How do we prioritise solutions versus industries?

An industry marketing strategy can take many forms. You may have found that going to market with industry-specific messaging improves your marketing’s effectiveness, even if your solutions are not industry-specific. Or you may have industry-specific solutions that you wish to market. You may also wish to build mindshare of broad-level expertise within a particular industry. Or you may be in an organisation that has all three of these goals, plus the potential for pureplay horizontal solutions in the mix. Together you have the potential for a Marketing organisation that that’s ripe for dysfunction.

This materialises as teams start competing against each other for customer’s engagement rather than competing with competitors, duplicating your resources and most likely driving functional confusion. Put another way: you recruit separate teams to create pipeline for the same solutions from the same customers, you give them separate budgets and you expect them to force multiply. They won’t.

Industry and horizontal marketing models need careful consideration to avoid this duplication. Be clear on your objectives and your audiences. Do you need to communicate both industry and horizontal messages throughout all stages of the customer journey or if you build industry mindshare and early stage opportunities at an industry lens, can you resort to horizontal touchpoints as customers progress through to purchase? Do you need to build both horizontal and industry campaigns separately or can you build campaigns that consider industry relevance and cross-industry messaging integrated together? Do you need to activate those campaigns separately or can you build a channel strategy so that you’re not targeting the same audiences and bidding against yourself by leveraging different digital channels.

Prioritisation is not about getting to perfect, it’s about getting to the best imperfect solution: optimise business impact and value from resources available.

Another input to your decision-making process should be the size of your target audience? It may seem simple and it may seem like there are always more people within scope than you can capture in your campaigns, but even for enterprise marketing teams this can prove false. A horizontal audience – say, the IT function – can be of significant scale. A sub-function within IT can also be substantial. But the sub-function in a particular industry like Retail, for example, can become much smaller. And when you have to evaluate this at a local level when content localisation is required, such as in France, an IT sub-function in Retail in France could be quite limited. Even if the audience is not very small, it may still be too small when the effort to localise content and coordinate campaign setup is compared against the same effort for another business priority. For a marketing manager based in France, the decision to run a general IT audience campaign in French, rather than a French campaign to an IT sub-function in retail, may appear like a global team is just doing generic irrelevant marketing. But if they understood the strategy behind prioritisation of limited resources both in France and globally they may better understand this compromise.

Consider another example of an email nurture campaign: what does an average of 15% open rate and 2% click-through rate look like in real numbers. Say our IT sub-function in Retail in France create 200 leads a month that we want to nurture. Each email would only be opened 30 times a month and clicked on 4 times. Is that worth the effort of developing the content, setting it up, measuring and reporting against it? Maybe it’s worth doing and just running in English – does localising the content make enough of a difference to open and click-through rates that the cost is worth it? Marketing resources can only be scaled to the hours and budget available to them, so constrained audiences may need to be deprioritised against other objectives. Put another way: you can only use your resources once, so use them wisely.