Marketing is about engaging. It’s about meeting customer needs and delivering an experience.

Marketing is an art.

But, there is a science behind marketing and that is where Data-Driven Marketing comes in.

Metrics like net present value (NPV) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) are a good starting point, but don’t forget customer lifetime value, return on dollars spent, and transaction conversion rate (TCR).

Does this sound familiar or like a foreign language?

These are the type of numbers you need to have in order to answer questions such as, “When will we see a return?“, “Is this worth doing?“, and “What are your assumptions?”

In total, Mark Jeffery covers 15 essential marketing metrics, that you need to know, in the book. If it has been some time since your last finance or statistics course, not to worry. The book not only goes over the formulas, but also provides case examples to see how they would work in the real world.

But what if your company doesn’t do Data-Driven Marketing? You are not alone. In his research, Jeffery found that 80% of companies don’t use these metrics to drive their marketing efforts. However, the ones that do have a greater chance of capturing more revenue and meeting their financial goals.

What’s not to like about that?

Image credit:  artnoose

In most businesses there is a gap between marketing and product that must be filled. Without an audience, a great product has nowhere to go. Likewise, a great marketing strategy can’t save you from a woeful product.

I believe that business success can be found when you match a great product with a great marketing plan and this is where Product Marketing can have the most impact.

Boaz Ronkin and Tim Johnson added comments to the post that I think are spot on. Product Managers need to focus on the voice of the customer to make sure that the product delivers the necessary benefits to the users. However, the product users are often not the only ones with input when it comes to purchasing the product, especially in B2B products. This is where Product Marketing can deliver on the voice of the prospect and make sure that the story being told is correctly positioned.

A list of technical specifications does not make for a good product message.

Product Marketers need to create and evolve the product story to best attract the right prospects. This story then drives the development of marketing and sales materials – from data sheets to webinars to social media. Product Marketing may not be responsible for producing all of this content but it is their job to make sure that the message is consistent until it is time to evolve.

My opinion is that there is a need for the strategic Product Marketer and it is not just a tactical role. Look at the Zero Moment of Truth and the End of Business as Usual as recent examples highlighting the need for great product marketing in the age of the connected consumer.

Enough about my thoughts, where do you see the role of Product Marketing?

I would like to introduce our guest blogger Dave Wolpert who has a very interesting opinion on the state of Product Marketing to share. Dave is the Founder and Principal of Swordfish Communications, a product marketing and content marketing services firm in Austin, Texas. Previously, he was a product marketer at pcOrder.com, BroadJump, Convio, and LibreDigital. You can also find Swordfish on Twitter at @SwordfishComm. Enjoy the post and looking forward to hearing your thoughts. 

The product marketing function in tech companies is heading for extinction. The work product marketers currently do will continue to be performed, but by different people.

Preparing for the Asteroid Impact

To simplify the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, product marketing provides two broad functions, which can be loosely grouped under inbound and outbound activities. Both of these functions will continue to be of critical importance, but will eventually be de-coupled and performed by others.

On the inbound side, product marketers represent the “voice of the customer” to various groups within their company. Tactically, that means they solicit input from both current and prospective customers, as well as survey competitors and the market-at-large, through a variety of channels. They then synthesize that information and present it to the appropriate internal stakeholders to guide decision-making.

Of course, this is precisely a part of what most product managers do today. And, moving forward, I believe they’ll do it more often to feed progressively faster product development cycles.

On the outbound side, product marketers typically create a spectrum of marketing collateral, from product-focused website copy to white papers. Unfortunately, most product marketers aren’t the best writers, so this work is increasingly “insourced” to a MarCom group or outsourced to marketing agencies or individual copywriters (a.k.a. content marketers).

Product marketers also create “sales tools,” such as PowerPoint decks and sales proposal content. But this is increasingly outsourced, too. Sales can build their own sales decks, and MarCom can make them visually compelling; most copywriters can write persuasive proposal content.

You see where this is going. As product managers become the primary conduit for collecting customer and market insights, and the content creation piece is insourced or outsourced to those with better writing and design skills than the typical product marketer possesses, what is left for product marketers to do?

My answer: nothing.

Aren’t You Forgetting Some Things?

Sure, someone still has to perform the bit roles product marketers play (organize the infamous quarterly sales trainings, plan product launches, define positioning, and so on). But these ancillary roles don’t collectively constitute a full-time job. And again, much of it can—and in some cases should—be sourced to others.

