Remember the days of cave paintings targeting everyone who walked by? Yeah, traditional marketing feels a bit like that these days. Your audience craves a more sophisticated approach, one that speaks directly to their needs. That’s where technographic data comes in, the missing link to crafting marketing messages that resonate in the digital age.
As a B2B business leader, you’re probably already familiar with demographic and firmographic data. But in today’s landscape, where B2B marketing decisions heavily rely on financial investments, understanding the intricate details of technology adoption and usage is crucial. Technographic data provides that crucial insight, empowering you to drive your sales and marketing strategies forward with confidence.
In this blog, we’ll break down what technographic data is, where you can get it, and how it can ramp up your sales, boost your marketing results, and take your company to the next level. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your sales targeting, improve your marketing efforts, or just understand how to attract more customers, we’ll show you why technographic data is something you shouldn’t overlook.
Table of Contents
What is Technographic data?
Technographic data, in its simplest form, analyzes statistical information based on how a group or population uses and owns technology. It is an efficient way to segment the market, much like demographics (age, gender) or firmographics (company size, industry).
This data helps us understand a company’s tech setup by looking at:
- The hardware and software they use,
- The tools and applications they rely on,
- How they implement and manage these systems and platforms.
Essentially, technographic data covers all the tech-related details companies use to run their operations, from software applications to hardware infrastructure, and even the platforms they use to interact with customers. This detailed view of a company’s tech stack can tell us a lot about their processes, efficiency, scale, and even what they might buy next.
Why Technographics Matter?
Understanding technology means recognizing it as a key part of modern evolution. It’s unavoidable; adapt or get left behind.
This is especially true if your business relies on accurate prospecting data for marketing, aims to identify niche personas, or is a startup trying to make its first sale. To survive, you need every competitive edge possible. Equip your sales and marketing teams with data-driven strategies.
According to a Demand Gen Report study, 66% of B2B marketers use technographics to find competitive opportunities and target accounts not yet using their products or services.
For B2B businesses, technographic data isn’t just another dataset, it’s essential for shaping strategy. Knowing your customers’ demographics or industry is no longer enough. You need to understand how they operate, and technographic data provides this crucial insight.
The Power of Leveraging Technographic Data
Technographic data is important because it helps you gauge a prospect’s readiness for your product or service. For example, if you’re selling a SaaS product, knowing that a prospect already uses advanced analytics tools can signal that they’re more likely to appreciate and adopt your solution. On the flip side, a company still relying on basic spreadsheets might need a different approach, focusing on the benefits of upgrading to more advanced technology.
Technographic data can also reveal market trends, showing where there’s a growing demand for certain technologies. This can help you anticipate needs and tailor your offerings, giving you a competitive edge over others who aren’t leveraging this information.
The amount of data we have access to today is mind-blowing. By understanding a prospective customer’s tech stack, technographics allow for more personalized customer journeys. According to a report by Forrester, 75% of B2B customers expect companies to personalize their messaging and offerings based on their technology use. In a world where many solutions and services are similar, those who provide superior customer experience will always come out on top.
The 4 Hidden Benefits of Technographic Data
The main strategic advantage of using technographic data is that it lets you personalize your sales and marketing messages to match your prospects’ current tech setup. This makes your communication more relevant, leading to higher engagement and better conversion rates.
There are also a few extra benefits:
1. Boosting Sales Productivity
A recent Forbes study found that 63% of a sales rep’s time is spent on non-revenue-generating tasks, with a significant portion spent on contact and account research. Technographics can cut down this wasted time by allowing salespeople to focus on selling instead of searching for potential clients. Using technographic data in account profiling gives you a more accurate picture of your Total Addressable Market (TAM). This helps improve sales efficiency by narrowing down the prospect base and giving sales reps a clearer focus.
2. Uncover New Opportunities
Technographic segmentation can help you find new market opportunities that you might not have discovered otherwise. Once you know what technology a prospect is using, you can better tailor your marketing content for that first contact. Customizing your messaging to meet the customer’s specific needs shows that you’ve taken the time to understand their current challenges, increasing your chances of getting a positive response.
But it’s not just about better messaging. Once your message gets a response, technographic data can guide the conversation your sales agent has with the prospect. This means your sales agents will use their time more effectively and see higher conversion rates from their interactions.
3. Enhance Account-Based Marketing Campaigns
If you’re into Account-Based Marketing (ABM), the benefits of using technographic data are clear. Adding technographic data to your existing firmographic insights can sharpen your messaging and improve teamwork between marketing and sales.
You can target companies based on their tech stack and create ads or emails that really speak to what your prospects want to hear. As you gather more information about your prospects, your lead scoring will get better, letting you spend more time chasing leads that are a perfect fit for your solution.
4. Boost Customer Retention
Turning prospects into customers is great, but keeping them and building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships is the ultimate goal.
Technographic data can improve your market forecasting, allowing you to anticipate and address market-driven issues affecting at-risk accounts. You can also use these insights to drive product development; like when you notice your customers adopting a solution you could potentially offer.
Knowing which competitors’ tools or services your customers are using provides opportunities to increase your market share by targeting your competitors’ customer base.
All these benefits, along with goals around customer success (such as upselling, cross-selling, renewals, and expansion opportunities), can be achieved through effective use of technographic segmentation. This is why many companies already integrate technographic analytics into their marketing activities and customer analysis.
Methods For Collecting Technographic Data
There are three well-known methods for acquiring technographic data:
1. Phone or Email Surveys
While these methods have been useful in the past, they’re becoming less effective in today’s digital age. They can be time-consuming, unreliable, and may not yield the desired results. In the era of big data, there are more efficient ways to gather technographic insights.
2. Data Scraping
This involves extracting information from websites, but it has its drawbacks. Not all software leaves traces on websites, and the data collected may be outdated or irrelevant. Plus, there are ethical concerns surrounding this method.
3. B2B Data Providers
Another option is to acquire technographic data from specialized B2B data providers. These companies focus on collecting and aggregating data on businesses, including their technology usage. While this method may involve a cost, it often provides more accurate and up-to-date information compared to other methods.
Decoding Technographic Data: Insights for B2B Success
Digging into technographic data reveals crucial insights that drive strategic decisions for B2B businesses. For instance, spotting trends in technology adoption can signal which industries are ready for innovation, helping you focus your development efforts where demand is growing.
Moreover, analyzing technographic data uncovers competitive intelligence. Understanding the technology stacks of your competitors’ customers lets you identify gaps in their offerings that your business could fill, giving you a competitive edge.
Furthermore, this analysis shapes your go-to-market strategy. Understanding the technologies gaining traction allows you to prioritize markets and regions for expansion, aligning your efforts with the technological preferences and maturity of those areas.
Conclusion
No marketer or salesperson can know everything about their target accounts, but they can get close with technographic data. Having a full picture of a company’s tech stack helps your team speak directly to prospects’ real issues. With this insight, your sales and marketing teams can figure out where and when your product would fit perfectly into prospects’ workflows, both now and in the future.
But getting clean, reliable technographic data isn’t easy. That’s where we come in. Write to us at [email protected] to make your B2B marketing campaigns more precise. Let us help you accelerate your campaign outcomes with accurate and customized database services.
