Digital Marketing for IT Companies: Your Product Won’t Sell Itself

The web is inundated with informative demos, free trials, and subscription plans. How do you rise above the noise? 

Yup, digital marketing for IT Companies. Let’s take a look at a few tech and SaaS stats to get the ball rolling: 

• B2B companies dedicate 8.8–10.7% of their overall budgets to marketing every year.
• Organic search accounts for up to 77% of leads and traffic for top-tier SaaS companies.
• Software company Workfront earned a 104% increase in conversions by leveraging onsite enterprise marketing tactics. 

We’re just scratching the surface there.

Now, not all digital marketing strategies are the same. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Otherwise, you run the risk of being just another one of those tech businesses. Because, after all, your product won’t sell itself.

This guide on digital marketing for IT companies intends to help you elevate your expertise on the type of exposure and long-term growth your business can achieve—there’s always room for improvement. Let’s dive in.

The 7 Key SEO Challenges of Digital Marketing for IT Companies

1. Technical Complexity
2. Rapid Technological Advancements
3. Competitive Landscape
4. Targeting the Right Audience
5. Building Trust and Credibility
6. Long Sales Cycles
7. Data Privacy and Security Concerns?

What Exactly Does Digital Marketing Mean for IT Companies?

Helpful Tips

• SEO
• Content Marketing
• PPC
• Link Building
• Online Reviews?
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

What Results Can You Expect??

AI’s Role in Digital Marketing for IT Companies

Strategies in Action with Digital Marketing for IT Companies

• Pluralsight
• Workfront
• CORE
• Venafi

An Expert SaaS & IT Digital Marketing Team at Your Service

The 7 Key SEO Challenges of Digital Marketing for IT Companies

At Big Leap, we regularly see seven key digital marketing challenges IT companies face. We’ve used these pain points as springboards to craft customized solutions, many of which we will discuss real soon. 

Technical Complexity

There’s a delicate balance to be mindful of between technicality and creativity. There are two parts to this: 

• Communicating technical concepts to an often non-technical audience is no walk in the park. You must strike the right balance between establishing your authority in the space and illustrating the features and benefits of your product in an approachable manner. Doing so is key to gaining the trust you need to win conversions.
• Adjusting the content for SEO purposes is another ballgame. Search engine bots may crawl your content and choose to leave it out of their index without incorporating SEO and technical SEO best practices. This means your most coveted audience members won’t see the content you worked hard to produce.

Rapid Technological Advancements

It’s technology, after all; it will never stop evolving. You’ve got software updates and trends pumping out like they’re on steroids. McKinsey notes, “Digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both the organizational and industry levels.”

Digital marketing for IT companies needs to home in on these shifts to adapt their strategies accordingly. Otherwise, your business is quickly outdated and irrelevant to the masses.  

Competitive Landscape

Look around you:

• The global information technology market industry makes up $1.9 trillion of U.S. value-added GDP. This is over 10% of the national economy. 
• There are more than 557,000 software, and IT services companies in the U.S.

When there are a ton of other companies vying for the attention of your target audience, being unique is tough. And that’s what makes digital marketing so tricky. You need to bring your A-game when it comes to differentiating your product/service from the rest.

Targeting the Right Audience

When there are so many of the same products and services out there, reaching the right niche audience can get convoluted. Digital marketing for IT companies helps you execute competitor and audience analysis and craft unique messaging to connect with the right people. 

Building Trust and Credibility

Trust is the centrifugal force that ties all your value propositions and key audience members together. Trust is not to be overlooked, especially in the crowded tech realm. There are big players in the field, so it’s a matter of leveraging IT & SaaS content marketing strategies to build connection and credibility.

Long Sales Cycles

The customer journey in the tech B2B world is a lengthy one. It takes around six to 18 months to close an enterprise deal, and at least six people are involved in the decision-making process. 

This makes IT & SaaS content marketing (let’s not sugarcoat it) pretty daunting.

Data Privacy and Security Concerns

These are often two critical areas of concern for prospective customers, so they must be addressed. Compliance has to be front and center. Marketers should efficiently communicate security measures and updates. This involves being transparent about data collection and providing opt-out options.  

Especially with the rise of AI, marketers must be extra cautious to ensure their messaging and data are pulled through ethical means.

What Exactly Does Digital Marketing Mean for IT Companies?

Digital marketing can get pretty broad, so let’s nip this in the bud. Six digital marketing strategies are pivotal in the IT field. The Big Leap team considers all of these to maximize your campaign results.

SEO

When your target audience types specific terms/phrases related to your product or service, you want your brand to appear. SEO makes this possible.

