How to use the Boston Matrix to inform your content marketing

Anyone who is involved in any way with marketing is likely to have heard of the Boston Matrix, and even Joe Public has probably come across the term 'cash cows'.  For contract manufacturers navigating growth decisions, the Boston Matrix offers a strategic lens to align your content marketing with commercial performance.

What is the Boston Matrix?

Whether you're scaling up a new CDMO offering, promoting your long-standing toll manufacturing services, or questioning the ROI of a legacy product line, understanding where each offering sits in your portfolio is an essential first step in your marketing strategy.

Possibly one of the most well-known marketing models, the Boston Matrix was created by Bruce D. Henderson for the Boston Consulting Group in 1970 to help corporations analyse their product lines.

Also known as the Growth-Share Matrix, it categorises a portfolio of products in a way that helps strategic decision making. Typically it is used to make hard decisions about investment – which products/services to drop and which to invest in to achieve maximum growth.

Although it’s a relatively simple model that is not without its flaws, the Boston Matrix essentially plots your product or service against market share and growth, dividing them into four strategic categories:

• Stars – High share, high growth
• Cows – High share, low growth
• Question Marks – Low share, high growth
• Dogs – Low share, low growth

Stars, Dogs, Cows, and Question Marks

A product or service that enjoys a high market share in a fast-growing market is said to be a “Star” – as against a “Dog”, which is a product or service with a low market share and low, no, or even negative growth. 

Cash Cows are products or services with a high market share in a low-growth-rate market, and Question Marks (sometimes known as Problem Children) are products or services in a high-growth-rate market but with little market share.

From an investment point of view, Dogs should be killed off, and Cash Cows should be milked.  Stars may need a high investment to keep their place, but they should be high earners.  Question Marks are those products or services that require further analysis and discussion. Eventually, they will either need more investment or be withdrawn from the market.

But you can also use the Boston Matrix for your marketing strategy as the position of a product or service within the matrix determines the marketing approach.

For contract manufacturers, applying this model can clarify which services need more marketing investment, which are driving ROI, and which should be retired.

Mapping your content marketing strategy to the Boston Matrix

Marketing for Dogs

Let’s start with Dogs. These are outdated or underperforming products or services you should work towards removing from your portfolio. Maybe it’s a discontinued PCB repair service, or a legacy product line with high overheads and low demand, that’s consuming resources that would be better employed in supporting a more profitable product or service.

You might think that this implies that you carry out no marketing for this product, but what you might consider is marketing aimed at moving any existing customers over to another of your products or services.

Here’s how you can achieve this:

1.  Phase-out content: Review all existing content and revise or remove to support the withdrawal of the product or service and the promotion of alternatives. Archive website pages tied to obsolete services or redirect traffic to alternative offerings.
2.  Switch messaging: Create content comparing the older and the newer offerings, pointing out the advantages of the profitable product over the dog, how easy it is for customers to switch, and the benefits of doing so.
3.  Internal comms: Align sales and service teams to stop promoting these offerings.

Marketing for Cows

Cows are well-established products or services that make money without drama. From an investment point of view, they are maintained using the minimum amount of resources and extract the maximum amount of profit. These revenue-driving services could help to fund the development of Question Marks or to support the rise of Stars.

In theory, you need only do the minimum possible amount of marketing. Because Cash Cows tend to be stable, you can predict cash flows and work out budgets reliably, allowing you to determine the marketing budget as well.

However, there is a very real danger here that they become such reliable earners that you start to forget about them or take them for granted. And if we know anything about modern market conditions, it is that you can never take anything for granted. 

So while it is good to keep marketing costs low, review the situation regularly to determine whether you need to boost the Cow’s position in the market or fight off a new competitor. Never forget that these Cows provide the money for investment in future products or services.

Here’s a content strategy for the Cows:

1.  Maintain authority: With Cows, there is less of a need to increase awareness or establish authority, so Cows should be supported by content marketing that underpins their dominant market position. Case studies, surveys, and data showing success are powerful here.
2.  Support with social proof: Use customer testimonials, reviews, and interviews to affirm the value of these products or services.
3.  Don’t neglect: Cash Cows, despite best efforts and suitable marketing, can eventually descend into Dogs – so look out for that when reviewing and don’t let misplaced loyalty to a long-serving product stop you from retiring it, if need be.

