With an extremely busy target audience, solution providers face hurdles capturing and keeping the attention of CIOs, CTOs, and IT leaders. Growing management burnout levels and overworked IT leadership (prompted by widespread restructuring and today’s tightening budgets) have raised brand awareness and engagement hurdles even higher.
It takes a thoughtful, consistent strategy to foster awareness of your offerings while building a strong foundation of trust as leadership teams explore your offerings and purchase your solutions and services. End users and decision-makers need to know you are a source of support and peace of mind and feel confident you won’t become a source of additional stress or challenges.
Read on to learn 8 effective awareness and trust building strategies that bridge the exploration and buying decision phases and continue after prospects become customers.
Build Awareness and Trust Before the Buying Decision
1. Deliver the right message at the right time with relevant content. IT decision makers want specific information from solution providers as they go through the three stages of the buyers’ journey: 1. Awareness 2. Consideration. 3. Decision.
If you inundate prospects with technology compatibility details when customers just discovered your brand, chances are you’ll lose them. At the beginning, IT leaders and technologists want helpful information that clarifies how your technology solves top business challenges. Effective content offerings for each stage include:
Awareness
Remember, with each channel and content format below, the content should directly address business problems/pain points and how you solve them.
Consideration
Here, prospects are aware of your offerings, but they now seek deeper confirmation that your solutions will solve their challenges effectively and reasons to trust your organization over competitors.
Decision
Now you’re on the shortlist and it’s time to stand apart from the crowd and address remaining doubts/concerns.
2. Differentiate by sharing your unique knowledge and outcomes with confidence. You bring distinct technology expertise, experience, and market knowledge to the table. These are differentiators that you should share with confidence and at a regular cadence, if possible. Case studies are an excellent way to amplify how your company solves client issues without resorting to cookie cutter strategies. You can also encourage executives to share their thoughts and insights on timely issues on social channels and industry-specific networks that reach your audience. Participating in IT leadership networks that involve online workshops, peer support, and always-on networking is another way to spotlight your expertise and helpfulness, and build an authoritative brand presence in the IT space.
3. Sponsor in-person events to get to know IT leaders and share how your solutions solve their challenges. Face-to-face events are invaluable for meeting new prospects, establishing camaraderie and trust, and building business relationships that last. They’re also an effective way to raise brand awareness with IT leaders who are exploring solutions and technology trends — and who have buying power. The best IT industry events offer varied sponsorship levels and opportunities that let you and your team put your best foot forward across a blend of touch points. Look for events with a mix of solution tables or booths, keynote speech sponsorships, small-scale solution presentations or demos, IT trend thought leadership, solution presentations, and low-pressure networking events. A survey following our Midsize Enterprise Summit Fall event highlighted the value of event sponsorship, with 97% of attendees saying they planned to set follow-up meetings with sponsors and 72% of attendees planning to recommend sponsors to their teams.
Attending in-person events are also valuable beyond the decision to buy. These gatherings are great opportunities to deepen relationships with existing customers at the same time you meet new prospects.
4. Make the most of MDF opportunities and uplevel your technology vendor partnerships. Many vendors offer ready-to-use content and marketing development fund (MDF) programs for each stage of the technology buyer’s journey — and too many solution providers leave this marketing support on the table. Take advantage of your technology vendor partner program tools, marketing assets, and training offerings. This expands your chance of reaching your target audience and provides marketing time and cost savings. It also demonstrates your commitment to vendor technologies which will deepen your relationship over time.
5. Measure the results of each strategy and build on what’s working best. Quantifying the results of your awareness building and engagement efforts is essential to improve outcomes. While an omni-channel approach is critical, you want to modulate your efforts based on metrics that spotlight what is — and is not — working. For example, consistently tracking LinkedIn metrics over time can reveal that posts on in-person workshops generate dependable engagement and follower count increases. In response, you may choose to increase posts in advance of these events and even add more in-person events to your calendar to connect with new attendees.
Expand Awareness and Trust After the Decision to Buy
6. Discuss breaking industry news. Stay ready to address industry events and changes that directly impact your clients. Trusted sites like Computing UK can help you stay current with top news and insights, as well as the core issues facing IT end users around the world. These conversations confirm you understand what is happening in the wider marketplace, have proactive strategies in place, and aren’t asleep at the wheel. When generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) interest skyrocketed last year, for example, solution providers deepened trust by demonstrating their knowledge and offering guidance around this rapidly evolving technology.
7. Keep up to date on your customers’ current issues and objectives. Beyond external transformation like GenAI and other emerging technologies, your clients’ internal problems and priorities will evolve over time. One-to-one conversations can help you zero in on their top focus areas and challenges, as can conversations on your social media channels. As an example, consider a client who is expanding into a new, more highly regulated industry or entering the global marketplace. Their cybersecurity needs will no doubt shift. This is a time to share content that clarifies how your solutions meet the complexity of the new industry or region.
8. Stay proactive and consistent. Establish a regular cadence of authoritative communications across digital channels and face-to-face — and ensure the messages you share are authentic to the time and situation. Solution providers that deliver managed security, for instance, will need rapid outreach content plans to address out-of-the-ordinary concerns or activity and provide updates on breach responses. For widespread vulnerabilities with possible implications for all your clients, emails confirming your awareness, sharing your response strategy, and outlining clear internal protective measures your client should take is helpful and reassuring. If a breach impacts a single client, you’ll want to convey similar information as above while also reaching out with a phone call or onsite visit.
Responsive content that addresses specific worries, questions, and expectations — both before and after purchase — helps solution providers attract new customers continuously and sustain IT leader and end user trust long term.
The Channel Company is a leader in IT engagement strategies that build awareness, nurture leads, drive revenue, and boost client retention. Contact us today to build targeted, custom strategies that drive superior engagement outcomes
