I’ve written about this quite often, but it’s never enough to get every tech and innovation company, big or small, thinking how to make sure their product or solution fits in the market, and ensure the market understands why it’s so great!
Marcomms or Marketing Communications has changed a lot in the last few years, especially driven by how quick technology advances, how quick new products are created, and how short lifecycles have become. Just think about how quickly any digital device becomes outdated hardware-wise.
If you look it up in Wikipedia, this is what you get:
Traditionally, marketing communications practitioners focused on the creation and execution of printed marketing collateral; however, academic and professional research developed the practice to use strategic elements of branding and marketing in order to ensure consistency of message delivery throughout an organization – a consistent “look & feel”. Many trends in business can be attributed to marketing communications; for example: the transition from customer service to customer relations, and the transition from human resources to human solutions and the trends to blogs, email, and other online communication derived from an elevator pitch.
The elevator pitch is a 30 second sentence – just about the attention span of any C-level – that describes what you do, who you do it for, why do you do it better and why it has business value.
So there are 4 key things here: product, audiences, purpose and business value.
This should be the starting point and it’s what defines the positioning, i.e. how to approach the market.
This is the basis for the search every technological or innovation business must do to differentiate itself from the (fierce) competition. Searching for the stories in the business – virtually speaking to every team, partner and clients – formatting the tone and look & feel so it resembles something any potential client wants to do, creating the assets (no printed collateral please – use the cloud), and pushing them through the right channels – internal and external.
This is the basic Job Description for any Marcomms position or service, but it’s changing, just like companies are.
In emerging industries like #bigdata and #IoT (Internet of things) these stories are still to be created, so go get your hands dirty with the R&D and partnerships teams, and build a prototype or a pilot. Start small, measure it and grow it. Launch it internally to some colleagues, if it works get some end users, and if it’s as you expect and rocks the foundations of your company, get a client use case.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APDjX3cZ7Ps]
The best stories about your businesses are the ones others are telling for you, so the more people you bring along the journey the more advocates you’ll have. Build assets, take your clients and partners to events and share it on social media. This is where the Marcomms roles are evolving, and I am very excited to be a part of this evolution.
And why does it matter?
With the right story you get relevance in your social media presence, you get press coverage (without media fees), industry events speaker opportunities, spontaneous business leads, and one final thing – you attract others that think like you – Talent attraction is one of the biggest challenges for any company!
If you think you have good ideas, imagine having two or three more like you around – what would you be able to achieve?
But there’s more, these are the stories your employees not only get, but love to brag to their friends during Sunday roast! Get the whole company engaged and evangelizing: if it’s a good story, everyone understands it – and everyone loves a good story, especially storytellers – colleagues, journalists and yes, bosses, just the people you have to get through to!
Whether you use social media, blogging, press releases or videos, remember whenever you raise the bar in quality or innovation, everyone expects this to become the norm, and look up to you as the first ones to demonstrate it – so do it first, with the story of why your idea is changing the world!
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