Tech Marcomms: 8 Ways You’re Doing it Wrong

1. Tech brands don’t talk to their audience. They talk about themselves.

Count the number of times you say ‘we’ and ‘our’ on your home page.

Then, count the amount of time you mention your audience ‘you, your’.

Let’s just let that sink in for a moment.

If the ratio is about 50:50, then well done. You’re not doing too badly.

If it’s tipped in your favour, then you’ve got work to do.

2. They’re too reductive about benefits of their solutions. 

Your audience wants to know about desired outcomes and yet tech brands rarely talk about HOW the solution can actually help people in any meaningful way.

It’s not enough to tout generic benefits like saving money or time or accelerating growth.

It’s easy to see why this occurs so often in the tech sector. The inherent nature of tech products and services is to normalise and standardise input to create repeatable, scalable results. It’s embedded in the DNA of the sector.

But the trouble is, your audience doesn’t see themselves or their unique and complex business challenges as ‘input’ for your new tech product.

3. They’re too reductive about the audience.

It’s a fatal mistake to assume all ‘business’ is the same.

And worse, that all ‘business people’ are the same.

Your audience cares deeply about their business.

By forcing the audience to think and act in categories that are convenient for you, you’re reducing them to a lumpen mass. And they feel it when they visit your website, as they glaze over trying to understand your world view instead of you trying to understand theirs.

Don’t ever forget that even though it’s called B2B, you’re never communicating with a ‘business’. You are always, every – single – time, communicating with a human being. They might acting on behalf of the business, but they still have human interests at heart.

“We bring together the latest workplace technologies to deliver solutions for your business users.” Un-named Tech Brand

4. They overestimate their importance.

Tech is a tool.

It’s the means not the end.

And for the audience, it’s beginning to feel like tech brands have simply become vendors who have technology that’s looking for a problem to solve.

5. They oversimplify the problems.

Business challenges are not a thing you can neatly contain in a bullet point list and manage with a simple, end-to-end solution that costs £XX.99 per month.

We get it, you want as many customers as possible. But when you over-simplify your audiences’ needs and challenges to create a convenient ‘average customer’ you end up appealing to none of them.

“The extreme simplification of communication makes it impossible for users to distinguish which brand category the message belongs to — whether it’s banking, education, investment… The brand identities become blurred, and as a result, brands lose their connection with the audience.” Medium

6. They overstate the ‘solution’

What do you mean when you say ‘solution’?

Because we certainly don’t know

7. Messaging is lazy and confusing

Data. Growth. Scale. Future-proof. Solution. Transformation. End-to-end. Innovative. Accelerate. Technology. Empower. Workplace. Legacy. Digital transformation. Deploy.

These are tech sector buzz words.

And no one likes them.

Try harder.

“Delivering a fully automated, user driven, transformation based on data analytics performed against your legacy environment.” Unnamed IT/Tech brand

8. Stop talking about ‘humans’

This ship has sailed. Let’s talk about something else please.

Tech brands love to talk about ‘being human’ and yet their messaging is anything but. Most of us mere mortals won’t ever be able to live up to the epic promise of their tech solutions.

The skills gap is growing day-by-day as tech gets smarter and smarter. This leaves most of us feeling left behind and inadequate in the face of your insistence that we can accelerate, unleash, unlock, enable, empower, increase, transform, improve, and out-perform.

Let’s turn the volume down a bit.

(ps: we all know ChatGPT loves power verbs)

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