Why can’t Sales organize their own training? Why can’t MarCom or other marketing team members plan a product launch? (After all, launches increasingly involve activities that others manage, like events, social media and PR.) And isn’t product positioning fluid, anyway, often defined evolutionarily by Sales based on what resonates with prospects?

You might be thinking that it’s advantageous to centralize all these roles with one person. I disagree. Part of my frustration as a former staff product marketer was that I was constantly asked to do too much, too quickly, while delivering consistently excellent work. (To wit, check out this exhaustive list of typical primary and secondary product marketer functions.) With so many good outsourcing options available, why would any company want to overload their staff and sacrifice quality?

What Happens Next

The product marketing extinction event won’t be as dramatic or as quick as a giant asteroid hitting the earth. Instead, the role of the product marketer will be peeled back in stages.

This has already begun. At many companies, product management has already replaced the inbound function I described earlier. At others, product marketers have evolved into field marketers by focusing mainly on sales tools that are only used internally; development of externally-facing content marketing tools, like technical white papers, are sourced to others.

Eventually, all the strategically important roles product marketers traditionally play will be stripped. This will inevitably result in reduced wages and, ultimately, product marketers disappearing by forced or voluntary attrition.

Survival is Possible

Will any product marketers survive the mass extinction event I’m forecasting? Only those with an exceedingly rare combination of talents: someone who is exceptional at customer interaction, and who is a superb writer, and who excels at understanding the needs of the Sales team, and whose technical knowledge is comparable to that of the product managers. I’ve met very few such individuals over the years. Ones that good are often promoted to Director or VP roles in their organizations, go off to be independent consultants, or start their own companies.

I paint a gloomy forecast, but if there’s a silver lining in my argument it’s this: individuals with any of these superstar skills will always be in demand. Their job title and department they report to might change, but in the end, companies will find a place for those with valuable skills.

So don’t obsess over how to build a career in product marketing, because that whole field is on the endangered species list. Rather, focus on advancing the skill sets that an ideal product marketer would have. That’s the best way to survive.

Image Credit:  viking_79

Our topic of the call was how to get a job in product marketing or product management. Tim and Scott both share their advice and experience on transitioning into the role and what they would look for when hiring now. We also touch on some of the expanding responsibility of a product marketer and the growing need for customer engagement.

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe

Show Notes:

Runtime:  39 minutes

• How did I get into product marketing?
• Product marketing – “the fun of sales without the quota”
• Transitioning from sales – moving from thinking of one customer at a time to thinking about all customers
• Is a technology background a “must have” requirement for a product marketing or product management role?
• The marketing skill set and the strategic role of the product marketer
• Gary Vaynerchuk video on engagement:

• McKinsey article - We’re all marketers now
• What skills do you look for when interviewing a candidate for the role?

Then came Groupon with this short video:

Needless to say that I did punish Derrick (it’s not you Derrick, it’s me).

The simple addition of this video actually got me to re-consider whether or not I should unsubscribe from Groupon. Well just for a few seconds.

Seriously how many more white teeth cleaning offers can I consume within a year?

Anyhow, this is a great example showing how  you can make a boring experience interesting. I would love to hear some other great examples that you’ve come come across.

One of my New Year resolution is to read more books.

Author and blogger Julien Smith spent 2011 reading a book a week. Why a book a week? Julien’s answers,

It feels awesome. It gives you an amazing amount of ideas. It helps you think more thoroughly. It’s better than TV and even the internet. It makes you understand the world more. It is a building block towards a habit of completion. Did I mention it feels awesome?

I love the idea and the commitment to making it a habit. However, with work, family, and finding some time to write a few blog posts and podcasts, I don’t think I can make it all the way to 52 books.

So, I am going to shoot for 2 books a month focusing on marketing and business. 24 books for  2012 doesn’t sound as impressive as 52 but I think it is still a respectable number. It will also leave me time to write-up reviews and put together a few Slideshares for the really good ones.

Here are my two picks for January:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman was selected as one of the best books of 2011 by Amazon. Here’s an excerpt from the book description,

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior.

For my second book, I am going with Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know by Mark Jeffery. Here’s an excerpt from the book description,

We live in budget-cutting times, and marketing budgets are among the first to get cut. Why? When non-marketing executives take a hard look at the numbers, they often can’t see a tangible link between marketing and overall revenue. So if you’re a marketer today, you’re probably facing the need to do more with less, justify all investments, show results, and still beat the competition. The secret to this balancing act is having—and correctly using—the numbers.

Have any recent or favorite marketing books to recommend for 2012?

