Marketing is dead: long live product marketing
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The document discusses the decline of traditional marketing and the rise of product marketing as a more effective approach. It emphasizes the importance of understanding market needs, targeted messaging, and providing valuable content to engage potential customers. The author advocates for a strategic shift toward inbound marketing that focuses on attracting customers through helpful insights rather than pushy sales tactics.
Marketing is dead: long live product marketing
- 1. Marketing is Dead* *long live Product Marketing April Dunford rocketwatcher.com
- 2. My Background • Big Companies • IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere) • Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services) • Nortel (head of incubation) • Startups • Infobright • DataMirror (exit to IBM) • Janna Systems ($1.4B exit to Siebel Systems) • Solarsoft ($100M roll-up) 2
- 3. Marketing Sucks • Untargeted and generic • Interrupt-driven • Way too pushy (most marketing doesn’t care if I’m ready to buy yet) Marketers are yelling, and not even yelling at me in particular…
- 4. Plus There’s the Lying….
- 5. Nobody Believes Marketing Anymore ….and can you blame them?
- 6. The World has Changed Vendors are no longer THE source of Information • Customers can broadcast to the world • Prospects can easily talk to each other • Product info is readily available Prospects are far along the buying path before vendors know about them
- 7. What Changes? Buying vs. Selling Earned vs. Bought Media Customer Service Visibility vs. “Branding”
- 8. Who Will Get us Out of This Mess? You. Yeah, Ms./Mr. Product Marketer, I’m looking at you.
- 9. Why Product Marketing? • We get segmentation • We understand the market needs of our segments • We have deep product knowledge • We know how those fit together
- 10. A New Marketing Framework
- 11. Key Elements in this New Environment Inbound Messaging Marketing and Content Visibility
- 12. Messaging Needs to answer 3 questions for prospects: • What is it? • Is it for me? • Why should I buy it from you? Stories, stories, stories.
- 13. Paris Hilton Marketing beautiful but makes no sense 13
- 14. What You Do? Netflix – Watch as many movies as you want for one low monthly price. SalesForce.com – the world’s favorite CRM software as a service. Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software. 14
- 15. You do WHAT? Sun Microsystems – Innovative products and services that power the network economy. Sterling Commerce – helps companies optimize and transform their dynamic business network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs. Any internet b2C startup – Personalizes the Internet!! 15
- 16. Step 1: What the Heck is it? Keep it brief Use simple language Just come out and say it! 16
- 17. Segmentation is not a Dirty Word Market to Everyone, Sell to No One 17
- 18. Explicit Targeting is Powerful ThinkGeek: Selling geek t- shirts for programmers, linux hackers, and open source geeks. VS Customink: your t-shirt expert for companies and individuals. 18
- 19. Go Deep – The Janna Example CRM for Investment bankers: • Use cases, day in the life of a banker • Demos, example data • Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed • Sales Enablement: the IB dictionary 19
- 20. Step 2: Is it for Me? Be explicit about who you target Use their language Go as deep as you can 20
- 21. Why Buy From You? The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school: 21
- 22. Why Buy From You? The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school: Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES 22
- 23. Why Buy From You? Value Features Make sales more productive Integrates customer data from any source, show relationships between customers. Deploy new applications 20% Extract and transform data from faster heterogeneous sources Resolve IT issues faster Monitor cpu and memory usage in real time. Pay off your debt sooner View all account information in one place, graph spending patterns. Sharper, more realistic images Megapixels 23
- 24. (do that and you won’t need to lie)
- 25. Step 3: Why Buy it from You? Value not Features Focus on Differentiators 25
- 26. Bring it to life with Stories Go ahead April, tell them a story…..
- 27. Inbound Marketing What it’s NOT: • Broadcasting info about products What it IS: • Attracting customers to you by offering helpful stuff
- 28. Content for Prospects Content needs to be helpful Provides the benefit of your expertise in the market (not necessarily about product) Needs a programmatic approach: • Requires a strategy • Map to steps in buying process
- 29. Visibility How non-users observe that others are users: • Product features • Shareable content • Reviews/awards • Independent analysis • Success marketing
- 30. Thanks! RocketWatcher.com Twitter: @aprildunford 30