It never hurts to know more about your target audiences. Learning about their wants, needs, interests, desires, pain points, and overall spending behaviors is the key to connecting with each individual prospect and customer and building lucrative relationships with them. Especially now when brand loyalty is quickly diminishing.
While there are countless customer data points you could collect, there’s recently been a growing focus on technographic data, primarily in B2B circles. This type of data offers valuable insights that can help you improve lead generation and conversion and ultimately increase your bottom line.
Technographic data in a nutshell
First thing’s first – what is technographics? The word comes from “technology” and “demographics”, referring to the process of collecting information on your customers’ technology use patterns.
Your customers’ technographic data provides insights into the number of your customers who use technological solutions, the types of solutions and apps they’re using, what they’re using them for, and how they interact with different types of hardware and software.
Though it can be beneficial to B2C companies, shedding light on how individual consumers interact with apps, for instance, it’s indispensable for B2B companies in fields such as Software as a Service (SaaS).
Pro Tip:
4 Ways you can collect technographic data
Whereas collecting typical customer data such as email addresses or shopping habits is a relatively simple process, collecting technographic data can be slightly more challenging. Some of the ways you can gather relevant information are as follows.
1. Surveys
Seemingly the most straightforward way to get the most relevant data is at the companies themselves, using surveys performed over the phone or via email. That being said, called-calling and spamming surveys are not always well received and yield mixed results.
2. Tracking cookies
The latest regulations on proper cookie etiquette notwithstanding, as long as your website visitors don’t mind you tracking some cookies, you can get a ton of useful data this way. Of course, the more privacy-minded customers will only allow the very basic cookies, making things a bit more complicated.
3. Web scraping
Web scraping is an excellent way to extract a wide range of data from competitors’ and industry leaders’ websites to gain actionable insights. The main issue with this approach is that you need the proper tools and skills to avoid security protocols on websites, and you might not get access to the latest or most accurate data.
4. Third parties
Outsourcing this part of your market research to a third-party company with tried-and-true methods and plenty of experience is probably the safest bet.
Putting technographic data to use
Once you have some high-quality, relevant data, it’s just a matter of making sense of it. With proper analysis, you will be able to tell the best approach, and you will be surprised how much the right data can tell you. Here are a few examples of how you can put the technographic data you’ve collected to good use:
Boost sales – understanding the functionalities of common tools used by companies in a particular niche and their common pain points will allow you to better tailor your own solutions to meet industry demands.
Improve targeting – knowing what type of tool is preferred by certain industries or companies of different sizes allows you to streamline your marketing and focus on fewer potential buyers but ones that will be drawn to your offer from the start.
Outperform competitors – the trailblazers in any niche must undergo extensive trial and error, a complicated product design and development process, and several updates and fixes to get their software ready for the market. You, however, can learn from both their successes and mistakes, just enough to evolve and add your own unique selling point.
Final thoughts
In the B2B sphere, knowing what technological solutions companies prefer, why they gravitate towards certain functionalities, and what their biggest gripes are with current offers on the market is indispensable. With the correct approach, you can amass enough of this technographic data to start making changes in your product development and marketing that will keep you one step ahead of the competition.