Creating a Customer Community - My Fourth Lesson in Product Marketing
Perhaps the most sophisticated product marketing team I have had the pleasure to work with was at AT&T Tridom, a business satellite subsidiary of the telecom giant.
I was hired to help provide technical leadership over a service called Vistacast, which provided satellite-based video services for Corporate Communications and Interactive Distance Learning. The industry jargon of the day called these services Business Television, or BTV.
The service was stellar, fusing best-in-class satellite, digital video, and interactive learning technologies with engineering design and software development from a team at Bell Laboratories. The people, the technology, and the facilities were all world class.
The Marketing Strategy
Despite our product’s superior features, advantages, and benefits, our marketing team chose not to put the technological and service elements front and center. “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the results” was a popular mantra amongst our team.
Instead, we chose to spotlight our customers and their success. We celebrated our customers for the extreme value they were bringing to their organizations and their associates. Subtly embedded within these stories were details on our product’s value proposition and return on investment.
Our campaigns directly targeted their peers in other organizations. Our messaging was wildly effective, leaving our prospects asking “Why can’t that be me?”
Creating Customer Communities
Our marketing plan went a step further into creating customer communities. This went beyond holding “user group” meetings for our customers. Instead, we facilitated the creation of industry organizations that included - but was not limited to - our customers.
For our government customers, this involved formation of an association dedicated to promoting best practices, interoperability, and a procurement consortium. This formal approach was wildly successful, attracting both defense and civilian agencies. Within two years, the association expanded from a handful of members to nearly two dozen. Virtually all of these agencies became our customers.
For our commercial customers, we took a less formal approach. The driving desire for many of our customers was to meet and develop relationships with their peers. We encouraged this and facilitated opportunities for our customers to connect, often at conference events. We helped secure and promote our customer's participation on conference panels, elevating their stature while softly evangelizing our service..
This commercial community effectively attracted their peers at other large enterprises, with several becoming our marquee customers.
The Lessons I Learned
The Vistacast experience taught me five valuable lessons:
It’s not about the technology, its about the results - It is natural (and common) for technology providers to espouse their whiz-bang capabilities. However, most people assume that your technology is stable and performs as advertised. What they want to understand “How will this improve the bottom line for their organization?”
Customers want to know “What’s in for me?” - People, in general, are motivated to invest in products that help drive their personal success. If you can demonstrate how they will personally benefit from using your service, you will likely win them over.
Customers want to be “In the Club” . When you create a community, outsiders will want to become members. Knowing how to effectively create and promote a community of successful customers will likely attract additional customers.
Customers don’t want to “Leave the Club” - Creating a vibrant community of customers creates meaningful “stickiness.” They feel a deeper connected to that community - with greater loyalty - than they will typically have with a vendor. This results in reduced customer churn, which helps drive growth and profitability.
The value of a highly-talented marketing team - Inside technology companies, engineers and developers tend to trump marketers in terms of prestige and respect. With Vistacast, I learned that a highly-talented marketing team is essential in helping your technology realize its market potential.