Leveraging your industry expertise

Feature

Your product managers may represent a more powerful expert resource than your marketing people realize.  Veteran marketing director Joan Tesla explains how to leverage their industry knowledge as an asset for building industry awareness, satisfying client needs, and driving sales success.

By Peter Longini, Managing Editor

With their attention centered around launching new products, building market share, and driving revenue, most product managers look to their colleagues in marketing communications to create the product brochures and other materials that promote their products.  But those who do may be missing a major marketing opportunity - packaging and promoting their own expertise.

"As a marketer, my job has ultimately been to help generate sales and revenue," Tesla acknowledged.  "For emerging companies, that starts by building awareness of the company and its products.  And I have always found that by leveraging the expertise our product managers have gained through market research and hands-on experience with customers, we're able to achieve that awareness-building objective and leverage it into sales opportunities." 

"I learned early on that market expertise has tremendous marketing value.  I began my marketing career in the mutual fund industry, where the products are intangible and market dynamics can change overnight," Tesla said.  "In that world, marketing is all about leveraging the expertise of the portfolio managers because you can never depend on a product's performance alone to ensure success.  Capturing a manager's expertise as commentary in newsletters, speeches, and even direct mail campaigns, positioned our company as an expert in specific market sectors and gave credibility to the funds they managed - regardless of market dynamics."

A tenured marketing communications professional herself, Tesla is a proponent of leveraging the expertise of product management as a marketing asset - and has done so successfully for a number of different businesses - from early adopter tech companies to non-profit.  And while the marketing tactics differ somewhat from industry to industry, Tesla has found that certain marketing tactics pay off across a wide range of industries.  It all starts by understanding what makes you an expert, packaging that expertise as it relates to market trends, then leveraging every opportunity to promote it.

1. Know Your Smarts

Where does a product manager begin to understand what makes him/her an expert?  For most product managers, that expertise has likely been gained on the job - that is, understanding the needs in the market and developing products in response to those needs.

As marketing director for Confluence, a provider of financial services automation technology, Tesla views product management as a marketing communications asset.  Confluence product managers develop solutions based on intense market research directed toward building solutions that best meet the market's needs.  Their understanding of those needs, gained through the product management process, creates the opportunity for them to be positioned as industry experts or even thought leaders.

That same kind of market know-how opportunity applies in any industry.  "At United Way our products were designed around our ability to impact critical issues that our customers - the donors - told us were important," said Tesla, who previously headed marketing for a United Way regional office in Pennsylvania.  "By packaging and promoting our product leaders' knowledge of critical community issues and the philosophies impacting them, we not only created awareness of these problems but also confidence in our ability to solve them.  That's how we inspired donations."

But as a product manager, how do you know what makes you so smart?  Start by thinking about your buyers and the problems they are dealing with, she suggests.  The opportunities for creating an expert or thought leader marketing strategy lie in demonstrating your expertise in providing solutions to your buyers' problems. 

Some of those opportunities reflect the distinctive contours of a particular industry, an emerging trend in the industry, or the ensuing adoption of a new technology.  "Whatever the nuance of your particular industry, your clients have a need to understand the impact of anything new," she said.  "Highly regulated industries, for example, create the ongoing need for clients to understand the impact of new regulation.  Ironically, the specific industry doesn't matter - market expertise is always valued." 

According to Tesla, when you develop products based on the belief that there is an overriding need in the market, you have an opportunity to leverage the knowledge you have gained through hands-on market research to the benefit of your industry, your clients and your sales success. "Every industry has its trends; every industry has its issues," she said.  "Some are just slower-moving than others.  At Confluence the driving force is largely regulatory, but in other cases it's more a matter of trend than of regulation."

2. Package Your Smarts

Once you've identified what makes you so smart, the next step is to package that expertise, Tesla said.  Leveraging your Marketing Communications team is mission-critical.  That's because, while you can supply expert marketing content, Marketing Communications has the arsenal of tools and the creative ability to turn your great content into effective marketing artifacts.

"Marketing Communications has the budget and the media access you need to take your marketing expertise and package it into valuable marketing content," says Tesla.  "And they are usually hungry for great content ideas.  As a savvy product manager, all you have to do is serve it up."

For tech companies, whitepapers - essentially extended discussions of one or another of the issues facing the company's clients - can be an important marketing communications tool for highlighting the company's expertise.  Developing the solution and developing a narrative about the issue which the company's solution is addressing, are typically part of the same process, frequently led by the same product managers.  The resulting papers are can be made available online and distributed in hard copy at conferences as well as through the mail. 

But whitepapers are just one way to package content.  According to Tesla, once you have good content the opportunities for packaging it are endless.  Consider this short list of B2B marketing venues for packaging great expert content:

- blog

- podcast

- webinar

- white paper

- e-mail newsletter articles

- e-book

- by-lined article

- video

- press releases

However the most valuable piece of advice Tesla offers about packaging is what she refers to as the three ‘R's of marketing content management: Repurpose.  Repurpose.  Repurpose. "Whether you start by creating a video or publishing a whitepaper, don't stop there.  Consider as many ways as possible to repurpose your expert content," she said. "Turn whitepaper content into a speakers' bureau abstract, and encourage your marketing team to peddle you to speak at industry conferences.  Offer to contribute articles to your company's e-newsletter.  Make a video.  Use direct mail.  Or start a blog to engage in ongoing dialogue with your target audience.  Get started by engaging Marketing Communications and developing a plan to package your smarts.  And if you are really smart, you won't even have to do the writing - just provide the content and Marketing Communications will put a writer to the task."

3. Promote Your Smarts

Let's assume you've decided to turn your market expertise into a marketing asset.  You've engaged Marketing Communications.  You've got plans to package your valuable content and repurpose it across multiple marketing media - from creating a video to launching an online newsletter or blog.  Your next challenge: promoting that content to capture leads.  "After all," she pointed out, "it really doesn't matter how smart you are if your product can't generate revenue."

Although branding and awareness building are crucial in product marketing, the ultimate goal is lead generation.  "Capitalize on your expert content for lead generation.  If it's valuable content that helps solve your buyer's business problems, they will give you their contact information in exchange for receiving your e-newsletter or downloading your whitepaper," Tesla said.  

Don't underestimate the power of free media.  "The trade press loves this type of material because they don't want to write about your company's products - that's what their ads are for," Tesla said.  "If you're trying to get a reporter to write about your product, you're not going to have much luck.  They like to talk about trends, they like to talk about fresh ideas, and they like this type of content because it gives them something to write about that's not a product pitch." 

The same holds true in pursuing speaking opportunities.  "Here again, you're not pitching your product; you're positioning yourself as an expert on a trend or a regulation or something that's going on in the industry.  So professional associations are happy to put you on a panel if you can discuss a trend; they just don't want to put you on a panel to talk about your product per se," she said. 

Finally, make sure your marketing communications team is optimizing web site opportunities - both paid and non-paid.   "When people have a problem, the first place they go online is a search engine," she noted.  "Make sure your web site is optimized to achieve high rankings for keyword searches and that your marketing communications team is promoting the topic of your expertise via paid online advertising."

About the Author:

Peter Longini is the Managing Editor for Inside Product Strategy™. He can be reached at   .