A 5-Step Outbound Marketing Strategy for your Tech Business

At NNC Services, we love inbound marketing. However, inbound is not the perfect solution for all our Tech customers as it needs an extended period to deliver results. In B2B, outbound marketing is a faster approach, which if executed well it has the potential to increase the business’ market share with the minimum financial risks, helping Tech companies expand their businesses while protecting their profit margins.

We use a 5-step process to build efficient outbound marketing strategies for Tech businesses: Define the target market, Market research, Initiate contact, Nurture; Optimize and Close. Today, I’m going to run you through the first 2 steps of an efficient outbound strategy for Tech companies - defining a tech business target market and conducting a market research. Stay tuned for the next 3 ones, which we’ll publish soon on NNC’s blog.

Define your Tech Business Target Market

Or maybe you should just evaluate it and gather the important information that your business already has. At NNC, we often recommend our customers to avoid making assumptions when it comes to defining their tech business’s market. I’ll suppose you have been in business for a while and you should have some ideas of who are your customers. However, you still need to do proper research to make sure your business is maximizing the opportunities the target market has to offer. Given the state of the fast-changing economy, it is crucial for any tech business to identify any possible market advantage.

A well-defined target market will enable your sales team to focus its efforts and increase the rate of sales conversions. Write down the answers to these questions about your current customers:

• What industry are they in?
• Where are they located?
• How many employees do they have?
• What type of job roles or titles do they typically have?
• Which are the job roles of the persons who usually take the decision to buy your product/service? Who do they report to?
• Which other technology tools do they use?
• What’s important to them? What do they value?
• What problem do they have that needs solving? Do they need to cut costs, are they struggling to stay ahead of the competition, do they need to increase productivity? Do they prefer value or price?
• What is forcing them to look after your tech business profile and offers?
• What drives them to take the purchase decision? Smallest price offer? Your reputation? Your unique solution?
• Are they likely to make repeat purchases?
• What would hold them back from closing the deal?
• What conferences and events do they attend?
• How do they spend their time online? Do they read niche publications, use professional social networks like LinkedIn or Xing?
• What channels do they use to communicate? (email, Facebook messenger, Linkedin Inmail, phone call, etc.)
• How do they use and navigate your website?
• What type of content do they already enjoy on your website?

And last but not least:

• how much do they know about you and what you offer?

You will now have a well-defined target market built on real-life facts and on specific sales interactions, which you can use to craft customer profiles. You should no longer work with assumptions on who may buy your products or services. Customers who find your product or service valuable often share similar characteristics with other businesses. You can use the gathered information to uncover shared traits and get to the next phases of an effective B2B outbound strategy. Let’s now get to step no 2 - finding similar customers.

Market Research

Market research is the phase that helps you find prospects for your tech business. At this stage, the research involves finding collections of companies and professionals, divided into categories that can help you build lists of lookalike prospects. At NNC Services, our specialists are focused at this stage on identifying naturally occurring clusters of similar customers. For instance, if you are a software development company with specific technical expertise (i.e Node.Js, Angular etc), you should look after software and apps collection platforms, which usually are very well organized by categories or industries - Capterra, GetAPP, SaaS Genius, just to name a few. Here are other places you could look for prospects depending on the customer profile you are targeting:

• Targeting tech startup businesses - AngelList, CrunchBase, GeekWire
• Targeting big tech companies and enterprises from different industries: Owler.com, Caft.co
• Targeting a specific geographical market - local conferences and events participants;
• Targeting specific industries - professional associations, business alliances groups, industry trade groups; niche conferences/congresses/events/tradeshows participants;

An outbound marketing approach is an effective way to build velocity when ramping up your tech business, but you need a clear vision over your customer personas and comprehensive market research to identify all the opportunities your target market has to offer. At NNC Services, we work with our Tech customers through the entire outbound marketing process, making sure they do not miss important details of their business, target market or market research.

Stay close for our next 3 steps of the outbound marketing strategy. Don’t hesitate to share the information with your peers and if you’re interested in getting in touch