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The Rubicon Agency
In Insights, Miscellaneous, Our industry, Product marketing, The Content Spectrum

The importance of the product marketing enigma machine

Marketing enigma machine thumb

Cracked by the boffins at Bletchley Park and synonymous with films like The Imitation Game and U-571, the Enigma machine was at the bleeding edge of cipher technology in the mid 20th century. Unlocking the true meaning of its coded messages had a monumental impact on the outcome of WW2.

With a slightly tangential pivot, the same premise could be applied to deciphering the sometimes-cryptic messages unveiled by product marketing teams. Tasked with communicating a product, solution or service to the market, product marketing can sometimes default to showcasing the technical features and functionality.

Now, there is a time and a place for this information – comparing competitors’ offerings can require a forensic peek under the covers. However, being able to convey the benefits to a non-technical audience or apply relevance to certain lines of business is a skill that requires a degree in translations.

Demonstrating the art of possible

As we are all well aware, buying centres and tech budget holders have become more diverse than they were 20 years ago. Lines of business including HR, finance, marketing and sales now have dedicated budgets to purchase x-tech products and services.

Assuming these buyers aren’t tech savvy, or particularly excited by the number of functions your product offers. So, how do you effectively communicate the value and the difference of your brand over a competitors?

The answer is empathy. Put the product in context. How is it going to make their lives better? How is it going to benefit the business? What possible use cases can your product be applied to? These are some of the messages that will cut through the noise of traditional speeds and feeds information.

The growing influence of Product Marketing Managers

In a recent article, McKinsey reported that PMMs could be the secret weapon in turning products from ‘meh’ to ‘must-have’. They stated the following:

  • Market understanding: PMMs bring essential insights to the table which in turn help tailor products to meet customer needs and preferences.
  • Orchestration: They coordinate efforts across teams to ensure a seamless transition from development to market launch.
  • Risk mitigation: By understanding market dynamics they’re able to reduce the risk and guesswork associated with new product launches.
  • Revenue growth: Companies with robust PMM functions see significantly higher revenue growth, with top performers having a 25-30% higher ratio of PMMs to product managers.

Used effectively, product marketing managers can bridge the gap between development and customer speak, they can pivot the stories above to resonate with their audience and act as ‘chief code breaker’, to take the technical intricacies of the product and decipher it into real business benefits.

At The Rubicon Agency we have a track-record of working with product luminaries and ‘simplifiers of propositions. Together, we craft product marketing content that bridges the gap between tech speak and storytelling. With over 25 years of experience working within the B2B tech sector we know what it takes to articulate a new product, service, platform or architecture.

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The Rubicon Agency
In Insights, Our industry, The Content Spectrum

Surface and serve ‘the power of people’ – an open letter to tech services marketers

Consulting and services blog thumb

People are brilliant

Not everyone can possess the scientific, literary or mathematical brilliance of Einstein, Wilde or Turing. Luminaries and intellectual gamechangers like these don’t come along every day.

However, brilliance manifests in various ways, reflecting exceptional intelligence, talent, or skill in specific areas. Brilliant individuals think deeply, solve complex problems, and generate innovative ideas daily.

It’s a shame that this truth seems to lack recognition in much of the tech services marketing for professional services (PS), managed services (MS) and engineering consulting (EC). How can we change the record here?

The new services universe

‘Old-world’ IT Consulting has long been a complex industry, where well-paid organisations are charged with ‘integrating the un-integrateable’. And managing the (almost) un-manageable.

Big advisory firms, boutique players and top-drawer resellers have feasted over the space for decades. Their success stories had/still have the potential to influence corporate client success – and for institutions to deliver-on policy pledges.

But times are changing.

  1. The new world of IT is more integrateable, more composable, more modular.
  2. IT itself can now deliver more profound business capabilities than previously dreamt of.
  3. Tech offers are now (generally) configured to be consumed as a service.

But while this is all true, it still needs the power of people to make it happen. We must make sure the value of human ingenuity, assurance and experience shines-through in marketing PS, MS and EC offers. This is not always the case.
Articulate the potential of people

As technology marketers, or b2b tech agencies, we’re used to extracting and communicating the value/potential from a software, device or platform. We’re experts at projecting the impact to the user or buyer. But advisory plays are a little harder to land.

Yes, explaining process and operational pathways are part of the job – especially for complex, high-risk tasks that benefit from a ‘good-old’ methodology. But don’t forget about the value-add. And it needs to be better than competing offers too!

What’s the checklist for services marketers?

