Software Marketing's Recipe Requires Risk Taking, Creativity, And A Secret Sauce
By Christine Alfano, Vyne (Vyne Corp)
Software marketing is about building a relationship with prospects — through your brand, your product messaging, your images, your tone, your calls-to-action, your team’s responses to inquiries. It is everything you use to introduce your organization to those elusive prospects you are trying to get to purchase your software.
In simple terms, your marketing efforts include your website, your social media presence, your email and print communications, your tradeshow experiences, your PR; every touch you make with those you are trying to reach must carry a consistent brand message, voice, and perspective of those you hope to serve.
Marketing is everything you do to acquire customers and maintain a relationship with them, but the ultimate goal of your marketing efforts — whatever those may be — is to match a your company's software to the people who need and want it.
Creativity Counts Within Brand Bounds
Creativity in marketing is like saying a door needs a handle or a car an engine. They just go together and some of both is required for a successful venture. However, unbridled creativity is nothing short of laying all your chips on a single number on the roulette wheel and letting it ride. Marketers must be creative in their efforts in the realm of their brand and make sure that whatever they come up with — whatever the ideation of their potential campaign — is consistent with the brand image.
For example, in software marketing, it seems like new products and services are being brought to market all the time. Those new services have to be named and branded. While naming is its own iterative process, it should not be done in a vacuum, meaning, when naming a new product, you must take into consideration many things including: the established brand architecture, whether the name should be a common word or a made-up, never-before-heard-of term, competitive brands, trademark options, URL and SEO challenges/opportunities, and much more. Simply coming up with a product name because someone likes it or thinks it has “a nice ring to it” is a good start, but it’s not enough. A product brand needs to maintain the integrity of the master brand and fit in well with the family of products it represents.
A brand defines how you are perceived. Brand, in its most basic form, is your promise to your customer. Your brand tells your customers what they can expect from you and your products and services, and your marketing efforts must support these perceptions or the perceptions you are trying to create.
“While companies can’t control this process, they can influence it by communicating the qualities that make this product different from that product,” said Marty Neumeier of the Brand Gap. “When enough people arrive at the same feeling, a company can be said to have a brand. A brand is not what you say it is — it’s what they say it is.”
Sales And Marketing Are Not One And The Same
Too often people think of marketing and sales as one and the same — in fact there are a lot of job titles that combine the two. In my experience, this can lead to a slippery slope. Sales-driven marketing organizations may stray from the true definition of marketing, leaning more in the direction of sales support and lead generation. While these are necessary parts of a marketing plan, if they become the focus of a marketing team, it makes it easy to lose sight of the other strategic functions of marketing.
One such strategic function that often gets overlooked is messaging. Marketing experts know messages for digital campaigns, websites, social media posts, collateral, etc. don’t just drop out of the sky like a gift from above. Messaging is an art form — when done well, it can be a tremendous asset to any company; conversely, if a business’ messaging is off-track or misses the mark in resonating with prospects, it can do more harm than good. Without impactful messaging that hits the mark telling a story, solving a problem and promoting a solution, there is no lead generation from any channel.
Obviously, lead generation is always a goal for a marketing team. After all, without it there would be no prospects or leads for a sales team to follow, but it’s important to keep in mind that marketing encompasses everything you do to reach, educate, and persuade prospects to engage further. Lead gen is a part of marketing, it should not be the measuring stick by which all marketing efforts are measured, however, it is a function of effective marketing.
By working closely with sales, marketing can establish a cadence for integrated campaigns. Here’s an example of how marketing and sales can work together to drive attendance of clients and prospects to attend a webinar with the goals of promoting a new software product to prospects and up-selling the new offering to existing clients.
- Marketing initiates a touchpoint with prospects communicating the webinar/product information;
- That same day, sales adds a promotional message to their email signature related to the webinar;
- Next, marketing initiates an in-product message to drive client registrations;
- Marketing creates a series of LinkedIn promotional messages and shares the content with sales for them to cross-post from their personal accounts.
- Then, a week prior to the webinar, sales reaches out to their hot prospects with a follow-up phone call extending a personal invitation to the webinar;
- The day before the webinar, marketing sends reminder emails to all who have registered.
- After the webinar, attendee lists are cleaned and consolidated into two groups: marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs.) MQLs are pushed into the marketing automation system for nurturing and SQLs are passed along to sales as leads for follow-up.
Marketing campaigns drive demand generation for sales teams to follow-up on and further nurture leads to sales. Handing-off leads to sales is where marketing stops and sales takes over working to close the deals. Strategically combining both marketing and sales, and striking the balance between expectations is the secret sauce.
Then What Is Marketing?
Marketing is defined by product, price, place, and promotion. Software products must meet customers' needs and meet the quality and value that customer’s demand. Price includes costs to a customer, including costs of time, effort and stress.
Place is the access to your product in general. Promotion is telling customers about the availability of the software and its benefits, reaching prospects at the right place and time that provides them a call to action. Marketing then is the effort of reaching out to customers.
Marketing Is An Investment — Of Time And Expense
Marketing is part art and science and the mix between the two varies by organization. In fact, many companies will forego a marketing team in efforts to keep costs down, preferring instead to let those pesky “marketing tasks” be handled by an admin who has extra time or by someone in product management. It’s amazing how many organizations put very little to no value on strategic marketing efforts, placing this important function in the hands of team members, who by no fault of their own, are simply not qualified to execute marketing plans effectively.
Along those same lines, when it comes to cutting costs within an organization, marketing funds are, unfortunately, usually the first to go. But why is that? Most often, it’s because people that look at numbers and not strategy, viewing marketing as an expense rather than an investment. Until that mindset changes, the ax will continue to fall hard and fast on marketing, but that’s where the creativity comes in.
Doing more with less is one of the greatest challenges for a marketer and seasoned marketers expect that to be the case and prepare accordingly. It’s easy to be creative and execute successful campaigns with healthy budgets, but the true test of a marketer’s grit is learning to plan and execute successful campaigns on minimal budgets. You’d be amazed at the engagement you can get and the memorable feedback you can elicit with a five-foot tall, $15 blow-up monkey and some solar-powered dancing monkey tchotchkes at a tradeshow. People want to be entertained and humor is a great way to break through the clutter of a thousand other booths at a show. Plus, a huge monkey provides a fun way to engage passersby for interactive photo opportunities to share on your social media platforms. Not everyone will engage, but the ones that do can lead to some great conversations about your company, your software, and might even just lead to an opportunity for a sale.
Marketing and managing a budget effectively can often feel like those TV shows where they change cooking ingredients and make people create amazing dishes with leftovers or miss-matched ingredients. It’s not always easy, not always 100 percent successful, but it’s always rewarding — especially when the dish comes together as something that dances on the palate.
Anyone that’s worked in marketing for a number of years knows it’s trial and error in many cases, and there are always those who think they have a bigger, better idea for what the marketing team should be doing. The bottom line is, you just have to keep plugging along based on whatever data you may have — about your software and your prospects. You may get it wrong because you’re trying to anticipate needs and drive consumer behavior. The key is what you do next.
Like a recipe, sometimes you need to improvise along the way. Some of the best dishes ever cooked have come from refining a recipe and adding a few unexpected ingredients — that’s the risk, add in a dash of creativity, try something outside the box with a few new spices and you’ll get it right. Remember, the secret sauce of that famous fast food chain wasn’t likely developed overnight.
About The Author
Christine Alfano is the senior director of corporate and dental channel marketing at Vyne (Vyne Corp).