AMA: Amperity Vice President, Product Marketing, Jason Perocho on Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

Product Marketing: Product Marketing encapsulates your product's core positioning and messaging. It is the most concise definition of the pains, benefits, differentiation, and value that your product provides to your ideal customer profile. Solution Marketing: Solution Marketing takes product marketing messaging and makes it relevant for a horizontal or vertical use case. Solution marketing tends to involve some translation of pains, benefits, differentiation, or value that makes it relevant for ...Read More

Great question! Here is where I would start and build up to: Platform Messaging: Platform should serve as a guide on how all of our products fit together. Messaging should focus on how your technology helps solve your target's jobs-to-be-done better than other solutions. Product Messaging: Product messaging falls into buckets in your platform messaging. It focuses on how it helps individuals solve specific pain points they face. Suite Messaging: Suites are a collection of products (i.e. solution ...Read More

Verticalization is a strategy that horizontal platforms should postpone as long as possible to keep their TAM as large as possible for their next funding round or exit. I recommend only verticalizing after you've exhausted horizontal (i.e., non-industry-specific) use cases. In my experience, most pain points are universal but described using different language in each vertical. Here are a couple of lessons I've learned helping products verticalize after the decision has been made: Cultivate a Pa ...Read More

You should have a full GTM funnel strategy for each of your ICPs. Top of Funnel: What's the industry trend that's forcing your ICP to adapt or change? These trends have to be relevant for the message to resonate. Middle of Funnel: What is the problem, solution, and value each of your ICPs is looking for? You can contextualize each using a jobs-to-be-done framework if there are multiple jobs. Focus on the value for the business. Bottom of Funnel: What are the pains and benefits for a target perso ...Read More

I think of messaging in terms of the marketing funnel. Top of Funnel - "The Brand Promise" is the highest level of your messaging. It is a concise, emotionally driven statement that captures your core experience or value. It encapsulates your differentiation, painting a picture of how your product will change your customer's life. For example, at one point, Salesforce's brand promise was "We Bring Companies and Customers Together". It's short, relatable, and easily understood. Middle of Funnel - ...Read More

Your messaging hierarchy should guide how product, platform, and solution messaging/PMMs fit together. Platform Messaging: Platform Messaging should serve as a framework in which all product messaging fits. If I have a simple platform, then I encourage PMMs to create a storyline of the uber job-to-be-done, then have messaging pillars, no more than three to four, for each product. If you have more than four products, then group your products together into jobs-to-be-done, then create a messaging ...Read More