Get answers from product marketing leaders
Andy Yen
ServiceNow Global Partner Marketing Director • January 17
The frameworks that I use for positioning and messaging have changed over time, as I've advanced in my marketing career in enterprise tech. Earlier in my career (when I was in product marketing), we would approach positioning and messaging for a major product launch. There were a few frameworks that worked well for me here: * Elevator Pitch - tell me what your product does in (25 words, 50 words, 100 words) * 9-box messaging framework - call out three benefits that your customers experience from your product/solution and provide proofpoints for how your product supports those benefits. I've found that this internal document is best socialized for buy-in across larger marketing and product teams. * Draft press release - forces you to take a more outside-in approach when you're coming up with new positioning and messaging. While each of these items/assets will help you build stronger positioning and messaging; what's most important is to align and set expectations with your cross-functional stakeholders and broader marketing team. As I've advanced in my career in marketing, I've had the privilege to partner with third party agencies and brand teams to refine the core positioning assets above. You'll be amazed at how much perspective these teams will provide you in overall positioning and messaging. I'd highly recommend early-in-career product marketers who are handling a major launch to proactively take this approach. The other major component of positioning and messaging is around internal comms. It's up to you to show your work to cross-functional stakeholders, and inform people that good marketing doesn't just come out of thin air. Once you're done with all of your net deliverables I'd make sure to inform a broad cross-functional team of what you've brought to the table. You will get more visiblity and feedback from this; which will ultimately make you a better marketer.
...Read More11471 Views
Upcoming AMAs
Stephen Baloglu
Adobe Director of Product Marketing • March 30
Great question and glad to see people taking a customer-led approach to product launches. There are a few strategies I recommend here and they fall into 4 areas. 1. Review the foundational research and insights that already exist - What you’re launching was built based on deep customer research and …ensure you’re clear on the insights that drove what you’re bringing to market in the first place. If gaps are identified, now is the time to identify and close them. It’s better late than never on the foundational pieces. 2. Dig into early customer feedback - Talk to beta customers - what do they love, what’s missing, are they actually using the product with frequency and intensity? You’re a great product marketer, so you already have some customers on speed dial (OK…does anyone remember speed dial???) But you get the idea. Talk to customers! 3. Qualitative and quantitative research with prospects/target audience - To develop great messaging, positioning and marketing plan, you need to know what work the marketing actually needs to do to convert your target audience. What are the perceptions, motivations, barriers, media sources, and buying process for your audience? All in the context of your new product. The keys to this research are to target a representative group of your audience, do the qual first to guide what you’re measuring in the quant, and leverage product prototypes for stimuli, so feedback is richer. And remember, focus groups and individual interviews are not perfect…I find they can identify big reactions - but are not likely to inform how people will behave in the wild. 4. Market and competitive research - Do your diligence on what’s happening in the market. What else is your target audience exposed to? How will you create a breakthrough message? Big markets with lots of $$$ tend to be crowded and highly competitive, your goal may not be differentiation, but going to market with distinctiveness.
...Read More25692 Views
In my experience, this is one of the toughest things as a PMM. You always see the potential upside for making an announcement, and you can spin a story out of anything / convince anybody why something matters. But really, you need to exercise a lot of restraint to avoid overloading your sales teams (in B2B companies) and customers with the sheer volume of releases. I like to group features into regular channels (e..g monthly newsletters and webinars) so customers can appreciate the feature velocity but only have to think about digesting information once a month. For small features, it's not just about the splashiness of the feature, but the impact to customers. Here are a few examples: * Planned downtime -- this is not splashy, but users should know and be informed to plan around it. Think about the channels that you have to reach your target audience. Users may be active in the product, or it may be more effective to deliver notices via email. A multi-channel approach works well here. * Small polish features / improvements to their experience -- let's say you have a small improvement that isn't going to break workflows, but is just going to improve quality of life. Oftentimes customers will discover this improvement on their own. But, it can be helpful to highlight these features in some sort of monthly newsletter, to demonstrate how your team is continually delivering features to delight users.
...Read More12245 Views
Angus Maclaurin
BILL Director of Product Marketing • February 3
Product Marketing plays a critical role in launching products, but it is harder to measure. This question can come up frequently in performance reviews and setting OKRs for the coming year. Product Marketing owns several key areas of product launch - from defining customer needs and key features to launch strategy and target channels. Multiple goals may be binary - Did you do customer research? Did you create a launch plan? The challenge comes when you want to tie these activities to specific revenue results and try to separate what team contributed what percentage. The type of product also has an impact on what gets measured. For some it’s about active usage, or upgrades to premium features, while for others it’s about how many units are moved off the shelf. Product Marketing should help define the baseline goals and track improvements against these metrics as you optimize your marketing and outreach. One of the best options is to create shared goals. Frequently you can see conflicts between sales and marketing when the goals are different. Marketing may reach MQL goals, but sales may complain that the quality of leads were not high enough. The more you can align on the same goal, the more the teams work together to reach your overall revenue and profit goals. Ideally you can get to a point where everyone - from product management to product marketing to sales - are measured on the same target. Then each team can focus on how they can optimize their specific part of the process. In my current role, Product Managers, Product Marketing, and Growth Marketing all have common revenue targets. This enables us to all aim towards the same end goal. We can start with the customer journey and how we can contribute to bottom-line growth. Often it works well to create a prioritized list with all potential tactics back. Then we can easily determine if it’s more important to build a new feature or optimize our email messaging.
