What is IT marketing?
In short, IT marketing refers to marketing the services or products of IT companies (sometimes with the help of IT marketing companies). Maybe it sounds easy, but in fact, we need to clarify what is “marketing” and what is an “IT company”. And, while the definition of “IT company” may be more or less understandable (in practice, it’s an umbrella term for a software services company or a software product company), different interpretations of the meaning of “marketing” sets IT marketers up to fail.
The American Marketing Association’s (AMA) current definition of marketing (from July 2013) is: Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Digital Marketing for IT Companies
Digital Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever
According to Gartner’s “B2B Buying Journey” report, “44% of millennials preferring no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting… The best work in digital selling is not happening within sales departments but rather in marketing. Progressive marketers have shifted from spec sheets and product overviews to digitally rich buyer enablement. They are helping customers manage the complexities of an end-to-end purchase decision and navigate the implications for their business.
Gartner posits that “sales leaders failing to shift significant focus, resources, and political capital into creating rich digital experiences through the next five years risk alienating customers and losing business as a result… The company website is the place to start.”
SEO statistics for IT companies
- B2B researchers do 12 searches prior to engaging on a specific brand (Source).
- SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate as compared to outbound leads at 1.7% (Source).
Top 6 B2B Marketing Challenges in 2026
Recently, Ann Gynn asked me a few questions for an article at Content Marketing Institute. That gave me a chance to sit down and organize my thoughts about the B2B CMOs challenges in 2026. Doing this once a year is genuinely useful. I recommend it to everyone.
2025 already brought disruptive changes to the day-to-day work of marketers. In 2026, these changes will become the new normal. The reasons are economic and technological.
- Competition will heat up for businesses and marketers alike
- Marketing budgets will be flatlined
- Expectations for marketers from business owners will rise
- Technology platforms will increase their requirements. Marketers must adapt
- Challenge between the need to deliver immediate revenue but the want to go for long-term play
- Hiring motivated, qualified talent remains the biggest challenge for CMOs
1. Competition will heat up for businesses and marketers alike
Competition will rise again in 2026. A huge number of rivals will put in twice the effort to win your potential customer’s attention.
That fact alone will reduce your brand’s visibility. Marketers must work much harder just to get the same results as before.
Your marketing team now must produce more content, which is obvious since everyone else is doing it.
However, the content quality must be higher than it was when you had more time to craft it (you now have less) in order to stand out.
Marketing blindness is growing among your potential customers in a digital world full of distractions.
Despite this, you still must show up more often than before in front of them while avoiding annoyance.
Intermediary technology platforms you use to reach customers will reward exactly this type of behavior.
2. Marketing budgets will be flatlined
We are heading into another year of muted growth.
B2B buyers in key markets for many global services companies (the US, UK, etc.) will be hesitant to spend more because, in general, their own markets aren’t growing.
This means marketing budgets won’t rise in 2026. At best, they will stay flat.
Those who achieved more with last year’s budget and still have money left will come out ahead.
3. Expectations for marketers from business owners will rise
Leaders expect marketers to deliver higher KPIs in 2026 having the same budget as in 2025. They are convinced that marketers can be even more productive and effective.
Only those who significantly improve their qualifications will satisfy this demand.
They must combine strategic marketing expertise with deep capability in the area that delivers the highest ROI for the industry in which their company operates, whether that is advertising, email newsletters, or consultative content marketing.
The winners are those who already upgraded their skills in 2025.
When it comes to GenAI, simply using ChatGPT to work with text or Google Nano Banana to generate photorealistic images will no longer be enough to be productive and effective.
Now you need a precise understanding not only of the differences between specific models, but also of their modes.
For example, you must know that ChatGPT Agent mode will be better suited for targeted research than Deep Research mode, while ChatGPT Pro with extended thinking will be best for extracting and grouping high-priority claims from large forum threads.
You’ll switch to Claude when you need to cluster large volumes of marketing data or identify intent behind search phrases, and to Gemini Pro for high-quality analysis of long videos, including YouTube.
You’ll see that Gemini Pro will be most effective in Google AI Studio for explaining complex concepts in plain language.
If you want your model to avoid generic AI output and instead use your own tone and wording, you’ll fine-tune an OpenAI model on your texts.
For advanced automation that was previously largely unavailable to the general marketer, you’ll turn to Google Antigravity to generate Python scripts that will scrape large amounts of data, analyze trends, or quickly build landing pages.
Having detailed knowledge of the specifics of AI tools, not just general usage, will make you more productive and let you create high-quality content faster, all on the same budget as before, helping you meet higher expectations and secure your position.
