When you’re a marketer with years of experience, it can be tempting to think that marketing your product to other marketing organizations will be a breeze. But marketing to marketers can be extremely tricky, in large part because marketers can see other marketers coming. They’ve seen it all, and they’ve probably tried it all. That means we need to step up our game when our target audience is in the marketing industry.
I’m Christine Royston, Wrike’s Chief Marketing Officer. I joined the team at Wrike in early 2024 and have over 20 years of B2B enterprise marketing experience at companies including Udemy, Bitly, Dropbox, and Salesforce. I’d love to share a few thoughts on the best way to market to marketers.
Why marketing to marketers is critical, but challenging
Marketing is often a key audience for SaaS companies because these professionals like to experiment with new tech, and are, therefore, more likely to want to purchase new solutions. Marketing departments are an appealing target audience because budgets aren’t typically tied to headcount, which means they can make decisions on where to spend funds that aren’t necessarily long-term commitments. However, they are being constantly pushed to optimize their budgets and deliver increasing efficiency, which ties into their purchasing decisions and can limit their appetite for experimentation.
For marketers, that affinity for experimentation with new tech solutions may lead you to believe that marketing to marketers would be an obvious choice and an easy task, but that strategy comes with its own set of challenges.
Marketing budgets aren’t bouncing back quickly after the “do more with less” era — a survey of chief marketing officers that concluded in March 2024 discovered that marketing spend increased only 2.5% during the previous year. Another survey of B2B marketing decision makers found that only 35% are expecting a budget increase of more than 5% in 2025, according to Forrester. The majority (47%) expect an increase of just 1% to 4%.
With limited spend available and only modest increases expected, it’s crucial that marketers think strategically about exactly how to achieve the most impactful results. Given the limited spend and increases marketers are experiencing, we as marketers have to be extremely thoughtful about marketing to them.
Marketing is all about getting the right message to the right audience through the right channels at the right time. Here are a few tips for doing just that with marketers as your target audience.
Use what you know works
I speak from firsthand experience that marketers are flooded with campaigns from other marketing teams, especially those marketing SaaS products. I view that as a good thing because it means we get to keep tabs on the strategies and best practices other organizations are using.
We know we need to put together high-quality marketing strategies and messaging if we’re going to reach those who are inundated with outreach. When we’re marketing to marketers, I remind our team we need to go back to basics. This recent research from the Content Marketing Institute confirms exactly that: 94% of marketers still rely on online articles when they’re researching new solutions, 81% use product reviews, and 75% use case studies.
That shows longer-form written pieces are still valuable for conveying information about our products and services. When we go back to basics, we give marketers what they’re looking for and find more success in converting them into buyers of our products.
Build long-term relationships
Marketing to marketers isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. We’ve got to be concerned with the long game and not be tempted by what looks like short-term easy fixes. To me, that’s really the enjoyable work — building longer-term partnerships and relationships with peers that will eventually result in purchasing decisions for your product.
This can and should be done through thought leadership and topic-related content that conveys your understanding for your audience’s business needs. These relationships can be nurtured through other marketing-related communities and watering holes as well, where marketers already go to share knowledge and expertise. When other marketers can view you as a knowledgeable resource and a trusted member of the industry, they’ll be much more open to a sale in the future because you’ve already provided value through those community forums.
A lot of tools I’ve bought myself have involved long-term relationships. I make a purchasing decision after a period of consuming a company’s content and resources. When we’re working on outreach to any of our audiences here at Wrike, that’s part of our strategy — to make sure we’re providing value to the community so we’re trusted and top of mind when it comes time for a new purchasing decision or switch to a different software.
Being in the thick of those marketing communities also helps me intimately understand the issues and pain points marketers are facing so that our teams can design product updates, solutions, as well as content and messaging that address those directly.
Make your marketing stand out
There’s no way around it: when you’re marketing to marketers, you need to stand out from the sea of communications we all know marketers receive. If you’re working on a campaign designed for marketers, you need to raise the bar and develop strategies that can cut through the noise.
As marketers, we know all the tricks. We know exactly what you’re trying to do and because of that, we’re super critical. We can tell when effort hasn’t gone into a message, outreach, or experience. That’s why when I see great marketing, I flag it to my team. It gives us another thing to think about, and, hopefully, a good example of what we’re reaching for.
Use Wrike to excel at marketing
Our marketing team spends every day working in Wrike, so we know it’s an incredible tool for planning, building, and assessing the success of marketing campaigns. We can then market examples of how Wrike improves our own workflows to our audience. For instance, our mighty marketing teams use Wrike to streamline collaboration and accelerate project completion. This approach not only ensures efficient project execution and bigger impact, but also facilitates a harmonious working environment by maintaining transparent and inclusive communication. We highlight some examples for marketing teams here!
Are you ready to try using Wrike to plan, build, and deliver marketing campaigns that will resonate with the right teams? We’ve got you covered with the most effective and easy-to-use platform in the business. Start a free two-week trial and market to marketing professionals today.
