If you’re a geospatial technology company, odds are good that you’ve thought more than once about how to market simply and effectively. After all, location-based tools and services can be complicated, and explaining them in ways that resonate with potential customers is an art unto itself. Here’s the thing, though – it’s not hard to engage in geospatial technology marketing when you know what you’re doing.
With the right approach, you can take the intricacies of your service or technology and turn them into compelling stories that will bring customers to your door. In this article, we’ll detail how to craft a strategy for telling your story in a way that wins new business (or at least makes people want to find out more).
1. Define your target market
The first step in developing a better geospatial technology marketing strategy is to define your target market. Defining your target market depends on the size and scope of your business. This can be done by geography, industry, technology, or any combination thereof. In some cases, it may even be beneficial to define the number of employees or projects in order to narrow down the scope.
For example: If you are looking for new customers in San Francisco who work for an architect firm and use Esri products for their mapping needs, it would make sense to focus on firms that have between 50-100 employees (with an average annual revenue over $50 million).
2. Do your research
Before you do anything, it’s important to understand who you’re marketing to or what kind of clientele you’re looking for. What are the demographics of your market? What are their pain points? How much are they likely to spend on geospatial technology products and services in the coming years?
It may seem obvious, but defining your target market is critical for marketing strategy development—and it can be hard! To help narrow down this process, we recommend using social media as a way to gather information about your audience – what kind of content do they share with each other online, what websites do they visit most often, and which blogs do they subscribe to, etc.
This kind of data can help inform how best to reach them through different channels like email newsletters and blog posts. Once this research has been done, share it with others so that everyone working together has the same understanding of who our audience is (and isn’t).
3. Define your messaging strategy
Before you can develop a good marketing strategy, you need to define your business’s unique selling proposition (USP). What is the problem you solve for your clients? What value do you provide them? What is the target market for your geospatial technologies and services? How are you different from other companies in the industry? You can use these answers to determine how best to communicate with potential customers.
Your messaging strategy should be based on four things:
- Understanding who your customers are and what they want from their relationship with the company.
- An understanding of what competitors offer in terms of services, technology, or pricing.
- A description of why customers should choose this service over other options available today.
- A description of how this product or service delivers an improvement over existing offerings on the market today (if applicable).
4. Build a highly visual and modern website
Your website is your primary sales tool, so it should be visually appealing and easy to navigate. You’re probably thinking, “Of course, I want a visually appealing website!”
But how do you make sure that your site looks modern? How can you keep it easy to navigate and easy to update? How will your potential customers find you if they don’t know where to look? And how can they read your content if it’s not well-written or formatted properly?
These are all important questions, but the answers are simple – just ask an expert in web design! A good designer will help create a beautiful online space where customers can learn about your company and products in a smooth way.
You could also hire someone to write content for the site or even build up a blog on the site so that people have somewhere else besides social media where they can go for information about what’s happening within your industry.
5. Create and distribute valuable content
Content is king. It’s the foundation of your SEO strategy, and it’s what you create, publish, and share online. Content is what your audience consumes in order to learn more about your company and its offerings. And the content will drive traffic to your website which ultimately grows brand awareness—all things that are necessary for developing a successful geospatial technology business!
Geospatial content can come in many forms – blog posts, white papers, webinars, case studies, infographics, podcasts, videos, etc. The important part is knowing exactly what type(s) of content will help you achieve your goals most efficiently.
6. Get a big boost from client referrals
One of the most important ways to get more clients is through referrals. This is a simple concept and one that you may already be doing, but it’s worth repeating: if you want more business, ask for it!
You can get referrals in several different ways:
- Ask your existing customers how they heard about you and if they’d recommend you to others. You might even offer incentives like discounts or free services as an incentive to refer other people.
- Create a referral program so that anyone who refers to someone else gets some kind of benefit (i.e., cash or gift card).
7. Build a meaningful social media presence
One of the best ways to drive traffic to a website is by sharing relevant, interesting content on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The most important thing that you can do when promoting yourself online is to engage with others in your industry — especially those who are already following you on social channels like LinkedIn or Twitter!
Conclusion
While the above lessons are specific to geospatial technology marketing, there is a broader lesson here – a more effective inbound marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily mean creating new content from scratch. In fact, improving your existing content can have just as much impact as building something entirely new.
This is particularly true if you start by understanding your audience and how they consume your message. Based on this data, you can create content that is more likely to resonate—whether by changing its format or making it more engaging.
