Choosing a product marketing firm for emerging technologies
Creating space in the market for something entirely new can be a challenge. You may have an impressive demo for your new tech product—but are you clearly communicating what it does and how potential buyers can use it in their work?
Choosing the right emerging technology product marketing firm can help you with that. They’ll get to the heart of what your product does, what it takes to use, and how it can fill existing gaps in customer workflows. When evaluating prospective partners, you’ll want to determine whether they can make an unfamiliar product understandable while giving buyers a practical way to evaluate it.
Start where the buyer is
Not all buyers are the same. Some may be trying to fully understand the problem your innovative new product solves, while others may be ready to dive right into the technical details of setup. The right product marketing firm will help you speak to both audiences.
To drive adoption, your chosen product marketing firm should establish a baseline understanding of your potential customers. They should assess what these prospects already know about your product by conducting interviews, having sales conversations, paying attention to questions during demos, and leveraging available research. This will help them tailor your product’s positioning.
For example, let’s say you have an immersive training product. A training leader is going to have a very different understanding and perspective than a technical evaluator. The training leader may know that your product can assist with training, but they may want to understand more about what skills it can help employees practice. They probably aren’t ready to hear terms like “spatial computing” at this stage. On the other hand, a technical evaluator may be ready to discuss things like spatial computing and the requirements for distributed setup. Both points of view are important to understand in order to effectively communicate with potential customers and drive them to adopt your technology.
Turn curiosity into an evaluation path
No matter who you’re speaking to, you’ll want to be able to explain a clear use case to the buyer and point them to a relevant demo. This will spark their curiosity and influence their consideration of your product, helping them understand how your emerging technology could meet their needs. From there, you’ll want to nurture them further, driving them toward a small pilot with a set number of participants, established conditions, and clear learning goals.
All of these steps along the buyer journey are important, and they can’t be replaced by a successful demo alone. In a demo, you don’t have the opportunity to address tailored, specific concerns each customer may have. That’s why potential customers may want to discuss in more detail:
Setup requirements
What integrations are available
Training resources
The cost
Security & privacy controls
What internal approvals are needed
The right emerging technology product marketing firm will know that tailored approaches are needed when driving potential customers from awareness and interest to adoption. To select the right partner, you may want to give prospective firms a short product brief and ask them how they’d explain the use case and next steps for a pilot. In their answer, look for a specific next step and clear assumptions (that will help sort out who’s qualified and who’s not).
Learn and refine as adoption grows
Your emerging technology product marketing firm should constantly iterate and evolve your messaging based on how the market responds. They should refine your marketing materials on an ongoing basis using insights collected from frequently asked buyer questions, common objections, demo observations, and early pilot feedback. This will ensure that your messaging is accurate, relatable, and helpful.
To do this, you will need a process for gathering customer feedback, a set cadence for reviewing feedback, and a plan for sharing the information across teams. It’s important that your system is streamlined, continual, and easy-to-understand—this will make it easier to evolve your marketing materials over time. Don’t have a system in place? Ask your emerging technology product marketing firm to make suggestions and outline a clear plan.
Match the claim to the proof
Building trust in the market involves honest marketing claims. Making overblown or misleading statements is a surefire way to discredit your product and lose potential customers.
Before sharing claims externally, make sure the right evidence is there to back it up. Ask your product marketing firm to explore what claims can be made now, which need pilot results, and which require more evidence—it’s important that when you make a claim, there’s enough proof to support it. This is the best way to foster trust with your audience and solidify your reputation.
Choose a partner who turns buyer curiosity into a clear next step
A strong emerging technology product marketing firm will want to fully understand your buyers. What are their roles? What’s important to them? What challenges are they facing? And why would they be excited about your product? They’ll dive into all of this (and more), to develop a practical, compelling story for your product with plenty of evidence to support your claims. They’ll develop a clear path for potential customers to evaluate your product, outlining what they may want to try first and what tests would help them determine whether the product is right for them.
Choosing the right partner is a big task—take our tips and considerations into account, and ask prospective firms questions that will help you make the best choice for your company.
Bringing an unfamiliar technology to market? Let’s talk about how to make its value clear. Schedule a call.