In this post I discuss the marketing discipline, particularly the high-tech marketing that is practiced in large technology organizations, though still relevant to small or low-tech businesses. Any business needs to understand the “science” of marketing and apply it to its business. Naturally not all areas and elements of marketing are applicable and relevant for every business, so one needs to adjust and customize it to the business’ needs and budget.

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I briefly cover various types of marketing such as strategic marketing and product marketing as well as newer areas including web and social media marketing. In a follow up piece I will explore a typical marketing process, its stages and steps, and how these types of marketing are leveraged in such a process.

Marketing, a key differentiator

Whether you are in a high-tech market or a commodity or low-tech market, whether you are in  enterprise B2B market or consumer market, marketing has emerged as a key discipline and an important differentiator that can significantly influence the success or failure of your business as a whole. Technology is becoming increasingly more commoditized and less differentiating. With the openness of internet, readily accessible Web 2.0 technologies, open source projects addressing various software needs from OS and database to middleware, various web programming and scripting languages and frameworks, and the emerging cloud computing, it is progressively more difficult to built sustainable competitive advantages based on technology alone. So to succeed in business, you need to do effective marketing.

Strategic & technical marketing

Marketing as a discipline is evolving. Though the 4 Ps of marketing (product, price, promotion and placement) still matter, the new marketing is no longer defined based on them. Marketing is becoming increasingly more strategic and less tactical, with a broad and complex range of functions. Strategic marketing is concerned with defining market and product strategy. To arrive at a good strategy, market and competitive research must be performed to better understand the opportunities and challenges.

In technology companies product management and product marketing roles deal with managing the whole product from concept and plan to sales. Product marketing typically deals with defining marketing requirements, product definition, product positioning and messaging, differentiations, product launch, and sales and channel enablement. Product management typically is inbound and somewhat more technical as it works closely with R&D to plan and build the product that is defined jointly by product marketing.

Most marketing organizations have established and practice these roles though the exact titles and organizational structures may vary from one company to another. For example, there may or may not be a dedicated role to marketing strategy. While product marketing is typically within marketing proper, product management is often under R&D. And in smaller organizations both roles may be combined into one.

There are several firms that have defined and teach frameworks and methodologies on marketing and particularly. For example, Pragmatic Marketing has a good marketing framework which I am actually certified in. Several marketing organizations that I have worked in, have adopted and customized this framework per their needs. Another firm, ZIGZAG Marketing also provides a good product management framework with decent templates for various product management and product marketing deliverables. There are also many books dedicated to related topics such as strategic marketing and product marketing.

“Soft” marketing

Beyond the strategic and technical marketing roles, there are many other marketing functions that you may see in a large high-tech marketing organization such as programs marketing, lead generation or telemarketing, partner marketing, field marketing, marketing communications which may include public relations and analyst relations, event marketing, etc. Some of these roles may be combined, not explicitly defined, or may be outsourced to marketing agencies who provide such services such as PR firms.

Web & email marketing

In the areas of lead generation and campaign execution, in the recent years there has been a lot of development and progress leveraging various web and email related technologies and techniques. There are companies such as Eloqua who offer sophisticated marketing automation tools and services, and there are email marketing services such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response that are fairly inexpensive and widely used.

There is also the very important area of SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) that deals with search engine rankings and find-ability of a website in relevant searches. This also takes a particular and somewhat technical skillset and is often outsourced to firms specializing in SEO.

Social media marketing

In addition to all this, social media has brought in further complexities and requirements to the marketing discipline. Though having a solid product or service that meets its target market’s needs is still critical, nowadays success in business is less about product and more about customer experience. Managing that experience goes beyond just marketing as it touches up on operations, product/service quality, and customer service. But marketing leveraging social media does play an important role in shaping that experience.

Social media by nature has a high degree of subjectivity and it is very autonomous and distributed as it is the voice of many that you may deal with. There is very little control that an organization can exert. A positive experience can be highly valuable for an organization in terms of acquiring new customers and increasing customer loyalty. At the same time, a negative social experience can very adversely affect a brand and ultimately the organization’s reputation.

To manage the presence of a company, its brands and reputation across social media, nowadays many marketing organizations also have added new roles such as social media manager, community manager, and brand manager as extensions to an already complex marketing organization. Again depending on the size, these may be combined with other roles or be outsourced. However, they are functional responsibilities that must be addressed. Needless to say that this is not an isolated activity and it must be aligned and in sync with the rest of the marketing plans and programs.

As a side note, in writing this section on social media marketing, I wanted to shorten the term to “social marketing”. Then I checked Wikipedia and realized that social marketing has a specific meaning: using marketing to “achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good”, which though of high merit, it is not what I have in mind. Social media marketing is doing marketing by leveraging social media technologies, services and techniques.

In the follow up post, I will discuss a typical marketing process that incorporates various marketing area and functions that I have outlined here.

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