Tech is one of the largest industries in the world, but marketing into it doesn’t behave like marketing into most others. Audiences are identifiable, often by name. The product rarely fits in one line. The sale takes months. “IT and tech” covers a lot, from enterprise software and cybersecurity to cloud infrastructure, networking, hardware, devices, unified communications, and the integrators who deploy it all. None of it makes the work easier; it makes it different.
The size of the market
Worldwide IT spending is forecast by Gartner to reach US$6.15 trillion in 2026, a figure built up from spending across data centre systems, devices, software, IT services, and communications services. Australian IT spending alone is forecast at A$172.3 billion in 2026, with software the fastest-growing segment. The market is anything but small. What’s smaller is the number of people inside any given organisation who decide what gets bought, and that’s where most of the structural difference begins.
The buying committee
Modern B2B technology buying happens in committees. Research on the B2B buying journey describes buying groups of 6 to 10 stakeholders, and Forrester’s 2024 data puts many enterprise purchases closer to 13. Whatever the count, tech purchases are made by groups working through their own internal consensus.
Each member reads the work differently. A technical evaluator is testing integration. An IT manager is checking deployment effort, security and support. Procurement wants total cost of ownership. End users want to know whether the product will make their day better or worse. Executive sponsors want to know whether it will pay back. Marketing has to give each of them enough to do their part without overwhelming any of them.
The other layer is the channel. A great deal of IT product reaches the end customer through resellers, distributors, MSPs and systems integrators, so marketing aims at both the end buyer and the partner who recommends, configures, sells, and supports the product on the vendor’s behalf.
Why the cycle is long
Tech sales cycles are long because the decisions are consequential. Published benchmarks converge on a pattern: SMB deals close in 1 to 3 months, mid-market in 3 to 6, and enterprise deals routinely take 9 to 18. A striking share of buyers express purchase regret afterwards.
That length shifts marketing’s job description. Buyers spend most of the cycle researching independently and talking to peers, and only a small fraction of it meeting vendors. The task is to keep showing up usefully across those months, because by the time the sales team gets the call, the shortlist is usually already drawn.
Content as substance
If buyers do most of their research before they speak to anyone, the work is to be the company they keep meeting along the way.
Content isn’t decoration in B2B tech. It’s the substance of the relationship.
The Content Marketing Institute’s B2B Benchmarks consistently rank webinars, email and organic social among the most effective channels, and LinkedIn is the platform marketers nominate as best value; the 2025 LinkedIn B2B Benchmark frames trust as the new metric.
What works is practical: analyses, case studies, technical explainers, comparison guides; the material a buying-committee member can forward to colleagues to advance their own argument. The vendor that publishes useful material gets remembered as the expert. The one that publishes only sales material gets filtered out before the shortlist is drawn.
One nuance. Buyers say they prefer a rep-free experience but regret purchases more when no human was involved. So the channels work as a hybrid: self-service content for most of the journey, human contact at the decision points.
Where buyers show up
For all the digital reach, IT and tech buyers still cluster around physical events. Trade shows, conferences, vendor summits and roadshows are where they learn from peers, see products in real conditions, and have the technical conversations that don’t fit in a webinar. In-person events have ranked ahead of every other channel for years running, and in Australia fixtures like Integrate, Tech in Gov, AISA’s Australian Cyber Conference, AWS Summit and EduTech pull this audience together year after year.
Lead generation usually pairs a gated white paper or research report with a partner publisher who already has the right readers, supported by sponsored content, EDMs, and BDR follow-up.
I’ve worked the edges of this audience at Jands, where some of the brands distributed (notably Shure on enterprise meeting-room audio) sell into IT managers, AV/IT integrators, and corporate workplace-technology teams. The work included lead-generation campaigns with major IT trade publishers, plus sponsored content in industry magazines reaching the same audience around hybrid-collaboration spaces. The mechanics are familiar B2B tech: targeted content, partner publishers, qualified leads, considered follow-up.
Account-based marketing and the consensus problem
When the buying group is large and the deal is large, lead-by-lead marketing breaks down. That’s why account-based marketing (ABM), treating individual target accounts as markets of one and coordinating sales and marketing around them, has become a near-default in enterprise B2B tech: 71% of practitioners now run an ABM strategy, and 87% say it delivers higher ROI than other approaches.
ABM works because it matches the shape of the buying problem. One account holds multiple stakeholders, each with their own concerns, and ABM addresses them in parallel rather than hoping one campaign reaches them all in sequence.
None of this asks for louder marketing. It asks for more patient marketing: useful content across a long cycle, aimed at a committee rather than a lead, and honest about what the product does and doesn’t do. The brands that win in tech are the ones that show up as useful before they show up as suppliers.