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.
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:
And last but not least:
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 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:
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