Does your content have a clear purpose?
By Saeed Khan
Content marketing is all the rage. Well written, targeted content can propel your website traffic, can deliver more leads, can increase your perception as a thought leader etc. And so companies have joined the content marketing fray and started corporate blogs, posted videos on YouTube, and created targeted micro-sites. Companies also create brochures and whitepapers for download, chalk talks and recorded webinars for viewing etc. And each of these is usually measured for clicks or views or likes or downloads etc.
And while all of this content is generating a lot of activity — “Hey, our latest ‘Harlem Shake’ video just went viral!” – is there thought given to a clear purpose and target audience for each piece?’
More content is not definitely better than less content, and more “views” or “likes” are not necessarily better than less.
Optimizing Content + Marketing
“Content Marketing” has two parts: the actual content that is created and the marketing of it. i.e. getting it to the right people at the right time for the right purpose.
And it’s that last sentence that is key. When you create content, do you first identify who it’s targeted at, why it’s needed and when it would be used? If not, then your content marketing efforts are being wasted.
Someone asked me for my opinion of a white paper recently, and I said that before I could give feedback, I needed more context. In particular, I wanted to know the following:
- Who is it targeted at? Role/persona?
- What questions/concerns is it intended to answer?
- When during the sales cycle would this be best utilized?
If those 3 questions aren’t clear, then why create the content? In this case it was a 12 page whitepaper? But it could be a video, chalk talk, customer recording etc. It doesn’t matter.
Content without clear purpose is noise.
Brandon Hickie at the Openview blog wrote a great piece that puts structure around this idea. He talks about defining a “content matrix”. It’s purpose is:
to help your company’s director of content strategy prioritize content production to ensure that his or her team is focusing on the content production activities that matter.
I actually think that a content matrix is much more than that. It’s a standard and structured way to maximize results for content creation, publishing and use. It helps you decide what to and what not to do, and if the matrix itself is published (internally), it helps those people who use the content understand what was created and why.
I discuss a similar — though more general concept — in my presentation on Lean Communication.
A lot of content is created and published without a clear purpose in mind. Use the 3 questions above, or tools like the content matrix or principles of Lean Communication to help maximize the impact of and return on your content marketing efforts.
Saeed
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About the author
Saeed Khan is a founder and Managing Editor of On Product Management, and has worked for the last 20 years in high-technology companies building and managing market leading products. He also speaks regularly at events on the topic of product management and product leadership.
Market research is easy. Visit customers
By Steve Johnson
Market research is easy. Visit customers, with or without sales people. Go on sales calls. Go to user group meetings. Go to conferences. Call a few customers on the phone and ask how they are using your product, where they find deficiencies, and what direction they are taking their own businesses. Listen.
You don’t have to hire an agency; you don’t need to spend a lot of money. A quick phone call or Skype meeting is often all that’s necessary to get in sync with your customers.
The job of product management is straightforward: find a couple of key customers and just do what they tell you. Find out what is needed and build it. That’s the idea behind “customer development” and the “minimum viable product.”
I was asked to evaluate a local charity’s workflows and systems, looking for ways to improve the process for the volunteers. I determined that another configuration would best fit their needs and spent a few hours implementing it.
I asked, “What else?” but they couldn’t think of any other area where my technical assistance was needed.
Willing to help in any way, I joined the team keying information into the database from requests for information. While I worked, I heard these very nice people using not very nice language. I asked what was wrong and they complained bitterly about bad information in many of the database records. Looking at a few examples, I realized someone had converted the database from one format to another and many of the fields had become corrupted.
I quickly set up a macro to move information from the incorrect field to the correct one, and asked, “Would this help?” They were thrilled! Time to market: 10 minutes.
The volunteers were performing manually a process that the computer system could do automatically—if only they had known. They didn’t have any problems that they knew of, but I discovered a big problem with a simple solution just by observing and working with them. I knew the technology but I had to “walk in their shoes” before I could see their problem.
This market research technique is what Luke Hohmann calls “The Apprentice,” in his book Innovation Games.
Do the job to understand the job and its challenges. In most cases, the customer doesn’t know he has a problem. A product manager must understand the customer’s situation better than the customer does, and use that knowledge to develop a solution for the customer.
Product managers build internal credibility by having up-to-date knowledge about customers. Spending time with customers and potential customers reveals problems that need to be fixed. Then work with your team to fix them.
Many strategic product managers make calls every day: to prospects, customers, and non-customers.
Do you?
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photo credit: nocklebeast via photopin cc
About the author
Steve Johnson is a recognized thought leader and storyteller within the technology product management community. As founder of Under 10 Consulting, he helps product teams implement strategic product management in an agile world. Sign up for his newsletter and weekly inspirations.
Positioning, messaging, and ownership
Who defines product positioning? Product Management or Marketing Communications?
Product managers are responsible for the features of the product and its positioning in the marketplace. The Marketing Communications (marcom or marcomms) organization is chartered with delivering the product message to the market. Product Management defines the positioning and Marcom delivers the positioning.
Here’s a crazy idea. What if we thought of marcom as a development organization?
A product manager wants to develop a new brochure to use at a product launch in two months. Marcom says, “Yes.” The costs are estimated for production and a bid is given to the manager. If her budget allows, she will go ahead with the new brochure. Marcom is in effect an inside agency, doing all the design, layout and production work—synchronized with the company branding.
