NOTE: The following is a guest post by Jennifer Doctor. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.
Aren’t the marketing automation tools great?
They help you develop target lead campaigns that automatically respond to a “visitor’s” action depending on what they do. This is done without human interference or effort, moving the potential buyer through the elements that have been pre-determined to be the right marketing piece of collateral or action at the time. How did business ever do this before, given how time and labor consuming these efforts can be?
But there is a flaw. And it can ruin your efforts.
Simply put, if the campaigns are developed without thinking about key aspects of product marketing, they will likely fail. And those aspects include:
- Understanding the market – from the problems they face to the tools they use
- What they do and don’t like and why
- Their buying process including budget and authority
- What will motivate them to action
- They have created the buyer personas that help others in the organization truly understand the buyers’ goals, attitudes and behaviors.
Tools Empower
Tools empower and enable, but too often, they do so at a cost. And, they often may empower the wrong team at the wrong time.
It starts when marketing teams create their campaigns in a vacuum. In order to effectively aid marketers in fully understanding customers and subsequently developing a strategic marketing plan, marketing automation tools provide information across all phases of the marketing process, including:
- Demand Generation
- Lead Management
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Nurturing
- Lead Generation
- Campaign Analysis
- Lead Qualification
- Sales Effectiveness
However, this vast amount of work that the tools can perform has created a false sense of security for the marketing teams. From my experience, without understanding the buyer first, even the best demand generation effort will not work as effectively as planned. And, there is no amount of clean up afterwards that will recover the lost time and effort.
Let’s Bring it Back to the Beginning
First, you can’t outsource the campaign or the copy. While many marketing teams will hire agencies to work with them on copy, the copy will only be effective if the right information about the intended market – the targeted buyer – is understood. It is never a good business practice to outsource a strategic element that is at the core of your business. Understanding the buyer is the job of Product Marketing.
Once your Product Marketing team has shared the buyers’ goals, attitudes and behaviors, and personas, it’s critical that they work with Marketing to create the triggers for the automation tool. The Marketing team and agency can help define the steps, the campaign flow – whether it be three or ten steps – and explain the goal.
The Product Marketing team should have definitive answers on what will motivate the buyer to move through the process eliciting the response for the next automated trigger to occur. Despite what many people may think, it isn’t a great pitch or giveaway that attracts buyers – it’s about making content meaningful to the buyer so they act in a positive way.
Product Marketing makes it meaningful by truly understanding the buyer’s motivation and properly communicating this motivation to all internal parties.
Product Marketing Shouldn’t Own This
I am not advocating that Product Marketing own the automation of the messages or be in control of the process. In fact, it should be the opposite. Once the strategy is set, the buying cycle is understood, messages crafted, the flow mapped out and the calls to action created by the Marketing team, Product Marketing should assume an advisory role.
The actual implementation of campaign management, tracking and administration ownership rightfully belongs in the Marketing team’s control. If buyers change unexpectedly at any point in the buying cycle, Product Marketing should be brought back as the advisor and recommend modifications to the campaign.
Looking in from the outside, if product marketing doesn’t plan and prepare to help our marketing counterparts, then we aren’t helping them understand where and why we add value. And, if we don’t add value, we need to accept the marginalized role that the automation tool will place us in.
Tweet this: @onpm Remember, Product Marketing comes first. http://wp.me/pXBON-2rQ Guest post by @jidoctor #prodmktg #prodmgmt
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Jennifer Doctor, a strong advocate of ProductCamps, is an independent product marketing and management consultant, working with companies to help them understand their markets, buyers and how to better enable sales teams to deliver results. She maintains her own blog – The OutsideIn View – and can be reached at Jennifer dot doctor at gmail dot com.