BJREES

B2B marketing and AI

Category: Product Marketing

Everything about the product marketing discipline. Messaging, launches, personas, go-to-market strategies, and the unique role of product marketing in technology businesses.

  • Everything So Far

    Everything So Far

    All of my PowerPoints so far. Most of what I know about marketing up to this point!

  • How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    We’re about to go into our quarterly review period at Redgate. We don’t just run QBRs, we also run reviews across all parts of the business. These are a chance to examine the last three months – what worked? What’s going well? What’s not going well and needs fixing? All part of a strong agile process for keeping an eye on what’s really happening, and making adjustments through the year.

    But there’s a flaw in these meetings when it comes to marketing. The implication of this process is that the things we did in Q1 have a direct and measurable impact on the outcomes from Q1. I.e. when I’m talking about our Q1 outcomes, the activities that occurred in-quarter are the most relevant for discussion.

    But that’s a very partial view of the truth. As all marketers know, marketing is a mix of long, medium and short term activities which, if played right, add up to the outcomes we all seek, such as pipeline for the sales teams.

    We’ve just had one of our best quarters for marketing-sourced pipeline in a long time. I can’t say “forever” because we’ve changed how we measure things over the years, but a quarter-to-quarter growth of 20% is something I’m very happy with. I’m not giving absolutes in this chart, for obvious reasons, nor a key to what the colours mean!, but the chart below shows how COVID-19 hit Redgate for marketing sourced pipeline through 2020, then how we’re coming out of the pandemic stronger than ever:

    No alt text provided for this image

    So, great, and I couldn’t be more proud of the incredible marketing team at Redgate for making this happen.

    But we’re trying to build a scalable, predictable revenue engine here. It’s not enough to know “What”, we need to know “Why?” – what did we do to achieve this? What can we re-produce? What activities had no impact, that we can cut? This is a Sisyphean task, full of estimates, best guesses, rules of thumb. And I thought back to a poster that used to be on the wall of our HR department (back when we all worked in offices!) stating “Not everything that can be measured is valuable, and not all valuable things can be measured” – which is particularly appropriate here. But we should at least have a stab at trying to know what influences these numbers.

    Here’s my go, some based on data, some not. And I’ve given these in reverse “timescale” order – from things we did actually do in-quarter, ranging down to activities that have been in-play for years. And of course it’s almost impossible to weight these things – what was most important? What only made a small difference? Very hard to know..

    1. Project to “Leave no lead unturned”. A slightly clunky phrase, but we made an operational change in Feb to hire a couple of great temps who are responsible for passing the right marketing generated leads to the right people in Sales. Like every single B2B company in the world, our internal systems for lead flow are less-than-perfect, so, while we fix those issues over the year, we have two people passing leads over by hand, ensuring leads don’t get lost in various buckets, or in the wrong hands. By doing this we at least know we’re maximising the revenue for each lead we do generate. Timescale: 1-2 months
    2. Fast, agile response to a competitor mistake. Without going into details, one of our competitors made an error, and within days we’d made it clear to our customers that we were there to help them with an alternative if their bosses were asking them to “look around”. We explicitly didn’t “exploit” this error – we never mentioned the competitor’s mistake in any of our comms – but we did make sure that when people were looking for alternatives, that path was easy for them (for example, through comms and campaigns, through sales training – what should people say when these customers make enquiries? – that sort of thing). Timescale: 1-2 months
    3. A launch. We launched a new offering in February. Of course you can’t do a launch every month, or even every quarter (it can call your credibility into question, if you’re constantly doing grand launches for point releases!). We try to do 1-2 “big” launches each year – incredibly well researched, meticulously planned, focused on real customer needs, and when we get this right (like we did this time), these launches resonate really well with customers. Timescale: 2-4 months to plan the launch, but the research goes back much further..
    4. Experiments with digital spend. It’s so easy to just keep spending $$ on the same ads, the same channels (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But end of 2020, we decided to do some bold experiments moving budget from A to B, and this has really paid off. What we found was the the efficacy of, say $1,000 is enormously different for different products at different lifecycle stages. Specifically, if a brand is well-established, then digital advertising is much less effective than for a new product or brand. This makes theoretical sense of course, but it’s great for the reality to match the theory. Timescale: 3-6 months
    5. Internal marketing re-org. This is way harder to measure. But, we made some changes in marketing end of 2020, to reduce the friction between different areas and to make the partnership with Sales simpler. Primarily this was about changing the responsibilities for our field marketing teams in different offices, making it easier for them to collaborate with their local sales teams. It’s hard to say “That change made us $500k in pipeline”, but what I can say is that it’s made it much easier to collaborate on various projects (e.g. some of the things above), which I think would have been far less successful without the change. Sometimes your job is to remove barriers and hurdles, rather than add new activities. Timescale: last 6 months
    6. Treating our customers with respect and empathy during COVID-19. Really? That led to marketing ROI!? We made a conscious decision in April 2020 that, during the pandemic, we wouldn’t exploit the situation for our advantage. We could have gone to customers and turned the screw on various deals, trying to take advantage of their difficulties. Instead we decided “How can we help our customers this year? How can we support our customers through this difficult time?”. We started things like the Redgate Community Circle, with a focus on educating customers (so that at least, through the year, our customers could spend time on self-learning). We made sure that, if a customer was struggling to get a deal or an approval renewed, we gave them that time and space, extending trial periods for example. We actively listened to the struggles they were having (e.g. healthcare orgs struggling to keep up with demand) and made sure adjusted our interactions to give them the support they needed – for example, providing additional free support to healthcare companies, no questions asked. Can I directly measure the return on this effort? No. Do I think it was valuable? Definitely. Customers like working with vendors who understand them and their pain. Timescale: 1 year
    7. Moving out of the pandemic. Obviously this isn’t something you can “do” – we as vendors have had zero control over the course of the pandemic. However I think it’s crucial to recognise where your success is a mixture of internal and external forces. In marketing, we have a symbiotic relationship with our customers – we’re always trying to understand their concerns, at the same time as representing what our company has to offer. It’s obviously been beneficial to Redgate that our customers are feeling more confident, perhaps a little more willing to think ahead and getting back to solving some of their long-standing problems. Timescale: 1 year
    8. Long term brand work. We’ve made a number of changes over the years to clearly associate the value customers get from us with the Redgate brand. Specifically, it should be trivially easy to remember “I learnt a lot this year about how to do my job better. It was Redgate that helped me out there”. Or, “I read a great article about what I need to do about problem X at my company – it was Redgate that wrote that”. We’ve done a lot over the last few years to simplify, simplify and simplify again our brands and the associations with that brand, which I think has at least partly led to current success. Timescale – many years!

    Obviously I’ve missed a lot of things here – so many great projects over the last 12 months, small and large. And, as I mention, it’s really hard to to figure out “Okay, but which of these were really important?”. Problem with that of course – successful marketing is a complex combination of lots of activities, hopefully orchestrated together to give the result you need. No single activity is sufficient or even necessary for success, but I think you do need most of these things working together for growth.

    But to go back to the original problem – how do we present a successful quarter as a set of repeatable, scalable activities? Should we just repeat all these things!? The skill is to choose between either stopping, maintaining or increasing these activities. There are a number of areas which are certainly in the maintain mode – the brand work, experiments with digital spend being just two examples. We’ll keep doing these, but not more. And a couple of things you can’t or shouldn’t “continue” – marketing re-orgs are very expensive, and I certainly hope that we need to do less and less work supporting customers during the pandemic – an option I’d be very happy to lose! But the trick is knowing what to double-down on – something I’ll be working on over the coming weeks.

  • Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    It’s hard getting ahead in Marketing. It’s a discipline changing every year (certainly true of 2020), it covers an enormous breadth of disciplines which need a great variety of skills and it’s notoriously difficult to prove the impact of your work. So what can you do to give yourself the best chance of success? Of growth and moving to the next level?

    I’ve always believed that a significant part of your career success is dependent on the organisations you work for. You can be the smartest marketer around, but if you’re working at a deadbeat company in decline, you’ll struggle to grow and show success. Equally, for better-or-worse, if you’re only an average marketer working at a place growing 100% year-on-year, you may get away with perhaps more than you should!

    So obviously we all try to work for exciting growing companies. But the other big factor is the size of the company you work for. I’ve worked at companies of 50,000 employees and of 2 employees (one of which was me!) and it makes an enormous difference, not only to the sort of work you do, but also your chances of learning and growing. A growth mindset is crucial for your future success. I’ve personally found that Scaleups – organisations that sit between early stage startups and the big corporates, focused on scaling up to the next level – have provided the best opportunities for growth.

    My first job out of college was at British Airways, as a developer. I had no idea what to expect, but it started well. The first month was a formal training program (on their systems), and it felt very structured, almost a continuation of college. I was getting training and everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

    So a great start. But 6-12 months later, something didn’t feel quite right. I soon realised that every problem (at my level), every process, every significant decision had already been figured out by someone, likely years before. A simple example – the precise naming, file location, structure, font and format of every doc I had to write had all been worked out approximately 10 years before. I suggested “Perhaps for a small change, we can just write a short note (a ‘Minimal viable document’!), something really useful to the reader, rather than writing 25 pages, taking more time than the actual code change”. That didn’t go anywhere. I soon found that my ability to grow on-the-job was very limited – it’s a cliche, but you quickly become a cog in the machine.

    So many years later I tried a startup. A very small startup in fact, just two of us. There was not a formal training program when I joined here! And it was really exciting – I did really enjoy this time. Certainly, a little hairy at times – there wasn’t the backup of a large corporate with deep pockets. But the rollercoaster ride was part of the fun. And I definitely felt like I had an enormous influence over the strategy for the company – this is one of the key attractions for smaller orgs.

