Being Authentic in Tech Marketing

 This week I attend an event in New York City for content marketers. One of the speakers talked about data and storytelling. Creating narratives out of numbers is my everyday jam, but I've seen that the marketing zeitgeist is all headed in the same direction - an impressive statistic, a cute icon, and a short blurb on the proofpoint.  

I questioned the speaker about how a company could stand out when everyone is doing the same thing. His answer was to tell your authentic story. 

I thought long and hard about this advice and realized that there was an authentic story that the company I worked for could tell - but it didn't align with current marketing directives. Yet, rather than boosting about the proofpoints that everyone else was also crowing about, we could be highlighting a single, definitive truth. How often with statistics are we digging around for the footnote, the asterisk - how much data was used? How many people were surveyed? How fresh are these numbers?  If you tell the story that everyone knows is true about yourself, there is, instead, immediate head nodding and acknowledgement.  

Like every other area in life, things get easier, marketing-wise, when you own your story. 

Is there anything new about Buyer Personas?

With campy 1960s space show Star Trek getting yet another rehash, it really does seem that everything old is new again.  A couple years ago buyer personas came to the fore as the newest way to fine-tune marketing efforts. But is this idea at all new? On the surface, it feels like marketing 101, i.e., know your customer. Even in the golden age of advertising, copywriters could zero in on what housewives wanted to serve their families and they created advertising accordingly:  

Getting to know you - better than ever before 

Actually the news in persona development isn’t the “what,” it’s the “how.” Now we can know our customers’ habits on a very intimate level thanks to social listening, click tracking, Facebook likes, and numerous other online data collection.  It all adds up to a level of specificity about our customers  that was never possible before.  For a good breakdown, check out this article.  

Whether you have a huge pool of data on potential customers, or you just talk to shoppers in your bricks-and-mortar store, it's always been critical to know your customers before trying to market to them. That's why robust persona development can provide a powerful tool in your marketing.

Persona development - where's the but? 

Everyone agrees that an accurate persona can help, but only if they're effectively used.  If you battle product managers who still want to emphasize meaningless features rather than customer concerns or desires, you will still produce ineffectual marketing.  And all the money spent on building personas, focus groups, surveys or any other customer discovery will be for naught.

I encourage marketers to explore building buyer personas – but take time to get buy in from the rest of the organization  so you won’t be wasting your time. 

The price of speed in marketing development

It happens everyday: the marketing director hands the writers a new assignment with little focus and direction. The wordsmiths are charged with "doing their magic" and creating great copy out of a poorly developed idea.

In the last twelve months, I have increasingly pushed back from this unsavory productivity trap. Content lives and dies by the idea behind it.

For example, are you charged with writing an article with no customer focus? Push back.

Does the product brochure assignment provide no information about your competitive advantage? Push back.

Is the art direction suggested generic and reliant on dull stock photography? Push back.

Content marketing is about more than well-written words. It's a whole package that will either distract readers long enough to absorb some information - and if you're lucky click to learn more - or will turn them off immediately.

Some marketing departments rush to deliver more email campaigns, white papers, flyers, and other materials. If you can produce quality work at that pace - do it.  But, some times it's you who has to put the brakes on a campaign.  Because if there aren't quality ideas behind it, it will only be your team that looks bad when the results come in.  And your company's customers will lose out too - because you'll be wasting their time, as well as hurting your chances of engaging them in your next campaign.

So if your team is moving too fast and hasn't thought things through - Push Back!