Building a Marketing Strategy for an Enterprise Technology Company

The conventional corporate marketing playbook is being challenged from the top down and bottoms up as clients expect both transformative expertise and simpler, self-service experiences. As a marketing team, we suggest focusing on offering deep expertise, selling transformation rather than products, and prioritize customer success as a growth engine. 

Reimagining marketing and sales for enterprise technology companies 

The quick surge in digital transformation spurred exponential development in the corporate IT industry during the first two years of the COVID-19 epidemic. 

Companies of all sizes sought out a subscription, as-a-service, and cloud-based solutions with unparalleled zeal, wanting to facilitate and expedite their digital journeys. According to McKinsey, the breakthrough in adopting digital products has accelerated by seven years in 2020 alone.

When it comes to B2B tech, expertise is what matters the most. This is a far more complicated job for enterprise marketing teams, requiring technical expertise, comprehensive industry knowledge, and integrated solutions to guarantee value is generated throughout the life cycle. 

Customers now value knowledge above features such as a single point of contact, and their purchasing choices increasingly involve a diverse set of stakeholders rather than simply IT. At the same time, customers are wanting simplicity and self-service experiences that are straightforward and highly customized. Delivering on all of these emerging demands might be a challenge, but also an opportunity. 

According to a recent McKinsey study of 60 top-performing software-as-a-service companies shows that at least 25% of these companies are gaining growth from the combination of multiple factors: 

• New-business acquisition, with new customers accounting for 15% of growth
• Maintaining and developing current customer base with net retention rates exceeding 125%
• Monitoring spending to invest effectively while keeping marketing expenditures at no more than 30%

To drive successful growth results, an enterprise marketing strategy should combine growth-focused tactics and organizational-wide resources, which requires cross-company communication and collaboration with numerous departments.

Key pillars to successfully market enterprise tech

As market conditions evolve and the need for efficient growth becomes more pressing, errors on a strategic level will have far-reaching effects on the company’s wellbeing and revenues. So, what are the key focus areas to achieve success with promoting your tech products and services?

Prioritizing customer success

As subscription-based models are getting more traction and customer recognition, leading tech enterprises are increasingly recognizing the critical role of customer success as a growth element. 

Customer success teams create value by assisting customers in realizing the full potential of the solutions, which fosters customer trust and relevance. Leading marketing teams, on the other hand, go above and beyond in uncovering hidden opportunities and giving sales teams actionable insights into company requirements. 

As a result, businesses are making their sales, marketing, and customer success teams more and more intertwined, boosting them with resources and technical expertise, and dismantling previous sales divides to deliver growth across the entire customer life cycle. The organizations are providing subscription-based premium plans that enhance customer engagement and provide excellent user experiences.

Tighter cooperation between marketing and sales

The traditional ways of approaching customer interaction are becoming increasingly impractical. Historically, B2B tech was doing the work linearly, where one department does its job and then passes it on to the next stage down the sales funnel. 

As this segmented approach becomes unworkable, marketing departments will need to widen their duties and collaborate with sales, channel, and customer success teams to build and maintain full-funnel health. 

What does it look like in practice? For example, companies like Oracle and Snowflake encourage their marketing and sales teams to work together in a hybrid approach to nurture potential customers by evaluating their intent using contact data, press announcements, financial records, and geolocation information. 

The main goal is to make a prospect as ready for interaction as possible by predicting their intent and needs. Such strategy can decrease the number of leads, but land more actual conversions. 

Adopting the product-led playbook

Companies that wish to meet their consumers’ need for simplicity are adopting product-led growth by developing easy and scalable digital self-service purchasing experiences. Simply said, the goal is to create the shortest, the easiest and the most appealing mechanism for the customers to complete the purchase on their own, without having to actively sell it. 

Rich material and engaging events make goods easy to explore, free trials and a simple purchase procedure reduce the friction that buyers frequently associate with enterprise-grade solutions, and simple products result in satisfied customers, who then become growth engines. Using a mix of free trials, demos, easy-to-implement solutions, and user communities, you may generate demand and accelerate acceptance among business clients.

Changing the model of customer relationship management

Digital transformation is still a remaining challenge, as solutions become more complicated and multi­year. As a result, account managers are frequently unprepared to give customers a full-cycle adoption support. 