    But this comes at a price – I was there for over 3 years in a Product Manager role. But my growth in the disciplines of product management and marketing was pretty close to zero. I learnt a lot about the hustle of working at a startup. I learnt a lot about closing deals, about getting 25 things done all at once. But my understanding of the emerging disciplines of product management, product marketing, brand, digital marketing, marketing operations etc etc didn’t advance in three years.

    So where’s the Goldilocks zone? Where can you get this sort of support for growth without just becoming part of the machine?

    I now work at a company of 400 people, in a strong growth phase with a laser-focus on learning and development of its employees. A Scaleup like this – somewhere moving from the stage of “Everyone doing everything, just get the release out!” in to a more disciplined stage of “Okay, how do we scale all this? We have success already, how do we make this 10x bigger?” is the sort of environment where you can really become a master of your discipline.

    When I worked at the startup, I did all of the product management, a lot of marketing, some development work, and a lot more besides. I did what needed to be done to survive, as we did everything we could to find some sort of product-market fit. I didn’t have the time to work out “What would be a better way of running that digital marketing program? How would I do that better next time?” – the rollercoaster was moving too fast for this sort of introspection.

    At Redgate, we have a marketing department around 45 people strong. We have product marketing, digital marketing, brand, ABM and customer marketing functions (all with disciplines within each of these) as well as a nascent marketing operations function. We pride ourselves on being world-class in all of these areas. Of course we’re not there yet – part of a growth mindset is accepting that you’ll always be striving to do better – but I feel we improve at everything we do year after year. However great, say, our digital marketing team was a year ago, they’re better this year (through growth and learning activities), and will be even better this time next year.

    We even run an internal conference devoted to the goal of growing our capability. Called “Level Up”, this year will be a week long event covering an enormous range of topics across the whole business. Previous years have been a single-day offsite, but with everyone working remotely this year, we’re trying something new. I’m really excited about this as, yet again it reinforces the crucial role that learning and development plays when a company is scaling up. It’s just not good enough to still be working in the same way this year as we did a year ago – as the business grows, we need to grow as well.

  • Brand Amplifiers

    Brand Amplifiers

    I’m writing this on my way to the Sirius Decision Summit in Vegas (sitting in Terminal 3). I’m hoping to get a lot out of the conference (though I’m currently in option paralysis mode – too many sessions to choose from).

    But this post is about a very small part of that conference – though it’s something which I feel is very important for brands, and is often forgotten about.

    On the first morning of the summit, Sirius arrange a 5K run for all attendees. Though it seems like madness going for a 5K run along the Strip in the desert weather, it’s all for a great cause – the VWM Families Foundation. In particular, after a long flight, it’s just the sort of thing you need to get “back to normal” and find some energy for the days ahead.

    But what I also thought was interesting was that this is a great example of a “Brand Amplifier” for Sirius. By this I mean – the run isn’t something directly relevant to what Sirius do. There’s no “Call to Action”, there’s no surrounding “Digital campaign” with attached ROI, no “Strategy”.

    What there is, is Sirius doing a great thing that can only lead to a positive residual opinion of the organisation. Would I buy their services on the back of this alone? Of course not. Is there a clear ROI on the time and investment from Sirius – unlikely. Is it based on deep customer needs analysis and segmentation? I very much doubt it. But, should they do it? Absolutely yes!

    Activities like this (and there are many sorts) are great for “amplifying” the rest of your marketing. And most great companies do it. They provide positive re-inforcement of your core messages and campaigns in a way that is hard to measure, but still also worth doing. Note, I’m 99% certain that Sirius aren’t hosting the run as part of a cynical campaign to “Boost their brand awareness” – I’m sure they’re just doing it because it’s a good thing to do. But they’re doing it nonetheless.

    The effect on customers is intangible, but still real. It leaves me with the impression that Sirius are the sort of people I’d like to do business with. Of course, the proposition has to be strong, what I need, it has to work and so on. Like a guitar amplifier, if the signal going in is poor, then the amp only makes things worse. But if the signal going in is good, then the amplifier can only help.

    What does this mean for you? For most, it’s the sort of things that are on your website around and between your core messages. Sure, front and centre you’ve got the key benefits of your offering, all finely-honed over the years. But what does it say in your “About us” or “Company” section? Is it a series of glum black-and-white photos of aging men from the “Management Team”, or is a story about the annual charity ball that your company runs? Is it a bland and detailed description of your services, categorised and ordered, or is it photos of your colleagues contributing to a local hackathon?

    And it extends beyond that – what activities does your company do to support the community it serves? Anything? It’s not just charity work, it’s user groups, universities, local events, sponsorship and so on.

    Of course, not every organisation wants to be appear as “fun” – if I’m looking through a financial advisor’s website, I don’t want to see pictures of the team drunk at Ascot. But the “peripheral” activities that your company undertakes, have a stronger effect than you might think (both positive and negative).

    Does this matter for B2B? Yes, I think it does. To repeat – if a company doesn’t provide a great service or product, that I genuinely need, at a good price, then I’m not going to bite. But we are people, buying from people – I’ve encountered a few examples over the years where the impression given by a company’s website has strongly put me off that organisation (even if you often end up buying, begrudgingly). And there are orgs that give such a strong impression of the great company they are, that you actively seek them out when looking for a solution. Did I make the purchase because of that? No. Did it help – yes, yes it did.

    Finally, if you work in marketing today, you’re likely – and rightly – being pushed to measure the impact of your work more effectively than ever. Spending millions of dollars on campaigns without a clue whether they work or not, is no longer okay, and that’s a good thing.

    But if you’re worrying about the “ROI of the charitable work that we do” then you’re asking the wrong questions. These things are good in-and-of-themselves. For me, they require no justification, no debate. For the Sirius run, it’s a win-win-win – I win because I get a nice run after a long flight, the charity wins from the donations, and Sirius win from the brand amplification. That’s justification enough.

  • Anatomy of a Great Ad

    It’s easy to forget, amongst the talk of marketing automation, social media strategy, customer experience, lead nurturing and so on, that you still need well written, well targeted and well designed ads to reach new customers.

    I spotted a great example this week, and just wanted to run through what I thought was great about it.

     

    Channel, Placement and the Ad

    Here’s the initial ad that I spotted:

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    What’s so great about this?

    1. Platform – I see it on my mobile phone. Outside work I spend far more time on my phone than on a laptop, it’s a B2C offering, so mobile is best.
    2. Channel – you can’t quite see from this, but the ad is on Facebook. Personally I view Twitter and LinkedIn as “work-related” networks and Facebook as a “non-work” platform. There’s some overlap, but little. So an ad which is targeted at me as a parent makes a lot more sense on Facebook.
    3. Targeting – well, I’m guessing here, this could be great targeting, or they could have advertised to everyone in the world (at great expense!). But, the ad is for a product for people with children of a certain age (8-18). I’m a 44 year old male, I doubt they know I have kids, but it wouldn’t take much research to figure out the probability that I do, and that they would be of a relevant age (I’m less likely to have an 8+ child if I was 25 or 65). Of course, if Facebook is really clever, it knows that I do have kids (from my posts), and have sold that information to GoHenry. Like most advanced analytics/AI – creepy, but impressive.
    4. The hook – “Kids age 8-18? Discover a safe, easy and fun new way to pay pocket money and teach kids about money”. What a great line! First they’ve identified me with the kids and ages. Second, they know the pain of paying pocket money in a world where most money is digital (finding change each week is a pain!). And they know most parents are paranoid about their kids attitude to money (that in reality it doesn’t grow on trees).
    5. The graphic – you can’t see it above, but the ad cycles through a list of names on the credit card, showing how you can personalise the card for your kids – something I know they’d love. NB: What would have been genius, was if they’d known my childrens’ names (from Facebook) and inserted those in to the ad – how impressive would that have been? True personalisation.
    6. Call to Action – “Sign up in one minute”. Simple, clear, pain-free.

     

    The Landing Page

    Okay, so you’re convinced by the ad, so you click on the picture.

    The landing page – it’s a big page, so click on the link to view, but it has the following elements in order, that are done well:

    1. Call to Action – right at the top. And it’s made so simple for you – Sign Up Now, to create a new Custom Card for your child.
    2. Validation – right under the CTA (and indeed all over the ad and landing page) is the Visa sign. This immediately lets you know that this is a safe financial institution, that you’re not putting your money in the hands of some start-up. “Designed for children in collaboration with Visa” – so you know they worked with Visa to get it right and are big enough to work with a premium partner.
    3. Short video – the video says “Under 1 minute” so you know you’re not going to have to spend ages learning about the system. No-one has time for anything over a minute nowadays!
    4. Free trial – straight under this: “Try if free for 2 months”. Great, so if you’re not sure about this whole thing you can try it for 2 months, see if it’s right then stop if it’s not for you. Again, they’re removing a barrier to trial. One thing worth noting – you can see that their measure is to “Get trials”, to get people to sign up in some way.
    5. Validation from a real user – under this is a quote from a real person. I personally don’t trust these a great deal (anyone can get a quote for any product – it might be that 1 person loves it, and 1,000 hate it!). But still – it helps you think that there are already people happily using it – important when you’re talking about a financial product that needs trust.
    6. Benefits, and emotional appeal – after a few more logos, there’s then a nice section which describes how the thing actually works and describes the benefits in nice clear language. Reading this, I know, in a matter of seconds, how it will work and what immediate benefits I’ll get. And there’s a nice emotional pull on “Buy this if you want your kids to grow up as financially responsible people”!:Capture
    7. Further details – there’s then another section, more detailed explaining the features and benefits of the product. What I like here, over the whole page is that there’s a gradual increase in information as you become more interested. At the top you just want to know “What is this thing?”. But if you’ve read further down, chances are you’re more interested (else why would you be there?), and you want more detailed info about what it actually is. This worked really well for me.

     

    There’s then a ton more sections – about security, how it works in practice, about the mobile apps, about good financial habits and so on. All good stuff, though I couldn’t help feeling exhausted about half way through.