Another product manager needs a brochure in two weeks. Marcom’s answer is still “Yes.” However, in this case, the price is probably much higher. In addition to the standard production costs, Marcom must bring in additional resources to perform the service—producing a brochure on a tight deadline probably can’t be done using only internal staff. The estimate for delivering the brochure is given to the product manager. If the costs are greater than the budget will allow, the product manager will have to say “No.”
As a service provider, Marcom decides when to do things inside and when to use outside help. The costs are all passed back to the product’s promotion budget and the product manager decides whether the promotion is warranted.
Is this too crazy to work?
Fundamentally, the product manager should evaluate promotional materials based strictly on their support of the positioning. Leave the creative work to the creative people. Ask yourself: does it support the position?
You should be able to describe the position or the statement you wish to make to your marcom contact and trust them to deliver the message.
Another fine distinction is the contrast of product positioning and messaging. Positioning is what we’ll say; the messaging is how we’ll say it. Marcom generally owns messaging while product management generally own positioning.
I once shared a positioning and persona document plus a drawing on a cocktail napkin to our marcom group. They were able to create a go-to-market campaign and product brochures based entirely on these items.
In my work with both marcom and agencies, I have learned that most of the project time is spent in “planning” which is really time spent trying to figure out the product position. They interview the various product people and then create a positioning document based on their understanding of the product. From that document, they build their promotional plan.
There’s nothing wrong with developing a positioning document with a marcom group as long as you know that’s what you’re doing. You run into trouble when a promotion meeting is spent trying to define the positioning.
If you don’t know the positioning, you’re not ready to begin your promotion.
Related posts: http://under10consulting.com/category/positioning/
Need help? Ask me about my positioning workshop, part of my Pragmatic Marketing assistance.
About the author
Steve Johnson is a recognized thought leader and storyteller within the technology product management community. As founder of Under 10 Consulting, he helps product teams implement strategic product management in an agile world. Sign up for his newsletter and weekly inspirations.
What Type of Product Manager Do You Really Need?
By Rivi Aspler
Saeed recently spoke at Product Camp (Silicon Valley), where he presented a presentation, named, How to truly manage your product like a CEO.
This post is related to Saeed’s presentation, especially slides 21-22 of it, offering a way to choose the right product manager for the Product Life Cycle stage that your product is at.
Just making sure that everyone is on the same page, I’m attaching images of these 21 and 22 slides out of Saeed’s presentation.The first slide presents the product life cycle objectives and the second slide explains what should a company focus on when addressing the challenges of each objective.
Assuming that we agree on the objectives and the different focus of each of them, it now becomes interesting to see what type of product manager should lead the product at each of these stages.
Using the two differentiated objectives: “Build It” and “Scale It”, one can see below the different skills set orientation that you would like to make sure that your product managers are leveraging.
For the “Build It” objective, which focuses on the building of a new product for a specific use case, for a specific market, one can see that a product manager should possess good engineering skills and an innovative mindset. Other skills are less important when building a new product.
The other example is of the “Scale It” objective.
For the “Scale It” objective which focuses on product and customer base expansion, one can see that a product manager should posses good management and marketing (inbound and outbound) skills. Other skills are less important when scaling and expanding an existing product.
Summarizing it all, I could simply say that finding your next product management dream job or hiring that next great product manager is about understanding the product management objectives that you will be pushing for the next 2 years and only then finding the person that posses the right skillset to best achieve those goals. Rivi
Rivi
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Avoiding the “best of both worlds” mindset
Take a close look at the picture to the right. It’s the 1899 Horsey Horseless, considered one of the worst cars of all time (source Time.com). Note the fake horse’s head on the front to give it a “familiar” look to those used to riding in carriages pulled by horses.
Transitional products, like the Horsey Horseless, can be quite problematic and there are a number of such products over the last century that have failed.
Do you have a favorite example of a product that tried to tackle two markets at the same time and failed?
You might have a product problem if the value proposition of your new product sounds something like this:
- Our product bridges the gap between the old and new
- It is the product of today with the all power you need for tomorrow
- It has all the features you could ever want and all the agility you could ever need
Sound familiar? Is so, it is a good sign that you are trying to create a product that is the best of both worlds.
What does this mean?
You are trying to compete in two markets simultaneously by finding benefits that overlap between the groups. Why win in one market when you can have two with a single product?
This is where theory often gets run over by practice. What sounds like a reasonable idea in a PowerPoint pitch deck turns into a complete mess of a product. Instead of a winning combination you are stuck with a product that doesn’t compete in either markets.
You are too expensive, complicated, slow, or all of the above compared to the new entrants. You have too many features, require too much training, and look outdated.
Or on the other side of the coin:
You don’t have enterprise integration, security, and management to compete head-to-head with existing market leaders. You don’t have the extra capacity, the APIs, or the service organization needed to deliver value to an entire organization.
When you are just getting started, finding the right features and benefits (not to mention product messaging) is tough enough for one market. Don’t fall for the trap and try and tackle two at the same time.
Have any other examples that you think failed because they were trying to tackle two markets at once?
One of them may be the recent effort to turn J.C. Penny into, “the Bloomingdale’s for Middle America“?
Josh
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