The social network has released a new report that talks about the emergence of 'Tech Challengers' in the B2B space, or the middle-market tech brands that are leveraging emerging technologies to take on much bigger, more well-resourced incumbents within their sectors.

'As shared with LinkedIn:

"Bigger than start-ups, yet smaller than enterprise firms, Tech Challengers face the same expectations from customers as its giant siblings but without the gigantic budgets. To distinguish themselves from larger companies, they have to act as startups on steroids and make their marketing dollar go further through innovative, creative, and increasingly digital strategies."

Given these parameters, Tech Challengers are a pretty good set of companies to know to understand marketing examples and tips that could help in your strategy.

But to get a deeper understanding, LinkedIn sent out a survey to over 200 marketing managers, directors, VPs, executives, and CMOs from those challenger brands about their digital advertising goals and challenges, which has led up to a new, 21-page overview.

You can download the full Tech Challenger guide here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights.

First off, LinkedIn looks at the marketing budgets of Tech Challengers, to get some comparative scope on available ad spend.

LinkedIn claims that the Tech Challengers spend 31% to 60% of the marketing budget in digital marketing, with an average of 44%. This means, on average, it is $57,900 per month, and 67% of the brands in the segment spend between $10K and $100K.

Product launch and growth are the majority of the budget. Building company profile/brand awareness do not rank significantly behind in the list.
The main issues, however, remain the same: most still fail to drive maximum conversion, with 70% of marketers picking 'converting engagement to sales' as their biggest challenge.

Which is pretty universal. It's one thing to get people to like and comment on your posts, but it's a whole other level when you get them to actually take real action as a result, and get in touch with your brand. That's long been a confusing element in the digital marketing sector, with some brands hiring people that are great at generating engagement, but not so great at optimizing for sales.

This would be well worth considering in your process to ensure that your efforts are end-game focused, not just on feeding into on-platform metrics.

The report included data on which CRM and marketing automation platforms were most frequently used by Tech Challenger brands as well as the top sources that have insights regarding how to approach digital marketing.
I'm going to assume that Social Media Today falls into the 'Digital Marketing Influencers' category so I can feel good about our input in this regard.

LinkedIn finally delivers some actionable recommendations, including crafting the right message to the right platform, and tracking your results so you can measure your marketing spend.
Which, frankly, is a little disappointing - I was hoping for some more specific, practical action steps based on this pool of marketers, but instead the action notes are rather general, and once again, another key point in the summary is improving the collaboration between marketing and sales.

Like, obvious reasons to use the right messaging for every platform-it's obvious why you measure performance. Unless you're doing any of those things, you're probably not gonna find much success-but if you work in marketing at all, and you're not paying attention to these things, what are you even doing?

Perhaps I read one too many of these reports-and I did-read many of them, but again, I was expecting more explicit information from these innovative brands, where instead, that is more an account report of their challenges rather than the solution to overcome them.

There are some interesting data points either way, and if you’re working for a Tech Challenger brand, it provides some additional industry perspective for your planning.