Tech Marketing & PR Objectives: Rethink Your Strategic Plan

By Janice Hughes, B2B Tech Marketing and Technology PR Leader

Marketing budgets are down by a third from pre-pandemic levels, and 124,000 tech employees were laid off in the first eight months of 2024. You face a new business environment. If you want to achieve the necessary results from your budget, it’s time to rethink your B2B tech marketing and technology PR objectives. Let us walk you through the process we use with our clients:

1) Accept complexity

Getting meaningful marketing results isn’t easy. And, much of the complexity requires helping all your stakeholders to gain an understanding of the overall process with all the departmental interdependencies. Bring all the people to the table.

2) Look for opportunities

Next you need to focus—not so much that all you can see are myriad details, because that’s overwhelming, but enough that you can see the patterns. And that’s hard to do. You’ve worked with your company for a number of years. You’re enmeshed in the company’s headspace and assumptions. It’s difficult to not be overcome with all the bits. Sometimes, that’s just the right time to call in outside resources. A third party, like HCI, can help you sort it out.

To help you choose marketing and PR objectives, we look at where your team can make the biggest difference. The opportunity for you may be to boost an established, successful product or it may be to establish a presence in a new market. Which one you choose depends on the state of the competition, product differentiation, how well your solution fixes pain points customers are willing to pay to solve, and the ability of your company to articulate the value of the solution.

3) Determine what results you want

You know your direction. Now identify what stages of the sales and marketing funnel need the most help. Awareness, interest, consideration, intent are the stages driven by B2B tech marketing and technology PR. Awareness, interest, and lead generation go hand-in-hand but are not the same. The tougher the economy, the more pressure is on to deliver leads to the sales team.

At the same time, you always need to consider the tradeoff between quantity and quality. Do you want 499 low-quality leads or 30 good ones? What is best for your sales team? Almost always in B2B technology, the real need is a high-quality lead.

4) Decide how to measure success

Identify what you can measure and bind it with a timeframe. An objective is a specific, quantifiable step to achieve a larger goal. How will you know the objective is achieved?

Realistic objectives depend on the business environment—you may aim to staunch a drop, maintain current momentum, or gain ground. Beware of both aspirational objectives—and very low-hanging fruit: aim for something in between to create reasonable and meaningful objectives. For instance, dramatically expanding your social media presence or creating a lead generation engine from scratch takes time and money—what’s doable this year?

Access to tools and baseline data influences measurability. Again, this is where a third-party agency can help. We can guide you on best practices.

5) Pinpoint resources

You have the problem sorted, you know your goal, you’ve chosen your channels, you know what dictates success…. Do you have the resources? What do you need to get there? Can you afford it? Consider return versus level of effort.

Also, who will champion this objective? Seriously, that’s a big thing: someone has to have ownership. In football terms, you need a quarterback or center midfielder. And they need the authority to marshal the resources to get it done—people, budget, time—otherwise other priorities will push it aside and waste all your strategic planning. Is your champion your VP of marketing or biz dev?

You are on your way!

The path forward clears in the presence of meaningful, reasonable, measurable objectives. Your ability to pick strategies, such as which B2B tech marketing and technology PR channels to use, becomes easier. And, you are poised to develop a process of experimentation more easily.

Still feel stuck? Reach out to HCI. As a market savvy, technically fluent, and globally influential team of professionals, we come alongside, provide steady guidance, thoughtful expertise, and hands-on assistance. We are equally determined to help you achieve your B2B tech marketing and technology PR goals.