Is your IT/High Tech business competing online?

With so much competition, you need to stand out

  • Digital disruption has accelerated innovations in digital marketing technology selection.
  • You need to be visible to existing and your future potential customers, instill trust in your IT/high tech brand, and once converted, engage them to retain them and promote advocacy.

The RACE Growth Process is a tried-and-tested methodology to support the growth of IT/High Tech businesses.

  • Apply a planned approach to your IT/high tech company’s marketing to rapidly review, find opportunities, build a high-performing team and develop your marketing strategy to reach, acquire and engage more customers.
  • Smart Insights have marketing solutions for retailers of all sizes

Omnichannel customer lifecycle

Our recommended omnichannel marketing tools for IT/high tech businesses

Structure a plan using the RACE Framework
  • Learn how to structure a comprehensive omnichannel marketing plan, using the Smart Insights RACE planning framework
Define content marketing strategy
  • Learn how to develop a content marketing strategy using our content analysis and planning tools
Define digital value proposition
  • Learn how to craft a powerful Digital Value Proposition (DVP) and how this differs from a brand proposition

Use our updated digital marketing tools infographic to audit the types of marketing technology you use

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost digital marketing tools to give us insight into our customers, competitors, and markets. These strategic digital tools help us to compete to win and retain customers by delivering automated relevant, real-time marketing communications, integrated across digital devices and traditional marketing channels. To help highlight the range of great options available, our updated 2023 essential digital marketing tools infographic recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. Plus, we’ve grouped them across our RACE Growth System for managing digital marketing, so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle. Click on the infographic below to see a larger version, or, free members can download our…

Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?

If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant. In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology. Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…

Grow your IT/high-tech business across the 'internet of things' by applying these latest industry strategies for technology product marketing

What is product marketing?

Product marketing describes the management of all processes involved in taking a product to market. This field of marketing involves working with R&D, manufacturing, logistics, comms, and sales. Since your role is so closely tied to the products in your category, product marketers take the role of advocating for the customer when product-related decisions are made (positioning, launch, development, etc). In this blog, we will explore what makes technology product marketing different.

What is technology product marketing?

Technology product marketing refers to product marketing when your products are IT/high tech. Typically sold in a B2B environment, technology product marketing is renowned for extended stakeholder relations and, currently, an increasingly competitive market. Of course, the nature of IT/high tech means many technology products will be software. The growing Software as a Service…

Practical ideas for you to use including how to use ChatGPT

Each year, for the last 10 years, or so, I have identified the latest trends in digital marketing and forecast what the major trends will be in the year ahead. The aim is to help marketers and business owners find new marketing ideas, review their budget investments and put together their plans. There’s always a lot of interest as businesses consider tactics they can deploy to gain an edge by using some of the latest techniques. This review covers the latest developments in digital marketing across the many digital marketing channels tools that businesses can use shown in the visual below based on our RACE digital marketing framework. I cover ChatGPT at the end of the article. We developed this to help businesses develop a robust approach to developing integrated digital marketing strategies across 25 key activities which we define as…

There are winners and losers from the recent fintech marketing shakeup in the financial services sector. The key is putting your customers first as we delve into the latest trends and innovations in the finance landscape

Financial Services marketers are working amidst an era of digital disruption. Those based in traditional financial services businesses are witnessing rapid digital change, whilst new digital startup marketers are looking for fast growth and shaking up the marketplace. On both sides of the spectrum, it is agreed that financial services martech and fintech marketing unlock great opportunities to get closer to customers when done well. Smart Insights helps marketers and managers in a range of financial services businesses. We have dedicated startup and SME marketing tools and templates, plus full-team integrated marketing training for large global corporations. One marketing principle that rings true for all financial services marketing activities is ensuring a keen focus on the…

Today, tech marketers and managers advocate for IT and high tech both internally in their businesses and externally to their target markets. We've got the marketing tools and training you need.

Looking to strengthen your technology company's marketing strategy? As marketers, we are all striving to apply data and customer insights to our marketing activities. But in the IT and high tech sector, with competition at an all-time high, this approach is absolutely critical. Our tried and tested tech marketing solutions support IT and high tech marketing professionals to plan, manage, and optimize their marketing strategy, and win more customers.

Why invest in strategic marketing for your tech company?

If you haven't already got an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, now is the time to develop your marketing to compete in the competitive, growing, IT and high tech marketplace. As McKinsey found in their UK B2B COVID-19 survey, the technology, media…

What benefits might deeper, actionable, aspect-based sentiment analysis offer for your marketing strategy and planning?

I have recently attended the Social Data Summit, which gathered prominent speakers from leading brands and organizations to discuss the latest developments in digital insights, social listening, and sentiment analysis. The first speaker Dr. Jillian Nay, a founder of the Social Intelligence Lab, challenged the audience with her presentation “Social Data Intelligence is a Mess! Let’s Fix It”. Jillian highlighted some major challenges facing the social intelligence industry that need to be addressed such as lack of standards, transparency & accountability, insufficient support for social media intelligence roles, limitation of current tools, depreciation of social networks APIs, but also acknowledged exciting progress that industry is…

Examples of digital marketing tools and techniques to give you an edge in the year ahead

Well, we’ve nearly made it! For years I’ve been looking to the future, predicting how innovations in digital media, platforms and technology will shape marketing in 2020. The cutting edge examples certainly show the exciting opportunities available - there is almost too much choice… In this article, I’ll explore six key marketing trends based on examples and research on the adoption of the latest marketing techniques and technology marketers can use. For recommendations on tapping into the innovations in different digital marketing channels, including email, social media and search engine marketing, see all the other posts from the Smart Insights team covering channel-specific digital marketing trends for 2020.

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In 2020, we can see the huge impact that digital marketing has had over the last decade, and more. Looking at advertising alone, these eMarketer predictions show…

6 implications for selecting and managing today's and tomorrow's marketing technology

We've been sharing the latest Marketing Technology Landscape map by Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec for several years now. You've almost certainly seen one of the earlier iterations since it has been widely shared. I love it because it's a USEFUL infographic - it prompts marketers to review their current Marketing Technology and take action to improve their Marketing Technology Stack. When I discuss it with marketers when speaking or training, it certainly has a big impact, not always in a good way... It prompts that "OMG how do I cope?" fear amongst marketers and business owners due to its complexity. But, for me, from a positive POV, it shows the opportunity of the many tools we have available to deliver more relevant, more personalised communications today. It's inspired the Smart Insights team to create our own Martech infographic which includes both insight and operational tools…

Which are the technologies that are dominating the Marketing Automation space?

Did you know that when it comes to marketing automation, just six technologies hold more than half of the market share? Well, now you do – courtesy of competitive intelligence and lead generation company SimilarTech and inbound marketing agency Bold Digital Architects. The two companies recently teamed up to create a report on the State of Marketing Automation in 2017 and managed to draw up a couple of interesting conclusions. Before we go into further detail, here’s a short overview for your convenience: Six biggest technologies hold a total of 57 per cent of the market share. A total of 482,765 websites have been using marketing automation technology last year, representing an increase in usage. With more than a fifth of market share (21 per cent), Hubspot has the single largest market share. B2B companies are most inclined on using marketing…