4. Technology platforms will increase their requirements. Marketers must adapt
A digital marketer today cannot rely on a website alone, even with excellent content, to generate profit from marketing. You have to use media to drive traffic to your website.
Paid media, or more precisely, technology platforms (mainly Google and social media, which digital marketers use to reach potential clients) have made their algorithms increasingly complex in recent years and will continue to do so in 2026 to protect their business models.
For marketing budgets, this will mean higher spending and lower returns unless you specialize in the algorithms of these specific technology platforms, whether it is Google SEO, Generative Engine Optimization, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and so on.
If your team lacks platform-specific expertise and relies only on general marketing theory and constant experimentation, the budget will be spent quickly with little or no return.
For example, to win customers from Google, publishing SEO-optimized content and even covering the entire customer journey with topic clusters is no longer enough.
You must use proof-based marketing (case studies and reviews from recognizable clients) with storytelling on owned and earned media (review platforms).
You also need continuous newsjacking and a high-velocity PR strategy.
Finally, your content needs a human touch to stand out from the general AI content some competitors may publish, often with even less budget than you.
Some company owners will feel frustrated with their marketers and annoyed by the algorithms. The competitors whose marketing teams have deep expertise in each platform that delivers the best ROI for their industry according to benchmarks will continue to get results.
To understand these technology platforms, you must look at how customers use them. They often use it today because they want better personalization.
For example, results of generic searches like “best software development company” no longer satisfy potential clients. Now they want more precise answers to their specific needs, asking questions like, “Where can I find AWS migration specialists for AI-enabled analytics setups?” (Case studies and reviews fit this need perfectly.)
Technology platforms provide analytics (Search Console, etc.) to help marketers analyze shifts in customer preferences.
In 2026, marketers will need to use these analytics capabilities to extract insights for content strategy and act on them immediately.
5. Challenge Between the Need to Deliver Immediate Revenue but the Want to Go for Long-Term Play
The challenges for a long-standing CMO and a new hire are vastly different. Still, they come down to one single factor: leadership trust.
However, trust from a business owner alone is not enough. The CMO must also understand the source of the company’s past marketing success. Was it built on marketing strategy, or did marketing simply benefit from a growing market?
If the market is not growing now, but the leadership expects the same financial results as before, and the marketing budget is unchanged, the CMO must answer a rhetorical question: Is this the right company for me?
The CMO must also ask another honest question: Do I have deep expertise in the specific channel that, according to benchmarks, may generate the highest ROI for this type of business? If not, and you have to test every channel, the budget will run out quickly. Trust will be lost, and high CMO turnover will continue.
When leadership and the CMO are aligned, the relationship is built entirely on financial terms using standard metrics.
The common main goal is profit from marketing. However, we can assess our progress before reaching break-even and beyond by tracking the number of SQLs (leads that fit our ideal customer profile, not just general marketing leads), by comparing our acquisition cost to industry benchmarks, and, finally, by calculating ROMI.
If we are on a stable track, we can mathematically predict in advance whether we will underperform in terms of profit and need to adjust our approach as soon as possible, or if we are on course and there should be no challenges regarding the expectations of either side.
The CMO needs to report on spend and results during the leadership meeting at the bi-weekly Marketing Performance Review. If there are any issues, they are raised and resolved immediately.
With this setup, there will be no conflict between leadership priorities and marketing execution. The only risk is if the CMO lacks the skills needed for the role.
6. Hiring motivated, qualified talent remains the biggest challenge for CMOs
For a CMO, the hardest part is hiring motivated, qualified talent who fit this year’s budget. They need to prove their value as soon as possible so the company can scale results next year.
The reality is that a CMO can see things from the owner’s perspective. Front-line marketers often can’t, for both objective and personal reasons. This has far reaching consequences that are most visible in content producing.
AI has made general content production cheap, such content has low value and often irritates readers. Unfortunately, many copywriters lack backgrounds in philology, rhetoric, or journalism – fields that train to write linguistically polished content that can as linguists call it make perlocutionary effects.
These copywriters often struggle to understand the core traits that distinguish AI-generated text from writing that can actually deliver value to the business buyer.
On the flip side, some experienced writers may still struggle to adopt AI. They prefer to keep writing manually (slowly and expensively), missing the chance to improve productivity and, paradoxically, quality. This puts pressure on the marketing budget. Their expectation that this manual work will go viral rarely proves true, because today’s algorithms mainly reward those who maintain quality and high velocity at the same time.
When facing a talent shortage, a CMO should not be afraid to roll up their sleeves and execute personally. The business doesn’t care who delivers the result, only that the result is profitable. If a CMO in 2026 stays hands-off, they will lose touch with what is actually happening on the ground.
