How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products
Simha Chandra Rama Venkata J
Risk Management/ Business Analytics | Postgraduate Degree, Investment Banking & Data Analytics
Product marketing is the foundation of marketing tech products.
To gain market traction, tech companies need a good product – but that’s not enough: You also need strong product marketing. Product marketers use strategic marketing to shape market perceptions and thereby promote product adoption. The size and complexity of product landscapes today make it imperative that every tech company stake out a clear position and coordinate its go-to-market (GTM) activities with care – the role of product marketing.
By applying strategy and product insights, the product marketing function provides a foundation for the GTM effort as a whole. Product marketing generates product collateral, enables sales and handles launches, but the function does much more, and its purpose transcends these specific tasks. Tech companies rely on product marketing to help them ensure market fit, reach user goals and lead their category. Product marketing takes place even in companies where no single person holds the title of product marketer.
“While you have to build good product, market traction – how every product’s success is ultimately measured – requires equal, concerted effort on the market side.”
The story of Pocket illustrates the purpose and power of product marketing. In its early days, Pocket – then called Read It Later – was competing against Instapaper, the brainchild of Tumblr creator Marco Arment. Instapaper dominated the press, even though Read It Later had triple the users. Read It Later’s founder, Nate Weiner, lacked Arment’s advantages. But Instapaper languished while Read It Later – rebranded as Pocket – gained ground and grew to 20 million users by the time Mozilla acquired it.
Weiner’s team achieved all this by adopting a product marketing mind-set. Rather than simply promoting the product, the team promoted a new view of the market and the potential of mobile devices within the “anytime, anywhere” trend in media consumption. The rebrand aligned with that view, reinforcing the idea that Pocket could do much more than just save articles to read later. By shifting the market context, Pocket’s team built meaning around their product.
Product marketers act as strategists for product go-to-market (GTM).
Playing a pivotal role in a company’s GTM engine – its overall strategy and machinery for bringing products to market – product marketers develop and oversee the execution of product GTM: the path by which a specific product goes to market. Product marketers create a product GTM plan that specifies activities, how and when those activities will get done, and, most importantly, why. Product marketers will leverage the company’s existing distribution strategies – such as, for example, direct sales, channel partners or product-led growth.
“Every action should build toward an intentional outcome. It’s how you get superior results.”
To select marketing strategies, product marketers should consider the company’s resources, its maturity, the need for third-party validation, the product’s strength, and category trends, among other factors. Strategies will usually aim at enabling growth; boosting conversion rates; building the brand; shaping or leading a category or platform; spurring evangelism or loyalty; or developing new customer segments, partners or programs. Creating a strategic product GTM plan can take time but can accelerate the marketing timeline.
Product marketers serve as ambassadors linking customers and internal teams.
Expertise in grounding product marketing in customer and market insights is fundamental to the role. Product marketers need to know why customers seek new solutions and how they journey toward product adoption. Product marketers need to understand both the rational motivations and the emotional drivers that move buyers through their journey. A minimum requirement for gaining this level of insight is for product marketers to have regular direct interactions with customers, asking them open-ended questions. Techniques such as customer interviews and sales call shadowing can provide deeper insights.
“Strong product marketers help teams stay focused on what matters most.”
Product marketers can also learn about the market and its surrounding ecosystem from third-party content such as research, reviews, reports and social media. Third-party sources can be particularly helpful for understanding the competitive landscape and public perceptions. Having developed deep insight and knowledge, product marketers then communicate what they’ve learned to internal partners. They inform internal conversations about product development, marketing and sales, and they help direct activities to meet marketing challenges.
Product marketers partner with product management, marketing and sales to take products to market.
Product marketing’s partnership with product management is its most important pairing – essential to any form of product marketing – and it will generally look the same regardless of a company’s maturity or organization. Ideally, a product marketer works in the product team as its marketing strategist. Product marketers apply all their product and market insight to formulate a GTM strategy and then to lead the preliminary tactical work involved in the GTM effort.
Product marketers should be closely involved in all major product decisions, including the timing of major releases. They should collaborate closely with product managers to determine positioning and messaging. Based on their discovery work, product marketers also identify market opportunities and determine the implications of product decisions.
“The why and when in a product’s go-to-market are what make the what and how worth doing.”
Product marketers also partner with other roles in marketing to execute a product’s GTM. The product marketer acts as lead, providing a messaging framework and strategy foundation on which other marketing people can build their activities. Product marketers support their marketing colleagues by providing insights into customers and the market, and suggesting new ideas for marketing to try. They help marketing ensure every piece of execution connects with customers, sends the right message and contributes to meeting the company’s goals.
Product marketers partner with sales to ensure salespeople have the knowledge and tools they need to do their job well. Product marketers identify reference customers that serve as the basis for creating sales best practices. In collaboration with sales, product marketers then compile these best practices into a playbook and train salespeople to use it. The playbook defines customer stages, next steps and sales tools for each stage. Tools include, for example, customer journey maps, sales presentations, call scripts, email templates and product demos.