    Still, I thought this a great example of the art of a good advert – an art that isn’t dead yet! A well targeted app, from a company that understands their customer, simple CTAs, good validation, clear explanation of benefits, emotional appeal and so on.

    You never know, I might even sign up!

     

     

     

  • Getting Stuff Done as a Product Marketing Manager

    plates

    I hardly know a Product Marketing Manager who isn’t overwhelmed by his or her workload. As I’ve written previously, this is at least in part because of the vast number of activities that PMMs “should” be doing – how can you not being doing your job properly if you don’t, at least, have a full content marketing strategy, a mobile strategy, a full list of researched and refined personas, a great Twitter presence, a nicely written weekly blog, a monthly webinar, a multi-threaded email nurturing campaign, remarketing, GDN etc etc? All done by Friday if possible?

    So part of the problem is that there is too much we “should” be doing – though as I wrote, I think most of these things should be dropped if only for our own sanity. But that’s only half the problem – the other is the way in which many PMMs work, including often, myself. Even if we’ve restricted our Work In Progress (WIP) down to four items, we still often find ourselves context-switching between those four things through the day – effectively spinning multiple plates trying to keep on top of all of the activities that do genuinely need to be done.

    Context switching is a well-known problem in any field of work. The gist of it is that, by constantly switching between tasks – often including minor admin tasks such as checking and replying to email – you lose a lot more than just the time it takes to switch tasks. You lose the momentum you’ve built up in something, the time it’s taken to get your focus and flow flying so that you can make real progress. And the problem is far worse for difficult or creative jobs – switching between admin tasks (e.g. from email, to filling in an expense form, to sitting in an “update” meeting) is very easy because, quite frankly, you don’t really need your brain for any of these. But trying switching from something like “Think about the core strategy for my marketing plan for next year” to “How are we going to get people to read our articles on X or Y?” – very difficult indeed; and you’ll lose a lot of time trying to figure out “Now, what were we thinking about those articles? Where did I get to last time? Let me re-read my notes…”.

    So it’s a bad thing. But how do you avoid it? I’m trying something at the moment, which is working really well, so thought I’d share it. Completely by luck I read the following book:

    Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series)

    (It was a random £1.19 offer purchase on Amazon).

    Now half the book – the second half – isn’t great. It’s a little too full of pat phrases about “Creative thinking” and a bit too close to a self-help manual for my liking. But the first half has a handful of really great pieces on productivity and “How to get more creative work done”. My favourite quote, about email:

    RandomReinforcement

    This quote isn’t about context-switching per se, but about the related problem, that’s sucks up as much of our time as context-switching – email interruptions.

    Anyway, the primary bits of advice that I’m taking from a number of chapters, and that I’m currently trialling are:

    1. Figure out what time of day you do your best work. For me this is most definitely the mornings, starting as early as possible.
    2. During this time (in theory, when you’re going to do your best work), undertake a single, important task (say, for 3-4 hour stretch) that requires critical thinking.
    3. No interruptions, period. For me this means email is switched off, office communicator is off, anything on my phone that could interrupt is off, Skype, Yammer etc etc – basically everything.
    4. No meetings. A 30 minute meeting in the middle of a creative period, and you might as well kill two hours.
    5. Push all admin to the afternoon – no email replies (of course you’re not checking it anyway, are you, so you wouldn’t know to reply!?), no updating task lists, no taking 5 minute breaks to check your company Twitter stream, nothing.

    And so far – it’s been great! I’ve managed to write a long blog post, a couple of big plans, think about a couple of quite tough problems all just in the first week. The hardest part is that you have absolutely nothing to do all morning except the single task. And that’s tough if, like most marketing people, you’re used to jumping between tasks endlessly trying to spin the plates. I keep thinking “Surely there should be something else I should be doing now?”. But no – you’ve got the one thing to do, and that’s it.

    But the point is – you’re paid to think, come up with great ideas, solve difficult problems and add some real value. Replying to emails, having catch-up meetings, updating To-Do lists etc are just the necessary part of working in an organisation and, though necessary, aren’t where you’ll ever make a big difference – and if you don’t give yourself time to singularly focus on tasks, how are you ever going to come up with that great, big idea that could turn your marketing strategy around?

  • My 10 Biggest Marketing Screw-ups of 2013

    Alexander O'Neal Criticize

    It’s nearing Christmas, time for “Top 10…” and “Round up of 2013″ style posts, so here’s mine. One of my failings is that I’m a terrible self-critic, so I thought I’d write a piece on “My 10 biggest marketing screw-ups this year”. I don’t think I’ll get fired because luckily I work at a place that believes that “Visible mistakes are a sing that we are a healthy organisation.”, from p82 our Book of Red Gate. More seriously, we actively encourage learning from mistakes (a sort of kaizen I guess) and, as the quote says, if you’re not making mistakes, perhaps you’re not trying hard enough.

    So, excuses out of the way, here are the top 10 mistakes I think I made in marketing this year. I’m sure my colleagues could list many more, but these are the ones that are top of mind. NB: I was going to do a “What I learnt” section for each item, but for most it’s pretty obvious – Don’t do it it again!

    1. Trying to do too many things in parallel rather than in series

      This covers a lot of the year in fact, and was perhaps the thing that took me the longest to correct. In essence, there have been many times in the year where I’ve kicked off multiple activities (e.g. some Adwords work, a new site, some new emails, a change to pricing, some new social media activity), all at once, I guess with a view that “Well, one of these things must work!”. This is, I believe, a mistake for two reasons – i) Measurability. When you (hopefully) get a lift in traffic, which of these activities made that difference? Who knows!?  And, ii) I think if you try to do 10 things at once, you’ll do each of them, at best, adequately, and likely fail at all of them. If, instead, you focus on one specific activity, get that working, tuned, and implemented to the best of your ability, then move on to the next thing then this is more likely to get the results you’re after long term. Better to do 3 things well, than 10 things poorly.
    2.  Not being brave enough about making some significant changes to marketing spend

      Obviously I won’t go in to details here about what we spend on what, and that’s not really the point. The real issue is about following one’s gut feel for certain things, and having the courage to carry those changes through. For much of this year I’ve believed in making significant changes to certain parts of the marketing mix spend, but for a long list of reasons, none of which were insurmountable, I haven’t pushed those changes through. I could have done, but the changes would be risky, unpopular with many, and aren’t strictly in the area I work in. Nevertheless, I wish I’d pushed these changes through.
    3. Occasionally being too “Marketing-ey” in copy

      I work in the software industry. Tech people have a radar for marketing spiel second to none. Any hint of hyperbole or marketing-speak, and it’s a massive turn-off for our customers. Our copy needs to be plain, say what it does, talk in the customers’ language and so on. There’s been at least one major and a few minor incidents this year where I’ve written copy which is definitely on the wrong side of this line, and which shouldn’t have gone out. I guess it’s a quality/attention-to-detail thing, making sure I’ve done a final check of everything I’m sending out with a final “Is this just marketing BS?” check at the end.
    4. Periods of time out of contact with customers

      There are have been dry periods during the year where I’ve gone for weeks and weeks without speaking to a single person who buys our products. Just no good and, basically, laziness. Even if I’m not at conferences, or going on customer visits, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t just call a couple of them up and see how they’re getting on with our products. As I said a couple of posts ago, if you’re not at the coalface a lot of the time, keeping yourself up to date with what the customers really need, you can drift in to an ivory tower of speculation and digression, losing focus on what the customers are really interested in.
    5. Too much time re-jigging pages on our website

      It’s just too easy! Perhaps it’s borne of the Lean Startup movement, but it’s very tempting to endlessly play with web page layouts with the (I believe, mistaken) belief that “If I just put the video on the left and change the colour of that button, conversion rates will double!”. It never has. As I say, it’s just so easy to play with the website (rather than doing something more difficult and longer-term, such as “Building a community” or “Finding 10 reference customers”), and I should have resisted the temptation to sit in this comfort zone.
    6. Too much short-termism; not thinking long-term enough

      This is related to the previous point, but the Lean Startup movement implies “Make change X and watch conversion rates go up 10% in a week!”. But that rarely happens – genuinely building demand not just leads can take significant investment of time and effort, and you might not see the results for months, even years – if you can even measure the impact anyway. Endlessly pivoting week-to-week, just because some minimal piece of marketing work hasn’t shown immediate results is a hiding to nothing.
    7. Chasing shadows in KPIs

      This is a phrase borrowed from a colleague, but if leads go down 10% this month, compared to last month, does this matter? I’ve spent too much time investigating ups and downs in various metrics, to little effect. It’s the long term trends in KPIs – whether tracked over quarters, years, or even longer, that bring real insight in to your market, movements in customer demand and so on, and just chasing the shadows of local changes doesn’t really lead anywhere very useful.
    8. Not implementing marketing automation earlier

      We’ve been crying out for marketing automation for a long time and now, finally we’re implementing HubSpot (hurrah!). It’s going to be transformational to the way we carry out certain activities. But we’re not implementing it because of anything I did – thankfully another colleague made the effort to push the trial and implementation through, and it’s down to him that it’s now up-and-running. Given the importance of the change to all our activities, I should have prioritised it earlier in the year, if not last year and not let organisational difficulties get in the way. I guess the real learning here is that if something is going to fundamentally change the way other things are done, you should implement it first, as the other work will just become obsolete. It would be like endlessly tweaking all of your music and playlists in iTunes, getting it all perfect then at the end just switching to Spotify anyway..
    9. Not supporting Sales properly

      Sales people are the individuals actually talking to your customers on a daily if not hourly basis. If a sales person says “I really don’t know what to say when this problem comes up for customers, or how our tools solve it”, you need to listen and you need to help. In particular if your products do actually solve that problem for customers and you haven’t told your sales people it does, you’re throwing money away – revenue from leads that probably cost you a lot to acquire. Why throw it away at the final hurdle?
    10. Not just accepting that some things are unmeasurable

      Some (if not most ? ) of good, effective marketing is basically unmeasureable. You’ll never be able to quantify the enormous value to be gained from, say, taking a key industry influencer out to dinner and taking him/her through your ideas. I think I’ve spent too much time worrying about measuring everything. Instead now, I partition activities in to “measureable” and “unmeasureable”, I try to accurately measure the former and just forget about the latter – it’s pointless.