Image credit:  Amelia-Jane

As we start 2012, I thought I should highlight a few more bloggers and experts that have greatly influenced me in the last 12 months. Some might surprised you as they would probably not even consider themselves as Product Marketing experts. However they do cover topics such as buyer personas and sales enablement that are critical in today’s product marketing realm.

Congratulations to the 2012 Fab 5 Product Marketing Blogs winners:

• Toni Zambito – Toni is an expert on buyer persona and his series on “the buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future” is without doubt the best and most influential write up that I have come across in the last 12 months. As product marketers we should always plan with the end in mind (the purchasing transaction) and map our marketing strategy and sales initiatives around our customer’s buying journey.

• Tamara Shenk – A new comer on the blogger scene, I first encountered Tamara at the 2011 Forrester Sales Enablement conference in San Francisco where she talked about the need to “not just enable sales people but the entire buying system”. A VP at T-Systems, Tamara is a thought leader on one of the most under valued and yet critical function of the product marketing role. I strongly encourage you to read her thoughts on the sales enablement biggest challenges as well as her insightful perspectives for 2012.

• Diego Lomanto – In his new blog purposely titled What is Product Marketing, Diego is doing a great job at clarifying and promoting the critical role of product marketing in today’s B2B world. Diego is not only offering a framework for those looking for a better answer than the Wikipedia definition but also providing some very pragmatic advices on topics such as how to conduct a competitive analysis or plan a successful product marketing launch.

• Giles Farrow – A product marketing consultant focused on software marketing, Giles is to product marketing what John Gatrell is to product management. He is doing an excellent job at sourcing and sharing some of the best write up on product marketing and marketing topics. Giles has also written a very insightful series on software product marketing that works and he regularly comments on other product marketing experts blog posts.

• Josh Duncan – Josh is a prolific product marketing blogger, and storyteller, whose passion for the field of product marketing is unparalleled (disclaimer: Josh & I are co-blogging on this site). I am particularly a big fan of his simple yet powerful examples as a result of a family trip to the garden center or a read from the many blogs (and books) he digests on his Kindle every week. Josh is also the host of the insightful Product Marketing Podcast series covering a wide range of topic from product marketing to product management.

Ultimately your list of favorite blogs and bloggers will differ based on 1) what you want to learn about 2) those who will help you to make a difference in your job, and 3) the writing style of the authors

I am always looking for more inspiration so …  who is on your Fab 5 list for 2012?

Image Credit:  Creativity103

2011 has been a great year for presentations so I wanted to share some of my favorites. With thousands of presentations published in the business category, I am sure I missed a lot of good ones so please add your favorites to the list.

Here are my 10 favorite marketing presentations:

The topic of this podcast is comparing products. Scott has been working on a multiple part blog series on how product managers can use comparisons to make better products. Scott is halfway thorough the series and since he is covering so much ground (already over 8000 words) we decided to discuss over two calls. For this first part, we introduced the topic, talked about why and when you should compare products, and how to bring  customers into the conversation.

I hope you enjoy the show and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes and from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime 30 minutes

• What at a product level do you need to do to make it a better product?
• Scott’s comparing products blog series (so far)
• Introduction & Overview (so that the step-numbers align with the article numbers)
• Identify your customers.
• Articulate the problems they care about solving.
• Determine how important solving each problem is, relative to the other problems, for your customers.
• The challenge with speeds and feeds
• The Kindle Fire positioning -  vs. the BlackBerry Playbook
• Past podcast were we discussed Playbook and it’s spec marketing
• Previous Podcast – Getting Ready for 2012
• Using specs for product comparisons and for solving problems
• Kano Analysis for product managers
• Lenovo boot or bust test video
• Brining your customer’s needs into the comparison
• The elastic user problem
• The Lean startup approach

Here’s an idea for you from the Innovator’s DNA that I thought was worth sharing. If you want to innovate, you need to ask questions. More importantly, you need to ask the right type of questions.

The goal is to challenge assumptions, make new connections, and see past what’s already there. This doesn’t happen by asking a random scattering of questions but through a disciplined practice.

Here’s how they sum up the approach in the book:

During interviews with disruptive innovators, we noticed not only a high frequency of questions but a pattern as well. They started with a deep-sea-like exploration of what currently is and then rocketed to the skies for an equally compelling search for what might be. Focusing on what is, they asked lots of who, what, when, where, and how questions (as world-class journalists or investigators do) to dig beneath the surface and truly “know the place for the first time” (as poet T. S. Eliot observed).

Essentially, you need to be able to see the entire box before you can see outside the box. Only by asking the right questions can you get build the full picture necessary to find a transformative solution to the challenge.