Many technology companies focus their marketing efforts towards several decision makers in their target companies. Going beyond the traditional tech buyer and attempting to reach the c-suite has proven to increase awareness and credibility and ultimately influence some purchases. This strategy requires the technology companies to truly message map against the various target audiences that they are attempting to reach.
Chris Koch, a leading voice for the Information Technology Services Marketing Association, has outlined some CIO traits that should be considered when developing relevant content. Chris created three archetypes of the CIO’s to provide a better understanding of different CIO roles, skills, aspirations, and business contexts. Beyond some universal themes that CIO’s tend to share in their positions, these description can provide some insight towards content development for your various marketing activities.
Function Head. These CIOs focus on keeping the lights on, on the IT utility, and are usually at smaller organizations or divisions within larger organizations.
Transformational Leader. These CIOs tend to be in larger companies and generally serve multiple business entities. Because they have this cross-business visibility, they have the opportunity to become business process experts and use IT to make those processes more efficient and effective. Following through on those process opportunities requires more than programming and project management skills, however. They focus on processes and standards, different organizations, and they do a lot of work on governance; especially concerning what elements of IT are shared and what are local.
Business Strategist. These lucky devils have access to the business and are involved in strategic planning. The best have built up their business skills through direct experience. Others are successful CIOs who take on complementary business roles in addition to IT such as supply chain, for example.
Though CIO no longer tracks a fourth category, I think it’s important to mention:
Turnaround Artist. These are a small, powerful minority of CIOs who defy categorization. You can find the Turnaround Artists in any of the archetypes, but they have one important issue that marketers need to be aware of: they’ve been brought into fix what the business thinks is a broken IT department.
Of course these descriptions seem a bit broad, but with more input from your sales teams and secondary research, you could begin to segment out your target list into categories for proper message mapping. I think the true value here is to ensure that you have done your due diligence to ensure your messages are relevant to these very different persons that share the title of CIO.