For b2b tech marketers with a people-driven service portfolio, they should:

  • Ensure each play expresses the very difference of human input – not just a flow of tasks.
  • Cluster service propositions into meaningful bundles where collaboration and intersection of expertise can flywheel success.
  • Create constructs that express the escalation of value aligned with human inputs – possibly around a lifecycle or buyer experience.
  • Establish interlocks between individual services – creating a pathway around the incremental plays that can deliver compounding gains.
  • Embed a vision/ultimate customer destination that can only be achieved with the right combination of tech play + services play.

Manifested properly, these principles will set marketers and tech agencies on the right path.

Blending empathy with expertise

With services plays, tech marketers have more chance to apply empathy and emotional intelligence. Here they’re selling people to people. They’re addressing highly-human concerns – ‘is that something we could do?’, ‘do we trust that to happen?’,’ how can that possibly be achieved?’.

It takes b2b tech agency expertise and mind-shift to get the balance right. But, after all tech still needs people, and people still need tech…

For now, until AI fully takes over! (wink)

The Rubicon Agency has deep experience with consulting, engineering and services propositions, working with many of the leading vendors in disruptive innovation. 

Check out our experience in consulting and services.

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The Rubicon Agency
In Insights, Our industry, The Content Spectrum, The Message Elevator

Sell aspiration not anti-perspiration – a philosophy for software marketing

Software blog thumb

Heros need a mix of aspiration and perspiration

Imagine the scene. A TV ad for a world famous anti-perspirant, where our hero is just about to make the rock climb of their life. Picture the director, sizing the dramatic perspectives that show the peril of the route in-frame and the atmospheric shots of the climber’s preparations. Edit-in the adrenaline-inducing ropes and apparatus – and the climatic joy at the summit. You get the picture.

Now imagine the ad where the focus is just the anti-perspirant and its ability to reduce sweaty arms. It’s a passion killer isn’t it. Well, this is much like the state of software marketing – where there’s a lack of craft and flair in blending perspiration with aspiration.

New models in software make things worse

Software has been core to the tech industry since day one. And as decades have rolled by, the delivery model has changed radically – and more recently the software supply chain and operating models have been turned on their heads too.

But in all that time, software has been engineered to fulfil specific roles – such as office tasks (Word/Excel etc.), processes (SAP/Oracle etc.), horizontal functions (Workday, Adobe etc.) and many more. All are positioned to make things easier, save time, improve accuracy – and fulfil basic needs in our workday lives.

But these binary messages/measures are now table stakes and not enough to express the real value of modern software applications to a business with zeitgeist challenges.

Modern architectures, APIs and AI bring massive potential to what software can do and achieve. And now (as tech marketers and b2b tech agencies) we need to place more emphasis on presenting how it’s going to change the business – rather than the basic performance it achieves. The potential and accomplishments of our erstwhile climbing hero need to be evident and authentic.

Software needs to dare to dream

We’re now talking about new messages and yardsticks – accuracy of experience scoring, quality of predicted outcomes, performance of virtual behaviours – the list goes on.

All these messages are visionary, and all yardsticks were unthinkable just a few years ago. But what principles should be applied by modern software marketers to make sure they’re on the right track?

The modern software marketer checklist

Here’s how to achieve the right level of pitch for the software or app:

    1. Don’t think that the traditional high-touch nouns of agility, flexibility and productivity are enough these days. Break beyond these barriers into fresh air. Go beyond the blah, blah, blah
    2. Get up close and personal with the customer use cases to extract the most valuable essence(s) of the application.
    3. Get empathetic and imaginative in equal measure and apply your own ‘language translator’ to create and pitch a story for business managers/leaders, users and the IT function. All use different languages and have different care abouts.
    4. Loosen-up a bit – apply some b2c thinking (even in b2b propositions) to enforce a fresh perspective and brand expression that buyers and users can relate and buy into.
    5. Finally, don’t over-egg it! Make sure there’s authenticity and reality around the dream you’re selling to the customer. Overdo it and you’ll damage your brand and reputation.

The comfort in aspiration

The above 5 points take patience, rigour and high standards in knowledge extraction and message elevation to achieve the right results. But they sure feel like a breath of fresh air when you get there! The aspiration feels real, sweet and attainable.

The result. You end up with a differentiated, engaging and enduring pitch to your software play. And you’ll feel like our climbing hero from the outset.

The Rubicon Agency has 30-years’ experience in marketing software and applications, working with many of the leading vendors and engineers

Check out our experience in software.

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