Marketers at SolidWorks World talk about frustrations and successes
Software user conferences are great places to connect with software marketers, usually over a drink or three. Here are 3 themes I heard repeatedly at SolidWorks World in San Diego this week:
As big as we are, awareness is still an issue
Every company, from newly funded start-ups to giant companies, seems to crave a market niche where their product is virtually unknown. Maybe it’s a niche that’s grown fast and just hit the radar. Or maybe it’s because certain niches have complex needs that have only recently been addressable. Regardless of the reason, marketers are always seeking to build their brands through awareness as well as building incrementally from their user base.
We are all getting smarter with social
Marketers are using social media to turn traditional outbound campaigns into inbound success. For example, say your outbound campaign is an email that drives traffic to a landing page where the visitor trades their contact information for a white paper.
In the earlier days of social media you would simply post a link to the landing page from social media and push it out to your followers. You might put some budget into promoting those posts. Now we are seeing more leveraged strategies through social that repurpose the white paper in different content pieces, such as:
All of these are then given the full social media promotion effort that would previously have only been given to the landing page as a way to engage by content consumption preference.
Our “one size fits all” campaigns are falling short of their potential
Marketers are becoming very savvy at developing buyer personas across many industries. As they do so, they are realizing that their generalized marketing campaigns can’t match the needs of most of the industry personas they want to reach. Instead, they want to run an increasing number of highly targeted campaigns with content that’s customized to each segment. Naturally, the resources to do that just don’t exist.
There were other tips and frustrations I heard from software marketers (i.e. Demand Gen), but these were the 3 that came up the most. Hope you can relate.
At ENGINEERING.com we have a long history of marketing campaigns for software vendors of all sizes, including demand gen, branding and content creation. We are always open to sharing knowledge to assist companies with marketing challenges, so please reach out to Adrian or I should you want to discuss obstacles you face or see our Industry Marketing Solutions page for Engineering Software.
Yours,John