    And I’m sure there are many more things (I know there are lots of small things along the way..). Most mistakes are obvious with hindsight – of course if you don’t support sales properly, they won’t be able to sell as effectively as they could – but certainly not all are obvious with foresight. For example, at the time, it seemed like a great idea to analyse KPI data on a month-by-month basis (we’re all data driven aren’t we?) and it’s only with hindsight and experience that I see how little impact and importance that endless burrowing has had.

    So I’m quite happy to be open about these mistakes – some perhaps I should have avoided, but most are just things I’ve learned from another year of working in marketing in the real world.

  • Market Sizing – Old vs. New Markets

    anthony-gormley-field-1991-ls-m1

    I was attempting some market sizing activity this week. It’s something I haven’t done for a few months and quite frankly I’d forgotten how hard it was.

    I start from a premise that the future is completely unpredictable. Really, aren’t we kidding ourselves when we think we can predict how many people will buy our widget and at what price? But then this seemed rather defeatist, and I have seen market sizing produce some value, so I thought I’d try and break the problem down a bit.

    The other think I noticed this month was how much fruit-specific cutlery there is out there. You can buy a Kiwi spoon, a Mango splitter, a Grapefruit spoon and endless other tat to fill your kitchen drawers. So I thought I’d use this as an example market sizing task, focussing on a new, brilliant product idea I had, the “Apple Knife” (patent pending) – a knife specifically designed for cutting up apples with a fork bit on the end for picking up the pieces. I know, genius.

    So the usual method I use for market sizing is the standard “Start big, and narrow down” approach. And I try to use some sort of staging for this, a version of which is described here – try to define some sort of Total Addressable Market (how big would this market be, if we had 100% market share?) and then calculate some proportion of this, based on how many people we can reach, what market share we might able to get and so on. As a massively over-simplified example, for our wonderful Apple Knife product:

    • People in the world – 7bn
    • People who regularly eat apples – 1bn (I have no idea, btw)
    • People in the UK who regularly eat apples – 60m (we’re only going to sell to the UK to start)
    • Households – 26m (realistically, we’re only going to sell one per household)

    So, in theory, so far,  our Total Addressable Market is 1bn knives – if every person in the world who ate apples bought one, this is what we’d sell. I don’t think this will happen. So we have to start narrowing down the numbers.

    NB: You can always narrow the numbers down in different orders – addressable geography first,  or # of households first? I’m not sure it matters, but generally certain orderings are easier than others (e.g. it’s easier to find the number of households in the UK than it is in the whole world).

    Anyway, here’s where it gets interesting. If I were a naive presenter on the Dragon’s Den, I might go in and argue – 26m knives will be sold in the UK, at £5 each, makes a total market of £130m, ker-ching! (let’s ignore things like manufacturing and marketing costs for now).

    But, I suspect the dragons would have something to say about this. The next stage in the narrowing process is the most important and, I think, the most difficult – how many people will actually want to buy an Apple Knife? To continue our sizing process:

    • People in the world – 7bn
    • People who regularly eat apples – 1bn
    • People in the UK who regularly eat apples – 60m
    • Households – 26m
    • Households that will actually want one – 26m x n%

    And the key of course here is, what is the value of n? If we think everyone will want one, it’s 100%, great. But, if we’re being slightly more realistic, n could be as low as 0.01% – leaving us with a total market of £13,000 (26m x 0.0001 x £5) – somewhat less attractive as an investment opportunity. Or even less of course (I’m going off the idea more and more, as I think about it).

    I think the first parts of the market sizing, if not trivial, are much easier than the latter parts. It might not be easy to find, say, “The number of companies in the US that sell products online”, or whatever your top level numbers are for your business, but that’s a number which can, reliably be found – if I do the hard work to find that number of businesses, say 1.3m, then that number is correct and won’t change for a while.

    The latter numbers (or percentage multipliers) are very unpredictable however. But not completely – what are the tricks for improving the accuracy of this figure? I think this really depends on how new or old your market is. And this exists on a scale. With our Apple Knife example,  there are the following possibilities:

    1. We’re already in the specific apple knife business. We’ve been selling them for 30 years, and have been selling around 2,500 per year. We reckon our new model is a bit better than the old one, so we hope to see this go up to around 2,700 per year. But it might not, so a reasonable forecast for market size is somewhere between 2,500 and 2,700 – pretty accurate.
    2. We’re already in the “fruit cutlery” business selling around 5,000 kiwi spoons a year. We’ve got a pretty good understanding of the supply-chain, the market, we’ve spoken to our outlets, to see what they think etc, and have come up with estimates of between 1,000 and 5,000 apple knife sales a year based on that. This isn’t as accurate as “a new version of the same product”, but at least it’s close. There are also subtleties to do with how close different markets are – may be there’s a separate market for “exotic fruit cutlery” with particular dynamics? Or the soft-fruit vs hard-fruit cutlery markets are different in interesting ways? I have no idea, but the principle here is – you’re not starting from scratch.
    3. You are starting from scratch. You’re a company that currently makes electroplating chemicals and have lots of spare cash to spend; and you think apple knives is an interesting market for you. Ignoring concerns I might have that you have no idea what you’re doing in the new market, have no reach, no brand, no unfair advantages etc etc, you also have the issue that you have nothing to base your market sizing figures on – how on earth can you estimate these numbers (though see caveat below about stealing other peoples’ figures). You might have a go and estimate figures of between 1,000 and 20,000, but who knows?
    4. Brand new product/market. I’ve trawled Google, and I haven’t been able to find an apple knife for sale (I can’t imagine why!). So not only do you have no info about potential market size, but no-one does. Here, how do you know whether all 26m households will buy an apple knife, or not one single one?

    (NB: There’s a caveat here about access to competitors sales information. You might not be in the apple knife business yourself, but if you know a competitor who is, and have seen their sales figures – or can work them out from revenue etc – then that’s a great start. However, it doesn’t take into account massive differences such as market reach, brand, channels and other barriers to entry that differentiate the competitor from you. Nevertheless, looking at other companies’ revenue is a great check – if the biggest player in the market is only make £50,000 revenue per quarter from fruit-cutlery sales, that’s a good ceiling on your estimates..)

    Most examples I hit upon fall in to one of these four categories. A I say, the early parts of the calculation are relatively easy, but the latter parts, if your problem falls in to the last couple of categories – and most interesting innovations and product ideas do –  are very difficult indeed.

    And the basis of the problem – it’s almost impossible to predict take-up of a new product or a new innovation. If you’re producing a new laser printer, with slightly better functionality than others, at a slightly lower price, you can have a good stab at market sizing. But what if you’re innovating to provide a fundamentally different way of solving a pain-point – a pain-point which might not even be addressed at all at the moment? Though we all like the certainty of saying “This idea could make us £10m!”, we really are kidding ourselves. Instead, I prefer a more experimental, research based approach where we start on a new idea in a cheap or lean way (make a version of the apple-knife yourself and stand outside John Lewis, showing it to people and see how many would buy one), then start making forecasts when you have some idea of need and interest from the customers. E.g. if 1 in 1,000 people you asked said they’d buy an apple knife, that’s not a bad start. Though I think I’d be lucky to get that much interest..

  • My Product is Great. Why Do I Need a Marketing Department?

    campbells-soup-pink

    Well, I still hear this question and there is some logic behind it. I’ve created a product of beauty and wonder, why do I need to invoke the dark arts of marketing to get it out there? Won’t its greatness shine through and act as a beacon to all those lovely customers with their dollars and cents? It’s a simple enough question.

    Mm. Well, here are my 10 simple reasons for why you need a marketing department (okay, well perhaps a single marketer, if you’re just starting out).

    1. The first is really an aggregate of all of the reasons below. Creating a product without then applying any marketing is like building something in the attic of your home. With the windows shut. And the blinds closed. And the lights turned off. And then expecting people to just knock on your door out of the blue and ask “Can I have one of those please? Here’s $1,000!”. Until you’ve told someone that your product exists, they don’t know about it. Obvious stuff I know, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve just invented a time machine made from the parts found in a common garden shed – if you don’t tell anyone, they won’t know about it.
    2. Now, a bit more detail. There’s the foundation work you need to sell your product – a website. I don’t think it has to be anything clever (I’m much more of a fan of well-written words, over beautiful design, but each to their own), but it has to exist, it has to be findable (basic SEO, linked through from social media – see below, linked through from other sites and so on), it has to be usable so that the visitor doesn’t tear his/her hair out shouting “Where the hell do I press to get this thing?” and it has to tell you what the product is (again, see below).
    3. So far, all so simple. But again, a website will be left sadly unvisited, unless you drive traffic. How? 100s of ways, but a first is social media. Building a network of interested parties, letting influencers in the community know you exist, building a Google+ network to build traffic, replying to Twitter questions with “Yes, we do that! Come and see our site”, and doing all this in a way which isn’t creepy and too “marketing-ey” is a difficult and arduous task – for which you need a marketing person with personality, tact and a knowledge of social media etiquette.
    4. Another great way of building traffic to your site and something that has been very successful for Red Gate, has been encouraging 3rd parties to link through. This might be, again, contacting influencers and giving them free copies of your product (with the hope of a review in return), replying on forums when people ask appropriate questions such as “Does anyone know of a product out there that does X?”, contacting partners who could cross-market with you and so on. Again, a lot of social skills, diplomacy and patience are needed for this sort of thing, but the pay-off is well worth it.
    5. Positioning. Here I really mean product positioning and really what I mean is simply this – tell me why the product is so great! What’s this product great at? Why is it better than the competitors? What actually is it? The last might sound unnecessary, but in the few seconds that someone visits your site, they need to know immediately what the product is and does – particularly for a new product. Sent.ly is a good example – all over the front page: “Send & Receive SMS using the best SMS API there is.” There’s no confusion here, I know what the product is, and that’s good marketing. NB: for familiar products, something like this isn’t needed (e.g. iPod – you don’t need to put “An MP3 player that holds 1000s of songs”), but it’s essential if you’re just starting out.
    6. Explaining what the product is for humans. This follows from point 5 above, but you can’t expect people to figure out what your complex morass of interwoven modules, add-ins and platforms is – most people have better things to do. A good example here is Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. At the very top of this page it states:


      AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an even easier way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. 


