B2B Tech Marketing Agency: In-Depth Guide

The B2B tech marketing agency market is fragmented. Unlike service industries such as telecom and airlines, which are dominated by a few companies with billions of dollars of annual revenue, it’s a cottage industry with hundreds of agencies, each with dozens of employees.

Take, for example, the two top-ranking articles on Google’s search results page for the keyword “B2B tech marketing agency”: Top 8 B2B Technology Marketing Agencies and Top 11 B2B Tech Marketing Agencies. Combined, they present nineteen agencies, yet there isn’t a single agency in common between the two lists! This is why a nuanced approach is needed when choosing tech marketing agencies. Each small agency typically specializes in one or two areas, depending on the background of the agency’s founders.

This article explains the services of B2B tech marketing agencies. It shows you the range of agency offerings to help you implement a successful strategy for collaborating with marketing agencies.

To set the stage for the discussion that follows, let’s start with a high-level view of all the services that agencies offer. We have organized them by their focus areas in each column and highlighted the typical specializations in different colors.

We refer back to this article in different ways in the sections below.

The top questions when selecting a B2B tech marketing agency

This table offers a summary of the questions and answers covered in this article:

Should you outsource to an agency?

We think the answer is yes, but only for specific tasks. Let’s look at the table presented earlier, highlighted with colors to show the areas typically suited for keeping in-house and the tasks ideal for outsourcing to one or more specialized agencies.

Defining the initial product messaging strategy is a prime example of a task suited for full-time employees, perhaps with help from the founders or executive advisors. Even though agencies specialize in helping companies refine their messaging, no one knows the nuance of competitive differentiation better than the company’s leaders. This doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t consult experts or get help with creating graphics or web pages. However, management should be best positioned to decide which message will resonate best with the target market and how to iterate it over time as competition introduces new product features or major companies acquire the company’s competitors.

Another example is the production of case studies. You could hire an agency to interview a customer for an hour and write a case study, but having the company’s full-time employees manage the initiative would have more benefits. Having your product management team debrief with your sales and support teams, spend time with your customers, and internalize the use cases and enhancement requests is an opportunity to hone the product roadmap and improve your customer support processes. It should be viewed as a strategic opportunity instead of a generic task to outsource.

Why must B2B tech agencies be specialized?

Consumer marketing is a specialty. For example, a restaurant chain needs help from an agency specializing in local search optimization so those searching on their mobile devices can find the closest restaurant on Google Maps. In contrast, a jeweler would have rather different needs, such as getting help from social media influencers and access to celebrities to launch in the market.

Technical companies need a deep understanding of their markets from their agencies. For example, consider the author of an educational SEO article about cloud cost optimization who is looking to design the appropriate narrative that would make the case for the client’s product and find the right keywords to guide the content roadmap. This individual must know cloud-native tools like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Trusted Advisor, and AWS Budgets, open-source tools like OpenCost, and legacy and modern commercial tools. Otherwise, the articles won’t help readers and may have a low time-on-page (resulting in low search engine rankings) and thus might not help the company’s cause.

The table below shows samples of the strengths of each type of agency:

What services do B2B tech agencies offer?

Each agency has strengths based on the experiences and specialties of its founders. Some have JavaScript development skills that can be used to help speed up a website’s mobile user experience. Some agencies were founded by public relations (PR) professionals who have developed relationships with technology journalists to place stories in their publications. Some can coordinate the logistics of an industry event better than others because they have done it hundreds of times.

The subsections below follow the tabular diagram presented at the beginning of this article, explaining each column in more detail.

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Planning and messaging

Strategy and messaging

Overall digital marketing strategy ultimately depends on the go-to-market strategy. For example, a company focused on selling to the Global 1000 should integrate account-based marketing (ABM) techniques when planning LinkedIn ads, displaying ads only for prospects who belong to a curated list of named accounts. On the other hand, a company selling Kubernetes tools would want to attract Kubernetes administrators to its website by ranking on the first page of Google search results for any questions they might ask.

When allocating budget among content marketing, advertising, industry events, and website improvements, it’s best to consult an experienced senior management team advisor rather than a marketing agency because agencies will likely steer you toward their firm’s strengths (intentionally or subconsciously).

