"I consume; therefore I can market." Many people underestimate what marketing is and can do for a business. It would seem strange for someone to say, "I use a computer; therefore I can program." Nevertheless, many technology experts seem to regard marketing with apathy, if not out-and-out suspicion.
Techies often identify marketers as accomplices to the function that shall not be named: sales. Both sales and marketing are often viewed by engineering types as unnecessary, intellectually restricted, and just plain evil. Maybe that is because marketing is seemingly void of scientific explanation and often unclear in its cause and effect. However, consider that without sales and marketing, software is quite literally invisible bits.
So, let's briefly discuss what marketing really is and why it is important to software businesses.
First, here's a practical definition of marketing:
Marketing identifies, attracts, fosters, and retains qualified sales leads.
The continuity implied here is that marketing is responsible for finding precisely who will buy the software, enticing them to consider buying it, and then helping them consummate the purchase. As such, the objective of marketing is:
To profitably find prospects and then help them make efficient buying decisions.
The words "profitable" and "efficient" are key, because they imply that marketing doesn't count if it uses too much time or too many resources. So how does marketing avoid wasting time and resources?
To begin with, it must obtain a body of knowledge that will help to make defensible marketing plans. More specifically, that body of knowledge starts with marketers understanding the demographics and psychographics of buyers, users, and influencers. This helps narrow down the target segment and make it easier to position the product to reach the target audience with relevancy.
Next, marketers must thoroughly understand the buying process: who is involved, what steps occur, and how long the process takes. Marketers use this knowledge to effectively support the prospects' buying cycle and, ideally, shorten and optimize it.
Third, it is imperative that marketers know where prospects feed - that is, where they get information. This means they must know the media, events, and other places in which information about your type of product might be shared (formally or informally). Examples might be associations, conferences, meet-up groups, blogs, and LinkedIn groups, as well as which thought leaders influence target buyers. This information obviously affects the places and methods used to educate and market to the target audience to let them know about your software and its applicability to their lives.
Clearly it's important for marketers to be knowledgeable about competing vendors, but many of them don't make the most of that intelligence. Marketers should know not just the obvious offerings, the ones that are similar to yours, but also the products that yours might replace in function and/or budget.
And certainly, in terms of competition, pricing is not just a tool for profit management; it also works for positioning a product and sometimes even to help qualify appropriate buyers. (Sure, we all want to drive a Mercedes, but we aren't all qualified.)
The most amorphous area of expertise is predicting market trends and future marketing opportunities. Marketers should be able to assess major technological, social, and economic trends in their target markets and consider how much these may affect the business, whether positively or negatively.
One of the more challenging aspects of marketing is figuring out the balance between push marketing - generating awareness of the company and product with the target market - and pull marketing - retaining qualified leads and bringing them closer to the buying decision. Sorting and assessing which programs will generate desired results is not an easy task for any marketer, especially when budgets are limited and time is of the essence.
Why Do They Call It a Campaign?
Once all of these areas are known (which may be easier said than done), marketing's strategic plan and the tactical execution of that plan become based less on guesswork and more on math. For example, knowing what the close rate is per number of generated, qualified leads will allow marketers to better plan programs with which they can fulfill the needs of the sales pipeline and then measure the effectiveness of the programs as they are in process. Depending on the campaign (and the marketer), measurement may not be all that easy (or even possible).
To help manage the innate invisibility of marketing, lead tracking systems can help. Even simplistic ones done with Excel or ACT! can be better than using nothing. Knowing what leads are coming from where, and what happens to them when they go off to sales or a partner, can make or break a marketer's career. He or she may be generating terrific buzz and activity, but that may be moot if there is no way to demonstrate it in terms of marketing's cost-effectiveness, let alone its ability to deliver enough qualified leads.
Perhaps the toughest aspect of marketing today is filtering out the noise and figuring out what works for a specific business. Twitter is great, but not in all cases. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might not even apply to a business, and if it does, what's the right amount of sizzling Flash and boring old (but searchable) HTML on your website?
And speaking of websites, I contend that writing something pithy and captivating is much harder than writing something that is lengthy and educational. Whitepaper or brochure? Demo or narrated PowerPoint? You get the picture. Making defensible, measurable, and yet creative decisions is what makes marketing something not everyone can do - or at least do well.
Marketing is a professional discipline, and, like any other, it requires schooling, degrees, professional training, and ongoing personal education as new technologies and techniques emerge. Moreover, marketing isn't about any one tactic, such as social media, SEO, or direct mail. This is why experience helps, and makes all the difference when resources are scant and the marketing department may be, at best, one full-time person.
Knowing how to write a well-crafted press release for SEO, as well as attracting target readers, is no small thing. Writing the proper survey questions so that the answers are clean and not accidentally skewed is not an intuitive talent. Just try pitching media or crafting a positioning message if you have never done it - it's kind of like writing unintentional, self-referencing code.
So before we throw marketing under the SaaS, Agile, or Web2.0 buses, let's just keep in mind that marketing never was, isn't, and never will be easy& even for really smart marketers. Given the challenges of doing more with less, the answer isn't to cut marketing or use an inexperienced intern. You always get what you pay for, and if you cut corners on marketing, your customers probably won't pay at all. Marketing isn't a necessary evil; it's a scientific art form that can help make scary code attractive to the right buyers.
Formerly a CMO for a public company, Alyssa Dver is chief executive of Mint Green Marketing, which consults for companies ranging from large multinationals to small startups. She is the author of No Time Marketing and Software Product Management Essentials.