      (NB: If you don’t work in the area covered here, this might still seem like gobbledigook, but believe me, it’s a really good simple explanation of what the platform does).


      Again, this might see obvious, and something that anyone, whether marketing or not, would surely do. But it’s still very common to come to a site and go away thinking “Yes, but what does the product actually do!?! I don’t get it!” – so frustrating.

    7. Pricing. How much will people pay for it? And more interestingly, how much will different groups of people pay for it? I’ve seen examples where the exact same bit of technology can be priced at 10 times the price for different customers. This could be considered as somehow “unfair” but if something is 10x more valuable for one customer than other, than why not? And if one customer has 10 times the capacity to pay, is that not also fair? Of course the clever bit is finding, and selling to, customers who are willing to pay that 10x premium – again, all marketing.
    8.  Creating new propositions from the same product. Okay, you have a great piece of tech that does all sorts of clever things, but it’s not necessarily something anyone would buy yet (except Early Adopters perhaps). What if you provided the product with 24/7 support? With an account manager? With an online academy? What if you put together a cheat-sheet for how to use the product in a completely different way (to its intended purpose)? What about a SaaS version? I found a great example recently of an add-in for a popular content management system that, basically turned that system in to a magazine publishing platform, sell-able to publishing houses (who may have no idea how the underlying product is pieced together). A great marketer can find those markets, propose the product idea and take it to that market at the right price.
    9. Lead generation and nurturing. Of course the goal of marketing is to generate leads – people who want what you sell and have started down that road with you. A decent marketer will generate leads. A good marketer will generate the Glengarry leads. A great marketer will be generating demand. Rule 20 in the book “42 Rules of Product Marketing” states “Generate Demand, not Leads”. A good example given by the author is organising a party for a Friday night. On the one hand, you can just tell people the night before, cajole/bribe them in to coming, try and trick them with a “Free drink” offer or something. And this will get a few folk through the door. They don’t really want to be there, but at least they crossed the threshold!?! Wouldn’t it be better though to start building excitement about the party weeks before, get a great band or sound system in, tell people what’s going to be happening, make sure a few key people will be coming and so on. You won’t then have to bribe anyone to come, they’ll be battering down the door. This is building demand, and a great marketer will focus on this rather than cheap tricks just to get any lead at any price.
      Also, once you have the leads, you need to look after them – nurturing. Imagine getting everyone through the door then demanding they all take a drink there and then (whether they want it or not), then letting find the next drink for themselves. Wouldn’t it be better to keep everyone happy, listen to what they want during the party, be ready with drinks when they want them and so on?
    10. Finally (though I could think of many, many more), branding and brand awareness. I think of branding as the most underrated, misunderstood and difficult of good marketing. I couldn’t possibly write a good treatise here on what branding is. I just think of it as “The reason why I’d always buy a VW over a BMW, regardless of how good the actual cars were”. I think it’s underrated, misunderstood and difficult because, even for larger organisations, the skills required to really create a strong, long term brand that customers will go to again and again, are very hard to find and it’s something that can so easily go wrong. For small companies, I think the brand can actually happen by accident – if you’ve got a great bunch of people putting together a fun company with a high quality product, then that will shine through in all of your output, creating a positive brand that people will naturally warm to. In contrast, if you’re not a very nice bunch of people, you’re probably going to have to spend a lot of money to try and cover up that fact with the paying public ?

    ..and there’s so much more here I could write (running great events, the whole of advertising, channel management, sales support etc etc etc), but these were the first 10 that came to mind. Hope you agree!

  • Waiting for Google

    This isn’t going to be a very exciting post unfortunately, though it was supposed to be. I visited the UK Google offices this week to have a chat about the future of Google Analytics, well Google Universal really. I was hoping for some help, some tricks and tips, perhaps a few sneak peeks at a roadmap with dates and maybe some contacts for people who were nearer to the holy grail of marketing attribution than we are, and could help us out.

    First of all, I have to mention the offices (in the newly built Central Saint Giles). Though not a big fan of the buildings themselves, the interiors of the Google offices were fabulous (as you’d expect). The area I liked the most was the library – where the rest of the office is very lively, colourful and conducive to high-octane innovation (or whatever they do there ? ), the library was this wonderfully quiet, brown-carpeted and wood-panelled space, which felt like a great place to really get your head in to a problem without the distractions of email, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn, Youtube, RSS feeds and everything else that stops us doing real work.

    But, that aside, we were there to talk about the issues we have with Google Analytics (GA), for help with the endless problem of marketing attribution, and also to talk a bit about social media.

    And they do have a lot of great stuff coming up in Google Universal (GU from here on). The vision is obvious in its simplicity – to break down the barriers that exist between silos of information whether online or not. So today, when we look at the attribution models that exist there are a lot of things missing in the model (a lot of these are straight from Avinash’s posts – who works for Google as well, particularly his post here):

    1. Offline activity before online activity that contribute to lead generation, including –
      1. Events and conferences,
      2. Word of Mouth,
      3. Print ads and direct mail,
      4. TV, radio, posters etc,
      5. (Potentially) product trials
    2. Offline activity after online activity, primarily sales that take place on the phone or by email (i.e. not through a browser tracked by Google),
    3. Activity happening on different devices (right now, GA doesn’t pick up that the customer who bought yesterday, actually did lots of research on his/her iPad just before purchase) – phones, tablets, home PCs vs work PCs, other browsers even.

    One of the key things they’re trying to do as well, which was very interesting, was to move away from viewing Visits, Unique Visits or even Unique Visitors and instead to consider the Customer as the central key for the data. “Unique Visitors” is a proxy to this, but suffers from all of the problems mentioned above – if that individual customer browses sites on a mobile device, found out about you at a conference and eventually buys on the phone (with a brief visit to your site, somewhere in the middle), then you still don’t really know what happened, even if using Unique Visitors as your focus.

    So this was all very interesting and all very exciting. But what I realised about half-way through the conversation, was that so much of what they’re offering is still very much in the future – hence the title of this post. There are many things that are theoretically possible, but I’m afraid they were a little short on real and useful implementations that we could take away and use. Two problems for which we didn’t get great answers were:

    1. Attribution of offline activity such as an event. I was really after some great best practice advice and to find out how others had fixed this problem. Instead it was mainly just some quite obvious suggestions (“Have you tried a specific redirect URL for customers at an event, such as www.red-gate.com/NYCEvent2013?”) which we already knew,
    2. Integration with CRM systems so that customer data could be pulled in to GU and used to segment better. E.g. if you could add in your own knowledge of your customers to GU – for example, what sector they were in – then this would be a great way to split out your attribution to suit your own business. You could display things like “Show me what marketing worked for the Insurance sector vs. Healthcare”. But again, this is a way off. In theory it can all be done right now, but there are no pre-existing add-ins for Salesforce, SugarCRM, Dynamics (all the standards) as yet. If you want to try it, you’ll have to have a crack at using the APIs yourself.

    So my last question to them was basically “Can you give us a feed or channel through which we can find out when these things are going to be available?” – and this answer was actually useful. The best place is the training and thought-leadership events and conferences that they run about GU, as things will often get discussed at these events that aren’t firm yet, that aren’t quite ready for public consumption and so it’s a great place to hear the buzz. If I go to one of these sometime soon, I’ll report back if its useful!

    So overall, a little disappointing, as I’m quite a practical person and wanted to come away with something I could implement the next day (as an aside – always a great rule of thumb for training/educational events – if people can leave your conference and implement something the next day, that’s a great success). I’m excited about what they’ve got coming, but I really want to see the worked examples, the pre-written integration packs, the services that seamlessly plug in and “just work” for measuring offline activity. When these come, I think we’ll really start to see the true power of something like Google Universal.

  • What I Should Be Doing as a Marketer. But Won’t Be

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    “Should” is a complicated – and dangerous – word in marketing. How many times have you read blogs and articles proclaiming that you “Should be doing more mobile marketing”, that you “Should have full content strategy”, that you “Should be creating personae for all of you target segments”, “Should be doing more on Twitter”? And it’s not just from marketing “thought-leaders” – as a marketer, I probably hear suggests on a daily basis of new things that we “should” be doing.

    But I want to use this post to dissect the word “should” a little. When someone says “You should be doing more social media advertising”, what do they mean? I think “should” is a word with too broad a definition in this context.

    As a first pass, I’d like to narrow “should” to mean “Activities which will have a positive impact on the business and affect the KPIs you worry about”. I know this is obvious but we’re not doing God’s work here – marketing activities and spend exist to generate and nurture leads to make money for your business. Unless you’re doing marketing for the church, in which case, yes – you are doing God’s work.

    A second criteria that has to be applied is a constraint – you only have limited resource (either people or money). I suspect there are very few activities that would be particularly negative for your business. The problem is that many have very little impact at all. This would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that marketing costs money – so it needs to do something positive for your business, or you’re just wasting your limited resource.