When it comes to messaging, a company’s leadership should know better than anyone how to articulate its value proposition to resonate with its target audience and differentiate it from its competitors. After all, that’s the most important ingredient for the company’s success.

However, some companies hire an agency to help them define a messaging pyramid, develop a brand storyline, or name a product. This has resulted in consultants specializing only in messaging as their core competency.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a specialty and can benefit from the services of the right agency. However, tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can crawl a website to audit it and automatically produce a report that lists all the site’s technical SEO problems and calculates a health score (between 0 and 100%) for the website; this article explains what such a report entails. Agencies use the same reports to diagnose a website. Companies can hire an Upwork freelancer or get help from a specialized agency to address the listed problems and see their website’s health score gradually increase to 100%.

Keyword research

The vendors mentioned earlier (Ahrefs and Semrush) offer keyword research tools that provide the search volume and ranking difficulty scores for keywords. A keyword is one or more words searched on search engines like Google or Bing.

In the table below, the “US Search Volume” and “Global Volumes” represent how many times the particular keyword was searched in Google (and other search engine platforms) per month based on an average of the last twelve months. The “Ranking Difficulty” column represents a measure of difficulty in ranking on the first page of the Google search results. The higher the score, the more difficult it would be to rank on the first Google results page.

You can use these tools directly—which is less complicated than you might think—or get help from agencies to research how your target persona would search for information related to your product and propose a content roadmap for producing blogs and articles. This exercise is less about the numbers and more about interpreting the nuances of the search intent by someone who understands your product.

Traffic generation

Companies can get leads by buying lists from companies like ZoomInfo and emailing or calling the names on the list. However, cold calls and email marketing are increasingly considered aggressive and are being avoided by annoyed recipients, damaging the company’s brand. The alternatives are getting your prospects’ attention on social media, bringing them to your website when searching for a relevant keyword, or running ads on multiple platforms to get noticed.

Social media

Company founders and executives who are willing to be active on social media like X and LinkedIn display their commitment to their usually large networks and help market visibility. It’s common to publish content on the company’s social media corporate page (such as this page https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/) or the profile pages of its founders or management team.

Posting content doesn’t have to be time-consuming if the marketing team plans for enough assets in advance for each week or month’s posts. For example, a long-form article or a recent webinar recording can be marketing assets promoted on social media with a single sentence as a caption with a curated list of hashtags to help reach a wide audience.

Social media platforms like LinkedIn provide more accessible statistics than before. For example, the screenshot below shows the statistics for a published article on LinkedIn tracking the number of readers who clicked on the link or reacted and commented on it. The statistics include the click-through rate (CTR) that determines the percentage of LinkedIn users who saw the post in their feed and clicked on the link to see the article..

Companies often hire interns or relegate social media to an agency to do for them. Social media works best when built around the founders’ profiles, even if the postings are done by someone (like an intern or an agency) with access to their accounts. Tools like Hootsuite can also automate parts of the collaborative process. For example, the marketing team can schedule posts from the founder’s profile for the next few weeks to be published at particular dates or times.

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SEO content

Short-form content doesn’t rank on Google unless the competition is very low. As soon as the search volume is high enough to matter, companies compete by offering content depth, so they publish long-form articles of 1,500-2,000 words hoping to rank on the first results page and capture the traffic. The most comprehensive, unbiased, and educational content has the highest chance of answering the search intent and ranking high on Google’s search results page.

Here is an example of a multi-chapter guide designed to rank high for specific keywords related to AI technology. Note that it’s a multi-chapter guide made up of twelve long-form articles. A cluster of twelve articles related to a theme or topic provides a level of depth that can’t be matched by a single article as a source of information in the eyes of the search engine.

Website traffic growth depends on the number of new articles published monthly. An article reaches its maximum potential after three or four months, usually stays there for around a year or two, and then slowly loses its position to new content.

Marketing teams often start by enlisting their developers to write technical articles. The downside of this approach is that some of the most expensive employees are people who should use every working moment to help the company build superior features to get ahead of the competition. Instead, they spend time writing content that may never be found by those searching, especially if the initiative is not directed by keyword research and SEO best practices.

