Product Marketing is Evolving… Is Yours?

Posted on September 26, 2013 by KaonTrendSpotter

The customer-facing role of product marketing is rapidly changing. Customers are driving the sales process and expect a more hands-on interactive experience as a result of the consumerization of technology. As a result, companies need new ways to captivate and engage their customers to shorten the sales cycles and drive revenue. Product marketing is playing a pivotal role in this evolution. To tell an effective story, product marketers should incorporate these five trends:

1)     Product marketing takes a strategic role in content development  – When it comes to content, it’s usually the marketing communications team that takes the lead in content creation and distribution, but it is time for product marketers to take a larger role in content marketing efforts. Product marketers are the ones that understanding the buyer’s business challenges deeply enough to determine what content will alleviate concerns and answer their questions. Product marketers should be the ultimate content gatekeepers to ensure that the organization doesn’t create tepid, diluted content that will be too generic to truly engage anyone.

2)      Customer Drives Immersive Product Experience – There is a growing trend — customer driven experiences at every stage of the buying cycle.  Companies need to create more opportunities for customers to experience the product before they buy. Product marketers will want prospects to immerse themselves in a hands-on interactive experience virtually to dive deeper into products on their own terms through supplementary content and sensory experiences. In doing so, marketers can expand their reach to global customers by leveraging these interactive experiences on the web and mobile devices. From controlling their own experience, the prospect will gain and retain more product knowledge, making them a more informed purchaser, resulting in shorter sales cycles.

3)   Capitalizing on the Importance of Visual Storytelling – Successful B2B marketing content must have an engaging and storytelling component, as sales cycles are long and the need to engage an audience is pivotal. To do this, marketers are turning to visual storytelling. With 65% of the population being visual learners, these type of visual experiences captivate and engage. These experiences are particularly effective because the brain processes visual information 66,000 times more quickly than text! Viewers become more than spectators when engaging with a story: they become brand ambassadors, sharing the stories with other people, talking about what they learned.

4)    Integration of reusable product marketing content across all channels and increasing importance on mobile — Product marketers must create more relevant, reusable marketing content that can be integrated in multi-channel campaigns. Mobile Apps are the growing future of product marketing, used to easily demonstrate products, quickly disseminate updated product information to Sales teams and customers alike, and providing an unique touch-driven platform for marketers to capitalize on. By ensuring that you content isn’t strictly developed for the web, or a particular device, savvy marketers are repurposing content across venues to create a seamless customer experience.

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Working Mothers ‘Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk’

Posted on September 20, 2013 by kaonmarketingguru

Why? Because we don’t have the time. 41.6% of women working fulltime have children under the age of 2. Does that surprise you? It surprised me.

As a Senior Director of Marketing and mother of a 6-month old boy, I can tell you that there are very significant life/work challenges that come with being a working professional and mother.  Maternity leave policies in the US are ridiculous and finding the time within a busy workday to pump (especially if you’re heading to a conference or trade show) is extremely challenging.

As a marketer, I live-and-die by checklists, and I’m very methodical about making sure everything is done on schedule. Most days I find that I don’t have time to think strategically, or even take deep breath, but I know that needs to change for the success and growth of my company.

Strategic thinking needs to happen when rested and rejuvenated, but with new working mothers loosing approximately 740 sleep hours in the first year of your baby’s life, how can we defy the odds and become more strategic?

All right, I know what you mothers are thinking, what’s more important? Quite literally providing food for your infant OR making sure that you help your company meet their quarterly numbers? Well the truth is that they are both REALLY important, and the role you play within your company will significantly benefit your child and yourself in the long run, so you want to make sure you’re doing your best to think strategically, even when struggling with sleep deprivation.

4-Steps to Aid Working Mothers in Thinking More Strategically

  • Keep Notes. Great business ideas are everywhere but with SO much going on in the everyday life of a working mother we tend to forget record our ideas.
  • Schedule Strategy Sessions. Block 1-hour per week to think about ideas that aren’t on your current to-do list. Sometimes this is best to do with a co-worker so you can bounce ideas off one another. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box or look at how other industries are innovating.
  • Ongoing Education. Try to attend one learning session every 1-to-2 months. Do it during working hours, and if cost or travel is an issue (which often it is), there are tons of free Webinars going on daily.
  • Failure is an Option.  Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is a stepping-stone to success. If you don’t take the time to communicate your ideas or implement new programs, you’ll never excel.
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The Science Behind Why “Good” Marketing Makes Selling Much Easier

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Gavin Finn

Mark Twain is credited with many profundities, including a journalistic favorite: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

One of the most relevant Twain sayings for marketing and sales, however, relates to a critically important element of any company’s success: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  In the case of prospects (and even, sometimes, customers) their misinformation and misperceptions about your company and products cause your sales cycles to drag on, and often to fail.

The most difficult problem for any salesperson is to try to change someone’s mind. Cognitive research has shown that, even when people are presented with irrefutable evidence contradicting their convictions, they generally do not correct their erroneous beliefs. This can become an intractable problem if a company has not adequately laid the correct marketing groundwork, in order to ensure that the target market accurately understands the company or product position, unique benefits, and differentiated value proposition.

This is exacerbated when people make a decision based on inaccurate information – because unlike the “first impression” principle, once people make a decision, their likelihood of changing the decision is almost nil even in the face of overwhelmingly convincing evidence, due to the principle of cognitive dissonance. 

When the right information and messaging is available to the target market early in their research or discovery process, then the individuals involved in decision-making have the opportunity to form judgments based on accurate information, and these are the judgments that will stay with them throughout the buying cycle. Marketing teams should have a laser-focus on ensuring that the company and products have the appropriate positioning (that unique place which the company/product occupies in the target market’s mind relative to the problem that they are trying to solve) and differentiated value proposition (the business driver that is moved/changed by the company/product in a distinctive way.) Without this, the sales teams have the unenviable task of trying to change someone’s mind, in order to convince their company to buy your products or solutions.

How can marketer’s do a better job of this more accurate positioning and differentiated value proposition? By always providing more information and tools for customers to learn about how their business or technical challenges are solved through specific and relevant benefits and capabilities of the company’s solutions – at every customer touch point. Consistently engaging customers in an interactive dialogue (as opposed to passive, or static presentations of generic catch phrases) will result in the target market truly understanding your unique value, because interactivity results in better knowledge retention of key messages.

It is difficult enough to sell products in today’s globally competitive B2B markets, but to add the complexity of having to correct the target market’s misperceptions is an unnecessary and expensive burden; one that the sales teams should not have to bear.

 

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