Top Seven Keys to Success as a Technical Marketing Manager
If you’re a technical marketing manager and you want to be successful at your job, there are 7 important keys that you need to know.
1. Know the market.
Ensure that you understand all of your products, what they do and who wants to buy them. This is true for any type of product, not just technology-based ones. Market research will help you here – talk to your customers, talk to the people who work in sales and marketing strategy departments, look at industry reports and forecasts if they are available. And then use this information to guide how you promote your products.
This will ensure that you don’t focus on an area where there is little interest or where there is already a lot of competition. In other words, save yourself some time by avoiding areas that require a lot of work (including advertising) with little pay-off!
2. Understand how your products are used.
This is not to be confused with product branding, although the two are related. From the information that you gather on your products and how they are used, you will learn what type of content is most likely to resonate with customers and thus attract their attention.This research will help you create targeted marketing campaigns, which will in turn allow you to reach more potential customers. If a customer uses a product often, they are more likely to buy new versions of it. So selecting good keywords can make it easier for prospects to find your latest articles or blog posts and also easier for them to click through from those articles (so long as your titles don’t have too many words!).
3. Gather customer insights.
This is a cost-effective way to gather information that can help you be successful at your job. Start by identifying the types of objectives that different customers need, and then how these can be met by different products. This will be dependent on the type of product, but there are some general themes that you can expect to see.
4. Know your competition.
Competitors will be important for any organization, but especially for companies like yours where the products are fairly unique. Many of your competitors will at some stage have to adopt similar or complementary product lines. By knowing what they have already offered, you can easily identify the other products that they already have available, and this will help you to decide which ones they might sell to your target customers. In order to do some research on competitor’s products, you will need to ask questions of your sales and marketing department. If you are selling a product that is heavily reliant on social media, then talk to the team responsible for creating content – they will be able to give you information on what others have posted about the company’s products or services.
5. Know what type of content resonates with customers.
It is not necessarily just words (although this is certainly a part of it) – some customers really appreciate images, video or audio examples etc. You will have to test different types of content strategies and see what works best for your product. For example, if your product requires some expertise to use (like a highly sophisticated piece of software), you may want to primarily use video and audio. But if your product is based more on lifestyle aspects that are easy to understand, then you may want pictures and words.
In order to find the right content, ask other customers how they would feel about different subjects related to your products.
6. Keep everything up-to-date and organized (very important!).
People in Marketing need to be aware of the changes that are coming up in the business environment. For example, a new competitor may have entered the market, or there may be increased interest in a particular area. Keeping everything up to date and organized will help you keep up with this information.
So you need to gather all of the content that you have created since your last marketing campaign. Then organize them based on content type and topic, so that you can easily find information when you need it.
7. Research keywords to use in marketing campaigns
The different types of content require different methods for keyword searches. If a majority of your content is text-based (articles, white papers etc.), then search engine optimization will be an effective way to attract visitors from search engines to your website (which will link back to the relevant page). If your product is more visual or interactive, then social media advertising may be more appropriate.
Conclusion
For anyone looking to become a successful technical marketing manager, you will have to follow these 7 easy steps in order to make a difference. By following this advice, you will be able to get more traffic to your website and improve your sales.
