With each year, technology digital marketing gets more competitive. In the marketing industry alone, each year sees anywhere from 30 percent to more than double the number of new technology companies and products. To stand out among the many other tech companies out there, you need to produce digital marketing that makes a mark.
Inspiration is always helpful. To give you some inspiration for your digital marketing efforts, here are a few technology companies doing digital marketing right.
iOFFICE sells a complicated software to a B2B audience. That presents the challenge, familiar to many B2B marketers, of trying to provide enough information on the website about how and why their product is valuable without overloading the visitor. To do this, they provide a visually attractive and interactive experience on their website’s main page that encourages visitors to engage and pushes them toward opportunities to learn more.
Visitors can see each of the main features alongside screenshots that demonstrate them by clicking through their sliding menu, each page of which includes colorful CTAs for where they can learn more or watch a video demo.
Further down the page are six good reasons to choose iOFFICE, each with visuals that provide more information when you scroll over them—again with a clear CTA above them all to “Request Consultation”.
By making the page interactive, they’re able to provide basic information on their complicated products while keeping visitors engaged. Clear CTAs make it easy for the visitor to see where and how to learn more.
One thing many B2B tech companies struggle with is communicating with customers on a more human level. Just because your product is technical, it doesn’t mean your brand can’t have personality. Wistia sells video software to businesses. While anyone who buys from them would technically be using the product for work rather than play, their digital marketing successfully positions them as a fun and playful brand.
The first thing you see when you visit the website is a woman playfully dancing with what looks like a toy video camera.
Their tagline says they’re the “video platform for business. And dogs.”
They still provide all the information you need about the product on the website and produce helpful content that includes instructions on using the product effectively along with general tips and advice for marketing with video. But throughout all their marketing, the copy and images serve to keep up the playful branding.
They even host The Febbies each year, an awards show for their customers with a livestream that’s full of the same kind of goofy creativity they show in the rest of their marketing.
Wistia shows B2B technology marketing doesn’t have to be dull. By making personality a priority in their branding, they’re able to connect with their audience in a way that shows how useful their product is for work, while making the whole experience feel like play.
Buffer’s blog is well known for providing longform actionable posts packed with a lot of useful information on using social media effectively. They often do experiments to answer common questions their audience has or use the data they have on how people use their social media-sharing tool to create valuable content.
In addition to solid blog content, the brand kills it on social media (as they should, considering it’s their bread and butter). They host a twice weekly Twitter chat that gets a lot of their customers and audience interacting directly with the brand on a regular basis.
Their Twitter feed the rest of the time consistently includes eye-catching images and videos. And they use the platform to directly request participation from their followers (note the 79 responses to the tweet below!).
On Facebook, their banner is a fast-moving video that immediately draws attention and humanizes the brand by showing many of the people behind it.
They make use of Facebook Live to make their podcast go further, reach more people, and gain some immediate engagement. And beyond the posts and updates they share directly about their brand, they also share great content from other brands and interesting facts their audience is likely to be interested in.
Since social media is the main focus of their business and content, it makes sense that they’d know a little bit about how to use it effectively for marketing. With the data and experience they have in social media marketing, they’re a good brand to look to as an example.
BasicSafe is in the serious business of helping companies keep their workers safe, but that doesn’t mean their marketing has to be super serious all the time. They have a marketing video on the website that features a series of adorable penguin characters like Sam the Safety Manager and Gloria the HR Manager.
Each penguin has important priorities they’re in charge of that all come back to making workers safer. The video is short, entertaining, and lays out the main needs BasicSafe’s target audiences have and how their software can help.
Beyond the video itself, the website does a good job of making a case for why their software is so important in just a few words—it can save companies lots of money (nearly $200,000 per workplace injury!) and ensure they maintain compliance. And it uses social proof to effectively show how much experience the company has in the industry.
The BasicSafe blog covers an array of topics related to OSHA and best practices for workplace safety. And for anyone who likes the content and wants email updates, they provide frequency options—a nice opportunity to let every visitor personalize the way the company interacts with them.
GrooveHQ sells help desk software—a space with some solid digital marketing players. They definitely find creative ways to stand out in the industry. One way they do it is as simple as taking a new approach to their blog layout. When you think about it, while the general visual design of blogs may be different, most of them have the same basic layout and formatting. But Groove’s blog has a layout style you’ve probably never seen before.
It’s visually interesting, gives the blog a clean look, and makes it easy to browse through your options for posts. And of course, the blog posts themselves are high quality, packed with helpful examples and data that backs up the points they make. The layout itself wouldn’t matter much if it wasn’t helping people find posts worth reading.
Another thing Groove’s digital marketing does right is their detailed comparisons. Part of a brand’s job is helping their audience see why they need the type of product you provide. But another big part of it is helping those who already know they need a product like yours make an informed decision between your particular product and others out there like it.
Groove nails that second part by providing point-by-point detailed comparisons between their product and several of their top competitors. For many of their website visitors, one of the top questions they have will be how Groove is different from other products they’ve considered. They make sure there’s a clear, easy to understand answer to that question waiting for them.
Slack has a lot going for it as a technology digital marketing player. The company uses original illustrations throughout its marketing to create a distinctive digital style. They have a strong blog with a clever name (a phrase familiar to anyone who uses the service regularly) that offers a mix of posts on how to use Slack effectively and posts with more general advice for the businesses and professionals likely to use the platform.
In addition, they have a high-quality podcast, Work in Progress, where they tell interesting stories about the career paths people take and the meaning they find in work. People in the digital marketing industry talk a lot about “storytelling,” but it’s still rare to find marketing content that really focuses on telling people’s stories in an interesting and entertaining way like Slack’s podcast does.
As these examples show, there’s no one answer for how to do technology digital marketing well—there are lots of different right ways. You can (and should) explore different formats and approaches to your marketing to see what works best for your business and audience. And you should always look for opportunities to stretch your creative muscles and figure out new and interesting ways to connect with your prospects. It’s competitive out there, but with good ideas and a good amount of work, your company can create memorable digital marketing, too.