Last Thursday, May 7th, we hosted our 35th TechTarget ROI Summit in Austin, TX. Over 80 of the area’s top tech marketers convened for a morning event chock-full of invaluable insights and actionable advice on how to successfully influence *today’s* IT decision-makers. This year’s event featured analysis on current market and industry trends, firsthand recommendations to marketers from IT pros who work for the State of Texas, customer best practices from senior marketers at CommVault, and much more.
So, what were the biggest themes that shaped the discussion at the 2015 Austin ROI Summit? Without further ado, let’s dig in.
#1 – Buyers are in control
Today’s technology buyers are engaged with more forms of media for longer periods of time than ever before, giving marketers the ability to reach them through a variety of different mediums. But these buyers are no dummies – they know their needs and what they want to see. 65% of buyers leave our sites immediately if they can’t find what they want instantly. So it’s critical for you, as a marketer, to take an intelligent strategy to reach your targets; one that uses smarter, more targeted and more immediate calls to action on messages that resonate with the challenges, goals and pain points of each buyer.
#2 – Not all content is created equal
IT buyers prefer to consume different types of content throughout different stages of the buying cycle, and thus, marketers need to take a more strategic approach when it comes to pushing out their content. Sure, infographics can be fun and easy-to-digest, but when users are building their shortlist and making a final decision on a vendor, that’s not the type of information they’re always going to find useful unless it has specific insight or data that will help their decision.
#3 – Think like a publisher
Building content that won’t get ignored requires thinking like a publisher. When determining the right approach to implement data into your nurture streams, ensure your content is aligned accurately to your buyer’s journey and it must be buyer-centric. People buy based not on who you are but rather what you do. When a buyer references your content he/she needs to immediately be able to associate how your solution(s) maps to their pain point, challenge or need. From there, they need the ability to stay on that journey based on their personalized situation and unique needs.
#4 – Data is the key
As you’re well-aware, marketing often operates off very little or limited amounts of information. But imagine having the data that fills in the gap when prospects are not looking at your content, white paper or trial download and the visibility into what activities they are taking. It’s likely that type of data doesn’t exist in within your own ecosystem. Yet knowing this could help your nurture streams get better or find more MQLs faster across accounts you could be going after. The ability to access this data across time and accounts and know what marketing actions you could be employing every day could make your marketing more simple, easier and effective.
# 5 – Intelligence brings it all together
Just because you know who to target doesn’t mean you know when they want to hear from you or when they have projects going on in their organization. All the online research that buyers do before engaging vendors has put organizations in a weakened position when it comes to the buy cycle. The traditional offer-response-react model does not work anymore. You need to understand and identify where buyers’ interests lie and where their attention is focused and ride that attention wave. By seeing where they are spending their time, you don’t need to wait for them to reach out – you can intersect them where they are doing research and making decisions. And as we already learned, it is probably not in your own ecosystem. To this extent, our own Justin Hoskins shared a suite of new intelligence-driven marketing and sales tools that can monitor buyer behavior and help teams understand the buying signals and purchase intent of key accounts in their segments.
What Did You Takeaway?
Hopefully the 5 items listed above are helpful, but don’t just take my word for it – through the power of Twitter, here’s what a few of the customers and attendees (all feedback and conversations can be found here) had to say about the event.
Diving into intelligence-driven marketing and sales strategy at the #ROISummit
— Trista Perot (@tperot) May 7, 2015
Ready to learn valuable insights on the IT market at the @techtarget #roisummit
— Cristina BlancoAdams (@cbad33) May 7, 2015
If you attended the TechTarget Austin ROI Summit and we haven’t yet heard from you, feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.
We look forward to seeing more marketers throughout the year, so if you have any marketing and sales colleagues in Europe, please be sure to share this link on our upcoming TechTarget ROI Summit events coming in early June to London. We hope to see you at our next ROI Summit.
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