Research Insight:

Power, disruption & leads: tech marketing in the social economy

SOCIAL ECONOMY

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Cultural shifts in marketing

An unprecedented range of forces is intensifying the pace and complexity of technology marketing. Organisations have tightened management control, reduced marketing spend and are tipping the balance from out-sourced to in-house marketing services. Although marketers use an array of communications channels to engage the customer directly, they are now expected to achieve more with less building brands and, crucially, driving sales demand. The rise of social media has complicated research, marketing communications and the evaluation of both. Many marketers recognise that the marketing functions culture has changed fundamentally with important consequences for them and their colleagues.
Survey conducted in May to June 2013 byVanson Bourne. Responses of 59 tech marketers in UK-based companies.

Winds of change
As the leaders of technology firms strengthen their grip on operations, management teams are increasingly bringing marcomms activities in-house. But marketers are nevertheless being required to make sense of the burgeoning choice of formal and informal communications channels. Together with the effect of leaner campaign budgets, marketing teams must meet at times seemingly impossible corporate expectations of both optimum audience reach and lead generation for the organisation.

A source of leads
A weak economy has made companies concentrate on protecting market share while winning whatever new business they can, driving fundamental change. Most respondents see the role of marketing now re-defined as a feed source for the sales team and the biggest shift in their role in cultural terms is the overwhelming use of social media.

Colliding forces
Tech marketings three biggest drivers are budget cuts, social media and a greater focus on driving sales. In this collision of forces, the data shows that existing notions of brand strategy and planned campaigns are being uprooted. As a result, marketers are adopting the direct and resourceefficient communication possibilities of digital media for dynamic, sales-driven campaigns. The next challenge is to work out effective ways to track and evaluate such campaigns.

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Take a look at the headline trends in our 'Brands to Sales Leads' Infographic.

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Jason Day and Martyn Turze from Vanson Bourne review the key trends in tech marketing to come out of the research.

Lead generators not brand owners

Most tech marketers say marketing communications is less about brand development and more about demand generation. With reduced budgets, rising social media use and demands of voracious sales machines, where marcomms activity could once be termed a cookie cutting activity, it is now defined in terms of niche segments or even individual users. Todays acid test is sales leads. Nearly all interviewees say sales leads are a key campaign success factor against the minority that rates brand perception as important. And when marketers share their research data, its far more likely to be with sales colleagues than strategists or even the R&D/new product development department.

Im not listening: lack of social media evaluation

Although social media is now front and centre in marcomms and customer engagement, measuring its contribution is currently beyond many marketers abilities or resources. Despite nearly all marketers running and tracking multi-disciplinary campaigns, only a small minority measures audience reach and still fewer track social media chatter. With time and budgets squeezed, marketers seem forced to settle for monitoring social networks themselves: most interviewees track social media using in-house tracking tools but far more say they dont track social media usage than ask their retained or specialist agency to do it.

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The rise of social media, the targeting of specific audiences and the need for marcoms to have a direct impact on the revenue stream; how have these factors contributed to the changes in tech marketing?

Marketers to curators
Marketers are no longer creatives- theyre now expected to be researchers, data scientists and curators of branded content. Getting relevant audience insight" and "content creation" and ability to evaluate and prove ROI/value of marcomms are the skills valued by most respondents, with "creativity" way down the rankings. And while marketers reference point is still traditional research led by market data, formal customer feedback and market research, these avenues are being challenged by social insights, such as informal customer feedback, social media/analytics, social media customer insight tools and in-house surveys. But can they manage them all?

Tech marketing is now expected to support sales more than ever before. Its culture is now shaped by budget cuts that have brought marketing back in house with the expectation that social media is a low-cost panacea, taking the vendors message to individual users and creating a conversation channel.

Step change in the marketing suite

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But, as marketers manage everything from customer demand to customer satisfaction on smaller budgets, that panacea might yet prove to be a mirage that is yet to be adequately, measured, interpreted and understood.

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The requirement to prove value and ROI appears to have removed the need for creativity. So what does this actually mean for marketers?

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Find out more:Kevin Withnall, Director at Vanson Bourne explores this topic in more detail in his latest blog, 'From Brand Owners to Lead Generators'.

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Trying to make sense of it all

The unrelenting focus on sales leads and budget constraints is stretching marketing resources. Its also challenging the in-house teams skill-set, particularly in analysing audiences, segmentation and campaign data. Marketers said the skills they most lack are; data analysis, making sense of different data sources and trends analysis.

Data Analysis

Making sense of different data sources

Trends Analysis

Creativity was ranked much lower.

It looks as though tech marketers are struggling to juggle the tasks of gathering, compiling and interpreting data sources, as well as driving research, demand generation and communications delivery.

Interested in using market research to help your organisation? To take the first step, download our latest White Paper 'Things to take into consideration when choosing a Market Research company' for lots of tips and advice.

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Things to take into consideration when choosing a Market Research company

Market Research; What is it? Whats it for? What do you do with it and how do you do it? Which agency should I use? 1-2 3 4-6 7-10

MR: What is it?

The clue is in the name. This is an examination or questioning of a defined market, which is usually carried out by asking carefully-constructed and replicable questions of a representative sub-set of that market (rather than everyone because that would be a census which would be very expensive, take too long and is unnecessary) which gives us a perspective on the current, past or future behaviour of the whole market. It tests the whole market by researching the responses, attitudes, understanding, of this sample group. Thats market research.

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We look in more detail at what this means exactly for market research.

Where next for tech marketing?

Talk to Vanson Bourne to get to grips with the key questions of: how to help identify and drive customer demand and engagement; building continual market and audience insight channels; building effective measurement, evaluation and understanding of marcomms within your existing market insight operation.

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