Marketing to IT buyers (not active on social)
How to do marketing and sales for technical audience that is not active on social
Most ABM case studies you see on LinkedIn have the same structure: ads across multiple social channels + semi-personalized outbound or creative gifting + semi-personalized landing pages.
But what if your buyers are not active social media users?
What if you can't reach them via ads?
What if they completely ignore sales outreach and give 0 chance to marketing and sales?
Today we’ll share:
Live case study of how to sell to the technical audience (embedded below)
ABM fundamentals for selling to IT buyers
4 best ways to target and engage B2B buyers that ARE NOT active on social
Let’s dive in.
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
ABM fundamentals for selling to IT buyers
1. Program prerequisites.
Technical buyers will try to figure stuff out themselves, before reaching out to sales. Here is what you need to have in place before launching a program.
Good product and happy users who recommend it (check online reviews & technical forums/communities)
Detailed and clear product documentation
A trial or at least a sandbox
Remove fluff, overly benefit-driven copy from your messaging. Best, validate your messaging with your audience.
Understand the product use-cases and jobs-to-be done, and provide specific solutions
2. Incorporate advocacy into your ABM program.
IT buyers trust their peers' recommendations more than any testimonials or case studies. Make sure you include in your program the next 3 things.
a) Spontaneous advocacy.
Technical users will sometimes talk about your product in communities, technical blogs, conferences or YouTube. Work with them and promote their content.
b) User-centric case studies.
Showcase the success of power users, making them the hero of the story (instead of your brand) and you'll create loyal advocates.
Here is an example of the live case study we did with one of our clients.
c) Account expansion.
Help happy customers spread the word internally through account-focused advocacy (to other units that can use the product).
*We share expansion playbooks in our Full-Funnel ABM course.
3. Involve your Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) into thought leadership.
IT buyers may be very skeptical, but they are always learning, and looking for ways to make things better.
They trust their peers, who share no B.S. lessons learned from the trenches.
You'll probably have internal experts (e.g. solution architects) who used to do what your buyers do today. The key is to focus them on the actual challenges and use-cases that your target ICP has.
Stuff we saw worked for our clients:
Community round tables
Educational webinars
Academies (courses taught by experts)
Enabling them to create and share content on social*
*If the senior buyers are not active on social, some will silently consume. And their junior coworkers will engage and participate (they are often a part of product evaluation or even recommending solutions).
We asked the opinion of a solutions architect of our client. Here is what he says.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with a full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
4 best ways to target and engage B2B buyers that ARE NOT active on social.
Here are 4 proven across several projects ways to reach and warm up IT buyers.
1. Partner with niche communities & associations.
Technical audiences are often active in niche communities. Do a co-marketing activity, making sure that the association or community will help with intros and promotion.
One of our clients managed a relationship with an HVAC association to book 23 meetings with technical buyers from target accounts. We cover this case study here.
What works:
Involve your experts in providing advice around relevant topics and questions.
Co-create with active community members.
Sponsor educational initiatives and/or co-creation (e.g. market research) with community members.
2. Direct mail.
Why direct mail?
Direct mail cuts through the noise of spammy sales LinkedIn and email messages
Relevant gifts grab attention and provoke curiosity
Highly-personalized pitch and the relevant case study make target accounts reply YES just because it’s not standard, and they see you did homework.
We have a 100% reply rate for every direct mail outreach campaign we send at Fullfunnel.io. Our clients see positive reply rates of around 40%-60% per campaign.
Here are 2 detailed case studies:
3. Peer-to-peer relationships.
Even if your target buyers are not active on social, there are other departments that might be (sales, marketing, client success, data, etc.).
Build a peer-to-peer relationship to gain additional insights and ask for introductions. Ask your peers to connect your team with target buyers.
By building relationships with peers, marketing can:
Get insider information and share it with sales
Do content/marketing collaboration with the target account to boost awareness and strengthen a relationship
4. Content collaborations.
Content collaborations are:
The best way to connect, engage and build a relationship with the target accounts
Have an excuse to reach out
Create peer-to-peer content that is easier to distribute
Involve external experts in:
Permissionless co-creation (curating or piecing together content from different experts). Here is one of our examples.
Invite them to a podcast / market research / partner webinar / local event. Here is another example.
Co-create with buyers, too. I’ll share the recent example below.
It's hard, but it always pays off.
Just because your audience is technical, it doesn't mean you cannot engage buyers and set up proper ABM programs.
Our experience in niche, media-starved industries has been the opposite. It's frequently an opportunity to bring these people together and create niche media that will make you visible.
ABM to QA engineers - Live case study
In the new episode of Fullfunnel Live we'll share a live, step-by-step case study of an ABM program for skeptical IT buyers that generated several enterprise opportunities and won enterprise deals.
We invited our client, João Crisóstomo from TestRail (a brand of Gurock Software), to share:
How to market to a technical audience not active on social—what works and what doesn't
How to create expertise content when you don’t have the expertise
How to warm up buyers not active on social
How to work with internal and external subject-matter experts
Subscribe to Full-Funnel Live on your favorite platform:
This podcast episode was brought by Dealfront. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Dealfront: https://bit.ly/3UwLUZr