How to inexpensively promote IT products in Russia? Personal experience
Let's say you need to sell IT products to medium-sized businesses and large customers. Personal connections are already working, but more requests are needed. How to ensure a good flow of incoming requests?
About me
I am the Marketing Director of an IT company, we have 100+ employees and mostly large clients. We are developing several products in the field of construction digitalization. Our contracts are usually for several million rubles or tens of millions. We attract about 200 target leads per month with an average cost of up to 1,500 rubles. What tools we use – this is in the article.
1. What does NOT work for us
Context and YAN
More precisely, they work poorly: context search and YAN. They provide no more than 20% of the total number of leads, and far from the most converting ones.
There are many reasons and they are all understandable:
Too much competition in advertising = high cost per lead.
The products on the market are the same, plus or minus, especially after a quick glance. Therefore, it is very difficult to somehow stand out due to advantages and reduce the cost of a lead.
In B2B there is practically no opportunity to make strong offers: discounts, gifts, and so on.
Standard offers like free consultations, audits, checklists have stopped working as a class.
The problem is further aggravated by the fact that the product does not have a demo room. Demonstrations are conducted by managers during a meeting-call.
Telegram
From a lead generation point of view, Telegram is dead for us. With its help, we remind the audience about ourselves, educate, and entertain. But there are practically no live leads from it. Therefore, we consider it inappropriate to spend a lot of money on crops.
We don't use media. It might be suitable if you are a very large vendor or integrator. For small and even medium-sized businesses, media is useless (IMHO)
Events
No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to catch leads that came from events and reached some significant stage in the funnel. Of course, such leads exist – not all of them can be tracked through analytics and manager surveys. However, I would not consider events as a systematic channel for attracting leads. Yes, you can get leads from events. But given the cost of participation, they will be several times or even tens of times more expensive than from leadgen.
By the way, there is a persistent myth that you cannot attract large clients from a lidgen. Our experience shows that this is a huge misconception. Entire regional Ministries of Construction, Gazprom subsidiaries, TOP-10 banks, regional and regional administrations, and so on, “flew” to us.
Many copies have been broken on the topic of PR effectiveness. I'll just give an example. We have a competitor who is promoting himself through a very strong administrative resource. It is promoted by all major media outlets, often at the instigation of officials. They have 10 times more branded requests than we do, but we have more leads.
2. What works for us
1. SEO
For the life of me, the good old search works. According to analytics, 40% of targeted leads come from organic traffic. But, of course, this is a different quality of SEO than it was before. Each material is a well-made longread with a deep discussion of the topic, expert opinions, and unobtrusive integration of the product into the text of the article. The material must be original, with a simple and visual presentation – then it works.
2. Content Lead Magnets
In second place are content lead magnets. They generate leads partially on organic website traffic, but we also separately set up advertising campaigns specifically for lead magnet landing pages. A subscription costs approximately 200 rubles. And subsequently, the lead magnet generates an application for a demo costing an average of up to 1,200 rubles.
Newsletters are the third most important source of leads. But forget about news and press releases. Again, coolly written and laid out case studies from practice work. We create automatic chains for 5-10 cases. As the number of cases increases, we begin to segment them.
And the most important thing is positioning or meaningful packaging. Depending on what and how you write on landing pages and on the website, in articles and lead magnets, it will be reflected in sales analytics at a high level. The same product can be packaged in dozens of different ways for different audiences and decision makers. Therefore, it is important to start with this. Meaningful packaging answers the following questions:
What is a “product” for each audience, what value and benefits does it bring?
In what situations will this product be most useful to the client? It is necessary to know the most specific situations and examples
What evidence is there for each audience that the product actually works?
How we write about the product, in what words, in what presentation
What works in your IT product marketing?
