Vanson Bourne examines the changes in UK technology marketing from a recent survey of 59 UK Technology Vendors.

1. Research Insight:
Power, disruption & leads:
tech marketing in the
social economy
SOCIAL
ECONOMY
Intelligent Market Research

2. 2
Cultural shifts
in marketing
Winds of change
As the leaders of technology firms strengthen their grip on
operations, management teams are increasingly bringing marcomms
activities in-house. But marketers are nevertheless being required
to make sense of the burgeoning choice of formal and informal
communications channels. Together with the effect of leaner
campaign budgets, marketing teams must meet at times seemingly
impossible corporate expectations of both optimum audience reach
and lead generation for the organisation.
An unprecedented range of forces is intensifying the pace and
complexity of technology marketing. Organisations have
tightened management control, reduced marketing spend
and are tipping the balance from out-sourced to in-house
marketing services.
A source of leads
A weak economy has made companies concentrate on protecting
market share while winning whatever new business they can,
Although marketers use an array of communications channels to
engage the customer directly, they are now expected to achieve
‘more with less’ – building brands and, crucially, driving sales
demand. The rise of social media has complicated research,
marketing communications and the evaluation of both. Many
marketers recognise that the marketing function’s culture has
changed fundamentally – with important consequences for
them and their colleagues.
driving fundamental change. Most respondents see the role of
marketing now re-defined as a feed source for the sales team and the
biggest shift in their role in cultural terms is the overwhelming use of
social media.
Colliding forces
Tech marketing’s three biggest drivers are budget cuts, social media
and a greater focus on driving sales. In this collision of forces, the data
shows that existing notions of brand strategy and planned campaigns
Survey conducted in May to June 2013 by Vanson Bourne.
Responses of 59 tech marketers in UK-based companies.
are being uprooted.
As a result, marketers are adopting the direct and resourceefficient communication possibilities of digital media for dynamic,
sales-driven campaigns. The next challenge is to work out effective ways
to track and evaluate such campaigns.
Find out more:
Take a look at the headline trends in our 'Brands to Sales Leads' Infographic.
Find out more:
Jason Day and Martyn Turze from Vanson Bourne review the key trends in tech
marketing to come out of the research.

3. 3
Lead generators not brand owners
Most tech marketers say marketing communications is less about
brand development and more about demand generation. With
reduced budgets, rising social media use and demands of voracious
sales machines, where marcomms activity could once be termed a
“cookie cutting” activity, it is now defined in terms of niche segments
or even individual users.
Today’s acid test is sales leads. Nearly all interviewees say sales leads are a key campaign success factor
against the minority that rates brand perception as important.
And when marketers share their research data, it’s far more likely to be with sales colleagues than
strategists or even the R&D/new product development department.
I’m not listening: lack of
social media evaluation
Although social media is now front and centre in
marcomms and customer engagement, measuring its
contribution is currently beyond many marketers’
abilities or resources.
Despite nearly all marketers running and tracking
multi-disciplinary campaigns, only a small minority measures audience reach and still fewer
track “social media chatter”.
With time and budgets squeezed, marketers seem forced to settle for monitoring social
networks themselves: most interviewees track social media using in-house tracking
tools but far more say they don’t track social media usage than ask their retained or
Find out more:
specialist agency to do it.
relevant audience insight" and "content creation" and “ability to
cuts that have brought marketing back in house with
evaluate and prove ROI/value of marcomms” are the skills valued by
the expectation that social media is a low-cost panacea,
most respondents, with "creativity" way down the rankings.
taking the vendor’s message to individual users and
OM
N
than ever before. Its culture is now shaped by budget
IO
researchers, data scientists and ‘curators’ of branded content. “Getting
T
Tech marketing is now expected to support sales more
CUS
Marketers are no longer “creatives”- they’re now expected to be
ER
TOM DEM
US
D
AN
Marketers to curators
Step change in the
marketing suite
C
The rise of social media, the targeting of specific audiences and the need for marcoms to
have a direct impact on the revenue stream; how have these factors contributed to the
changes in tech marketing?
E R S ATISFAC T
creating a conversation channel.
7
And while marketers’ reference point is still ‘traditional’ research – led by
market data, formal customer feedback and market research, these avenues are
But, as marketers manage everything from customer demand to customer satisfaction on
being challenged by ‘social’ insights, such as informal customer feedback, social media/analytics, social
smaller budgets, that panacea might yet prove to be a mirage that is yet to be adequately,
media customer insight tools and in-house surveys. But can they manage them all?
measured, interpreted and understood.
Find out more:
Find out more:
The requirement to prove value and ROI appears to have removed the need for
creativity. So what does this actually mean for marketers?
Find out more:Kevin Withnall, Director at Vanson Bourne explores this topic
in more detail in his latest blog, 'From Brand Owners to Lead Generators'.

4. 4
Trying to make sense of it all
The unrelenting focus on sales leads and budget
constraints is stretching marketing resources. It’s also
challenging the in-house team’s skill-set, particularly in
analysing audiences, segmentation and campaign data.
Marketers said the skills they most lack are; “data
analysis”, “making sense of different data sources” and
“trends analysis”.
Data
Analysis
Making sense
of different
data sources
Trends
Analysis
“Creativity” was ranked much lower.
Interested in using market
research to help your
organisation? To take the first
step, download our latest White
Paper 'Things to take into
consideration when choosing a
Market Research company' for
lots of tips and advice.
white paper
Things to take into consideration when
choosing a Market Research company
Market Research;
What is it?
What’s it for?
What do you do with it and how do you do it?
Which agency should I use?
1-2
3
4-6
7-10
MR: What is it?
It looks as though tech marketers are struggling to juggle the tasks of gathering,
compiling and interpreting data sources, as well as driving research, demand
generation and communications delivery.
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The clue is in the name. This is an
examination or questioning of a defined
market, which is usually carried out by asking
carefully-constructed and replicable
questions of a representative sub-set of that
market (rather than everyone because that
would be a census which would be very
expensive, take too long and is unnecessary)
which gives us a perspective on the current,
past or future behaviour of the whole market.
It tests the whole market by researching the
responses, attitudes, understanding, of this
‘sample’ group. That’s market research.
01 | Vanson Bourne - Things to take into consideration when choosing a Market Research company
Find out more:
We look in more detail at what this means exactly for market research.
Where next for tech marketing?
Talk to Vanson Bourne to get to grips with the key questions of:
• how to help identify and drive customer demand and engagement;
• building continual market and audience insight channels;
• building effective measurement, evaluation and understanding of marcomms within your
existing market insight operation.
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