...Read More12059 Views
Vidya Drego
SmithRx VP of Marketing | Formerly HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce • January 20
It's an interesting time to be in product marketing because I think there will be significant shifts in the next few years in how we think about go-to-market. There's a fair amount being written today about how go-to-marketing motions have evolved from inside sales to inbound marketing to product-led growth and are heading towards more community-led growth. Each phase is additive to the one before it (i.e. companies are not going to stop doing one and move to the next but find more success in combining strategies) but I think a lot of the same skills will persist. First, PMMs will ALWAYS have to be exceptional communicators. Specifically, they have to be able to simplify the complex and not only write in their own voice, but typically in the voice of their company or sales team. They have to be able to understand a process or scenario that they're often not a part of and come up with ways of influencing it. And they have to be able to tell a story. Secondly, they have to be able to understand the dynamics of their market. This starts with who their customers are and how these people are changing or being challenged. The means by which a PMM influences or relates to their customers has changed and will continue to change but constantly listening to those customers and periodically picking your head up to evaluate whether the dynamics of the market have changed can often help you partner with experts to execute in the right way. As an example, my team has and will invest much more time with our customers telling their story, helping turn them into acvocates and build and develop their own communities. This is different from where we spent our time five years ago but involves many of the same skills.
...Read More8499 Views
Typing quickly, so excuse any typos! Competitors will always have a common set of features. Every pizza needs a crust and some toppings – what they are, how they manifest, how they taste – that's what's different. So, first, I'd think: 1. What's unique about my set of features? Are they solving for exactly the same use case? How do they play alongside our other products and features, in ways that they unlock a different set of use cases? This relates to a previous question about marketing a group of products instead of just focusing on one. Combinations of ingredients can lead to different solutions. 2. What's unique about how my company approaches the problem set and delivers for customers? Think outside of the set of features for a minute. What are my company's differentiators? What's been different and defensible about our approach? (For example, intuitive design and user-centricity? or tied to a greater platform? or velocity of development and improvements? or administrative oversight? intelligence built into every step? etc). Think about how that unique approach (overall) makes the set of features more differentiated. 3. What are the competitors' weak spots? What have they gotten flak for from users, from the press? How can we show that our solutions are different in just that way? Let's poke them. 4. Some features are going to be tablestakes. If they're complete mirror images, won't lead to any competitive advantages, moats, and more of a reassuring-yeah-we-got-that, then include it and don't fret. You can't focus on every little feature. Hype up what is different, defensible against competitors, desired and beloved by users.
...Read More4932 Views
Eric Bensley
Asana Head of Global Product Marketing • September 14
There's no perfect way to do this. People hate when I say this but when it comes to messaging, I'm much more into qualitative feedback vs. quantitative. If you similarly hate me, feel free to move on. If not, here are a few qualitative measures I use: * Can your sales team remember it and pitch it on calls? If you use call recording software with your team, take a listen. If your sales team is pitching it, it's working. If not, it's not. * Do a webinar or event and ask for feedback after. Incentivize response with free swag. Session scores call tell you a lot about how your messaging landed. * Is more work "falling out of it"? What I mean by this is whether other people are building on top of it. ARe they thinking about it could be used for their segment and iterating on it. The best messaging becomes an organic force at your company.
...Read More3043 Views
John Gargiulo
Airbnb Head of Global Product Marketing • December 1
Great question. Post-launch is the most underrated parts of the cycle. You've spent months aiming the rocketship, putting fuel in the tank and blasting off - now you've got to steer. Let's break it down into three steps: 1) ANALYZE The first thing is to immediately begin watching not just usage of the product, but which parts of the product. How are people interacting with your features? Where are they dropping off? Where are they spending their time? This will give you context and clarity to move onto step two. 2) PLAN Now that you know where your hypothesis was roughly right or wrong, develop a plan to go after those areas. Our team uses a one-pager that is incredibly simple, laying out the problem we're trying to solve (ex: the pricing is too high, awareness is too low) and mapping out in specific detail, right down to the deliverable specs, how we plan to solve it. 3) EXECUTE Especially soon after launch, when blemishes become clearer in the light of mass user feedback, we aim to move quickly. If you're still talking about a major problem with the way the product has been positioned or messaged two weeks later it's been way too long. Standups with your cross-functional team including creative shouldn't end at launch! The fun is just beginning...
...Read More22046 Views
Jason Lyman
Customer.io Chief Marketing Officer • May 30
I have seen product marketers move into various roles as their careers evolve. The PMM skill set is very applicable in most marketing roles. For example, a successful PMM should be able to translate insights into strategy, build power narratives that engage customers, and drive cross-functional alignment/execution. Therefore, you can apply those skills in a more data-driven way on the demand gen side, or you could use those abilities to have more ownership over product decision-making as a PM, or you could help sell more of a given product in a GTM role. I loved being a PMM because it offers you a lot of flexibility for the future.
...Read More1276 Views
Kristen Kanka
Morningstar Head of Marketing, Enterprise Solutions | Formerly CaptureX, Medline Industries • January 27
Storytelling is the biggest trait is look for. I want all of my product marketers to be able to tell stories that anyone can follow that inspire action. Everyone I interview is asked to provide a writing sample so I can see if they’ve got “it.” The next trait is problem solving: In every interview I ask the same question: Tell me about a go-to-market that failed. I don’t care so much about the “why” of the failure; I want to know how you determined it was off track, and what you did about it to get back on track. And third is collaboration. How does someone build relationships? How can they earn a seat at the table with a diverse group of stakeholders? If they aren’t able to collaborate, it isn’t a role for them. You have to want to be the glue that holds a team together.
...Read More1452 Views