    So the criteria so far is that you “should” carry out an activity if it positively affects your business and if it’s do-able with your limited time and money. So far, so obvious. But, how do you know whether these criteria are met (the first one is the hard one – it’s pretty easy to know how much something will cost to do, much harder to know if you get a return on that investment)?

    I try to use four levels of qualification to assess whether we do something. I’ll describe these below, then try to apply them to the plethora of activities that our business does. Really these are measures of “How strict am I going to be on the evidence I need and level of analysis required to say that a given activity is really worthwhile?”.

    The levels are:

    1. “Should” do, because thought-leaders on the Internet think it’s a good idea,
    2. “Should” do, because although there’s no data to support it at all, I believe these are having a beneficial impact,
    3. “Should” do, because there’s pretty good data showing it actually works,
    4. “Should” do, because there’s good data that would stand up to scrutiny by any scientist worth his/her salt.

    And here’s my table of activities showing whether I think we “should” do these things using these criteria. NB: By “Should” I really mean “Spend a lot of time and/or money getting this right”:

    Chart

    As you can see – a lot.

    Couple of points to make:

    1. Nothing fits the fourth criteria – having evidence good enough that wouldn’t be ripped apart by a half-decent scientist. I studied science at college, and remember ripping apart published psychology papers because of poor experimental setup (there is always an alternative explanation in psychology!). I’ve never seen any study or data in the area of marketing which reaches even the lowest standards applied by a psychology researcher – for example, running longitudinal studies or setting up proper controls. Still, if we applied this criteria, we’d never do a single thing in marketing!
    2. The list of things where there is even half-decent data supporting the work (criteria three) is also pretty short. As per my previous post, this is why we’re working with HubSpot – that list has to grow bigger, so that I can more confidently say “Yes, that works, and here’s the evidence (albeit, scientifically embarrassing) that it does”, converting criteria three items in to criteria two items.

    Given all of the above, here’s what we’re planning to spend more time on going forward shown in red. As I say, the fact that there’s nothing against “SEO Optimisation”, say, doesn’t mean we don’t spend some effort on it as a company. What it means is that I don’t believe spending a lot more time and effort on it, will move any needle that I’m interested in:

    Chart2

    Again, a few points:

    1. Everything we’re doing is something I believe works! Even if I have no evidence for it…
    2. But we’re not doing everything I believe works – this is the time/resource constraint. We have to prioritise and some activities that could have an impact just won’t happen. Even though we “should” do them.
    3. There are things like “Google Adwords” which we won’t be spending more time on, not because it’s not very important but actually because I think we already do a great job and we’re in the arena of diminishing returns.

    But, we do plan to kill a lot of activity. Activity that we really “should” be doing. It’s just that I need to use a different definition of “should”, one that allows us to focus and focus on things that I think will make a difference.

  • Value and Predictable Revenue Improvements

    I really like this very simple post about how to buy wine, when you don’t really know much about it (which is definitely me). Basically, select a price (say, £7.95), then select a wine at that price. That’s kind of it. And what Evan Davis is saying is “Statistically, give or take anomalies, most wines at £7.95 will be about £7.95-ness in quality”. The article is written from the consumers’ perspective but if you view it from the vendors’ point-of-view, he’s saying “If you want to charge £7.95 for your wine, you’d better make it worth around £7.95 in value”.

    Though this is a massive over-simplification of the process of coming up with a product, researching that product, marketing it, selling it effectively etc etc, it is, for me, a fundamental approach to product marketing. If you want to add 50% to your bottom line, then, somehow, you need to be adding 50% more value to customers this year compared to last year.

    I’ve written previously about the difference between big-M Marketing and little-m marketing – the difference between finding new markets, new people, researching what people want, creating propositions etc and the less impactful role of just tweaking Adwords, designing flyers and so on. I think the two most effective bits of work that a Product Marketing person can do, under the banner of “Big-M Marketing” are:

    1. Finding whole new markets and groups of  people who could use your proposition in some way. I.e. you’re currently selling wine in the UK for £7.95, why not sell wine in Ireland for 10 Euros?
    2. Finding new ways to add real value – researching what people actually want and either coming up with new products, or adjustments to a product that people want. Really, providing something of tangible value.

    An example of the latter is lower-alcohol wine mixers. There’s a large section in Sainsburys selling pre-mixed Buck’s Fizz,  Kir Royale, Bellini and so on which barely existed 5 years ago.

    images

    Some bright spark has thought “Hang on, rather than forcing someone to find a cheap Cava then try and find where on Earth the cassis is displayed, let’s just mix them and sell them at a great price!”. It’s clever – if somebody has to drive, but doesn’t just want to drink orange juice, they’re very low alcohol and great too.

    If you were a wine vendor, and a marketing person in your org came up with that idea, there’s a pretty good chance you could increase your revenue by a reasonable margin that year (assuming you get everything else right!). Particularly if you were already selling all of your current wines in the right places, with the best labels, at the right price, in the right combinations (if relevant).

    Of course another way the wine company could make more revenue is to improve the wines they currently offer. Obviously, easier said than done, but if they can come up with the processes and methods to improve the grapes (I suspect “Having better hillsides in France” might be part of it) and the wine thereafter, they’re directly improving the value of what they offer – and therefore, by Evan’s simple economics, can charge more for their wine. NB: I don’t think much market research is needed here – I can say pretty confidently that a better tasting wine is what most customers are looking for..

    This doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t revenue to be obtained from great presentation and promotion. If both of the following labels were on £7.95 wines, which are you most likely to buy:

    Wine Labels

    And of course there are countless examples of great marketing adding enormous wealth to a company’s coffers. The one that comes to find is Calvin Klein underwear. Add your brand name to a pair of pants and watch your business soar! And there are lots more examples like this where, fundamentally, the product offering hasn’t been improved at all (were the pants really any better for Klein putting his name on them?) and the marketing push has had an amazing impact.

    But – I think this sort of success is just far less predictable than success borne of product improvements. These are shots in the dark and for every Tango Orange ad, there are a string of forgotten, and often very expensive marketing failures. Also, I’ve rarely seen examples where just re-arranging product combinations or thinking of some clever re-presentation of the core value has made any sort of lasting impact.

    In contrast, I believe adding new, researched features to your product offering is the most predictable way of increasing revenue. I.e. by adding value to your offering, you can charge more for it and make more money. Simple! Joel Spolsky said this a long time ago:

    With six years of experience running my own software company I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features. Nothing. The flow to our bottom line from new versions with new features is absolutely undeniable.
     

    So if you have a choice between spending £100,000 on finding and implementing great new features for your products, or spending that on a new advertising campaign, though the ad campaign may produce some magic like it did for Tango, the more predictable revenue will come, I think, from adding some real value for your customers.

  • Competition, Disruptive Innovation and Total Recall

    total_recall_kw_new1

    A key part of any product marketing role is analysing the competition for your product. Put simply, when your potential customers are looking to solve a particular problem or take advantage of an opportunity, what are the options that they see, one of which (hopefully!) is you?

    Sometimes this job is easy when you have direct and obvious competitors (presumably Sony see Samsung as a competitor for TVs and vice-versa), sometimes not. However I think it’s worth breaking the problem down in to different types of competitor, most of which are relevant regardless of product category. I’ve listed these below (well, the ones I use anyway), ending with perhaps the most dangerous competitor of all – disruptive innovation.

    Following on from an earlier post, I’m going to use the product category of “Holidays”, and try and work out what Eurocamp’s competitors are in this space.

    Types of Competition

    1. Not buying anything

    Though it seems strange to talk about “not buying anything” as a competitor (who exactly is the competitor!?), this is an important group to consider if one of the biggest impediments to people purchasing your product, is people not purchasing anything.

    I think there are actually two sub-divisions here – people who don’t buy anything because they don’t want to, and those that want to, but can’t.

    1a. People who don’t buy anything because they don’t want the product category

    It’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t want a holiday, so I think this is a small group in this category. However, if the category was pet food, then this is simpler – I don’t have a pet, so you’re never going to convince me to buy pet food. This group isn’t really competition at all of course, so forget about this segment.

    1b. People who don’t buy anything because they can’t

    A very different group to the above. In the area of holidays, there are many reasons why people don’t buy a holiday at all even though they want one. But you can often do something about these problems as a way of “Beating the competition”. For example:

    Don’t buy because can’t afford it – offer much cheaper alternatives, out of season, last minute offers, cut cost-base and so on.

    Don’t buy because don’t want hassle of foreign travel – offer holidays in home countries, or take away all of the hassle of getting to the sun (think “Costa del Sol”).

    Don’t buy because no-one to go with – offer holidays targeted at singles, either for mixing with other people, or aimed at adventurous independent spirits!

    Don’t buy because too busy with work – offer weekend breaks

    And so on. There are ways of addressing this sort of competitor, as long as the desire for the product category is there.

    2. DIY

    Rather than buying a holiday, why not just get in the car, put a tent in the boot, drive to the south of Europe, set the tent up and hey presto – a holiday without paying a penny to any provider! This is a group who want to take a particular opportunity/fix a problem (in this case, taking a holiday), but don’t want to buy anything from anyone to do it. An example in the world of software – instead of buying MS Word to write documents, why not just use Notepad, or Write that comes free with Windows?

    There are various reasons why people prefer to do it themselves, rather than pay you for your product or service. Sometimes this is price – they can’t afford to buy your product. Sometimes though this is on principle – why pay for something you can get for free, or build yourself with a little effort? I don’t remember my parents ever buying a sandwich from a sandwich shop – they would always go home and make something instead, it was cheaper and nicer (i.e. for them quality outweighed convenience).

    If the reason for not buying something is price, then see above for possible solutions – can you offer something which is really not far from free (perhaps selling just part of the service) which the customer can afford? If the customer has to go my ferry or plane, then you could offer this limited service. With campsites as well of course, you could still profit from the holiday, by selling pitches in a variety of sites.