Enterprise clients demand best practices on how to answer business needs, insights on negotiating architectural trade-offs, and proof on how the solution will create value before making an investment. In order to solution to deliver on their expectations, they also require continual guidance and collaboration.

Tech executives, consequently, are adopting transformation-led sales to help create this new sort of engagement with potential clients, sometimes treating the largest of them as a separate business partner.

Firms are replacing one-on-one account managers with hybrid specialists’ teams, allowing them to reach a larger number of consumers. By using a mix of marketing tools, solution plays, and data-driven insights, they gain the momentum to approach customers with the right knowledge at the right time.

How some of the most prominent tech companies handle their marketing

There’s never a single right strategy for a company. Understanding which strategy will ultimately work takes time and research, but will eventually help executives to craft a perfect combination for driving continuous growth. 

We have gathered cases of three prominent tech companies with our own research data to demonstrate how different approaches are applied for success. 

Slack

Slack, founded in 2013, is the type of company did not necessarily succeed because its product was novel or because it had a large marketing spend. Its growth is based mainly on using customer feedback, viral word-of-mouth brand recognition, and the development of a non-salesy brand personality, resulting in 156,000 paying customers in 2021, most of them organizations that actively use the platform. On average, their website is getting 381 millions visitors monthly.

Behind that, there are clear indications that in its strategy the company relies on hybrid relationships with customer, is surely driven by customer success rate, and freemium subscription models. Slack had an estimated 18 million active users in 2020, and we expect that this number has already surpassed 20 million since.

The platform has also built a large and vibrant community, amplifying another dimension of marketing impact. According to our research data, the company’s community exceeds 1.8 million users, with an average of over 44,102 monthly brand mentions online.

Adobe

As of November 2022 Adobe has a market cap of $157.05 Billion. This makes Adobe the world’s 64th most valuable company by market cap according to our data.

With 9,546,700 followers on social media, Adobe proves itself as a company with engagement-centered marketing strategy. Few tech companies master the customer-first, empathy-led approach as Adobe does. One of the most bright displays of this way was demonstrated during the pandemic. 

In May 2020, a one-minute film touched the hearts of quarantined viewers across the world. Adobe’s #HonorHeroes film showcased breathtaking digital pictures of ordinary individuals accomplishing remarkable things. Recognizing the importance of compassion and empathy in today’s world, Adobe focused their pandemic marketing efforts on these themes. 

Ultimately, this approach assisted in better connecting with consumers amid difficult times. Additionally, Adobe granted access to Creative Cloud to 30 million students and employees when they were forced to work remotely due to the pandemic, displaying their customers-first approach in actions and not just words. 

The approach also brings very real growth numbers: the company achieved record annual revenue of $15.79 billion in fiscal year 2021, which represents 23 percent year-over-year growth.

Accenture

Accenture is the global leader in professional services and management consulting. Founded in 1989 in Dublin, Ireland, the company operates in five businesses to provide clients with integrated and technology-enabled solutions. As of today, Accenture has more than 7000 clients spanning across 120 countries. Additionally, 89 of the Fortune Global 100 companies use Accenture.

The Accenture brand slogan is “High Performance Delivered”. This alone demonstrates that it is a corporation that is centered on performance and turnover, and hence its goal aims to grow both directly or indirectly. In 2021, the company’s revenue reached was $50.5 billion, with its community size exceeding 11 million users, making it one of the largest tech communities in the market.

It is also a research and analysis firm, and its strategy was developed following years of research on comparable firms. Accenture is following the worldwide trend of expanding into emerging markets. Furthermore, the organization prioritizes volume and efficiency. Mostly, the enterprise relies on a mix of data analytics and deep market research to cater to its diverse customer categories. 

Succeeding in the changing world

In this new era of accelerating digital disruption, tech businesses need to reinvent their marketing strategies. Leading players are fast innovating, but the change is still in its early phases. 

Adapting to this new reality is a hard effort, since the desire for knowledge and the demand for simplicity are creating the future of growth marketing for software organizations. However, firms that are willing to take on the challenge today will greatly benefit from the long-term perspective.

As a company specializing in B2B and B2C marketing for enterprise technology companies, we at 42DM can help you define your strengths and use them as a powerful growth weapon. 
After managing 250+ successful projects, we have accumulated our experience in a tailored 5-step growth marketing approach that helps our clients to scale their businesses & reach their goals. Discover our proven approach of helping make your business thrive, or reach out with any questions today.