Promotion of IT companies

The market that offers IT products and services is constantly expanding. Entering it is always associated with difficulties in finding the first customers. To bring your offers to your target audience, to start selling, it is necessary to invest in advertising. Only by constantly informing the consumer about the products or services that he will encounter on a regular basis will it bring results.

Why IT promotion?

Unwillingness to invest in marketing leads to losses and the closure of even promising projects. Meanwhile for the expansion of business it is necessary to attract new customers, to increase sales. Launching advertising campaigns and promotion by your own forces, without the help of specialists, is undesirable. There is a chance of draining the budget and not getting any results.

You must create the need to purchase the product, and for this a whole complex of measures should be applied. Marketing for IT companies takes into account the complexity and intangibility of services and products. To make the client understand their benefits, marketers are required to compose a proposal in simple language, using a moderate number of terms.

Promotion in the IT-sphere is a set of marketing activities that are aimed at increasing the company’s scale, market share and brand awareness. Many companies that are engaged in testing, information security, software development, implement business applications, but do not pay proper attention to informing consumers about their services and products.

Difficulties of selecting an IT-company by the customer

Marketing for it-companies means that the customer’s criteria for choosing an IT-service provider or product are extremely vague. He wants a ready-made solution, not a description of methods. Reviews and testimonials help form the right idea.

The more clients leave feedback on information portals, Maps, feedback sites, and the faster the negative feedback is dealt with, the more credibility the company will gain. Having video testimonials also increases loyalty.

Reaching customers when promoting an IT-company is done at offline events (seminars, mitaps, conferences). To encourage the client to choose a particular solution (company), it is necessary to demonstrate their effectiveness. Publication of cases with examples, before/after results, own findings and failures increases the interest of target audience.

How to set goals and benefit from competitors’ experience

The company management should have a measurable, specific and achievable goal, for example, to increase traffic by n percent or increase the conversion rate of the site by a certain percentage, to receive a certain number of leads each month, etc. In order to realize your plans, you need to develop a content strategy, set out benchmark KPIs, create a recognizable image of the product (company), choose the mechanics and working formats of promotion.

Any promotional activity begins with an analysis of competitors and the market. The IT sphere implies general technological savvy of both sellers and buyers. Competitors, in order to promote, have previously conducted market research and have strengths and weaknesses, and work with identified triggers of the target audience. By analyzing competitors’ experiences, you can avoid mistakes and use ready-made solutions.

How to find your client

As a rule, this is not an easy task for IT-companies, because the audience is quite diverse. Some people choose products, others decide to pay for them. Most consumers and users don’t want to know anything about how “it works” at all. They care about getting a concrete result that solves problems and simplifies life.

The success of an IT company’s advertising depends on the accuracy of defining the portrait of the customer. Content, list of services, selling texts, blogging in social networks are based on knowledge of customer needs.

Different pages are provided for different groups of clients. The product should be tailored to the needs of a specific CA segment! Persuasion will require thinking through a communication strategy, selecting effective advertising channels and creating a clear marketing plan in accordance with the objectives of informing, persuading or reminding.

Contextual advertisement is set up according to segmentation of service types and niches, by requests of different frequency, with giving the keys a commercial flavor. Remarketing is set up for potential customers.

IT company advertising alone is not enough for high sales. An approach must be found to the potential client. Details are important: an offer, welcoming letters, the promptness of technical support. You have to get the person to like you, to create triggers that they will not be able to forget.

How to promote an IT company

Having correctly set goals, a promotion strategy is developed. For IT-direction the key tools of promotion are SEO, PPC, social activity, profile events.

SEO-promotion

The better the company’s website, the higher the credibility of the client. It is difficult to reach perfection, but it is necessary to audit the site, analyze competitors, collect semantics and improve the structure. Due to internal and external optimization increases the ranking.

SEO contributes to an increase in traffic through conversions from the most conversion channel – the search engine. That is why it is so important to be at the top of search results for certain queries. The advantage of the channel is an increase in the number of interested users, brand recognition and a reasonable cost of conversion.

• It is necessary to optimize the site, make it interesting for search robots and attractive to users. To do this, the site’s structure, usability, technical characteristics are improved, the link profile and methods of presenting information are worked through, and high-quality content is produced.
• With a collected semantic core, new service pages are created, ready-made business solutions are shown in the blog, showing the competence of specialists and their expert level.
• Work on expanding the structure of the site improves ranking, increases the flow of interested users, and increases conversion rates. High-frequency and general queries in the IT theme are evil! To attract leads, queries are detailed and different landing pages are created.
• Putting the site in order is impossible without internal optimization. Search engine crawlers evaluate the site on technical parameters, which include the absence of dead links, competent SEO-certification, correct addresses, a mobile version of the site, download speed, ease of navigation, etc.
• Content is the backbone of promotion. Make information comprehensible to help a few rules. The text is written by a specialist IT specialist, and makes it readable copywriter. The best formats designed to increase expertise and loyalty are interviews and videos. Consumers may not be able to absorb the text, but they will remember the facts and figures. The quality of content affects the promotion of IT companies. You should publish content not only on internal platforms (site, blog), but also on external ones (thematic portals, media). The clearer the texts, the better the position of the site in search results.
• External optimization takes into account the number of mentions and links to the content of the site, located on other resources. The authority of a site depends on how often it is talked about and referred to. Crowd-marketing, links from social networks, video content, industry directories, directories and rankings are working tools for obtaining quality links.

PCC advertising

Contextual advertising is needed to attract leads to the site and quickly make a profit. The channel works from the first day of launch. The advertising campaign allows you to adjust the strategy, change the budget inputs, adjust the targeting. In this case, the effectiveness of PCC advertising depends on the financial investments.

The channel demonstrates good results if used:

• segmentation by service type;
• Low-frequency, narrowly targeted queries;
• conversion queries;
• remarketing.

The effectiveness of contextual advertising is evaluated by analyzing queries and conversions. If you do it constantly, optimizing the advertising campaign, the channel pays back the money invested in promotion.

Social activity

Activity in social networks is necessary for the formation of a loyal audience, promotion. In order to gain a foothold in the market, IT companies need the trust of potential clients. The breadth of coverage of social channels determines the stability of user sympathies.

There are many platforms aimed at specialists – developers, programmers, creatives. Presence on them creates an image of an expert, attracts leads and target customers.

• Working on Q&A services requires time, but gives a good result for building one’s reputation as an expert.
• Business portals post company profiles, look for specialists and build up the “weight” of the brand.
• On information sites industry articles are published that work for the company’s recognition.
• The developer-selection platforms allow to advertise themselves, promoting themselves on the international market.

Profile activity

IT-companies use profile communities (seminars, conferences, exhibitions, webinars, courses). Participation in them as an expert, a speaker works for promotion, makes the company noticeable in the market.

Offline and online events are used to find business partners, establish contacts with clients, gain valuable experience, build expertise, keep track of information on the development and promotion of competitors, and strengthen the brand.

Advertising of IT companies should take into account that services and products in this area have a high price. To achieve the goals of promotion, it is necessary to analyze the points of growth, to select the channels that bring the maximum profit.