Member Article

How to run your marketing like product development

Martin Bailie, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Elysian Fields

With the ‘VC winter’ has come the necessity to create profitable marketing and sales as quickly as possible. Long gone are the days of vanity advertising and swag. Instead sales funnels are to show results within weeks not months. The only way to have a chance to do that is to run experiments that yield validated insights pointing to where sales can be sustainably generated.

Marketing, like product development, is a process of discovery. You’re working out how to sell your product and no-one knows the right answer at the beginning.

The good news is that this should save you, the tech CEO, lots of money. Nothing any expert can say will replace the deep understanding you’ll glean from qualitative research with customers. The answer is available through the same customer discovery methods used to create the product in the first place. Marketing without insight is like yelling into the wind, so validate your foundational insight before anything else.

Steve Blank, the esteemed startup advisor, puts it simply: “Your customers will teach you who they are, what to say to them and how to reach them.”

So with that in mind, here’s some guidance on how to structure marketing in a similar way to product development:

Jobs, pains, and gains

First discover what job the customer is hiring the product to fix, the gains they are seeking and pains they wish to avoid. Then use this insight to create a value proposition tailored to the needs of each specific buyer. Just like product testing, iterate that value proposition through message testing. When the value is clear, urgent and precise, buyers start to take action.

Solve real, painful problems

Product managers know that products must solve real, painful problems. Marketing, in an age of abundant information, must do the same. Marketing must help buyers solve their ‘jobs to be done’. The value marketing creates, and the manner in which it creates it, has to compete with other activities in the lives of buyers. It’s a meritocracy, so dull and worthless content gets ignored. Ad man David Ogilvy said that you can’t bore someone into buying. The vast majority of B2B tech marketing tries its hardest to do just that. Be interesting, have a provocative point of view and add tons of value. Be useful and you’ll get attention.

Sell a risk-free future

Co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Horowitz, famously said that “The company story is the company strategy.” Founders have a vision, and the role of marketing is to inspire others with that vision. We know from IPA marketing effectiveness studies that ‘story’ or ‘brand’ messaging should absorb around 60% of all media spend, with ‘offer’ or rational and promotional messaging the remaining 40%.

Give or take 10%, this rule of thumb supports psychological findings that we are mostly emotional, risk averse, shiny-new-object-noticing, lizard-brained belongers. We want to avoid pain, know where we’re going and join the right gang to get us there. An inspiring company vision appeals to these biases. So marketing must reassure buyers that we are the ones creating the future, and convince them their problem will be solved risk free.

Be patient and iterate

It usually takes 10-20 quality interactions with a company before prospects qualify themselves and become known to Sales teams. So clearly this can’t happen overnight. Like developing a product, developing marketing that is valuable enough to warrant up to 20 interactions takes testing and rapid iteration.

Channels won’t ‘work’ immediately, nor in isolation. Many prospects will interact with many channels (including stalking founder linkedin pages, listening to conference talks, reading news articles etc) before making themselves known. Consequently, attribution modelling can only tell part of the story. The simple reality is that we need to create a lot of value in a lot of places consistently for qualified prospects to emerge. Invest in a few channels for twelve months, reviewing attribution models after month three. Only pay for ads in one channel at a time so you can remove variables and optimise quicker.

Ensure your positioning is based on validated insight and help your prospects solve their problems efficiently. Like a well crafted product, your marketing will gain followers and fans. When there’s a warm audience to sell to, the effectiveness of all channels increases. So help a lot of people, keep your audience warm, optimise for volume of engagement, reach out and make offers and sales will come.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Elysian Fields .