Product marketing uses brand and pricing as primary levers.
Product marketers leverage brand at the product level to gain advantages in GTM. A brand comprises much more than a company name, logo, colors, and so forth – it also includes the promise of a consistent customer experience in all interactions with the company. For example, the start-up WebFilings, now known as Workiva, earned tremendous loyalty and achieved category leadership by building a brand that meant dedication to supporting customers’ success.
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A strong brand can influence how customers view and feel about a product, allowing the company to compete beyond features. Where a strong brand already exists, product marketers can build on it by incorporating the brand name in the product’s name, as Atlassian does for its Jira brand. In some cases, an existing brand carries associations that won’t connect with a product’s target market, and marketers need to establish a new brand. Product marketers should lead naming choices, as these decisions are essential in product road maps.
“Great execution with brand can shape entire categories.”
Pricing serves as a powerful lever product marketers use in GTM strategy. Price is entirely subjective, and customers’ perceptions of price will factor in the brand and the customer’s perceived value of the product itself. Hence, in setting prices, product marketers need to consider brand perceptions and market sentiment rather than merely the pricing of similar products in the category. Pricing decisions will reflect a company’s monetization strategy and packaging strategy as well as an overall pricing strategy.
As storytellers, product marketers shape perceptions of a product through messaging and positioning.
Companies can’t leave product perceptions to chance – they need to purposefully shape the way the world thinks about the product. Messaging means using statements, claims, stories and data to frame a product’s value. The product’s positioning – its place in the customer’s mind – begins with messaging but continues to evolve as all marketing activities shape the customer’s perceptions – such as during back-and-forth communications with a direct sales force or through evangelism on online forums or comparison sites, for example.
“Positioning starts with knowing the story you want to tell about your product – and having the evidence to support it.”
Good messaging gives customers what they need to hear – sometimes information and sometimes something less concrete. Good messaging helps people place a product in their mental map. Strong messages connect with people emotionally, convey benefits in a compelling manner and let customers know the company understands them.
As evangelists, product marketers enable and activate product advocates to support a product’s GTM.
In product marketing, evangelism means strategically enabling others – such as the press, investors and analysts, as well as internal teams such as the sales organization, social media marketers, content marketers, and many other specialists – to influence others as part of a GTM plan. Product marketers not only encourage influencers but also work to make product information easily accessible to advocates. Evangelism differs from promotion in that evangelism highlights customers and their stories as opposed to the product itself.
“Almost every team is good at cranking out content that talks about the product. What’s often lacking is making it compelling, credible or desirable for others to talk about.”
For example, the product marketing for Microsoft Word’s launch included providing an evaluation guide to reviewers and sales reps, holding in-person meetings with influential pundits, training sales teams in-depth on their presentation and demo, and working with product to obtain testimonials from reference customers. Over time, the activities involved in enabling evangelism have expanded to include new platforms and sales tools. Typically, product marketing evangelism today will entail creating a sales playbook, directing prospective customers to a community forum, recognizing existing customers for their uses of the product, and synchronizing GTM plans with the activities of top influencers.
Product marketers facilitate agile product management and marketing, and are beginning to adopt agile approaches themselves.
Product marketing plays a crucial role in facilitating agile approaches in product management and marketing. Often, the speed, unpredictability and streamlined communications of agile challenge these two functions to maintain alignment. Product marketing, sitting at the intersection of product management and marketing, can orchestrate processes to ensure synchronized activities.
The Release Scale is an essential tool for facilitating communication and aligning expectations between product management and the GTM team. The Release Scale defines release types and specifies standard GTM activities for each type, placing specific releases in a marketing context while also clarifying timelines. Use of the Release Scale can significantly enhance communications and improve GTM execution for product, sales, customer support, engineering and operations.
“A product go-to-market is strong and strategic when all its activities line up to achieve larger goals that incorporate current market realities.”
Agile approaches are also seeing adoption within the product marketing function itself. Here, product marketers lead a cross-functional group that includes communications, advertising, digital, web and design people. Agile practices enhance responsiveness, speed, collaboration and experiential learning, and aim at aligning marketing outputs with desired outcomes.
A strong product marketer will have broad professional skills and knowledge.
Product marketers tend to be generalists who have the versatility to take on a variety of roles. Generalists are particularly valuable early in a product’s life cycle because they excel in discovering GTM strategies and can also get their hands dirty performing marketing tasks. In more mature organizations, product marketers become specialists in specific vertical markets, marketing and distribution channels, or customer segments.
Product marketers need a skill set similar to that of product managers, but instead of applying these skills to developing a product, they use them to drive product adoption. These skills include:
Product marketers also need strong marketing knowledge, business savvy and technical competence.