    If the reason is principle, then the only way to address this is to really honestly think about what value you can add. This sort of customer isn’t going to buy your product just because you have a shiny website and an easy purchase process. Can you offer better pitches than could be obtained otherwise? Faster check-in? Flight availability the customer couldn’t get otherwise? Can you genuinely take away all of the organising hassle that goes with a holiday? Offer facilities, tours and activities that they couldn’t get otherwise?

    3. Direct, obvious competitors

    This bit’s easy. If you’re Eurocamp, there are a series of direct and very easy-to-find competitors which, give or take, offer more or less the same product at a similar price with similar service. At the sites I’ve been to, Eurocamp, Canvas Holidays, Keycamp and others all offer the same accommodation and at similar prices.

    There are all sorts of strategies for competing against direct obvious competitors – brand? Price? Key differentiators? It depends on your market of course, but at the very least you should have, for these direct competitors, key “killer lines” for why you’re a better purchase than them. If not to display externally, for your sales and marketing teams to use in competitive situations, when pushed.

    4. Same product category, different market

    This can mean a lot of things, but what I’m really thinking of, are the competitors in the same category (here “Holidays”), but that are addressing a completely different market. For example, a week on a campsite for £300 is a “holiday”, and a week at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris for 10 times this much  (at least!) is also a “holiday”. Similarly, if you’re selling a piece of word processing software for £100 and someone else is selling a something for £300, that does an awful lot more then yes, both of you are in the “Word processing software market”. However, you’re addressing a very different market. In the latter example, Microsoft sell MS Word for less than £100 and it’s sufficient for most people. However, a lot of academics pay a lot more for Nota Bene, primarily because of its advanced citation and bibliography functionality. Are these the same market? Similarly, when someone is looking for a £300 holiday on a European campsite, are they going to be looking at 5* hotels in Paris as well?

    For these reasons, although it’s good to identify these different competitors, and make a judgement call on how close to you they are, I don’t believe they’re as important as the others listed above. The exception to this is when they start innovating and moving in to your space – the last category of competitor:

     5. Disruptive Innovators

    This is the hardest group to track and the most dangerous. Clayton Christensen coined the term “Disruptive Innovation” in the classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and there are lots of sites showing some good examples of disruptive innovation, for example:

    1. http://www.slideshare.net/Christiansandstrom/5-examples-of-disruptive-innovation
    2. http://mashable.com/2011/10/09/7-disruptive-innovations/

    I like the infographic on the 2nd link, with some good simple examples:

    Disruptive-Companies3

    A few themes come through here – often the disruptive technology somehow fulfils the same need for value (e.g. computing power for entertainment and other needs) in a cheaper, more portable way (the iPad). Also of course, and most dangerously, these innovations often come out of the blue and can completely undermine your business model (pity the poor netbook providers).

    Really your only protections against these disruptions are to both keep an eye on what “the market”/your competitors are up to (keeping up with market trends, looking for new ideas that are bubbling up, new releases from current and potential other competitors, talking to analysts)  and also investing in innovation yourself. You should be actively trying to undermine your own business by looking for new approaches to solving the same problems – you should, after all, have the expertise!

    Back to the world of holidays – what would be the disruptive innovation in this category? The best I could think of was the use of memory implants in the film Total Recall (the classic original of course, with Arnie, not the dull remake). Instead of having to actually go to Mars, they could implant the memories of going instead, presumably at a fraction of the cost.

    But like all disruptive innovations, it wasn’t without technical glitches, and as far as I’m aware, we’re not quite there yet…

  • Why Product Managers Often Aren’t Great at Marketing

    Machiavelli

    Back when I was a developer, many years ago, I worked with a superb sales person – an ex-McKinsey sales person – who had been tasked with explaining to all us techies “What Sales Did”. Of course we already knew the answer – “Nothing, except get paid more than us, drive nicer cars, get more recognition, fly around the world and generally take up space that could be used by someone useful – someone like me”.

    The start of his explanation was as follows:

    “A sales department exists to convince people to buy things that they don’t want. If they did want it, then it would be an orders department.”
     

    He then went on to elaborate on different techniques, but at the heart was this basic premise. In essence, if someone is phoning you up and saying “I love your product so much, I’d like to buy five right now!”, then you don’t need great sales people or indeed sales people at all. You need people to write down the orders, get the invoice sent out and follow up on payments when they’re late.

    Sadly, the reality is a lot different. Most people out there don’t want your product. Unless you’re Apple, you’re not fighting customers off with a stick (and in the world of software, “Running Out of Stock” is rarely an issue!), so a considerable part of any marketing or sales role is to convince people that they want something that they don’t currently think they want.

    Now of course there’s a lot of gradation in what this really means. It varies from the almost illegal and certainly immoral (convincing someone to buy payment insurance, that they can never claim back on) to the much nicer end of the spectrum, where you are just making someone aware of a genuinely great product, that they might never of heard of before. For example:

    Thing-a-ma-bobs

    These knitted chainmail hats from Thing-a-ma-bobs are just the greatest things. But before someone had told me about them (or at least, posted a photo on Facebook), I had no idea they existed and so certainly didn’t want them. As soon as I saw them – where can I get one? The product is great.

    But this is still sales and marketing – it’s marketing that put this item in front of me. Similarly, I’m very lucky to work for a company that makes great products. I would say it of course, but Red Gate is the first place I’ve ever worked where I genuinely believe the products are great (my test for this is “Would I recommend the product to a friend?” – as I say, sadly, the first place I’d ever say “Yes”…).

    So marketing at Red Gate is a job I’m happy to do – because at no point do I feel like I’m hoodwinking someone in to buying something which is crap. Nevertheless, the job does consist of letting people know what the products are, promoting what they do, convincing people they’re better than the competitors’ versions, convincing people they have a need in the first place, even if they didn’t realise it, and so on. I.e. convincing people to buy something they didn’t previously want.

    And this, finally, gets to my point – working in marketing requires a certain perspective, a certain attitude, which is that you’re willing to change the minds of customers from not wanting your thing to wanting it. You’re willing to manipulate (in the nicest possible way), cajole and influence so that people get their wallets out, when they were, previously, quite happy not to.

    And this, I think describes why some Product Managers struggle with some marketing activities. At the heart of the product management role is a concentration on the product. Of course many roles in product management and marketing overlap, but the job title gives it away somewhat – most of your time as a PM is spent on creating the best possible product that fulfils the market’s needs given time, budget etc etc. And surely, when your masterpiece has been created, its perfection will not need explaining!? Its so obviously a great product, that does exactly what everyone wants and needs, any marketing is just superfluous? If anything, marketing has a negative connotation – if something is being marketed, this would imply the product needed marketing. How can this be?

    Obviously this is an over-exaggeration (like all blog posts ? ), but the point is about the type of mindset that I often see differentiates product management folk from product marketing. Are you willing to promote your products and services to people, even when there are alternatives out there that, Heaven forbid, might be as good as, or even better than yours? And are you willing to convince someone to buy something which, right now, they have no need for, and have never even thought about buying?

    Are you willing to convince someone to buy something they don’t want?

  • Favourite marketing posts of 2012

    This post is now 11 years old so a lot of the links no longer work!

    This is my last post of 2012 before breaking up for Christmas and I thought I’d finish with one of those lazy “Everyone’s out for Christmas, let’s just re-use some old material” posts, summarising my favourite articles that I’ve read this year.

    Rather than keeping a methodical record of what these have been this year, I’m actually just going to use the items that exist in my Pocket app, on the iPhone. This great little app lets you store articles that you find for reading later, when offline, though it’s also useful as a way of keeping track of “Things I really want to read, I just don’t have time right now”.

    Sadly, I realised that this totals around 30 or 40 items, which reflects poorly on my ability to get round to reading anything. So I’ve tried to group these in some way and just give a brief summary for each, for why I found them so useful. Also items marked *** are my particular favourites. Enjoy!

    Marketing Attribution

    The Buyer Lifecycle

    • Tom Pisello: The ROI Guy: Who Do B2B Buyers Trust? – another big priority for next year is mapping the customer journey/lifecycle and provide appropriate and well-timed content for our customers (aka context marketing). This is a nice practical guide to the sort of content people want at different stages.

    Blogging

    Product Marketing and Roles

     Marketing Automation and Lead Qualification

    Social Media

    • Social Media Measurement Is Still In Infant Stage of Growth – I’ve struggled to measure the ROI of work in social media (I’ve ended up at “Not everything that counts can be counted” – not very satisfactory) and although this post doesn’t give many answers, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one!
    • Search versus Social – which one wins? I love this infographic on which is better for marketing activity, Search or Social. E.g. what is better for lead gen? Search. For brand awareness? Social. ***

    Content Marketing

    Practical SEO Tips and Tricks

    B2B Marketing

    • Your Business Tech Buyers Are More Social Than Ever | Forrester Blogs – Red Gate are a B2B organisation (well, we sometimes like to say, B2BC – treating business buyers like end consumers), and I thought this was an interesting Forrester post about how you should be using Social Media in the B2B environment – these people are still using Twitter to find information, particularly for the type of buyers Red Gate has

    Miscellaneous

  • Lean Personas – How to Make Personas More Useful

    First of all, I prefer the term “Personas” to “Personae”. Doesn’t “Personae” just seem pretentious, n’est-ce que pas?

    Anyway, the point is, I’ve always struggled, over the years, to find personas a useful tool in marketing. I’m specifically talking about marketing here, rather than user-centred design – I know these are two sides of the same coin, but my main concern is with their use in marketing.

    The process of creating personas has often been interesting, perhaps even fun, but then when it comes to the next stage – of actually using them in some way to drive marketing effort – they never seem quite right and they never seem very usable. I think they can also be slightly dangerous – if the process for creating personas hasn’t been cast-iron, then you can find yourself making messaging and positioning decisions based on, what – a few Google searches, chats with a couple of customers and a few internal meetings? Not really good enough!