The poor use of company resources described above makes long-form SEO content one of the most natural areas to outsource. One challenge lies in finding an agency that has specialized engineers who can write the content with a level of sophistication that represents the company at a level considered acceptable to the company’s technical management. Another common challenge is getting someone from the technical team to find enough time to read the content before publication. This lack of availability underscores how difficult it is for these valuable people to find time to even read such content, let alone write it.

Paid ads

Many platforms accept advertising, including Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook. LinkedIn, for example, offers many types of ads, including impression ads that show on viewers’ feeds and sponsored messaging ads that go into LinkedIn users’ inboxes.

However, a successful ad campaign requires “care and feeding.” For example, a Google Ads campaign that delivers results requires upfront keyword research, persuasive ad copy, optimized landing pages, weekly performance monitoring, and regular adjustments of the ad bidding strategy. Complicating matters is the fact that over the last few years, click-bots have made running a successful Google ad campaign difficult by causing significant financial waste.

The key takeaway is that managing ads has become a profession that takes years to master. This makes it a prime candidate for outsourcing to an agency specializing in ads and the market where your company operates, so the agency can determine the significance of the keywords and not rely on the company for defining the keyword strategy. For example, if a company’s product automates the autoscaling of Kubernetes clusters, only a subject matter expert can tell if the keyword “AWS EKS Karpenter best practices” is related enough to the product’s value proposition to warrant a Google Ad display.

Product promotion

The company's product marketing team is responsible for tasks such as describing each product’s functionality, creating a datasheet, or delivering a product demo. However, there are certain areas that can be outsourced in this general category.

Product content and case studies

The company should create the content of sales presentations and website solution pages. Heads of product management, sales, and marketing should be able to articulate each product’s value proposition and to select the right terminology to describe it.

Ultimately, search engine optimization should come from the blogs and articles published for this purpose and should not rely on a website’s product and solution pages to produce inbound organic traffic. A website’s product and solution pages are designed to articulate the product’s value proposition once visitors land on the website via the hundreds of educational articles designed to rank on Google’s first results page by providing educational content.

This doesn’t mean an agency can’t provide feedback or ensure that the pages conform to technical SEO standards, but writing the copy (text) for the company website’s product and solution pages should be the responsibility of the company’s management and be updated once or twice a year to stay current with the company’s evolving strategy.

Case studies present an opportunity for the company’s product management team to collaborate with its customer success and support teams, spend time with its end-users, and apply their feedback to the product roadmap. This feedback loop is one of the most important contributors to the success of software and service companies and should not be wasted by being outsourced to an agency.

Industry events and webinars

Industry events take weeks or months to plan and a full week to attend. They are most valuable for providing off-site face-to-face time with prospects to help the company’s management internalize market requirements. It’s true that online information sharing isn’t a substitute for the value of human interaction. However, compared to a successful content marketing program that brings thousands of prospects to a website monthly, the yield in terms of the number of leads (in dozens or hundreds at most) divided by the number of hours invested (weeks) is not attractive.

Webinars (designed based on the content of recently published long-form articles) can be planned within days using the time of only one or two employees for a couple of hours. This gives them a more appealing ROI profile, especially if the webinar is promoted sufficiently online and via social media.

PR and backlinks

The role of public relations (PR) has diminished over the last two decades in technical circles. In the old days, journalists provided printed news and stories, but these have been gradually replaced by social media and user-generated content. This doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t do press releases to spread news and gain backlinks from publications, because they are effective, but PR is no longer a core component of a marketing strategy when compared to a decade or two ago.

Press releases help the company gain backlinks, which increase its domain authority. The domain authority score, calculated by tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, is based on the number of places where reputable websites link to your web pages. These backlinks indicate that the third-party websites view your website as a source of relevant information, which makes your company an upstanding member of that community.

However, Google’s rules frown upon the idea of paying websites to link to yours, which means that increasing domain authority will only happen naturally over time, typically resulting in hundreds of backlinks within a few years. You can accelerate this process by asking for help from partners (e.g., websites that include a partner directory), investors (e.g., a portfolio directory), and clients (e.g., a joint press release). You can also post on third-party websites that accept contributed articles. However, the value of posting long-form content on your website is far higher than gifting them to a blog site like Medium, which is why it’s better to contribute articles with a low production cost and keep the long-form articles for your website.

