The 'write' way to market

G Sankaranarayanan / Chennai

To win business, more and more IT companies are in search of a rare breed of marketing communicators who should possess the ideal characteristics of an entrepreneur’s instinct, a scientist’s head and an artist’s heart. In a typical organisational environment, marketing communicators help sales, marketing and business development executives effectively communicate technology solutions to potential customers using media skills.

“This is an upcoming discipline in the IT industry that has traditionally had a strong technology focus,” says R Ramkumar, senior manager, corporate and marketing communication, Cognizant. He adds: “The job definition in its current form covers all communication-related aspects of technology and marketing engagements. The ambit comprises the strategising, ideation and creation of Request For Information (RFI) and Request For Prop-osal (RFP) documents, press releases, fact sheets, white papers, case studies, website and e-mail content, advertisements, promotional material, and other forms of corporate literature.”

The difference

To begin with, marketing communicators are a different kettle of fish than, say, corporate communicators and technical communicators. To draw the distinction, marketing communication is essentially about persuading customers to buy a product, while technical communication is to instruct customers how to use a product and corporate communication to keep the external stakeholders in good cheer.

Explains Ramkumar: “Many look at this as an extension of technical writing, which is a misconception. Marketing communication far transcends understanding and documenting a technology or a product. Marketing communicators have to understand both technology and its business ramifications.”

He finds that with the mounting competition, software companies in the recent times have been according significant time, energy and resources to pre-sale communication, “which, while highlighting innovative market-winning approaches to business problems and showcasing relevant accomplishments, forms the first level of differentiation.”

For long, it was marketing executives, who prepared and sent out business proposals or technology solution documents. However, a large scope for value-addition in terms of content and presentation demanded the introduction of professionalism. “The language skills of dedicated marketing communicators cannot often be matched by the individual contributors to a proposal due to constraints of time and lack of exposure to quality, audience-friendly communication,” says Ramkumar. He further adds, “Often, proposal team members argue that their respective contribution is worth the most attention. As the ‘solution’ is the heart of the response for the IT specialist, the head of marketing or the head of that particular vertical practice look for a well-balanced and holistic approach. This is where techno-commercial communication skills are an imperative as it helps assimilate each contribution into the final document from the customer’s perspective.”

Lack of training

Though the need for a specialisation is quite pronounced, at present there are no exclusive training courses for marketing communication offered by formal educational institutions. Companies therefore have to be content with hiring MBAs and mass communication professionals and train them in the missing domains. According to Ramkumar, analytical skills are important for the communicator to prioritise information based on the client’s requirements. Presentation skills are necessary because they enable the communicator to provide the most relevant information in the most audience-friendly form for maximum impact. Technical knowledge is critical because most of techno-commercial endeavours are centred on elucidating the application of a technology to the clients’ business requirements. And language skills facilitate clear communication of the benefits of using a certain approach.

Anitha Selvaraj, a marketing communicator working for Odyssey, an information security company, which is into providing digital signature-based security solutions, stresses the importance of learning high-end technologies and their business applications. “In the niche business domain of information security, we are operating in an ultra niche area, which means a techno-commercial communicator should have extensive technical knowledge to create product collaterals,” says Selvaraj. It goes without saying that an equally good understanding of business of the customers/user segment is all the more important. Odyessey’s focus is to provide its solutions mainly to the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. “Information security is the vertical and BFSI is a horizontal. I must have thorough understanding of both,” she says.

“With the presentation skills anyone can produce a good article or a white paper but it calls for excellent learning skills to provide a ‘depth’ to the material,” points out Selvaraj. She believes that it is important for marketing communicators to gain better understanding of the field almost like a sales person. She meets customers with her sales team to have direct interactions with them. “We are not just pushing boxes for us to speak just to our own colleagues in the development team to do our work. We need to understand, for instance, the existing technology of our customers so that we can explain to them how our products can fit in,” she explains.

Lack of proper training also means the lack of professional orientation and ethics in marketing communication. “Most aspirants come from diverse backgrounds such as advertising, journalism or marketing, which often fall prey to the temptations to write and speak ‘smart’ even at the cost of the real merit of the message being communicated,” says Ramkumar.

