How to Get Started With Content Marketing in Your IT Company

Web readers are more impatient than ever, so you have just a few seconds to spark their interest with relevant content about your offering. Yet many IT marketers miss the mark and, as a result, watch their website visitors close the tab saying something like “Get yourself proper service descriptions, will you?” And of course, each leaving visitor means one potential customer lost for the company.

Indeed, a misleading homepage and incomplete information about the company’s services are among the major reasons for high bounce rates. That’s when your potential customers, uninformed and confused, stop being potential and get back to the Google results page to find a more reliable vendor.

So if you still want to launch into the endless journey of converting leads into actual customers, you need to have a well-planned content marketing strategy behind every line of text. And talking clearly about what your business offers is the very first thing to do. But don’t worry, we won’t leave you there. We’ve come up with an easy scale to measure and increase the maturity of your content in relation to the most precious digital asset — your website.

Stages of Content Marketing for IT Companies

Stage 1: Describing Your Company and Services

It seems like every company should have a website. So you put together a few basic pages that slightly cover the scope of your offering. It’s more of a brochure website now: perhaps a pretty interface yet too little engagement. You can’t impress Google and increase lead generation with this site. But what you can is give your visitors what they need to assess your competences:

• Services/products you offer: custom software development, platform-based solutions, consulting, outsourced product development, website design, QA & testing, off-the-shelf software, etc.
• Software you develop: enterprise applications, mobile apps, websites, BI solutions, etc.
• Target customers: start-ups, SMEs, corporations or healthcare organizations, marketing agencies, manufacturers, etc.
• Target markets: Banking & Finance, Education, Media & Entertainment, Retail, etc.
• Experience: years of experience, number of delivered projects and happy customers (name some).
• Promise on delivery: how you manage projects and arrange communication, what software development methodologies you apply, etc.

What’s good: now your visitors know what you offer with no need to guess, and the chances are that they will request a call-back to find out more.

What’s bad:

• Limited opportunities in Google search.
• No visitor engagement, no education — you don’t help your audience, you only hard-sell.
• Low customer conversion.

Tips for writing a company description:

1. Your potential customer doesn’t want you to be the best, they want to make sure you will deliver on budget and on time.
2. Read more do’s and don’ts of describing a company based on the examples of IBM, Microsoft, Google and other giants in my dedicated post.

Stage 2: Going Deeper into Your Offering

You spent some time writing in detail about your company’s services/products and competitive advantage. Good! Now every service, industry and domain has its dedicated page with relevant case studies and a CTA more subtle than just “Get a quote” on it. Related pages and posts are cross-linked to encourage visitors to read more.

Your blog contains problem-oriented content.

If you target the healthcare industry, don’t write about top 10 trends in healthcare IT — write on how to create a mobile solution that helps doctors to take care of chronic patients. Likewise, if you develop mobile apps, don’t write about how to choose a smartphone — tell how sales apps can empower telecoms’ field sales forces. In other words, be helpful to your target customer, not everyone.

What’s good: your audience can get to know you better, plus some of your website content (preferably, with related keywords) starts to pop up in Google search.

What’s bad: there are still hundreds of competitors above you on search pages, putting out tons of content to promote their offerings.

Tips for writing a service description:

1. Make your service descriptions neither too long nor too short. Write only what is necessary to convey what is essential.
2. Understand your customer and speak their language. For example, when targeting start-ups, don’t talk about how good you are in creating corporate websites — it has nothing or little to do with what start-ups might need.
3. Prove every statement with a number or a fact. Don’t have the number? Better not say it. Try to spice up your services with whatever ‘world-class’ adjective you have in your vocabulary — and it simply won’t work.
4. Focus on solving your customers’ problems, not selling your services/products.

Stage 3: Selling Through Targeting and Clever Personalization

Every page on your website is meant to convert readers into customers thanks to relevant and helpful content that proves your expertise and responds to the prospective customers’ challenges. You motivate employees to share valuable insights, published not only in your blog but also on reputable platforms, boosting your base of inbound links and brand visibility. You use multiple types of content that engages visitors and makes them stay on the website: text, original images, videos, webcasts, downloadable e-books, white papers, presentations and so on.

More than that, you actually cater personalized content to every visitor on the go. You track on-site behavior during their first visits and serve relevant articles when they return. Don’t push them to request a quote right away — use adaptive CTAs to educate and help first and then sell when it’s time to sell.

What’s good: your company is not simply present online — it’s selling online, attracting big leads and encouraging existing customers to buy more.

What’s bad: it requires a lot more resources to implement a full-scale content strategy, including more content creators (copywriters, designers and editors) and higher Internet marketing budgets.

Tip for this stage

Specialize.

If you are an ‘all-round’ IT services provider, don’t try to cover all areas of your expertise when marketing content online. You need to narrow the focus down to your strongest competences. Doing so doesn’t mean abandoning other areas of your business.

Consider focus as a shortcut to your target customers.

Think of particular services, technologies, industries or software in which you are more experienced or may have a competitive advantage. If your market research tells you that, for example, providing mobile solutions to US telcos is a good idea, you might consider starting this direction from scratch.

Where Are You on This Scale?

To quickly estimate the maturity of your content marketing, visit your website and look at it as a first-time visitor. Now check if you can find these elements:

If you checked all the boxes, congratulations — you stand firmly at either Stage 2 or 3 depending on the strength of your content, number of external links to your website and organic traffic. If some were left empty, you are likely to be at Stage 1 with limited opportunities for turning your website into a proper lead generation tool. Closing these gaps will be your starting, or turning, point in this content marketing journey to a better reputation on the web and higher sales through the website.

Author: Mikita Cherkasau, CEO at Your Extra Marketer, a small content marketing agency with a single focus on the IT industry.