Technographic Targeting – Friend or Foe in B2B Marketing?
Shelly Andrews
Linkedin
- February 26, 2024
- 11:38 AM
Understanding your target audience is crucial to reaching the right audience with the right solutions. But, understanding these audiences, especially in the tech industry, can be challenging. Companies employ various diverse technologies that can help you reach out to them effectively. It is an open market to promote, yet businesses fall short of promoting it to the right companies with the solutions they demand.
At this stage, we plan to bring in Technographic data or technographics. They come in to present you with a competitive edge and act as a strategic ally for your marketing campaigns. This data helps you explore how technologies adopted by companies can benefit you in your endeavors in the B2B industry.
Today, our blog attempts to understand how technographic targeting is essential in skyrocketing sales and marketing efforts, its transformative impact, and how the digital journey of companies stands to benefit you in the long term.
Let Us Understand the Word ‘Technographic Data’
In simple terms,
Technographics = Technology + Demographics
Let us now simplify this equation. Demographics is the data that projects the population in a certain area or specialty based on age, gender, income, and location. This data helps in studying groups of people based on the categories in which they belong.
What is Technographic Data?
Technographic data includes information about a company’s tendencies to purchase Technology, the use of these technologies, adoption rates, existing challenges, and the challenges that can be presented in the future for the company. It acts as a bridge to close the gap between potential conversions and practical insight of a company. It can open up the DNA of a company’s tech infrastructure to a business.
Technographics may be a term that has created a buzz in recent years, but it has been developing and growing among B2B marketers and businesses even before 2017. It can be traced back to the late 1980s and 1990s when technology took over the world in a new fashion. The seed for technographic data was sowed way back when the arrival and growth of the internet, personal computers, online games, and other devices started taking importance in every household. Thus, when companies realized the potential of purchasing data, technographic targeting was born. Companies quickly began gathering data on likelihood of purchase, brand preferences, and wealth to purchase. This was later coined as technographic data or technographics.
Explore Technology Users Data Here!
Are Technographic Data and Social Technographic Data the Same?
It is worth mentioning that demographic data, firmographic data, technographic data, and social technographic data differ from one another. While technographic and social technographic data share similarities, they diverge in the information they provide to organizations.
With slight distinction, technographics, as mentioned above, discusses an organization’s software, hardware, networking technologies, and more. On the other hand, social technographic data deals with the organization’s consumption and usage of social media. It points out software in play, challenges, and pain points that need to be addressed from a social media point of view.
Why Do You Need Technographic Data?
It is simple. Businesses see that people’s lives revolve around technology. As technology becomes more integrated into daily life, businesses must adapt their marketing campaigns to meet the increasingly high demands of consumers. Gone are the days when a one-size-fits-all approach attracted prospects to your business.
It is time to adapt and bring new tactics for growth. Technographic data enables your firm to tailor campaigns and strategies based on the popular technology your target audience employs. By bringing this precision to your marketing campaigns, you can enhance customer engagement and conversion rates. It is important to note that precision targeting based on the technology stack is an added advantage for your marketing initiatives.
Another aspect of why we need technographic data is strategic technographic marketing. Strategic planning and positioning of your products and solutions are the keys to walking straight into the view of a decision-maker.
By understanding the technical aspects, loopholes, gaps, and challenges via technographic data, you can position your solutions strategically from the prospect’s viewpoint. By leveraging technographics, you can resonate effectively with your target audience and win over customers who matter to you.
A new aspect that has become confusing to new marketers is technographic segmentation. As it moves ahead from demographic profiling, technographic segmentation is audience targeting based on technology.
The target audience is categorized based on tech stacks, tools, and adoption time. This segmentation based on technology enables marketing and sales teams to build strategies and campaigns that resonate well with potential customers. Marketers can also easily address challenges and pain points with each segment.
In this section, we do not just address the ‘why’ for technographics but also the benefits of technographics data. Understanding the benefits provides an answer to why businesses need to segment data by technographics for better reach and hold in the market.
