The marketer’s unique challenges in a tech company
Being a marketer in a tech company has some unique challenges as he is surrounded by technologists and engineers having another view on the products or solutions, the business and the market.
Translate technical stuff
In a technical company it’s all about technology.
However customers are business.
Translating the technical stuff into business stuff is all important as potential buyers need to be briefed and informed about the business benefits and business value.
The marketer doesn’t need to understand the technology entirely or be a technology specialist. His main task and challenge is to be able translating the technical solution into a business benefit.
Translating the engineering speak into easy to understand business value. Especially with an enterprise-class product where a divers range of decision makers are involved in the purchase process from different functions.
Your marketing needs to appeal to technical groups in non-marketing terms and to business executives in business terms and value.
Compelling business benefit instead of technical
The engineers, the developers and the CTO find their solution evident to buy, but for the customers the messaging needs to more compelling.
Not the greatness of the technical solution.
It is the perception of the added value of the product on the customers’ end which is important: it needs to be compelling.
The tech pits
The tech pit can occur or be present in different occasions or places:
- On the website
- On the product leaflets
- On the presentation slides
- During the product pitch
The website
Most purchases starts with an online search, so it’s key to speak the same language as your prospects.
The product leaflets
The product leaflets are not technical documents but they should present business value and business benefits for the customer.
The presentation slides
The presentation slides can indicate the technology used or an helicopter view of the technical solution but not more.
The product pitch
During the product pitch people easily wander into a technical presentation (in many case guided by the technical questions of one person in the audience), whereas most people listening to the product pitch just want a solution which they can trust to their problem or issues. A technical discussion can raise more questions and before one knows difficult to explain technical aspects are being discussed which increase the confusion and decrease the trustworthiness.
Submerged in technology
A marketer in a tech company has to deal with all these challenges as his colleagues all are engineers who prefer to answer and discuss technical matters – not the business benefits and value.
Moreover they often don’t see the benefit or the necessity of presenting the business benefits and business value. This can lead to discussions internally as the marketer wants to have completely different messaging about the products and solutions.
The marketing budget
In most cases technology people and engineers are not big spenders and will try to work cost effective: getting a return on every Dollar invested.
On the other hand marketers need to spend large amounts of money in order to get the messaging for the products into the market.
This is perceived by the engineers and technical people as wasting or burning money as no exact return on investment can be proved.
This can challenge or question the marketer’s position in the company.
The marketer faces difficult challenges and more than often his own position can be questioned or challenged, although they hired him in the first place to solve their lack of efficient marketing problem.
Can the marketer in your tech company fully exercise his job ?
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