Marketing executives have three major responsibilities:
- Maintaining and protecting current markets
- Deepening and expanding existing markets
- Discovering and creating new markets
A key activity in accomplishing these three goals is communication. Specifically, communication through writing.
Freelance content writers who understand how their skills fit into these strategic objectives will become a valuable asset to any marketing executive.
What does it mean to maintain and protect your current market?
If you have a business, a big priority is protecting your core markets.
Average companies protect this by focusing exclusively on product design.
Outstanding companies go beyond product design to include other departments, particularly marketing.
How Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company maintained and protected its market
Take Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
In 2018, The Economist reported that TSMC would be producing the world’s most powerful chips. Not Intel.
Moreover, TSMC had successfully claimed over half of the foundry market (aka the market for making chips for designers that don’t have a factory).
What does this have to do with a marketing executive’s objective of maintaining and protecting their existing market?
Well, there’s a key difference between Intel and TSMC. While Intel both designs and manufactures chips, TSMC only manufactures them.
But TSMC didn’t view this feature of their business as a weakness. They viewed it as a strength and doubled down.
When they invested in R&D, they didn’t invest in R&D for chip design. They invested in R&D for chip manufacturing and used lessons from different clients to perfect their operations.
From a marketing perspective, TSMC cultivated the image of an ecosystem perfectly designed to meet the needs of any chip designer.
They made sure they had everything a company needed to produce their sophisticated chip designs.
In short, they made switching to another foundry feel as inconvenient and unnecessary as possible.
Ultimately, the focus for TSMC was protecting and maintaining their market grip, and they succeeded.
They communicated a strong message about R&D investment, manufacturing capabilities, and sunk costs of foundry switching to clients.
How do content writers help marketing executives maintain and protect their markets?
Any company that’s focused on maintaining and protecting its current market needs content.
A customer interacts with your brand in countless ways. Effective marketing teams catalogue these touchpoints and create content that makes these touchpoints helpful and positive.
For example, a content writer may create:
- Blog posts that help a customer discover an exciting new way to use a vendor’s product
- A knowledge base that helps customers find detailed explainer articles and videos for frequently asked questions
- An online guide that guides customers through traditionally negative experiences like returns or service requests and turns this experience into a positive, helpful encounter
What does it mean to deepen and expand existing markets?
The second objective is deepening and expanding existing markets.
Eventually, existing markets become saturated and products reach the end of their life cycle.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean marketers need a brand new product.
Instead, marketers can find new commercial opportunities within existing markets and with existing products.
How GE Aviation deepened and expanded an existing market
When GE Aviation faced a maturing market, it had to shift from “technological innovation” to “commercial innovation”, as detailed in Harvard Business Review.
Even its most exciting, sophisticated products were turning into commodities. Fuel prices were all over the place and demand was slowing.
The division needed to find a new way to grow that didn’t rely on traditional R&D.
The marketing team decided to shift the messaging about GE Aviation’s engines. Instead of focusing on quantitative metrics, they’d focus on operational efficiency.
Eventually, this led to the development of myEngines, a “Facebook for Engines” that allowed operators to view real-time service updates.
By launch day, it had already landed LATAM Airlines (formerly LAN Airlines) as a customer. The airline ordered myEngines for about 100 of its aircraft.
How do content writers help marketing executives deepen and expand existing markets?
When you’re finding new ways to serve customers with existing products, communication is essential.
Someone needs to explain why this new service is worthy and important.
They also need to explain why it’s worth paying more to have it.
Recall in objective 1 that marketers create content, like blog posts, that teach customers different ways to use a product to retain customers.
The big difference is that with objective 1, customers are not asked to pay more or buy something different.
With objective 2, the company’s hoping for more revenue, not just retained revenue.
For objective 2, a content writer supports a marketing executive by creating:
- Long-form articles that explain how additional services and capabilities can introduce cost savings or enhanced outcomes
- A white paper that provides a high level overview of new methodologies and approaches within an industry
- A case study that illustrates to customers how a new service is already delivering value to a customer
What does it mean to discover and create new markets?
The third objective is discovering and creating new markets. This could be due to geography (an American company offers its solution in Europe) or innovation (a company comes up with an entirely new product or service).
How Amazon Web Services discovered and created a new market
An example of creating a new market is Amazon turning an internal issue into a multi-billion dollar cloud computing business that has since seen the entry of competitors like Microsoft and Google.
In hindsight, cloud computing offers significant value. But in the early days — and even now — it would have been difficult to convince legacy companies to switch from on-premise data centres to an off-site cloud.
Marketers had to find a way to explain the benefits of the cloud (cost savings, flexibility). But they also had to figure out where to focus their attention.
Their ideal customer profile was newer companies that were more open-minded about their tech stack and had massive data and computing needs.
An early client was Netflix, which expanded its business globally by migrating over to Amazon Web Services, and became a poster child for AWS.
Today companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Disney, Slack, and many, many, many more use Amazon Web Services to support their digital business.
How do content writers help marketing executives deepen and expand new markets?
Companies need to explain their innovative products and services, because consumers may not instantly understand why a solution is important.
This can destroy a product before it has a chance to prove itself.
Plus, a clear explanation also helps companies build internal confidence about their own solutions.
Imagine if Amazon Web Services let conventional wisdom about on-premise data centres create self doubt. They’d have quietly relegated a potential multi-billion-dollar business to an internal support function.
Content writers can help marketing executives explain their innovations with long-form blog articles, white papers, and e-books that:
- Provide an overview of an existing industry or approach
- Clearly identifies relevant pain points, and
- Illustrates the benefits of the solution
They can also create internal marketing collateral that helps sales teams start meaningful conversations about a new product or demonstrate relevant use cases to prospects.
Marketing executive have an important job to do, and content writers can land these interesting, long-term clients by helping them accomplish their goals.