Helpful SEO Tips

SEO is the foundation for bolstering your online visibility. So it’s worth investing the time and effort. This includes: 

• Running a site audit: For example, at Big Leap, we run a 180-point site audit that helps us identify areas that need fine-tuning on a client’s site. These areas may include page speed, metadata, canonicalization, and sitemap. (By the way, you can request a FREE mini site audit from us!)
• Running a competitor analysis: This provides the basis for seeing what you’re up against and how your competitors leverage their online IT & SaaS content marketing strategy. (We also provide a FREE Competitive Gap Analysis!) 

Content Marketing

The sales cycle in IT is a pretty complex one. Let’s pull this stat back up: 

It takes around six to 18 months to close a deal, and there are generally at least six people involved in the decision-making process. 

So with the prolonged customer journey, content plays a critical role in walking prospective customers through the sales cycle. You want your content to connect, educate, and build trust. And B2B tech marketers agree—80% claim writing skills were most important, followed by content marketing skills (78%).

Helpful IT & SaaS Content Marketing Tips

Content can get pretty broad. In the IT field, we’ve seen huge benefits from creating and optimizing content for every stage of the customer lifecycle. We’re talking: 

• Awareness: Glossary pages, infographics, educational/thought leadership blog posts, etc.
• Consideration: Video courses/tutorials, webinars, case studies, etc. 
• Conversion: Testimonials, surveys, content that continues to educate, etc.

Remember, it’s all about providing the answers to your target audience’s queries in a genuine and helpful way. Offering value is just one of the prime secrets to great tech and SaaS content marketing. 

PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It’s a paid advertising strategy that gathers qualified leads fairly quickly. You pay a fee each time a user clicks on your online ad. 

PPC is a great way to complement your long-term organic/SEO efforts. It ultimately maximizes your exposure to prospective customers. PPC:

• Offers guaranteed reach
• Gives you the power to customize your targeting options
• Helps amplify the reach of your organic efforts

And the results are pretty stellar. PPC has an ROI of 200%. Especially in crowded spaces like tech, it’s worth investing in PPC to stand out and generate higher-intent leads.

Helpful PPC Tips

Best organizational practices for PPC include: 

• Separating your budget among branded terms and three to four of your central services to start
• Limiting ad groups to a handful of related keywords
• Separating highest-performing keywords into separate ad groups
• Tracking conversions with help from a CRM

Link Building

Link building is an IT & SaaS content marketing strategy that earns one-way links to your site. 

Search engines see quality and relevant links pointing back to your site (also called backlinks) as votes of confidence. It’s a domino effect. The more votes you have, the more trust and authority signals you send to Google. Google then rewards your site with better rankings and visibility. 

Not to mention, links from authoritative pages pass more authority to your site. This portion of the Google algorithm is known historically as PageRank (PR).

Helpful Link Building Tips

Ways to earn quality and relevant backlinks include: 

• Creating stellar content everyone wants to use and link to as a resource
• Partnering with thought leaders and influencers in the tech space
• Engaging in community link-building via online forums

Online Reviews

What are people saying about your software? How are these responses impacting your brand’s image and potential? 

• 70% of online consumers read one to six reviews before converting. 
• B2B software and SaaS buyers spend 27% of their time conducting independent online research during the buying process. 
• Customers believe a product should have 100+ reviews, and 64% indicate they’re more likely to buy if an item (or service) has over 1,000 reviews.  

Helpful Reviews Tips

Garner more reviews by: 

• Offering rewards. Perhaps offering a free demo for another product can entice customers to provide feedback.
• Running an email campaign. This might entail a drip campaign that automatically sends emails over a set period, encouraging customers to leave a review.

Be sure to also respond to any negative reviews. This positively impacts your online reputation and illuminates your business’ human side—empathy matters.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

If you’ve got pretty good site traffic rates, great. But how’s your conversion rate looking? 

The journey never ends, even when you’ve got a ton of site traffic. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a strategy that improves your onsite experience to convert site visitors into qualified leads. 

According to Gartner, the B2B buying journey is not linear. Several steps or tasks happen simultaneously, with customers revisiting each buying phase more than once. Thus, maintaining a clear and consistent online experience is crucial to getting people to commit to your products/services. 

Helpful CRO Tips

Essential CRO practices include: 

• Improving page load time 
• Creating longer landing pages that address all of your prospective customers’ key queries about your product
• Implementing a chat box to speed up purchasing decisions
• Incorporating videos such as a tutorial on how to use software
• Eliminating unnecessary form fields

What Results Can You Expect?

If done right and well, digital marketing for IT companies can offer lucrative results such as the following. Keep in mind, marketing results are dependent on what your goals are and the strategy used to achieve them.

