The Vertical Approach
May 3rd, 2006 | Marilou BarsamI have been noticing that many companies are beginning to position their expertise within particular line of businesses. They are shifting their sales and marketing strategy to focus on vertical markets. Many of their field sales force have been reoriented to sell vertically and they are putting a large percentage of the companies marketing dollars behind vertical campaigns. So, how can marketers effectively reach vertical markets?
I recommend segmenting lists not only by vertical but also by content affinity. By isolating the audience by topic and vertical, the audience will see the value of how vertical content can resolve their day to day problems. There are many opportunities for companies if they illustrate why their product appeals to a specific industry. Through experience, I believe the best way to market to a specific vertical market is to create an integrated program that only promotes to that vertical.
May 4th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Karen, I’m the vertical markets segment leader at a large PR firm and totally agree that focus on the industry-specific issue seems to be key. A couple suggestions I would add - first, that there needs to be some real time spent listening and researching before aggressively pursuing outbound marketing and communications efforts. That’s fairly obvious but in the rush to align marketing efforts vertically, there can be corners cut, which increases the risk of campaign failure. The second is that a good collection of reference customers that epitomize the challenges and pain points facing that industry will underlie the credibility of the whole vertical marketing effort. Most of the prospects you’ll be targeting will likely be pragmatists who are quite inclined to watch and follow what their peers are doing.
May 5th, 2006 at 7:10 am
As a former Product Manager and now Marketing Director, I too agree with the original post and with the follow-on comments. I’d like to extend this discussion into the verticals (departments) of a particular enterprise, and discuss how to effectively market an enterprise wide solution.
I’ve found the tendency is to promote the benefits of an enterprise wide rather than vertical (silo) implementations. One reason is that the organization can obtain economies of scale by deploying the solution across multiple departments. Another is the enterprise story allows you to target the highest levels of the organization, in most case the decision makers. However, I have found that marketers must resist the urge to “go global” with their message. Rather a better approach may be to develop success stories within the vertical/departments and then, after building a legion of departmental supporters, look to leverage the internal support to reach the C suite and take the solution across the rest of the enterprise.
June 7th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
A cautionary note to the vertical marketing campaign is that I have seen too many of these campaigns go out without the right resources lined up behind them. Using a vertically focused message only to be followed up by a sales organization that only knows a horizontal play is a huge credibility risk. When marketers put vertical campaigns together - please remember to integrate your sales management and sales training teams into the program.
July 13th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
In my experience (15 years as an agency creative director and writer with technology clients) the most effective way to get into a vertical market is to hire in an expert from that vertical. It is necessary to understand “from the horse’s mouth” the issues facing that vertical in order to address them directly and specifically. And as Rob Commins mentioned above, it is of paramount importance that that person’s expertise is filtered down through all levels of the organisation.
On the actual approach, a marketer also has to take into account the various levels within a company in that vertical which need to be sold - who are the influencers, who the decision makers, and how can you integrate your messaging and communications to bring them together?
So deep knowledge about what makes a vertical tick, and an integrated communications effort are the cost of doing business with a specific vertical. Getting there isn’t always easy, but when it works…well, just watch the sales rise.
November 9th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Documentum executed a vertical stratetgy pretty darn well in the 1990s. They hired people from within each vertical and hire more for personality and network than strictly sales and revenues achieved. This follows with the talk the talk but took it a few steps further. No matter what approach is taken I believe that it has to come from the very top down - with some force as well as training, education, tools and consistency amongst execs. Leaders should be leading and you don’t see alot of that.