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Tools and KPIs

CRM

Every company needs a centralized repository to store its sales leads and opportunities, known as a customer relationship management (CRM) system. This repository must also allow the company to track its interactions with the sales leads and report each opportunity's stage based on its maturity.

There are many client relationship management (CRM) tools on the market, but Salesforce and Hubspot have the highest market share. Of the two, Salesforce is more complex to administer, and as the database grows to thousands of records, a specialist is eventually required to help deduplicate records, archive data, integrate with external tools, implement automation rules, and optimize performance.  

Hubspot offers a free forever version, which is easy to get started with. After watching a couple of training videos, the company’s sales leader should be able to set up and configure it in hours. It can also scale to support full enterprise requirements.

Attribution and reporting

Attribution can be complicated because a prospect might interact with a company through multiple channels. The diagram below shows the possible touchpoints between a company and its prospects before and after purchasing.

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Associating an anonymous browser cookie with an individual’s name is impossible until the user has registered in your CRM system, for example, by completing a form on your website.

Further complications include GDPR and the increasing sophistication of users who go undetected on a website by using browser plugins or incognito browsing modes. These trends make it increasingly difficult to determine where the sales lead originated (paid ads, organic search, industry event, word of mouth, email campaign, social media, etc.). The multi-touch attribution challenge makes it hard to allocate investments to the campaigns with the highest return on investment.

The phenomena described above collectively make attribution and accurate reporting more complicated than they appear to less experienced marketing professionals, often requiring an outside expert's help during advanced digital marketing strategy development.

Tools and automation

Running digital marketing campaigns smoothly requires integration between systems with as much automation as possible. Here are a few examples of campaigns that automated integrated systems can enable:

• Lead nurture campaigns are email campaigns sent to subscribers based on a list stored in the CRM system.
• Social media ads include LinkedIn InMail ads sent to employees of target companies stored in a company’s leads database.
• Lead scoring based on user behavior on the website. For example, the score increases if a visitor downloads a white paper or visits the pricing page, with the score calculated and maintained in CRM.
• An upsell campaign involves monitoring online user accounts to determine whether they log in frequently and make good targets for receiving an upgrade offer via email.

Many of these integrations can be implemented using the automation capabilities provided by features such as Hubspot sequences and workflows or by using Hubspot’s integration with Zapier. However, companies often require help from consultants and specialized agencies to integrate their systems and automate processes. Agencies specialize in specific platforms, so searching the partner directories for certified system integrators is the best place to start.

Website management

Core website content

We distinguish content between content meant mostly (~80%) to attract organic visitors and content intended mostly (~80%) to promote the company’s value proposition once visitors have reached the website. This distinction is relevant because vendor-agnostic educational content ranks best for keywords with a high search volume by answering the search intent.

The content that describes the company’s value proposition and product functionality is best written by its founders and leaders in content marketing and product management. Coordinating with a marketing agency to select product names based on keyword research can be helpful—it increases the likelihood of the products being found via search—but it wouldn’t be a good idea to task the agency with writing the copy for the core website.

Website development and operations

Surprisingly, content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and Webflow, despite being dated, still have the highest market share among startups and larger companies. Platforms like Squarespace and Wix are helpful for small projects but are difficult to customize. Vercel and Netlify are highly customizable but aren’t best suited for being managed by non-technical marketing teams.

The most common instinct for marketing teams is to ask for help from the company’s software developers. However, they usually take a customized approach to designing the website, which becomes a burden for marketing teams in the long run.

This is one of the areas where marketing agencies specializing in building and maintaining websites can help most. Remember that they typically have their preferred CMS platforms, so the engagement often starts with migrating from your initial platform to what they are most comfortable with.

Here are the biggest cautions in this area:

• Make website updates gradually and page by page instead of unveiling a brand new site, which is fraught with risk.
• Find the top site pages producing organic traffic and set up page-by-page redirects if you end up changing the URLs during site updates.
• Don’t casually replace your domain name because this can have major repercussions on search engine optimization.

