Creating Content That Connects With B2B Tech Buyers

The pandemic triggered a technology boom with rippling effects across the business world. Ever-accelerating digitalization means new software and solutions are constantly coming into play, impacting a growing range of roles and functions.

That’s good news for the tech industry, which continues to experience sharp growth. But it also creates a conundrum for the modern-day B2B tech marketer: we can no longer confidently predict who will influence or guide the purchase decision process.

Where once the majority of tech purchases were evaluated by specialized IT decision-makers, the sphere of influence has expanded dramatically. 

“B2B deals of any significance are bought by cross-functional teams, not individuals,” noted Gartner in a 2020 analysis. “This means organizational practices and perspective override individual stakeholder preferences. Selling technology to such teams can be tough to navigate given that the average tech purchase involves between 14-23 people, the majority of who (80%) are in senior operations or product roles.” 

What makes this even trickier is the air of anonymity around tech buyers. As we’ve noted, “four out of five employees are involved at some point in the tech buying process, and 50% of those tech purchases never go through formal approval. Technology buying has become a company-wide endeavor, and it’s difficult to know who’s really behind a new purchase.”

As I said, a conundrum. But luckily, new research and insight are helping bring clarity to what these cross-functional audiences are looking for in B2B tech content. The data suggests we need to rethink how we approach personalization and branding.

4 Ways to Make Your B2B Tech Marketing Content Connect with Buyer Audiences

Speak to a wide range of roles

This is Gartner’s leading piece of advice: “Appeal to the buying team, not the individuals on it. This is not to say you should discount central IT. That team remains vitally important. While the organization will be focused on outcomes, IT will be focused on how those outcomes are achieved. You have to sell to both dimensions.” 

This doesn’t mean your content should be overly broad and generic. A customer engagement study by Foundry, surveying more than 600 global tech decision-makers, found that 96% prefer custom-tailored content: “they seek content based on their industry, technology platform(s) already installed at their organization, company size, and job responsibilities.”

For marketers on LinkedIn, this is good news, because you can identify and target by professional parameters like these with ease. 

Let buyers self-personalize their journeys

One way to incorporate personalization into your content strategy while accounting for the unpredictable variety of roles that may engage with it is through self-personalized buyer journeys. 

Conversational marketing, online communities, and robust resource centers are among the ways to empower buyer autonomy as they research weighty decisions. Above all, make it easy to find what they need and make the information clear: Gartner found that 74% of B2B tech buyers found the buying process complex.

Educate your audience (and their audience)

Because of this complexity, and because more non-technical functions are getting involved with the process, educational content becomes more crucial than ever. According to Foundry’s survey, 74% of tech decision-makers say they are more likely to consider an IT vendor who educates them through each stage of the decision process.

This education can take many forms. Sometimes it’s nitty-gritty specs and product info – respondents in the Foundry survey cited product testing/reviews/opinions, product demos/product literature, and vendor presentations as the most relied-upon content types through the purchase process – but marketers should think bigger.

Think about how you can educate your audience to become the educators. LinkedIn’s Age of Agility report recommends that B2B tech marketers strive to “empower the next generation of IT guides.” 

“With technology unlocking opportunities for a wide range of businesses, many non-IT functions are now involved in technology buying decisions. To meet the needs of diverse internal stakeholders, marketers can support IT's mission to act less like a gatekeeper and more like a guide.”

Think also about how to earn people’s attention and build brand salience so this educational content gets noticed and associated with your company.

Create memorable impressions and tangibly associate them with your brand

Nearly every category of B2B technology solution has grown ripe with parity – or at least, perceived parity. You may (rightfully) believe your offering stands out from the pack in terms of features or capabilities, but that won’t always be clear up-front to your multi-faceted audience.

For this reason, strong creative branding is essential. Here, there is room for improvement. An analysis of 600 B2B tech ads from System1’s database revealed that “71% achieved a one-star creative score, meaning that — according to System1’s star-score system – they are unlikely to contribute to long-term market share growth.”

This analysis also identified some key opportunities to improve creative scores and drive more memorable brand experiences. Among them:

• Tell a story with your ads and content: Story arcs ranked as one of the top creative elements featured in ads that garnered a positive emotional response, but only 55% included one.
• Brand early and often: Make sure that your branding elements – be it logos, taglines, colors, distinctive brand assets – are prominent in visual content, and integral rather than distracting.
• Feature everyday settings rather than business settings: Video ads with everyday settings had the strongest association with positive emotion. This guideline speaks to a more general directive to make tech content more human and relatable. 

That directive is one being embraced throughout the industry, which makes sense when you consider the expanding universe of decision influencers. 

“I believe that as technology gets more sophisticated with an increasing number of automated techniques, B2B is going to have to learn from B2C to make more emotional and personal connections with customers and buyers,” said Siren CMO Rachel Kavanagh in a recent MarTech Series interview. “The B2B lead journey in most industries is saturated with the same style of automated content so even more disruptive approaches are required. Technology is going to have to help teams to show their human side even more, express their creativity more and provide tools that appear less automated or are indeed less automated.”

Technology has always been the great disruptor. But as alluded to by Kavanagh, in today’s world of B2B tech, humanity is the great disruptor: empathetic messaging, creative content approaches, and buyer empowerment.