1. Improved search engine rankings: More prospective customers will see your site and relevant product/service pages when looking up specific software/services they want to pursue. 
2. Increased site traffic: More users seeing your brand name on search engines drives more traffic to your site. 
3. Enhanced brand awareness: Better online visibility allows individuals to become familiar with your brand name and what you bring to the table.
4. Increased lead generation: Additional touch points and messaging keep that list of qualified leads/prospects growing.
5. Improved conversion rates: By continuing to refine the user experience via CRO techniques and carrying on the conversation via content, you can expect a higher customer base and an increase in revenue.

AI’s Role in Digital Marketing for IT Companies

AI won’t minimize the value of the strategies we discussed earlier. But it does and will continue to shift how marketers execute those tactics. 

Keep in mind, the results we outlined above are reaped through ethical, white-hat and white-glove digital marketing strategies. And this means being conscientious amid this rise of AI. Here are a few areas where you should take caution and how to do so:

• The legality surrounding AI-generated creative assets like content is still murky. AI currently doesn’t understand copyright infringement or privacy issues. It can also be biased and produce inaccurate information. 
• AI tools like ChatGPT can still produce erroneous results. Thus, AI should be used as one source only. Its answers/data should not be the final product. You are responsible for reviewing and double-checking accuracy before publishing. Doing so is critical to maintaining your brand’s credibility.

While AI offers convenience, it has its drawbacks. Thus, we encourage you to stay vigilant while navigating AI and digital marketing. Nurture a human-centric approach to remain on the good side. 

Bookmark this one-stop shop for AI.

Strategies in Action with Digital Marketing for IT Companies

We can talk your ear off about the value of digital marketing for IT businesses. But what good will that do if we don’t have the proof, right? So here it is. These businesses in the tech industry are the real OGs when it comes to amplifying the viability of their brand via digital marketing.

Pluralsight

While they were leaders in providing online courses, technical education company Pluralsight needed help maintaining their online momentum amid the rapid shifts and trends rising in the IT space. 

Through innovative and long-term SaaS content marketing strategies, our work with Pluralsight flourished into a five-year partnership that brought notable progress. We took full ownership of massive content marketing opportunities that helped them earn lucrative results.

The Results

• 36 million impressions
• 100% increase in organic traffic
• 2,388 increase in keyword positions

Workfront

Software company Workfront wanted to boost its organic search presence (which was lost after rebranding) and conversion rates on its landing pages. 

Upon running an audit on their site and implementing conversion rate optimization techniques, we regained Workfront’s organic standing and boosted conversions. 

The Results

• 104% increase in conversions 
• 1,400% increase in captured keywords

CORE

A payments and customer engagement software company, CORE needed help bolstering its outdated site and maximizing its digital footprint. 

Big Leap collaborated with CORE to establish a strong SEO and content backbone. This included: 

• Technical SEO to build out a robust sitemap
• SaaS content marketing to elevate the quality of their content and boost organic traffic
• Paid advertising to generate higher-intent leads

The Results

• 5,170% increase in site impressions 
• 6,694 increase in keyword positions

“We worked closely together on auditing the website, building a prioritized list of what we needed to tackle – from keywords to content – and what would drive the most impact. They spend hours keeping up on the latest so I don’t have to make recommendations based on what would help our brand – not generic advice but tailored to our industry and vertical. Any feedback has always been ingested and resulted in changes that have made our collaboration even better.  The team at Big Leap has truly risen to every challenge and has made us better for it.”

—Shash Cates, Vice President of Marketing

Venafi

Cybersecurity company Venafi sought steady growth in qualified organic traffic and lead volume. Big Leap collaborated with their team to execute a 180-point technical site audit, which helped drive a robust long-form content marketing campaign.

The Results

• 115% increase in lead flow
• 105% increase in organic sessions
• 3000+ keyword positions gained

“The workflow was seamless, so long as we could keep up with them. There was no lack of initiative – we really felt as if they were just off-site branches of our team, as committed, or more, to our goals as we were.”

• Venafi?

We could go on, but you get the idea. For more IT case study examples, feel free to bookmark these pages.  

• Excel SoftSources
• Cybersecurity management company
• KodeKloud
• Agility
• Paystand
• Totem
• SaaS company
• Canopy

An Expert SaaS & IT Digital Marketing Team at Your Service

As illustrated above, Big Leap carries the experience to amplify your online presence. Every business possesses growth opportunities—that includes you! 

Digital marketing for IT companies is a long-term strategy that requires pulling several levers to see your business reach its full potential. That’s why SEO agencies for SaaS and tech—like us—are here. So if you need help, look no further. 

Connect with a marketing IT specialist, and we’ll talk through your pain points and where you want to be. Growth looks different for everyone, so we’re curious to hear your goals and tell you how we plan to reach them.