Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Forget the differences, focus on the value received by the customer. What does the solution allow people to do? That''s where you need to focus your messaging and your relationship building.

There are quite a few differences between IT products and other products. In many cases IT products are intangible. There can also be some crossover between products and services, such as in the case of online surveys, or cloud computing options. IT products also change much more quickly than standard products like...say...soap...or paper...or swingsets. You also need to speak the techie lingo and need to be able, in a lot of cases, to put it into layman terms. IT products have extraordinarily short lifespans, too. Sometimes the end-of-life is mere months, as opposed to a more traditional product which may have an end-of-life of years.

What this translates into for an IT marketing model is the extreme need for flexibility and, I've found, a shorter planning time. It's also almost a foregone conclusion that IT products will be marketed using the most current and popular internet trends, mobile technologies and social media. Typically IT products are marketed to the innovators and they like to be right on the cutting edge of everything. In many cases the look and feel of IT product marketing will be more edgy and glossy because of who the target market is.

As a marketer in the IT industry, it's your responsibility to try to keep up with the most current technology jumps and to be constantly aware of how your product compares with current technology. That's actually true of most products, but it moves at lightening speed in the IT industry and that makes it harder to keep up.

You need to be ready to change your marketing message to accommodate each of the adopter categories as they become interested in your product and the more early adopters move on to something else.

To put a fine point on it, the biggest differences between traditional product marketing and IT product marketing are: the speed of product development, shorter window of opportunity, and broader spectrum of available marketing channels.