One of the core drivers of any product and marketing strategy is differentiation meaning: How does your product/service stand out in a way that potential customers care about, that’s different from the competition, and unique in the market?
When you find that core differentiation, it should be the driving force behind your messaging, content, and keywords–even the product roadmap (at least initially). However this isn’t easy, especially in a highly saturated market like cloud storage.
Standing out in a crowded market
Once upon a time, a decentralized storage startup was battling massive levels of competition. However, several features differentiated their approach from the ‘big guys’, like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
At the time, research showed that the thing developers–the startup’s end users–cared about most was security. The market was filled with nightmares about breaches, ransomware attacks, hackers and the like that were robbing their organizations of hard-earned brand reputation and millions of dollars.
With the horror stories piling up all around them, it’s easy to see why security was a key theme for the potential customers. The market, the startup, and the competition were all talking about it. But if you add the startup’s significantly lower cost (everyone cares about costs!), the security benefits they also offered completely set their technology apart.
Check-in: Is your differentiator driving results?
With its core differentiator as a focus, the startup’s positioning and messaging guided the production of full-funnel content, including thought leadership, blogs, pillar pages, product deep dives, webinars, and paid media campaigns, all designed to drive engagement and sales.
In the early stages, the company placed a strong emphasis on security, seeking an external audit and rolling out key product updates centered around security. Additionally, tech partners and integrations were selected to reinforce this security-focused approach. This foundation prompted a series of critical questions moving forward:
- Is security resonating?
- Is it starting a dialogue with target customers?
- Are analysts and the press interested/on board?
- Is this differentiator enough for developers to consider this new category/concept vs. the traditional hyperscalers?
- What is sales hearing? Are they able to progress and close opportunities based mostly on this differentiator?
- For self-serve or sales-driven customers, what are their activation rates, adoption levels, MAU (monthly active user) conversions, and revenue growth?
- After evaluating for six months and conducting an active vs. inactive user study, is security still the top priority? Or have other challenges taken the spotlight?
Using the guiding questions above as pillars, metrics such as PPC/paid media CPCs, content downloads, social media activity, along with sales input and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) activity can help determine how well the messaging is performing, which specific security features resonate most, and when it’s time to tweak or build on the initial core differentiator.
Differentiators that drive growth
In the above scenario, connecting the market’s priority challenge with the startup’s differentiator —security—with the startup’s unique strengths helped the company stand out in a crowded field. It positioned them as a serious player in the storage technology space, appealing to individual developers and large teams, from Web3 startups to Fortune 500 companies. This approach caught the attention of developers, CSOs, analysts, and partners, leading to early wins by engaging multiple decision-makers and the broader ecosystem efficiently.
But of course, security wasn’t the only factor driving decisions about data storage, especially for such an innovative, emerging tech solution. In talking with sales, they said security got them in the door, but the number one question prospects asked was about performance. A deep dive into performance—including community input, analyst feedback, and an active/inactive user study—confirmed that performance was just as essential as security.
Initially, the platform performance wasn’t really competitive, so the development team shifted gears a bit to enhance the performance of the network and gained the ability to be two times the speed of Amazon for certain use cases. The company then updated its messaging to highlight performance as a key pillar alongside security and cost. They partnered with a third-party performance tester and launched an integrated campaign emphasizing performance. This was a game changer for apps like video streaming, backups, and software distribution where security and performance were top priorities–and allowed their team to focus resources on these use cases (ICPs/benefits/content/PPC/media) for less cost and more impact.
Other key benefits included cost (of course!), availability, reliability, durability, privacy, development tools, integrations, and support. These features were included in the messaging, but the startup focused its resources on the top customer priorities, such as security, which helped them succeed. When sustainability entered as a core platform differentiator, it led to a key campaign, brand-defining initiative, and the formation of the Digital Sustainability Alliance.
Final takeaway: Stay on top
If there’s one takeaway from this, it’s the importance of keeping on top of your ICP and their priorities, competitor activity, market shifts, and ongoing customer feedback and metrics. This ongoing analysis and validation provides the ‘checks and balances’ that marketing is applying resources and spend to key brand and product differentiators that produce results, revenue, and ROI.