In B2B tech marketing, lack of customer insights creates a product-focused vacuum that leads to ineffective tactics, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. Avoid this by making research the priority, revisiting insights, and ensuring marketing strategies are customer-driven and aligned with long-term growth. When insight stays rooted to the core of our marketing, we give our solutions the best chance to succeed.
In nature, vacuums are rare. Wherever a gap exists, something rushes in to fill it. The vacuum we’re dealing with in B2B tech marketing is a lack of insight.
When marketing operates without insight, it creates a void that gets filled with guesswork, mixed messages, and ineffective approaches. This vacuum doesn’t just cause small hiccups; it creates a chain reaction of issues that continuously waste time, money, and opportunities. Teams get caught in a spin cycle of short-term tactics that look good on the surface but fail to deliver real results.
Many tech firms don’t realize they’re creating this vacuum because during startup phase, it’s very common to be heads-down in tactics. With constant pressure to generate leads and keep up with the competition, it’s easier to stay in “Tactics Land” than come up for air and do the necessary research to scale the business. You don’t know what you don’t know.
In this article, I’ll show you how this vacuum forms, the problems it creates, and how to fill it with the insights needed to produce effective marketing.
Lack of insight stems from a failure to do our research and due diligence. Skipping this important first step means we do not have the context we need to make informed decisions. To compensate, we end up going to market blindfolded and guessing what to do and who to do it for.
When we don’t invest in understanding our best-fit customers, the specific market niche we serve, or the competitive alternatives we’re up against, we create fragmented views of the market. This leaves us guessing about who we’re speaking to, what they care about, and how our solution fits into their world.
Without this context, marketing becomes a game of darts played in the dark. We might hit the target occasionally, but more often than not, we miss it entirely. Worse, we don’t even know how far off we are because we lack the data and metrics to measure accurately.
This vacuum of context doesn’t just make marketing less effective; it makes it almost impossible to plan strategically. And when we don’t understand our audience, we fall into the trap of talking to ourselves, focusing on what we think is important rather than what our customers actually care about.
The first step in filling this vacuum is to commit to doing the hard work of research. And because it is hard, it is avoided. But understanding our best-fit customers, their needs, and our competitive alternatives gives us the best chance to confidently build a solid foundation to go to market. When we take the blinders off, we create positioning and messaging that hits the target every time.
Before we can think about scaling, we need to understand the playing field we compete in. Don’t skip the foundational research. The longer we put it off the longer it takes to scale.
It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind while we’re in growth mode. Make it a habit to step back and reassess periodically. Annually is the minimum, quarterly is ideal.
Every marketing decision, from messaging to channel selection, should be rooted in Insight. It impacts the effectiveness of our GTM strategy (Go-To-Market) and our creative execution. Skipping this step is almost always the root cause of failed marketing campaigns.
Marketing is rife with creative wannabes and experts. Without insight, it’s tempting to jump straight into creative design, invent a strategy based on what “we like,” and make up a bunch of nonsense to justify it. It’s why so much “good-looking marketing” fails to deliver.
Marketing is one of only two business functions that produce results. The other is innovation. B2B tech rarely invests in marketing as it does innovation. If you’re running a tech firm with stable marketing leadership at the table, you’re light years ahead of any competitor who is simply “product-led.”
Lack of insight creates a vacuum that wastes time, money, and effort. It’s avoidable if we prioritize research. Clarity is essential for any business. It drives better results, both in the short-term and the long-term.
As the famous Dilbert comic strip illustrates, marketing without insight is just liquor and guessing. But with the right data, we can steer the business in the right direction. Marketing becomes more effective because it’s not just eye candy. Everyone, especially Sales, become increasingly confident because everything works in unison.
Invest in research, build strategies rooted in insight, and avoid the costly mistakes that come from operating in a vacuum. Your future self—and your bottom line—will thank you for it.
If you need specific advice for your B2B tech firm, reach out. I’m always happy to chat.
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PS: This article is also published and discussed on LinkedIn. Join the conversation!
