People are often surprised when they find out tech companies are our biggest clients. They think a company that makes high-tech software or hardware products should be able to create its own website.

Sometimes they can, but just as often, tech companies face unique challenges that make them an ideal fit for an agency partner.

Marketing is more than a website

Marketing automation setup, ad units, social listening tools — marketing is littered with domain-specific techniques, terminology and acronyms. Many tech companies are thinking a lot bigger than just a website, but it’s not easy to dive in without a partner.

You can figure out most of these terms using Google. But in many situations, conducting your own research isn’t a permanent solution. There’s a huge number of articles you could look through trying to solve any issue. And the world is moving so quickly, the articles are often out of date by the time you read them.

Unless you’re living in the marketing technology ecosystem full-time on a daily basis, it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of it all.

Hiring an entire marketing department is slow

An old fashioned service business can start selling their wares on day one. But software and hardware products often take months if not years of work to create. And you can’t tell your marketing or sales department to get out there and sell a non-existent product.

So for many companies, for better or worse, the product comes first and marketing is a problem to solve as fast as possible once the product is ready.

If this is the case for a company, it can take months to hire a marketing department. But many tech companies can’t wait months to start marketing their product.

Almost like flicking a light switch, hiring the right agency means you get immediate access to a team that is competent, experienced and professional.

Marketing departments need the flex

Most of the developers for a company are dedicated to the product team. So what happens if the marketing team wants to set up some AdWords campaigns, and then A/B test a few landing page concepts tied to a drip email campaign using MailChimp?

A campaign and test of this sort might take 3-9 months. That’s not long enough to justify hiring a full-time web developer dedicated to the marketing department. A marketing agency can easily slot in and complete the work — without gut checks over benefits packages and permanent commitment.

Technology companies want to focus on their core business

Want to know something wild? Industry veterans working at Amazon admit they struggle to keep up with all the new features being added to their own product.

That’s how quickly technology is moving these days.

Marketing is an intricate core competency of its own completely separate from creating technical products.

It’s easier to master one trade than try to be good at everything. Even if tech companies could develop marketing expertise, trying to become experts might be a distraction from their core business.

Getting a second opinion

A successful marketing agency needs to quickly diagnose and be able to assist in a lot of different situations. Even a well-run tech company, with a strong marketing department, can benefit from the kind of broad experience an agency has after years of experience working with many different companies.

These interactions are more like fine-tuning, where the agency and the technology company work together to trim excesses or find undiscovered leverage, much the same way you might tune a performance race car or sailboat.

It’s in the small margins that an edge is found.

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