What’s strategic for a product marketer?
- Understanding market and customer challenges
- Articulating a distinct competence or advantage
- Performing market sizing and competitive analysis
- Creating and revising the business plan
- Defining market positioning
and perhaps most strategic of all is…
- Actively engaging key stakeholders who can influence and help drive the success of your product or solution.
The unfortunate reality…
Too often, there’s not enough time to focus on these key strategic activities because it takes so much time and energy merely producing the bill of materials associated with every launch, campaign, and event that’s on the schedule.
It should be easier. But product marketers suffer from several challenges:
- Resource scarcities. Relying on a shared services group within their companies, they run into perpetual bottlenecks due to insufficient resources. These groups may not be there when you need them. But that excuse won’t fly when the launch window is missed.
- Compressed cycles. More needs to be accomplished, more quickly – and the demands merely continue to ratchet upward. You have more campaigns, events, channels, and content to manage than ever, but the time available to do it is shrinking.
- Rising expectations. The level of perceived quality that stakeholders assign to your work is perpetually increasing – even as the measurement of outcomes becomes more visible and precise. You have to meet these demanding expectations despite severe resource constraints and compressed launch cycles.
Sound familiar?
The secret…
The best solution to getting your bill of materials completed in the face of these challenges is to augment your capabilities.
How? You need an outside specialist who understands your need to focus on the strategic in the face of resource challenges, compressed cycles, and rising expectations – while also offering accelerated turnaround and high quality of service. A specialist who has been in your shoes and can deliver to your high expectations.
That’s not easy to come by. So, what should you look for in a specialized agency that can strengthen your strategic stance while allowing you to delegate more of what is tactical?
You’ll need a dedicated and responsive team that:
- Produces compelling content and designs. Your launches, campaigns, and events must be supported with presentations, collateral, training materials, playbooks, and other key marketing assets. Can they deliver at the level you require?
- Rapidly climbs your learning curves. Does the firm have experience in your industry? How about your domain or similar domains? Possibly even within your organization? The last thing you have time for is to “train” your agency. Instead, choose an agency that truly understands your challenges.
- Guarantees predictable production. You may have demanding production schedules. Can your agency meet them? Do they give you visibility into the design, development, and delivery of their work product?
- Manages your account in an engaged and responsive way. You want to know that they are fully immersed in the work – and are communicating on progress, milestones and delivery dates.
With design-driven, content specialists at your side that can meet these exacting criteria, you are in a strong position to meet your launch and campaign objectives. You can concentrate on the strategic while trusting your partner to deliver the tactical.
Curious? Want to learn more?
Contact me to discuss your challenges and product marketing needs, and find out if Visible Impact is the right partner to help you achieve more.
