There are many reasons why it is important to have a bold, inspirational vision for your product. But while it may seem that there are no limits to the shared vision you can create through marketing communications, in today’s enterprise tech environment it is good to remain well grounded.
If your messaging lurches too far out in front of you, you end up with missed user expectations and disappointment.
In this blog, we explore why, in a world of platform engineering, open source software and flip-a-switch cloud services, missing user expectations could be far more significant than it used to be. With the fashion for story telling, we look at the increased dangers of getting over-imaginative, and then explore some of the emerging technical marketing channels where creativity can be put to better use.
Creating a Fiction
Tech marketing used to involve a lot more of the worst kind of creativity. Working in media relations over the past two decades, I lost count of the number of times my colleagues and I were asked to officially launch vaporware that was nearly ready, or software or services that (while they were exactly what the market wanted) were still very much in beta.
Or take the user story, the former source of all success in tech PR and communications: C-suite decision makers were regaled with ‘imaginative’ tales of infamous business challenges and how bold new software solutions made them instamagically vanish. But then came the platform engineer…
“Superb!” said Debbie DevOps. “Let me spin up your legendary solution and put it to the test.”
(Queue sad trombone.)
Where spinning was once the preserve of vendor communications teams, suddenly, there is a fresh face in town spinning up test instances across Kube and AWS with happy abandon. These engineers don’t buy into vendors’ tall marketing stories — but C-suite executives increasingly rely on these engineers to inform all of their purchasing decisions.
The fact is, platform engineers won’t buy much of anything without trying it out first. And so, technology marketing and communications has been brought down to earth with a very heavy thud. Enterprise tech messaging was once built on bold claims laced with hyperbole and superlatives. But today, ‘the leading global providers of…’ now have just a few hours (at most — days) to start backing up their claims with a working demo or a plausible proof of concept (PoC).
Catfish Marketing is Dead
In branding terms, creating any kind of artificial image has, thankfully, been replaced by a need for developing genuine identity. Ambition and vision are as relevant as ever. Keep reaching for the stars: just don’t leave prospective users relying on your extensive experience as an astronaut.
We will explore why in the next section, but delighting users by carefully setting and managing expectations has not only replaced creating a more hyped, artificial image, it has become the only real way of attracting new users.
Devops teams and platform engineers still weigh up the technical solutions to business challenges, and they assess the different options to achieve product/project goals. It would just be very unusual for them to start by looking at user stories in the traditional tech media. More likely, they ask a trusted friend and look for recommendations on developer social channels.
Delight and disappointment — both get shared
User adoption now happens at the crossroads where tech challenges meet with: search engines, AI Assistants, Stack Overflow, Dev, Reddit or the Discord channel of a parallel open source project. This is where developers with real problems meet informed, trusted peers with real solutions. And there are two ways to get there — either by delighting or disappointing existing users!
Ensuring you are there for the right reasons is about early-stage product marketing — accurately identifying your target market. Any product vision that you share with users, can and should still be bold and creative (in its best sense). However, to avoid disaster, it needs to be firmly based on a real-world technical understanding of where, how and for which groups your product currently delivers its most tangible benefits.
Traditional marcoms cannot materially improve a product or service, it cannot make it more delightful. However, a technically literate team with strong market knowledge can identify where your current capabilities have the greatest impact. Put simply, they can identify the groups where your offering delights new users the most, producing vital advocates and online champions. Furthermore, a skilled marcoms team should then analyse these success stories to help define, fulfill and refine your stated vision. This, in turn, creates a reinforcing, virtuous cycle: more targeted positioning attracts more of the right prospects and creates more delighted product champions.
The New Place for Being Creative
In areas where engineers and developers have become key decision influencers, technical papers and documentation, guides and tutorials are becoming powerful marketing collateral.
A large part of successfully attracting and drawing-in prospects with this more technical marketing still lies in the market knowledge discussed above: research, targeting, retargeting, staying on top of shifting technology trends – tuning-in to those discussions happening down at the “crossroads”.
Technical audiences want answers to the questions they actually have in front of them: the technical challenges they face, and the business challenges they are being asked to address – if your product/project is included in a practical guide for building the PoC that everyone is being asked for, it will do its own PR and social media marketing.
But creativity still has an exciting role to play here. In many cases technical papers, guides and documentation are now where new users are guided into their first encounters with your product. This experience is not just an intro, it is an essential part of your product.
You could draw the parallel here to what Apple pioneered with packaging in the 00’s: moving us on from cheap plastic and tear-open cardboard, towards beautiful, considered and tactile packaging materials that make unboxing a central part of the product experience. However, the Apple parallel (yes it is clichéd, sorry) doesn’t really go far enough, and only captures part of the picture. To be accurate, we would need to live in a world where bad packaging decisions would result in people discarding their MacBook Pro before they had finished opening it up.
This should be a terrifying thought for many companies and projects out there because, as a whole, enterprise tech documentation is pretty terrible. Where documentation is even complete, it is typically a rushed afterthought from developers who were already focused on the far more interesting task of building the next feature.
But what this really is, is a massive opportunity. Technical marketing is now the place to focus creativity and increasingly limited budgets, where it will make a real difference to your product and to adoption.