How to Use Technographic Data?
There are three significant ways technographic data can be utilized for better-targeted campaigns.
Technology-based Audience Targeting
By utilizing technographic data, businesses can identify and prioritize leads based on the tech stack leveraged by a prospect. This enables marketing teams to focus their efforts on prospects who are more receptive to your solutions for efficiency. You can also direct offerings from your company that can benefit you and the customer equally.
Targeting Based on Technology
This can be close to cold calling or emailing your prospects. You can promote your solutions by crafting compelling campaigns for prospects who use relevant technology. You can showcase capabilities, compatibility, integrations, or enhancements. This can foster a relationship between you and the customer with tech stack as a medium and commonality. This brings a sense of relevance and immediacy for the customer to contact you when a challenge arises in the future.
Tech Stack Targeting
You can take up multiple marketing campaign approaches with tech stack targeting. You can promote the primary technology in question and address issues of secondary technologies under the umbrella. This enables you to cover the scope of the software and leaves no potential untouched and unexplored by either your business or your customer.
Why Do We Need Technographics in Sales and Marketing?
The B2B industry is growing, and so are the products and solutions businesses provide. As the industry evolves to match the growth rate of the information technology and services sector, it can be challenging to reach the right audience who needs your solutions. Hence, technographics is your solution to narrow down your audience.
Technographics enables sales and marketing teams to build the right strategy to target the audience. They are prepared when provided with a detailed report of their prospect’s technology stack. The intelligence and insights they get via technographic data help them build campaigns that are unique to each prospect. It helps them transform their approach towards lead generation and engagement strategies.
When technographic data is presented to sales and marketing teams, they can find common ground with robust data and work towards collaboration. A marketing campaign will succeed with flying colors only when these two teams join forces.
Do We Have to Understand Technographic Targeting for Marketing?
Absolutely! This is your chance to create an unforgettable campaign. By simply understanding technographic targeting, you can target the right companies by focusing on their requirements and pain points.
Technographic targeting involves marketers getting data on a particular company’s software usage, hardware supply preferences, and online behavior. These insights can help you build a profile, which can give you a detailed understanding of your target audience and their habits in the B2B industry. Now, you will be equipped with information that helps you build personalized campaigns and targeted approaches for effective sales.
How can you make sure that you are effectively implementing technographic targeting? It is as easy as working on audience profiling and user profiling via technographic profiling.
Audience profiling creates a detailed insight into technologies used by your target audience. By this profiling, you can understand your audience’s behavior, needs, and preferences. You now hold the power to personalize experiences and send out necessary communications. This, in turn, will help you resonate with your audience. Your campaigns are bound to work great for your brand and solutions.
User profiling, on the other hand, helps you create profiles of individuals or a business in particular. By understanding their technology preferences in a one-to-one discussion, you can create personalized experiences that resonate with them. This holds a higher chance of conversions and higher customer loyalty to your brand.
How Does Account-Based Marketing Benefit from Tech Stack Targeting?
A precious asset to a marketer is technographics, which maintains valuable client relationships with Account-based marketing. ABM’s main motive is to showcase your capabilities to the customer. The customer needs to see that you understand every need and requirement through your emails. It is about anticipating the customer’s demands, assuring them you have a solution, and presenting yourself as their success partner. Technographics play a key role in making this a reality.
Technographic data presents the following benefits alongside ABM for your business –
Your marketing dollars will be put to efficient use. By letting you know what they require now and what they need in the future, you can confidently communicate and attract them to your brand. It helps you work on the ‘audience of one’ style.
A customer notices the level of personalization and effort you put into their communications. Understanding the customer’s technology stack initially cuts down the initial round of uninformed formalities. This helps in meaningful conversations and better engagement.
Technographic data ensures sharper targeting and better sales. As the variables of control are in your hand, you can focus on your marketing campaign and ROI!
This post first appeared on 5-Ways Effective Account Based Marketing Can Benefit Marketers - ABM, please read the originial post: here
