Do you need a petrol head for adoption?
We all know one. An inquisitive, passionate petrol head that knows the inner workings of the combustion engine. Someone who can explain the mechanics of the turbocharger, crankshaft and gearbox. They’re a great source of free education – but they can be very heavy on the minutiae you pretend to be interested in, just to get the educated answer you’re after.
Cloud and AI vendors can have similar traits – super keen to show what they’ve learned and built over the years – and wanting to share technical detail that exceeds your need, desire (and let’s be honest), comprehension.
More innovation and bamboozling ahead
When cloud started to gather on the horizon a couple of decades ago, little did we all know the profound effect it would have on our lives – whether in the tech or marketing industry or just as a plain old consumer. We’ve needed to introduce and normalise emerging technologies rapidly – and sometimes we’ve overcooked it.
What started as ‘some virtual storage somewhere in the ether’, gained momentum, surfaced disruptive innovations and was the catalyst to a fundamental rethink of computing. It unlocked an Alladins Cave of possibilities and potential that not only reinvented what tech can do, but also business operating models, software supply chains and consumption models.
Tech marketing pros and b2b marketing agencies have spent the last 2-decades marketing cloud services in a way that’s made XaaS the de-facto that it is today. But like our erstwhile petrol heads, we’ve done some bamboozling and blindsiding along the way too.
Don’t love the tech too much
Early adopters can have a habit of thinking everyone ‘gets it’ and ‘instinctively knows where things are going’. And with that can come a false presumption of awareness and understanding.
Cloud upped the ante on what’s possible – but AI has taken that onto a whole new level. All segments, industries and economies are looking over their shoulders for what it could mean. It’s fair to say that (as of writing this blog) much of the AI market is still in its early adopter and (some in segments) early majority phases.
The early majority onwards need tech marketers to join the dots. We need to translate what the emerging tech is – into what it does and what it achieves.
We can’t afford for these emerging innovations to not achieve lift-off just because their value hasn’t been articulated. After all, not all tech vendors are led by visionaries with skills in crisp and eloquent distillation. We need to play our part.
Technologists – programmers, architects, engineers – are all understandably proud of their efforts and their stack. But product/portfolio management and marketing teams need to step in and stop this hitting the market without decoding the value.
What do cloud and AI marketers need to consider?
Solution, product and marketing teams should ask themselves these 3 key questions:
- Does your current marketing decode what’s enabled and achieved with your technology, rather than what it does and how it does it?
- Do you have tiered messaging to translate functionality and capabilities for varying levels of technical proficiency?
- Do you present crisp use case benefits and stories against the status quo?
If some of these answers are no, you may want to think again.
Serving a more tech-friendly audience
Cloud and AI technologies are great for audience levelling – often bridging the needs of the business managers while offering something more progressive and flexible for IT pros.
Alongside that shift, the business manager is becoming more digitally able (with greater workforce representation of millennials and Gen Z).
So, while business decision makers are becoming more technically literate – you still need to keep ‘Team IT’ on-side – especially in larger businesses. This means tech marketers (and their tech agency partners) must balance the need for simplicity with crisp business benefits and technical depth.
Campaigns and collateral produced by b2b technology agencies (and internal marketing functions) need to land the purpose of the tech proposition – without patronising or bamboozling buyers and users.
Collectively, we don’t want to be known as the petrol heads that no-one wants to sit with at the Christmas party!
The Rubicon Agency has significant cloud and AI expertise, working with many of the leading vendors in disruptive innovation.
Check out our experience in cloud and AI.
