Product Marketing Trends for 2010
While your mechanic might want you to believe that your car needs an oil change every 6,000 kilometers, automobile and oil technology has progressed to the point where recommended service intervals are now 15,000 kilometers or more. While this saves money and time, the downside is that minor problems often go undetected and become major issues; thus, it probably makes sense to have someone pop the hood every once in a while. In much the same way, product marketing should conduct periodic checks to ensure things are running smoothly. A perfect time to do this is during the yearly planning and budgeting cycle. In this post, I will reveal three key trends that should be on the radar of every b-to-b product marketing executive in 2010.
One: A Role in Sales Readiness
Many organizations have a dedicated sales readiness function that resides in sales and owns coordinating, synchronizing and integrating field, inside and channel sales with a variety of marketing functions. Product marketing must work with this function to define a common lifecycle management process across product lines/business units and to develop field requirements for sales tools, which will help sales reps understand what will be available when a new product or service is introduced. Product marketing will also need to work collaboratively with field marketing and communications to build the tools and collateral necessary for sales to more effectively facilitate buying/selling cycles. Product marketing can also play a key role in the evolution of the sales and marketing portal still prevalent in many organizations. Newer sales enablement platforms give reps the ability to intelligently search a content database for opportunity-specific content and customize it. These platforms also encourage collaboration across sales and marketing functions through community features and support for embedded social tools.
Two: The Rise of Hypersegmentation
Effective b-to-b organizations target at a sub-vertical level rather than stop at macro verticals, as buying triggers, trends, regulations and propensity to buy often vary wildly. This calls for increasingly defined target-level segmentation, or hypersegmentation, then choosing the strongest targets relative to one another. As product marketing tends to serve as the go-to source for information on an organization’s target markets, it will primarily fall to these marketers to educate the rest of the organization about deeper industry segmentation possibilities and how they can help provide a competitive advantage. Tighter targeting helps product marketing deliver better intelligence in such key areas as markets and roles, competitive threats and opportunities, win/loss analysis and pricing. Product marketing should help develop processes to take advantage of a hypersegmentation model without having to continually recreate individual programs to target.
Three: Program Interlock
One common theme for every marketing role is program interlock, or the process of marketing counterparts building integrated programs that align reputation, demand creation, sales enablement and market intelligence goals under a common campaign framework. Besides streamlining activities, this level of integration supports the reuse of content and best practices across marketing programs. Working together to align campaigns will also help raise the visibility of product marketing within an organization. Product marketing can provide field marketing input on product/solution positioning and messaging to ensure consistency, but also share its customer knowledge with field marketing to take advantage of hypersegmentation, which should improve the performance of demand creation programs. On the reputation side, product marketing can contribute to communications programs with unique value propositions for various audiences, then work collaboratively to define the mix of tactics that deliver them.
Product marketing is a hub of marketing, providing a foundation of intelligence and content that can be leveraged by the entire marketing function. While its capabilities and value to sales and marketing processes are often overlooked, product marketing can take concrete steps to integrate its expertise across a wide range of marketing programs.
