It’s time for something different in technical marketing. We believe the time has come for technical marketing to truly commit to focusing on actionable education. The days of ‘which box should I buy? marketing’ are over and frankly, in 2018, that approach isn’t fitting where most prospects truly live. Why not?

Consider: decision makers in the data center are staring down the barrel of a bona fide epochal change in how they can now deliver services to their internal stakeholders and customers, and many of them are under tremendous pressure to chart a strategic path and vision as soon as possible.

Put yourself in their shoes for a minute:

Your infrastructure is aging rapidly after years of capital cost tightening. Demands from internal departments and branch offices are constantly escalating, leading to a squeeze on operational budgets. Your organization is under pressure from the top to be more ‘agile’. Questions like ‘why aren’t we just moving everything to the cloud?’ are coming up almost monthly.

Developers inside your organization have decided to stop waiting for you to thoughtfully deploy the environments they need and have built outside environments of their own. You’re hearing a metric-ton of conflicting advice and murky buzzwords hyping new data center technologies like ‘software-defined’, ‘hyperconverged’, ‘cloud-enabled’ and ‘containers’. The marketing firehose puts you into a constant state of paralysis.

You know you need to be on top of this stuff but how? How will you manage to develop a strategy for your data center while still constantly putting out fires? How will you piece together an actionable understanding of your options and decide what to investigate, evaluate and procure? How will you get the business to truly understand the various options so that your company can forge ahead?

At ActualTech Media, we get these pressures because we’ve personally been there, facing these same challenges. We’ve actually been CIOs, IT Managers and Infrastructure Architects. We’ve lost sleep due to outages; we’ve fretted over backup and recovery; we’ve created paths forward for businesses large and small.

We’ve also seen how traditional technical marketing has skipped right over the most immediate needs decision makers have: to get a solid understanding of these technologies and the options they can open up. We believe this has to come before the marketing pitch, and ideally, it needs to come from a trusted 3rd party that has been there, that knows the legacy challenges IT has to deal with and the pushback they might receive as they begin to effect real change in the data center.

Time and time again we’ve seen that the vendors who pause to educate, who step back and think about how they can truly help decision makers are the ones who earn the trust and earn the business.

We’ve built our entire company around the belief that education leads to sales; that if you reward people with information they can really use, they’ll engage with you, share with you and invest with you. We’re here to help you educate and connect with key decision makers, and bring them into your world.

Let’s get started,

David Davis Scott D. Lowe Geordie Carswell James Green

Partners at ActualTech Media