What Cloud Companies Must do Before Promoting Engineers to Marketing
What do cloud companies need to know when they bringing engineers into marketing roles? Keep reading to find out
November 15, 2016
By Derek Handova
Many cloud computing companies have a cadre of electrical engineers, computer scientists and other experts managing technical operations. They all rose through the ranks via abilities to deal with specific problems with boxes, boards or lines of code. That makes them natural fits for engineering management, product management and even business development or sales where micro-environmental issues only need one-time solutions.
However, when it comes to marketing, one size really does have to fit all, in many cases. While one-to-one marketing and personalization have become fads, traditional marketing remains in the macroscopic mindset.
IQ and technical smarts alone will not cut it. High emotional intelligence (EQ) exists as a necessity to formulate outbound approaches that will activate customers and get them into the buyer journey.
“Engineers moving into marketing actually have the same challenges as most marketers,” says Ed Marsh, management consultant, Consilium, business advisory firm to B2B manufacturers. “Marketing requires high EQ to conceive and execute approaches for each stage on the buyer journey. Most fail. They deliver what they think is important; what they want to talk about; features they’ve obsessed over; technical challenges they’ve conquered. All that is irrelevant to buyers.”
Become the Buyer, Speak her Language, Answer her Questions
The biggest lesson in this is that engineers are not the buyers, according to Marilyn Heywood Paige, vice president, marketing, Fig Advertising, who says she has worked with many coders in marketing over the years.
“Your buyer could be a CEO, office manager, IT pro or administrative assistant,” Heywood Paige says. “You have to be able to speak to all these audiences in their language, not yours.”
For example, coders could write a searchable blog or white paper about reliable cloud service. Instead of writing, “Cloud infrastructure with the highest uptime by geographic location,” they should write, “Reliable cloud service in California,” because that’s a phrase non-technical audiences are more likely to search for, according to Heywood Paige.
To take the place of buyers at different stages of the customer journey, engineers can become effective marketers if they leverage their training to ask questions that purchasers would ask then develop answers, according to Marsh. And by cooperating with those who have liberal arts backgrounds, such as authors, engineers could help flailing cloud company marketing.
“In many cases, freshly minted journalists interviewing and writing for engineers will produce far more effective marketing collaboratively than vaunted marketing experts,” Marsh says. “Engineers are trained, much like journalists, to ask questions in an effort to understand root causes.”
This kind of tag team approach to marketing with engineering is a great way to identify engineers who can naturally blend IQ and EQ into go-to-market strategy for solutions, according to other former technical role players.