Creating a market for groundbreaking technology has never been easy, but today’s marketers have it especially tough. So how do you create a marketing strategy that breaks through the noise and gets your game-changing product or service the attention it deserves?
I’ve been marketing on the bleeding edge of technology for two decades. At Genesys, we pioneered the first wave of cloud applications (integrated voice, video and online presentation software). Then later, at ON24, we moved large-scale and high-cost events online. At Apigee, we accelerated digital transformation with APIs. Lately, I’ve been leading Snowflake’s efforts to redefine data warehousing for the cloud era.
Here are the five strategies that guide my approach:
Lead with education.
Truly innovative technology doesn’t fit into a box. It either gives rise to a new market or completely redefines an existing one. Either way, it’s uncharted territory for your buyers.
Instead of leading with traditional product marketing, deliver consistent, ongoing and valuable information that makes your buyers more intelligent so they ultimately reward you with their business and loyalty. Look at your company from your customers’ perspective. What problems are they grappling with that you can solve? Start there.
Next, get to work creating great content. Speak to your customers' pain points. What keeps them up at night? What motivates them every morning? How can your product or service help them make an impact?
Champion customers in everything you do.
These days, everyone talks about making data-driven decisions. But what speaks even louder than metrics? The voice of your customers.
In the early days of a company, establishing credibility and trust is paramount. But it’s also really hard, especially for companies introducing radically innovative technologies. Customers can help. They provide proof, which can be a powerful signal to your prospects. Every company wants to know what other, successful companies are doing and learn from their approach.
Always stratify content options so your prospects can experience your customer testimonials in a number of engaging ways. To truly value and involve them, create a customer council. This is a small group of your most engaged and impactful customers spanning a number of industries and business models. This will help you stay on top of who your best advocates are.
Involve partners at every opportunity.
It takes a community to provide a solution comprised of several complementary technologies to meet all of your customers’ needs. As a marketer, ask yourself how you can present customers with solutions that are bigger than just your product or service. From a demand generation perspective, everything you do with partners has a multiplier effect. If you run a campaign with two partners, you essentially triple the reach versus going it alone.
But don’t just slap partner logo on a banner at an event or add their name to a joint piece of content right before it publishes. To truly partner with these companies, invite them into the process early and involve them in the decision making. No matter the event or piece of content, develop a cohesive message from start to finish to deliver real value and a memorable experience.
Align closely with the sales team.
Many marketing teams run their programs in a silo, creating missed opportunities. Alignment with sales is critical. The closer the alignment, the better your marketing team will understand customers and their journey to purchase, which in turn helps them drive even more qualified and motivated prospects to your sales team.
To ensure this relationship, get a mandate from the top to get the partnership started and make it stick. Meet with as many members of the sales management team and with sales reps as necessary to understand their prospects’ pain points, what insights would grab their attention and their trust and how that content will create a low-touch sales experience while still moving prospects through the sales funnel.
Let the data be your guide.
As CMO of a groundbreaking cloud data company, the power of data in marketing has never been more clear. While data-informed decision making has been a major theme across all of the pioneering companies I’ve worked for, recent advances in technology have opened up so many new opportunities for marketers.
The key is to figure out how to track the customer journey. Then you can apply content and communication depending on where they are in the journey. For example, one of the biggest challenges in data warehousing is creating a single repository for all the varying types of data generated inside and outside an organization so they can analyze it and derive business insight to make informed decisions. But the challenge of creating this single source of truth has plagued organizations since the first data warehouse solution emerged four decades ago.
We start by providing a thought leadership piece of content on the topic with almost no company branding. From there, we direct prospects to a short video by a subject matter expert (SME), recommending an optimal approach. From that video, we link to a more hands-on how-to guide, likely an e-book. By now, the prospect is hungry to know who has done this. That’s when we offer a video or two of our customers who have actually accomplished this. By this stage, they’re likely ready to digest our product information or engage one of sales representatives.
