One of our latest client's business focuses on innovation in IT services. As you might imagine, innovation in IT happens so fast, that often, the service providers and vendors invent new terms before the market realizes what to search for.
In many technology fields, from software-as-a-service (SaaS) to high-performance computing, terms are being invented all the time, and in order to market and sell, you need your prospects to learn them—and ideally they learn them from you.
Today, I'd like to provide an in-depth look at three companies who've set par for how to do demand generation for new technology services. They're on the frontier of their industries; they've invented new products and services, and now, they're taking them to market in a way that generates search activity and social demand.
It may be no surprise that HubSpot is in this article. HubSpot, actually began its successful rise by generating demand for the term, "inbound marketing." Before Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote their book, it was virtually nothing. Now, if you look at Google Trends, "inbound marketing" has a huge search volume each month.
HubSpot's recently been trying to conquer the same thing with the terms, "sales enablement" and "inbound sales." Since service offerings to the sales team traditionally stop at sales training, HubSpot—in an effort to take their sales products to market—has had to generate demand for a much broader category of sales help, which focuses on marketing and sales alignment, sales content creation, and development of robust sales processes.
How have they generated search volume for these newfangled concepts? An aggressive PR, content marketing, and product marketing strategy. Sales enablement is now a steadily climbing concept in Google Trends, and HubSpot can take most of the credit for this.
An example from the financial world, Devenir has set at task building demand for HSA investments, or the use of a health savings account (HSA) to grow your funds over time through various investments. As Devenir explains, most HSAs today are not invested, earning under 1% interest (which doesn't even beat inflation).
Devenir provides technical solutions to invest HSAs, and to build that market, they've provided consumer solutions that help build demand for the entire emerging market of invested HSAs. Rather than using a content marketing approach like HubSpot, Devenir has gone for uber-helpful marketing assets: 3 different sites that drive consumers to look for investment options when shopping for an HSA.
Similar to HubSpot, Demandbase is a marketing automation platform that's recently been making waves by working to own the niche on "account-based marketing," (ABM). While account-based marketing may not have had that much search traffic all that long ago, Demandbase's advanced email marketing and content promotion tactics has certainly driven search traffic for the term.
Just check out Demandbase's home page messaging:
By committing to a certain key term and not turning their focus away from it, Demandbase has started to move the needle on turning B2B marketers into "account-based marketers," not unlike how HubSpot invented the concept of "inbound marketing" back in 2006.
