Let's just come right out and say it: Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) marketing is easy. No, seriously, bear with us for a moment. For most brands, the interaction with the consumer is simplified by two factors. First, the person who decides on the product, the person who purchases the product, and the person who uses the product is more than likely the same person. There is only one person going down the sales funnel from one end to the other.
The other factor? You as a marketing person have a great level of control over the marketing and branding as that consumer moves down the funnel. You know where they are when you deliver branding advertisement via television or print. You know their mindset when you deliver display advertising online. You know when they enter the store you can control the sequence from end-caps to shelf talkers to the product packaging. Most importantly, you as a marketer know the sequence that this messaging will be consumed.
Technology? It's a completely different ball of wax. As a friend once said, the problem with technology marketing is it looks a lot like work. Think of the example above for CPG. Now comes the reality that is tech marketing. There are multiple people bouncing around the funnel, not just one. You have evaluators of your product, the folks who are going to approve the budget, the ones who are going to install and run it, the line of businesses that are going utilize it…and the best part of it is that every one of them jumps in and out of the funnel at a time with a different pain they need solved.
Actually, I take the ball of wax reference back. It's not a ball of wax, it is a Rubic's cube. If you think of a cube, the challenge for technology marketing is to align the three sides in a matrix that gets the multiple constituents down that funnel as quickly as possible. The three sides represent message, audience and channel, and the challenge is to spin the sides to get the perfect combination. At certain points in the funnel, you need to spin the cube to make sure that you hit the right person at the right time with the right message, or you go right off the proverbial cliff.
How about an example to iron all this out? Let's say you about to introduce the latest integrated, on-demand, SaaS-delivered, standards-based, best of breed enterprise solution. Now goodness knows, that will practically sell itself, but just to be safe you are going to put some marketing behind it. In order to get this product sold, you need to approach things a little differently. Marketing people are about controlling the conversation, but with tech you can't because there are multiple people in on the talk. You have to be able to control a meeting you can't control.
What does that mean? It means that somewhere out there a bunch of people are meeting in a conference room and are deciding whether to buy your product or not (see, again not even remotely like CPG). There are tech people involved, business managers, finance folks, maybe even an executive or two. And they all need to have received the message from you that is tuned for them before they have that meeting.
This is what the cube is for. Each of these constituents consumes their information in different channels, each of them has a different pain point, and each of them responds to a different voice. A finance executive is reading about ways to increase profitability in a print magazine, while a line of business manager is trying to figure out how to make his department more profitable, while an IT person is trying to figure out how to integrated the latest technologies. This is the fractured, glorious mess that is your audience, and you have to solve the puzzle.
It's no surprise that the birthplace of integrated marketing is tech. So the next time you start building that media plan for a tech buy, here are three things to consider:
The other factor? You as a marketing person have a great level of control over the marketing and branding as that consumer moves down the funnel. You know where they are when you deliver branding advertisement via television or print. You know their mindset when you deliver display advertising online. You know when they enter the store you can control the sequence from end-caps to shelf talkers to the product packaging. Most importantly, you as a marketer know the sequence that this messaging will be consumed.
Technology? It's a completely different ball of wax. As a friend once said, the problem with technology marketing is it looks a lot like work. Think of the example above for CPG. Now comes the reality that is tech marketing. There are multiple people bouncing around the funnel, not just one. You have evaluators of your product, the folks who are going to approve the budget, the ones who are going to install and run it, the line of businesses that are going utilize it…and the best part of it is that every one of them jumps in and out of the funnel at a time with a different pain they need solved.
Actually, I take the ball of wax reference back. It's not a ball of wax, it is a Rubic's cube. If you think of a cube, the challenge for technology marketing is to align the three sides in a matrix that gets the multiple constituents down that funnel as quickly as possible. The three sides represent message, audience and channel, and the challenge is to spin the sides to get the perfect combination. At certain points in the funnel, you need to spin the cube to make sure that you hit the right person at the right time with the right message, or you go right off the proverbial cliff.
How about an example to iron all this out? Let's say you about to introduce the latest integrated, on-demand, SaaS-delivered, standards-based, best of breed enterprise solution. Now goodness knows, that will practically sell itself, but just to be safe you are going to put some marketing behind it. In order to get this product sold, you need to approach things a little differently. Marketing people are about controlling the conversation, but with tech you can't because there are multiple people in on the talk. You have to be able to control a meeting you can't control.
What does that mean? It means that somewhere out there a bunch of people are meeting in a conference room and are deciding whether to buy your product or not (see, again not even remotely like CPG). There are tech people involved, business managers, finance folks, maybe even an executive or two. And they all need to have received the message from you that is tuned for them before they have that meeting.
This is what the cube is for. Each of these constituents consumes their information in different channels, each of them has a different pain point, and each of them responds to a different voice. A finance executive is reading about ways to increase profitability in a print magazine, while a line of business manager is trying to figure out how to make his department more profitable, while an IT person is trying to figure out how to integrated the latest technologies. This is the fractured, glorious mess that is your audience, and you have to solve the puzzle.
It's no surprise that the birthplace of integrated marketing is tech. So the next time you start building that media plan for a tech buy, here are three things to consider:
- Don't just change message. Many campaigns have the same basic creative, with copy slightly tweaked for each audience. The problem here is that not only do you need a different message, it more than likely has to be delivered with a different voice. Engineers and executives process your message differently, so don't confuse or bore anyone by mistake.
- Get out of the valley of death. Think of a valley. On one edge is the CxO suite, who also occupy the other side. Down in the bottom of the valley is IT. Most companies deploy most of their spend on the CxO suite, and ignore the worker bees at the bottom. As a result, your campaigns go into the valley, but they never come out. Make sure you have enough spend to get back out.
- Don't differentiate between sales and marketing. You want to do great tech marketing, then go talk to a salesperson. Tech is “high-payload” marketing, meaning a lot of information has to be delivered before a sale happens. That means more places where sales and marketing can become disconnected, so make sure sales is involved as much as marketing.
