Facilitating Stages of Customer Awareness in Your IT Marketing Strategy

When it comes to IT marketing, there are four stages a client is going to go through. These stages are:

• Unawareness
• Awareness
• Consideration
• Easing the Pain

Learning how to lead clients through these stages to a pain-easing sale is fundamental to the success of your marketing campaign.

Unawareness

The majority of potential clients will be unaware of your available products or services before they’ve encountered them. You’ve got to reach them. Often, they have aspects of operations that would greatly benefit from your services, but they don’t realize it. Cloud computing is a great example. With the cloud, internal server arrays can be outsourced to a tech agency, which is more cost-effective for many businesses. 

In order to take advantage of these opportunities, identify common areas where your existing clients are missing services that would be amenable to them, and make them aware of this. Also, don’t forget your existing clients. They most likely have areas of operations that you could optimize in order to benefit them in a financial sense. Don’t forget to make them aware of upgrades and breakthroughs as they become available.

Awareness

Once you’ve made existing and potential clients aware of your services that could help them, you’re only a quarter of the way there. Think of it this way: sometimes, you’ll be aware, as an individual, that you’re engaging in unhealthy activities. Before that thought leads to action, though, you have to chew on it for awhile. In fact, it’s likely enough that you’ll put those unhealthy activities in the back of your mind and forget about them until something happens that forces you to reconsider.

Consideration

Identify areas of operation among potential clients with your IT marketing outreach that will likely require your services. This includes upgrades, patches, proactive monitoring and support, security, BDR (Backup and Data Recovery)–the list goes on. There are many areas where you can make a client aware of a problem that they were previously unaware of and which they will likely have to deal with in short order. Statistically, breakdowns in terms of technology aren’t a matter of “if,” they’re a matter of “when.” 

You’ve got a huge advantage with potential clients who have yet to work with you in this regard. You just have to make sure that you check up on them on a regular basis. Existing clients are a harder sell, but there are still areas where you can help them that they were previously unaware of. Take manufacturing, for example. IoT, or Internet of Things, solutions can be used to optimize manufacturing procedures cost-effectively, preserving machines and streamlining production. You might crunch some numbers for your clients, give them a proposal and see if competition prompts them to upgrade existing services.

The point is that you want to get your clients thinking about what they’ve got, where they’re at, where they want to be and how your services can help them get there.

Easing the Pain

Once existing and potential clients have been made aware of your services, be brought to consider them and have reached a point where they’re seriously considering acquiring your new solutions—
it’s time to help them out. Ease the pain of their over-expensive operations. They may not jump on with you immediately, so it may help to encourage further thinking on the subject. Show examples of other clients who were previously in a similar situation, but upgraded and are now experiencing greater profit. There are a lot of different ways to go about this. Find the one that best fits your business and use it.

IT marketing that has a strategic approach that utilizes awareness facilitation, consideration and easing the pain is likely to be more effective over time. There are many different avenues of approach when it comes to marketing for IT. One final thing to remember is that whatever you do, it’s probably going to take time. The client “life cycle” for IT is usually larger because IT’s scope defines operations more intimately. When properly approached, you can maximize conversions.