seems biased – because it’s coming from you. So, have your customers speak for you instead.
Reviews
The simplest way to enable social proof is to set up channels for past customers to review your business – and then engage with them,
The best platforms for this are usually social media or your own website. Social media can perform slightly better – because people may identify that you have the final say over what’s on your website.
Google My Business is also another great platform for hosting reviews – letting you display them to users searching for you right there on the front page of Google.
Case Studies
A second great strategy is creating case studies of what you’ve done for past customers.
This lets you prove your industry experience by showcasing success stories – and lets people relate their own business to them to see how you could help them.
Social Media Advertising
Lastly, social media advertising in all of its forms is a great platform for IT businesses to engage with.
We recommend staying away from the more “social” platforms as an IT company – unless you have a very specific strategy in mind.
Instead, stick to business-oriented platforms like LinkedIn. Chances are it’s much easier to reach your target demographic there – and you’ll have an easier time adapting content to the platform.
Paid Social Media Advertising
Paid social is a great way to immediately start generating leads over social media. A good paid social strategy can help bridge the gaps between the time you start your other strategies, like content, and when they start producing meaningful results.
Even past that – paid social is an invaluable tool for reaching people outside of your network.
With some experience and experimentation, business-focused platforms like LinkedIn are particularly great for generating qualified leads.
Organic Social Media Advertising
Advertising might be a misnomer here – because if you approach any social platform’s organic strategy with the mindset of putting out “ads” – you’re going to fail.
Instead, think of it as an extension of your content strategy. Social media is a great platform for sharing ideas and content, to build up an audience of relevant people in your industry and target industries.
LinkedIn is again a great platform for this – letting you share ideas with other industry professionals and build up a following that can turn into business later.
Just don’t hard-sell people, or they may become annoyed and stop following you.
Conclusion
We hope this gave you some good ideas on how to start advertising your IT business online.
Digital marketing in general is all about experimentation. So give each platform a real shot – and if it doesn’t work out, you can just move on.
Don’t give up too soon though. Some strategies, like content marketing, take a long time to “get going” – but deliver amazing value once they do.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
If you need any help running your business’ search ads effectively, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