Design and graphics

Designing websites and graphics is another area where marketing agencies or part-time freelancers can help significantly because it’s difficult to justify employing a full-time graphic and web designer in a small or medium-sized company. Note, however, that web designers must be experienced with JavaScript and HTML, not only the graphical design aspects of the website.

The most popular tool for designing websites is Figma, which has gained market share because it introduced the idea of using CSS and HTML during the initial design phase, making it much easier to exactly implement the original design.

A natural place to start with this process is by creating a branding guideline to help marketing assets stay consistent over time with the logo and website’s style and color scheme. This will also help new designers take over from earlier ones during inevitable turnovers.

What is the optimal outsourcing strategy?

Can you find an agency that can do it all? The answer is no. In fact, you shouldn’t use just one agency for everything even if one tries to convince you that it can. The reason is that agency founders have roots in very different skills.

Here is the same graphic from the start of the article, showing areas of specialization.

Technical SEO

Agencies specializing in technical SEO are most helpful for larger websites with hundreds of pages because maintaining a website of such scale requires special skills. For a smaller website, the engagement can be short and intended to ensure that the website doesn’t have any major issues preventing it from hosting high-ranking articles. Those specializing in this area should know about concepts like Core Web Vitals, sitemaps, robots.txt, and JavaScript.

Long-form SEO content

Content that ranks high on Google provides the most comprehensive answers to the questions asked by your audience. This is typically content authored by senior subject matter experts (instead of professional writers who conduct research with AI or copy concepts from other articles). Readers and search engines are sophisticated enough to tell the difference quickly, requiring the authors to be experts in your product’s exact area of functionality. The best agencies recruit active engineers who moonlight as freelance authors to make extra money.

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Public relations

As mentioned earlier, PR has lost its cachet over the last few years because journalists have less influence over the dissemination of information in industries. That said, it’s still helpful to have a PR agency that specializes in your industry leverage its relationships with journalists who write for major publications to include your company in their stories at around the time of a new product feature or press release. An obvious example would be making the cover of BusinessWeek, but there are a half dozen publications with reasonable followings in every industry, which specialized PR agencies would know. The second benefit of being included in those stories is getting backlinks that increase your website’s domain authority score.

Marketing operations

This area involves establishing and maintaining integrations and automation between your product (user list) and website (form fills) with marketing tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Webflow, WordPress, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, or Slack. Integrations and automation are often done via tools like Zapier because they require less coding, but they sometimes require custom code.

The goal is to automate as many of the steps as possible in a sales lead’s journey from the initial interaction (after clicking on a paid ad or reaching out on social media) through progression as a marketing-qualified lead (MQL), sales-qualified lead (SQL), contact for a sales opportunity, and customer.

The need for familiarity with tools and APIs has made this an agency specialization.

Website design and development

A small company can use a platform like Squarespace and Wix to create a new website using their existing templates in a matter of days. However, a website meant to scale for a growing company is best custom-designed and hosted on a platform like Webflow or WordPress.

Website design projects are finite in scope, but website maintenance is time-consuming and never-ending because updates are required daily, weekly, or monthly. New offerings, webinars, white papers, product releases, and blogs must be published regularly, which requires the attention of a part-time or full-time person.

Companies typically use an agency for the website’s design and development and transition its maintenance in-house. Note, however, that maintenance can rapidly become burdensome and require a dedicated resource, whether part of an agency, a freelancer, or a company employee.

Last thoughts

The B2B tech marketing agency landscape is highly fragmented, with numerous small, specialized agencies rather than a few dominant players. This diversity necessitates a nuanced approach when selecting a marketing partner. Companies should consider outsourcing specific tasks such as paid ad management, website development, SEO content creation, public relations, and marketing operations automation to specialized agencies. However, core functions like defining product messaging strategy and creating case studies are best kept in-house to leverage internal expertise and maintain strategic focus.

Effective B2B tech marketing requires a deep understanding of the industry and target audience. Agencies must possess subject matter expertise to provide value beyond basic digital marketing tasks. The optimal strategy involves collaborating with multiple specialized agencies for specific areas like content creation, ad campaign management, website development, and public relations. This approach allows companies to benefit from each agency's unique strengths while maintaining control over their overall marketing strategy and core messaging.