New Conference Delivers Marketing Gold

As a marketer in the technology industry, I can’t help but walk away from the Hypergrowth conference, Monday, Sept. 25th, being anything less than blown away. How does a two-year old start-up company with 50 employees put together a star-studded line-up of speakers and a full day of valuable session content, then fill the venue to capacity with over 1,000 people? This was an impressive event and I’m glad I was there to participate.

Hypergrowth was presented by Drift, the maker of a conversation-driven marketing and sales platform that plans to disrupt the marketing automation industry. Its target buyers are marketing and sales leaders in technology businesses (people like me).

The morning sessions focused on the strategic marketing issues faced by most technology companies, including branding and messaging, followed in the afternoon by important topics in marketing tactics. Interspersed were a range of enriching sessions that helped attendees to develop new perspectives on motivation, personal relationships and reflection.

Fully 100% of the content was hugely valuable for anyone in a high-tech marketing role, be it communications, inbound, web, product/technical marketing, field marketing or any other sub-discipline. Below, are some takeaways I think are especially relevant to the product marketing discipline:

1. Mike Troiano’s How to Build a Brand in 20 Minutes presentation reminds us how important it is to build product content that supports and reinforces the brand message. Consistency is one of the keys to successful brands. Because product marketers probably author or influence more content by volume than any other function in the company, we have an important role and responsibility to ensure the content reinforces the company’s brand.
2. Product marketers shouldn’t forget that emotions influence the buying process. We are highly skilled at building pain/promise/proof messaging for our products, which are generally grounded in product features and other facts. Our messaging also needs to account for the emotional aspect of the buying decision. For example, we need to describe how our product will raise the buyer’s stature in the industry or enhance their career.
3. We need to design our content in a way that is easy for the audience to absorb. Troiano presented a simple slide to illustrate how people absorb ideas. It shows a cone lying on its side against a time axis with the pointy end on the left at Time=0. He says audiences begin by absorbing a simple concept, the brand message, and they progress by adding supporting information over time, the bits inside the widening cone. Product marketers are often called upon to provide that supporting information. We need to think about how to deliver information in a hierarchical structure that enables the audience to absorb, accept and get emotionally excited about the brand promise.
4. The importance of a well-structured story. Andy Raskin's presentation, How Your Narrative Drives Growth, describes the fundamentals of building a compelling story. I think these apply to product presentations just as well as corporate and VC pitch presentations. Key concepts are contained in his Linkedin post, The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen.
   
5. When recruiting talent for your product marketing team, look for people with breadth and depth. Mike Volpe's presentation, How to Build and Manage a World-Class Marketing Team, suggested using a “T” model to measure a candidate’s skill on two axes – specialist and generalist. He tries to hire people with deep skills in the job role and broad understanding of the marketing function and industry. I think that’s a great recommendation for hiring product marketers because they are so integral to the success of the entire marketing function.
6. Art can and should play an important role in our lives – personal and professional. Benjamin Von Wong's presentation, Surviving Virality: How to Stand The Test Of Time, described his journey to producing memorable photographic art. As he presented his work, I thought about its ability to tap into the audience’s emotions and how valuable this talent can be when building a brand (see point #2). Product marketers may not be tasked with commissioning commercial art projects, but we frequently use art in our work (e.g. the stock art from Getty Images we embed in our presentations). We need to think like artists to ensure our work communicates the desired messages to customers on emotional and rational levels. Like Von Wong, we need to make our work memorable.

I could go on about the Hypergrowth conference - there was so much valuable information about technology marketing practices. In fact, I learned a lot just by studying the production of the event, itself.

We all need to take time to "sharpen the saw," as the adage goes. For marketers, there are very few quality forums to help us do that. I'm glad Hypergrowth has arrived to fill the gap.