    So I thought I’d describe the process I prefer to use. A key part of this, though, is the end goal. For me this is:

    Resulting personas should be strong enough that they are believable, simple and genuinely useful for sales, marketing, user experience and any other member of the team.

    This seems a little vague, but the point is – the usual problem with personas is that a lot of effort is made, some big pictures of archetypes are printed on the walls… then everyone gets on with their jobs, ignoring the work that’s been done. A persona should be so strong, that the sales team members recognise that person perfectly, have just spoken to five of them that week, and keep referring to the persona, without being hustled by marketing or UX.

    So, the process I use is as follows, and is actually very simple:

    1. Start with some market segmentation. Don’t be tempted to jump in to personas yet, but start by trying to figure out a few basic segments for your market. There are lots of ways of doing this but, for me, the key point is to avoid personas at this stage. Why? Because it can bias your segmentation towards familiar and known archetypes, undermining the validity of your segmentation. For example, if you’d worked marketing mortgages for a living, and you’d always worked in the homeowner segment only, then you might be able to come up with a rich and powerful set of personas for types of mortgage owner such as “Young, stretched first-time buyer”, “30s affluent”, “Older, careful-with-money” and so on. These would be based on your biases about people you’ve encountered in your work. But what about Buy-to-Let borrowers? If you’ve never encountered them before, you wouldn’t even consider different BTL personas. It might be (I don’t know) that a quarter of all mortgages are lent to this group, and by missing out this group in your work, you’re forgetting to create personas for a key segment. If you start with a segmentation first, based on some real data, then you’ll be spending your efforts on persona creation in the most valuable areas.
    2. Once you have your segmentation, take the largest ones of most interest (2-4, any more can get confusing) and create personas based on these. NB: It may be, in the above example, that you’re just not interested in Buy-to-Let borrowers. Fair enough, ignore them, but at least you’re doing that based on real data.
    3. There are a lot of well-documented processes for creating individual personas. Your user-experience teams, if you have them, are likely to be of great help here. For me though, a guiding principle is that these have to be based on real people. I know this is obvious, but if the end goal is believable and useful personas, then these will only happen if you’re pulling out traits from people you’ve actually spoken to. In the example above, if you were trying to better define a “30s affluent” persona, you need to speak to some people in their 30s, who are genuinely affluent. Are they actually in their 20s, or 40s? Does age even matter? And do they feel affluent? What’s that based on? Then, when you go in to further characteristics (such as “Where do they go out?”, “What websites to they read?”, “What newspapers?”, “What sort of neighbourhoods do they live in?”, or whatever you’re interested in), these also need to be validated. It’s very easy to fall in to stereotypes here (“Go to the theatre”, “Read The Guardian” etc) but are these true or just projections of our own prejudices?
    4. Once you have some interesting personas, the next stage is to then validate and adjust these with customers. This is why I call this post “Lean Personas”. Rather than spending months coming up with perfect personas, then launching these in your marketing, I think it’s a lot more useful to do an initial, decent job, then to test these against the people you’re talking to, whether on the phone, at conferences, or wherever. Obviously you can’t ask someone “Would you consider yourself a 30s-affluent type!?”. But you can ask, as background, “What papers do you read?”, “Where do you go out?” and so on.
    5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 a few times, perfecting your personas as you go along. Of course you can start using these in early marketing, but the real value can often take quite a few months, if not longer – when you reach a point where your sales and other people are willingly using your personas to help them in sales conversations, and when you can classify people in to personas at the drop of a hat, because they’re so familiar and so right, then at that point, you’ve got some great personas going forward.

    Good luck. I’m about to embark on this exercise myself, so I’ll write up how I get on!

     

  • Product Marketing and Product Management Roles

    Simple Minds

    I wrote a brief post, about the different roles in the area of product management and product marketing, so it was interesting to read what Saeed Khan had to say on the subject in the following two posts (the first one in particular):

    http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-1/

    http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-ii/

    These posts give really great insight in to what the different roles are. In particular I think he gives a really nice, succinct description of the product marketing role:

    Product Marketing is responsible for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the Sales and Marketing teams to ensure they are aligned and work efficiently to generate and close opportunities. Product Marketing is strategic marketing at the product or product line level.

    I agree with a lot of what he says. My one caveat is where Saeed talks about some of the poor definitions of the distinction that are used. In particular, a definition I’ve trotted out myself a few times is:

    Product Management focuses on putting product “on the shelf,” and Product Marketing focuses on getting product “off the shelf”.

    I use a slight variation on this, specifically:

    Product Management focuses on putting the right product “on the shelf,” and Product Marketing focuses on getting product “off the shelf”.

    The criticism Saeed makes of this and other definitions is that they are overly simplistic and don’t help people understand the subtleties of the different positions. But I beg to differ – I think it’s exactly this simplicity that makes this definition more useful. Less correct, yes, but more useful. Like any model or descriptive aid, this phrase is wrong in parts. For example, if a product manager wasn’t worrying herself about how the product is going to get off the shelf, then she’s not doing her job properly. Additionally if the product marketing manager isn’t thinking about how the product experience could be improved to help usage and sales, then he’s missing possible opportunities for improving the marketing/sales funnel.

    But – to people outside the product management/marketing function, I think it really helps people to get a grip on what product marketing managers do. I’m not sure that’s explained as simply with Saeed’s approach.

    The other point to make as well, is that it really depends on the people you employ. No individual perfectly fits in to one hole or the other. We have product managers who are quite product marketing-ey, and some that aren’t (and the same, reverse point for PMMs). It’s not a criticism of one type or the other, it’s just that people are generally better suited working to their strengths, and the jobs people actually end up doing rarely fit in to narrow definitions.

    Still, great post – and nice to know that what we do at Red Gate kind of fits in with how others see the split!

  • Are you doing marketing or Marketing?

    Seventh Seal

    Very interesting post here from the start of this year, from Joshua Duncan:

    http://www.arandomjog.com/2012/01/the-end-of-product-marketing/

    In it, Joshua describes how the role of Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is, essentially, moribund – not because the work done by these people isn’t required, but because these activities are rapidly being taken up by other individuals (Product Managers, MarComms etc), leaving PMMs with little left to do.

    To be fair, what he says at the end is – you’re not going to survive if you’re an average product marketer, because a lot of the day job will be done by others, so you’d better get very good at some part of the role.

    It’s nice to see some great comments at the bottom of the post (rather than the usual trolling!). And it is a very thought-provoking article. However, for me (or at least for the place where I work) the flaw is the difference between what I think is marketing, small-‘m’ and Marketing, big-‘M’.

    If the marketing function at your organisation consists of, basically, a few website updates, a bit of Adwords, check your SEO now and again, knock up some flyers for the trade-show, some banner ads and landing pages, may be even a few blogs now and again, then I can see Joshua’s point – a product manager covers the product strategy (and so doesn’t need any input from marketing-types) and the marcomms team (whether internal or external) can write the copy, produce the website and flyers and so on. And I think this would cover pretty much everything you need to keep the marketing juggernaut going. But I call this small-‘m’ marketing – it’s all necessary work (if you’re not on top of your Adwords and SEO, for example, then you’re just throwing opportunities away), but how much value is a PMM really adding to this? If the product manager is on top of the product strategy, users and benefits, and marcomms are looking after copy?

    Where I think PMMs can really add value is doing proper big-‘M’ Marketing. And by ‘value’ I mean revenue. The sorts of things I’d classify as big-‘M’ Marketing are:

    1. New markets. Sure, your existing customers see every new product new release, but what about the stack of potential customers who know nothing about you? Or would never consider using you? If you currently sell exclusively to tier 1 banks, how are you going to reach tier 2 banks? Or how are you going to reach the government sector, where you’ve never had any luck before? Or Brazil!?
    2. New business models. If you’ve always sold a perpetual license before, how are you going to start selling on a monthly subscription? Are these the same people? How are you going to change your offering to suit?
    3. Turning a product in to a proposition. You have a great product, but what needs to be added to turn it in to an attractive proposition? Support contracts? Professional services? What?
    4. How do customers perceive your product range as a whole? Does it make sense, all together?

    And so on – for me, these are the reasons why marketing is so interesting and so difficult. And, more importantly, where you can make a significant impact on revenue. I didn’t get in to marketing to figure out whether banner ads at the top of the page are better value-for-money than the bottom of the page, but to try and figure out ways to make a significant difference to revenue by doing strategic Marketing, not marketing.

  • Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc

    Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc

    As mentioned a few posts ago, I attended the Agile 2012 conference a few weeks ago. As far as I can see, one of the products of this movement has been the advent of the “Product Owner” role in the scrum team. This is someone who, as far as I can gather, does some of the work of the Product Manager, but is generally working much more closely to the Scrum team, guiding them with what they should be working on next.

    There are various articles written on what the different roles in the area of product management and marketing should be doing. The Pragmatic Marketing Framework is a superb resource describing all of the different tasks that form part of these roles.

    However, from reading a lot of these articles, many seem to be missing a fundamental point. In fact all of these roles, as I see it, are fundamentally the same – all are trying to figure out what are the features, benefits, propositions and messages that will make money from your product. If a product owner isn’t prioritising features that will make a difference to revenue (whether short term or long term) then she isn’t do her job properly. If the marketing person isn’t trying to craft propositions and messages that make some difference to the bottom line, then again, he is wasting his time. And more importantly if one of those people is ignoring factors outside of their traditional role, then this is something that needs addressing. Some of the most successful product marketing I’ve seen is where a product marketer suggests changes to the next sprint of the product or when a product owner has ideas about how to present features in a certain way, to certain types of people (maybe even writing the blog post herself).

    To be honest, I find most of the conversations around defining job roles rather dull – as long as everyone is working on the same commercial goals, the nature of different peoples’ jobs tend to fall out pretty quickly based on what needs to be done.