Marketing for Stars

Rising Stars are potential high earners for your business that can eventually become Cash Cows, so they should rightly become the primary focus of your marketing efforts. Examples could be AI-driven QA services, a recently launched sterile fill-finish suite, or a newly opened manufacturing facility. If you don’t have any Stars in your product or service portfolio, then the future of your business is in question.

To help boost their rise, a serious, committed level of marketing is required; this is where your marketing team should be most active. You need a range of content marketing across the board that establishes awareness and authority and educates existing and potential customers, as rapidly and forcefully as possible.

Here are some strategic steps to take for Stars:

1.  Maximise visibility: If it is a radical new product or service, or perhaps in a new market, then you will need informative, educational content that lays out the situation and the issues the product or service addresses. 
2.  Educate and convert: Build trust with authoritative, high-volume content like SEO-focused blogs that target the pain points in emerging markets, helpful guides, and explainer videos.
3.  Fuel expansion: To ramp up their transition from “Star” to”Cow”, focus on capitalising on the momentum of your marketing efforts by generating, nurturing, and converting leads into customers.

Marketing for Question Marks

Because question marks are just that – in question – the bigger issue of what to do with them should be resolved before deciding on any marketing strategy. These perhaps promising services likely consume high levels of investment without making real headway in the market. Generally, if the market is growing, you’ll have to ask why isn’t this product or service?

If you’ve just launched the product or service, it is likely to fall into this category – so persevere with your marketing and investment – treat it like a Star until the initial launch period is over. If you've made little impact after all the effort to establish it, it’s time to pause and review.

Here’s what to do when review time comes:

1. Investigate performance: The main priority with Question Marks is to figure out why they’re not succeeding. Competitor analyses can help you uncover what competitor offerings are getting right. Market analyses can help you understand if there’s a mismatch between your product or service and the target market. Even talking to your customers can provide valuable insights.
2. Test and iterate: Once you’ve worked out where the problems lie, you can formulate a different strategic approach; test out different messaging, alternative channels, or new audiences. 
3.  Decide and act: Depending on the outcome of your review, testing, and iterations, determine whether it’s best to invest further or phase out entirely—at which point, the Question Marks become Dogs.

Aligning your content with the Boston Matrix categories

A useful tool – but use with care

The Boston Matrix can be a useful tool for reviewing your products and services and deciding what levels of investment and marketing support are needed. But it does have a few weaknesses that you should be aware of if you intend to use it for content marketing purposes:

• The model uses market growth as the only measure of a market’s attractiveness and market share as the only factor in competitive advantage. You may want to consider other factors when launching or reviewing a product or service.
• It assumes that all products and services are stand-alone when, in reality, some might actually support others. This may even be a strategic decision, with a lesser offering deliberately placed in the market to push customers to your more expensive premium solution. Whatever the interdependence of your products or services, avoid making isolated decisions.

Two other factors are important when using the matrix:

• The definition of the market is crucial. If you base your analysis on a niche market, you can have a high market share, or a low market share if you look at a wider market. This can easily make the difference between a product or service being a Dog or a Cow.
• Product and service life cycles also have a major impact – over time, any product or service is likely to move around the matrix, and in today‘s world, that may happen rapidly. So it’s vital that if you use the Boston Matrix for analysis, you do it often to account for changing life cycles and market circumstances.

Despite these issues, the Boston or Growth-Share matrix has generally stood the test of time well – the Boston Consulting Group themselves reviewed the model in 2014:

“Given all that, is the BCG growth-share matrix still relevant? Yes, but with some important enhancements.”

These enhancements are primarily to review the balance of matrix types in your portfolio—testing Question Marks quickly and economically, being efficient about how you milk your Cows, and keeping Dogs on a short leash.

Conclusion

The concept of a portfolio of products or services is as relevant today as it has ever been, especially for contract manufacturers. Having tools that can help you analyse and make decisions about investment and marketing is essential to creating and maintaining growth. 

The Boston Matrix is one of the more useful tools you should consider when looking to bolster your marketing efforts. And aligning your content marketing with the Boston Matrix gives you a practical roadmap to inform budget, messaging, and growth priorities.

Do you need help reviewing your current service portfolio through a content marketing lens? Download our Guide to Strategic Content or get in touch with us today.