Self-made professionals

Almost all successful marketing communicators are self-made. Take for instance the case of Douglas D’Cruze, who is the marketing communication specialist at the Indian subsidiary of Brooks Automation Inc,

which is into providing automation solutions to semiconductor manufacturers. A graduate in English literature, D’Cruze started his career as a copywriter. He worked for advertising agencies. Later, he joined Frost & Sullivan, where he begun writing business reports based on online and other secondary research tools. Now part of the marketing team at Brookes, he is producing white papers and articles on technology products. He works closely with business analysts and a designer in his team, and the product development people.

He places the ability to acquiring skills independently above all the requisite skills of a marketing communicator. Giv-ing a real-life scenario of a marketing communicator, D’Cruze says: “Sometimes, you will not have access to any resource persons, who would teach you and clarify all your doubts on a subject. You will have to deliver articles or reports only based on online materials.”

Proficiency of IT tools related to content management also helps. “When it comes to presentation in print and online, hands-on experience in content presentation tools and knowledge on the subtle differences in the way the two different media work become important.”

Marketing communicators can specialise in a few domains in technology and business. Companies like Cognizant marketing communicators align with specific verticals and technologies and work closely with them. Over time, they gain a deep understanding of the domains and technologies, which helps them add value and insights to the proposal from a presentation standpoint.

Career growth

Ramkumar observes that marketing communicators deve-lop the power of persuasion and the ability to leverage it to win business. “In their bid to drive home the superiority of a solution over competing one, they develop the ability to clearly understand and articulate the customer’s needs, the benefits they can expect and firm recommendations accompanied by action steps. They also develop an understanding of the technical and other supporting details that substantiate an organisation’s qualifications and competence as also the issues, costs, schedules, risks, and future implications. This opens good opportunities for them to grow into business development and client relationship management roles.”

Agrees D’Cruze: “In the beginning, marketing communicators just produce what the marketing manager asks for—be it white papers or case studies. After gaining experience, they develop their business development skills to foresee the requirements and assume responsibility to evolve communication and marketing strategies. They can branch out to senior marketing or management roles because they get exp-osed to the market and all internal functions more than anybody else in an organisation.”

Short supply of talent

Product-based software companies in particular require to hire more marketing communicators. However, the entire IT industry has trouble in identifying and hiring the right people. There is a short supply of talent. Even for technical communicators, now comparatively a well-established profession, there is a shortage. If this is true for technical communicators, then the shortage of “techno-commercial” communicators (as marketing communicators are otherwise known) can be understood.

D’Cruze says: “Even if there are people out there, identifying them is difficult because there are not many forums—online and offline—for techno-commercial communicators at present in India. A concern area for this profession is that the perceived value of techno-commercial communication is less in many organisations. While the contributions of a developer or a sales executive is tangible and thus there is a systematic rewarding mechanism, the ‘profit-to-the-company’ of a techno-commercial communicator is not easily measurable. Therefore, there will not be due recognition internally at times.”

Ramkumar laments that in many organisations the contributory merit of marketing communicators is seldom acknowledged overtly with the credit of winning an order often going only to the marketing personnel.

Very few companies like Cognizant ensure that marketing support personnel gain their due importance by setting up processes that make it mandatory for the marketing personnel to formally involve marketing communicators in the formulation of all pre-sale communication, ranging from e-mail campaigns and preparation of corporate literature to brand design and client communication endeavours. “This gives marketing communicators the right visibility in the marketing process life-cycle and has sensitised,” he says.

Selvaraj says that at Odyssey marketing communication is a dedicated function. “Our HR policy clearly defines the job description and the career path. We have structured training programmes with modules on soft-skills, online communication methods including things like e-mail etiquette.”

Ramkumar advocates the lead role IT organisations can play in developing human resource in this domain. “Communication, as a whole, has been a grey area with technology companies. This being nascent, the need of the hour is to institute exclusive courses for marketing communication from formal training institutions. The industry also needs to play a leading role in this process in terms of contributing inputs to the formulation of syllabi and curricula.”

He believes that as the field is still nascent, the initiative will have to come from techno-commercial and marketing communication people from the industry. They will have to champion the syllabi and curricula in these institutions. It is imperative today, than ever before, that there is greater industry-academia linkage especially in areas such as these which are seen as highly impactful.

sankar@expresscomputeronline.com