In Marketing We Trust! Or at least a little bit...

One of the challenges that most professional marketing folks have is limited resources.  Limited time, limited budget but an UN-limited amount of work to do.  Think about it.  When it comes to driving sales and improving your business opportunities does anyone really ever say, "That's plenty, go home!"  There's always one more thing to do, one item to cross of your list and then tomorrow's another day.  That's a marketing truism that has held true no matter where I've worked. 

So why the need for trust?  Because the marketing discipline is one more step disconnected from the customer versus Sales or Product management.  Sales people are on the phone or visiting their customers directly so it's easy to measure what they do.  Product managers should also be directly engaged with their customers to identify upgrades, feature and products that will bring value to their customers so easy to measure their value there.  Product marketing folks (and marketing in general) sit one level further away from the customer in between sales and product management.  So it's more challenging to directly measure results and develop KPI's (key performance indicators) that accurately measure marketing impact.

So back to that trust story.  If your sales group or product management don't trust the marketing department or efficacy of their programs and efforts, guess what happens?  They start asking for more "concrete proof" of your marketing work.  Which means finding semi-accurate measures (or proxies) that tell your marketing efficiency story.  But as you can guess, those numbers are never that easy to pull together and unless your have a great CRM tool and a way to automate those reports, you're digging up information from multiple sources, slamming it into a spreadsheet and then creating a purty Powerpoint to present to the team.  Sigh.  And that of course, is a LOT of work.  Every single bit of time spent pulling up metrics and reporting back to the team to reassure them means you have less time to work on outbound activities and campaigns to influence and engage your customers. 

When your business is in good shape and you've got well-differentiated product or service, the above scenario is not an issue.  But if you're on a struggling product line, you can guess that fingers will get pointed back to marketing.  It can be easier to do that then fix a product or add an additional salesperson to the team.  So as a professional marketer you HAVE to maintain that trust with both teams to ensure you'll be given the latitude and time to get your work done the way it needs to be done because time is limited. 

I've been down that rat-hole where trust is lost and you can end up in a death-spiral of trying to show the efficacy of your efforts which then puts more pressure on you and your outbound activities.  The key is to keep your teams engaged and aware of your marketing activities and be transparent about their impact.  While you can not measure every single bit of your work, there needs to be enough hard metrics to show your value and impact.  Or maybe you can blow enough hot air and use words with lots of syllables to assuage their concerns.  Me, I'd rather just show the Product Management team and Sales team how effective I am.  Because even if you're a marketing professional, you're better off spending more time marketing to your customers than marketing to your internal teammates.  

Between a Rock- Product Management and a Hard Place- Brand: The Challenge for Product Marketing

Product marketing is often one of the first roles to get cut during a business downturn and I've often wondered why.  In reality the juggling act that product marketers must play is a challenging act of managing peers, executives, expectations and delivering marketing assets and programs that impact and enhance, product revenue.  At the center of the Product marketing role, from what I've seen, is a constant balance and tension between Product Management and Creative/Marketing Services.  One team designing and creating services and products for end-customers, the other a creative team designing assets, images and providing editorial services for the Product Market to go outbound with.  And why is there a natural tension between these two groups and Product Marketing?  It's pretty easy to see.

Given product marketing's role to deliver information to customers in an engaging an easily consumable fashion, we walk a tightrope between Product Management and Creative.  Product Management ideally has created features and offerings that will resonate in the market.  And they want to tell the whole world about it in a kitchen sink fashion.  But in the end, feeding features and benefits in a customer-friendly voice means bringing a prospect down a path that may take some time.  Telling your product story in a world filled with content, advertisements and social media means trying to get the attention of somebody who's nearly in ADD-mode.  So you must be succinct, you must be memorable and craft marketing content and copy that hits the mark and stays with your targeted audience.  Basically it's taking a big bag of "stuff" and ideas, and distilling it down to impactful ideas and imagery.

Once you have your content and copy, you need to get it produced in a variety of different assets within print and online.  You have to get it edited to make sure it stays within your brand voice and fits into the broader, corporate marketing umbrella.  And that line with Creative often gets blurry.  In their attempts to "clean up" or make the copy more "brand compliant", you often lose specific ideas, features and details that they think may be extraneous.  They may nix non-standard ideas and phraseology to toe the corporate line and in an attempt to keep content within brand.  And this line is often fuzzy and hard to define leading to content and ideas that have been inoculated and have lost their edge and effectiveness.  And when you've got 80 things to do today, you can't over-work and perfect any one project so you accept wants been returned to you and move on.

So that fine line between the kitchen sink approach of Product Management and perfectionist behavior of Creative often leaves Product Marketing in the precarious position of driving content and assets through the system in the most expedient and effective manner.  It's not about being perfect, it's about getting a compelling story to your audience in a multitude of ways.  And walking that tight-rope between these two key collaborators can be a huge challenge.  Just try not to fall off that tight-rope because as you can guess, doing so will lead to really unpleasant results! 

Doing More with Less, the Crux of Marketing and Limited Resources

When I was in business school, one of the questions I was always asked during interviews was: What did you do in this situation with limited resources.  And I always wondered about that question, limited resources?  Don't marketing groups have these large budgets to go do what they need to do?  Don't they have service groups and external companies to help them with what they need to do?  But after six years in corporate B2B marketing, I clearly understand what they mean.

One example of limited resources is limited time and bandwidth as an individual.  Even when you have teams that are supporting you.  Whether it's email marketing, design services, editors, videographers and advertising firms, even with an imaginary unlimited budget, the key bottleneck will be the product marketing person.  In the end, someone has to have the vision, the responsibility of executing on a specific initiative or program. And there's only so much you can outsource out. Eventually the responsibility ends with you as a professional marketing person which means meetings to report on milestones, direction and then a post-mortem to understand what was accomplished, what could have been done better and how to improve things next time.

And let's just say you are burning the midnight oil, creating assets, copy and programs that are innovative and interesting for your prospects.  In the end, one person can only do so much so you end up driving the work through your service groups.  The reality is that once you get past yourself as a bottleneck, there may be another one downstream.  Maybe your editors are backed up with all sorts of work and special projects.  Maybe people are on vacation a lot.  In the end, you are only as good as your downstream resource groups.  If they are unable to keep up with your output, there's going to be trouble.

The final part of this limited resources question is the input. As the product marketing person you quickly learn that everyone thinks they can do your job.  Engineers, Brand, Product Management, everyone.  And everyone, of course, has advice and suggestions on something cool and new to do which will absolutely work. Or they will absolutely need to have.  New ideas are really dime-a-dozen.  What matters in marketing is what you can execute on and get over the line.  When I say get over the line, it doesn't mean an automatic success.  But it means completing the task or program to the point where either you have a success, a failure or something in between to learn from in concrete ways.  There are a million ideas out there, don't get overwhelmed trying to deliver them all.

In the end, one of the key skills any product marketing person will have is balancing expectations, reporting and results to all involved to effectively meet goals for your product lines.  And that line moves over time and is often fuzzy. Without the innate instincts of where to put your efforts and what's most important to execute on from a financial, business and political standpoint, you'll sink your time and energy into endeavours that will not benefit your team, your product line or yourself.

So what would you do with limited resources?  Unfortunately that's an answer any professional marketing person must answer every day, every hour that they are working.  Yes, I totally understand that question now!