Today was my last day at London-based Caplin Systems, a fintech company where I’ve spent the past (nearly) five years helping to craft and deliver messages surrounding e-distribution in the capital markets.
I will really miss my tech marketing role and my colleagues at Caplin, but for me it’s an exciting time because I am moving on to a role where I get to focus almost exclusively on social media and content marketing (more about my new role tomorrow!)
As I close the chapter on nearly 15 years of B2B tech marketing in software companies, I thought I’d reflect back on some of the top lessons I’ve learned during my time as a day-to-day B2B tech marketing manager.
I could write a novel, but here are 10:
1. Technology is great, but simply telling new prospects every single thing about your technology is not the magic key to selling your technology. What you’re selling is not technology. You’re selling solutions to business problems and your marketing needs to convey that first off. There is a time and place for deep dive technical information and it’s usually much further down the selling cycle.
2. You may have really clever product names, but unless you are a very well known brand I am willing to bet that your product names will not mean that much to most people outside of your organisation. Describe your product and solution and make sure you don’t litter your press releases and award entries with too many product names. Same goes for your website. From an SEO POV, you’d be better off frequently using the commonly used category name for your offering, helping you to own that category in search results.
3. It’s all about the end user. When an end user experiences excellent electronic interaction in one area of their lives, they expect it everywhere (and they won’t hesitate to say so across a variety of forums!) Your end users are going to expect the most advanced approach and delivery because they already experience it using technologies daily. So Continue reading “As I say farewell, here are 10 things I’ve learned in tech marketing”
Eric Schmidt’s predictions aren’t always spot on and even he admits he sometimes misses the boat, but given his overwhelming success in
telecoms I wasn’t about to dismiss his claim in an interview with Bloomberg TV about 2014 trends:
“The trend has been that mobile was winning,” he said. “It’s now won.”
He may have missed the boat on social media…he may have said that the majority of new TVs sold by 2012 would have Google TV on them, but I do think he’s right when it comes to his prediction about mobile.
If 2012 was the year of change, then 2013 was definitely the year of learning to adjust. In February, I started back at work after 7 months of maternity leave and began the frantic juggling act that all working mothers with young children must do. I am proud to say that I did manage to pull through and adjust to this new existence. I learned to stop kicking myself for not being able to blog on techtalkmarketing as much as I had done pre-baby and to use the tools out there to help me continue being a valuable content creator and marketing manager for my company.
Here’s what I learned
1. On various projects, I realised our web content was killing us. This is a topic I will expand on in 2014 because it was one of the biggest lessons I learned this year. I was lucky enough to work with talented web developers and other content creators and along the way we realised that our content was so vast and inclusive that after reading it (if indeed anyone did read it all) people had no need to ask us questions about our products and solutions.
I hope my guest post on sofarbeyond’s site on my 5 top social media tools was well received. My LinkedIn contacts obviously liked it – looking at LinkedIn’s new “Who’s Viewed Your Updates” feature, I can see that it got 257 views via LinkedIn. Another great LinkedIn feature, and also proof that sharing via LinkedIn may drive more traffic than any other referral channel.
Techmarketingtalk 