Choosing Your IT Marketing Team
The first thing that you will have to determine is whether you are going to hire new employees to implement your marketing strategy, or seek out a marketing agency that offers IT marketing solutions.
This means having the right people doing the right things, whether they’re in-house, an agency, or a mixture of both. (It’s important to recognize that this is not a discussion about an organization’s website, or SEO.)
So what’s the right team?
1. Market Analyst that figures out a plan. This person will decide which is the ideal customer that is being targeted. Some additional responsibilities include understanding the gap between existing product and customers, and determining customer preferences.
2. CRM Manager that bridges sales and marketing, and deals with Customer Relations Management (CRM).
3. Graphic Designer that fills the role of a traditional marketing person. (Please remember, this person is not the be all and end all.)
4. Creative Writer is the team member that needs to provide the relevant written copy to be used across all mediums.
5. Marketing Strategist or manager to oversee operations and ensure that the chosen goals or objectives are reached. By understanding the product gap, the strategist thinks of ways to either actually close it, or to make customers perceive that it can be closed.
Scarcity and Abundance
It was just a short time ago that information was a scarce resource in the world. If a buyer wanted to research any kind of complicated purchase, such as a car, software system, or anything in-between, the buyer had to get their facts from a sales representative. It was the marketing department’s job to build a company’s brand through advertising, trade shows, public relations and print. This meant that all leads were eventually passed to sales, regardless of the quality.
In this day and age, there is massive surplus of readily available information on the Internet and social media. This is a recent development for marketing and salespeople, and the phenomenon is only increasing in significance. The amount of information that exists at our fingertips is only growing with the passage of time. Your team of marketing professionals should be up-to-date with the most recent trends in the field in order to cater to the massive information requirements of the modern buyer. This means that they should be providing your leads with useful and creative content that will gradually bring people further along in the sales process.