App Annie

PMM executive with extensive experience in GTM strategy, customer journey mapping & persona-based marketing.

Thomas Dong

VP Product Marketing

Heap VP Product Marketing, Thomas Dong 
on Stakeholder Management

Product marketing is a critical strategic function. It centers around a keen understanding of the product’s target audiences and strategically positioning and messaging your offerings to boost demand, adoption and revenue. But when you boil that down, it’s simply about driving go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

In order to do that effectively, there must be a consistent, company-wide understanding of your target audience. How your various personas interact with each other as part of a buying committee, and when they consume content/information over time can be mapped out through all the stages of the customer journey. Ultimately what they want to individually hear and see, i.e. messaging (+ content strategy), depends on each persona and what stage of the customer journey they are in. And during the learning and evaluation stages in particular, several personas will invariably require competitive details to discern between your offering and the various alternatives available.

And there I’ve just described the four foundational pillars of product marketing, upon which to build an effective and aligned GTM strategy!

The 4 Essential Templates for Building & Scaling Product Marketing

The mark of all successful companies is they truly get what their users need and want, how their buyers operate, and what makes their biggest champions and advocates tick. With that heightened awareness for customer-centricity, they are better positioned to successfully navigate the changing landscape and evolving needs of their target audience, introducing new products and features ahead of the competition, or entering new markets when new opportunities arise. Most importantly this takes a corporate commitment and cross-functional alignment that begins with a shared understanding of the target audience.

On the flip-side, for every struggling or failed company, the root cause likely traces back to a failed understanding of their target audience, which might have started with a bad product decision and/or a poorly executed go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Often times this begins with new products and features built with no business case – build it and they might <ins>not</ins> come! Or they may have foolishly aligned their GTM to an audience that either doesn’t exist, is not immediately accessible, or simply is not interested.

So what is a persona, or archetype more specifically? A persona is a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience, and the archetype represents a multitude of similar job titles (because often there is little consistency for job titles across companies or industries.) Personifying the archetype makes them tangible to marketers, salespeople, product managers and engineers alike. And by identifying similar patterns of behavior and backgrounds, every function can share a common understanding and indubitably deliver the experience each customer persona expects – without any additional oversight.

The Essential Persona Archetype Template

Buyer journeys are at the core of persona-based marketing. Once you have your target audience segmented into mutually exclusive persona archetypes, it is a technique used to better understand how your various personas interact with each other as part of a buying committee, and ultimately when they consume content/information or interact with you, as they first become aware, then begin to learn, decide to evaluate, move to buy, eventually use, and ultimately advocate for your product. You’ll note that I’ve also included product use and customer advocacy as stages in the journey for a more complete view, and henceforth refer to the “customer journey” versus just the “buyer journey”.

The Essential Customer Journey Map Template

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I subscribe to IBM’s philosophy on competitive selling. Competition is good. In fact, it is easier to get to a decision when there is a choice to be made, versus choosing between your product and nothing. Taking that one step further, product marketing at IBM was never about denigrating the competition, but rather taking an objective approach to de-positioning the competition. It’s a proven long-term winning strategy, especially when paired with an SEO strategy that puts you and your competition in the same (inevitable) conversation.

The Essential Competitive Battle Card Template

Consistency in how you present your company, brand or product is a challenge, especially across channels or touchpoints and over the course of time. Complex organizational dynamics don’t make it easy. Today content creators come from all parts of the organization – even outside, but everyone is probably working or starting from different sources. As a result, how a customer perceives a product, even from one product line to another, could vary drastically across a blog or tweet from engineering, a conversation with a marketing rep on a trade show floor, a cold call from an account executive, online documentation, an answer in an online community, or an email response from customer support.

Fortunately, while product marketing can be part of the problem, product marketing is the only solution! As the functional owner of messaging, product marketing has always been the critical bottleneck in reviewing or approving content, so often times the old just gets recycled or repurposed haphazardly. But imagine if there was an easy-to-reference, easy-to-find and always up-to-date messaging platform in place that serves as the foundation for all communications. #self-service #cut-and-paste

The Essential Messaging Platform Template

According to Forrester, <a href="https://go.forrester.com/blogs/welcome-to-the-b2b-marketing-renaissance/" target="_self">92% of B2B purchases</a> start with search. That means B2B buyers want direct access to our content, not some overthought home page or complex website navigation. This is especially true in multi-product companies like IBM or OpenText, but you also have similar dynamics when buyers are looking to find information on specific features and capabilities. I've seen that even after all information and content is published to the web, there is no guarantee that web navigation will lead users to what they are seeking.

So why doesn’t SEO generally play a more crucial role to product marketers? After all, SEO really is the voice (and mind) of the customer. It provides incredibly valuable insights into how they think about your technology, the competition, your ecosystem, and the market.

Product Marketing's Silver Bullet: SEO

Find Thomas on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomdong/ Join Thomas on Sharebird here: https://sharebird.com/profile/thomas-dong Heap is hiring! Check out career opportunities here: https://heap.io/careersQuestions we cover in this episode:<ol>
<li>Tell me about your career path to becoming a PMM? </li>
<li>How is the marketing team structured at Heap? </li>
<li>So you’re building out the product marketing team at Heap right now. What does that mean? </li>
<li>What did you do first? Did you need to learn about the product/customer/market to figure out how to build out the team? </li>
<li>How will you structure your team? Aligned to products? Industries? </li>
<li>What do you look for in new hires? </li>
<li>How will you measure success and evaluate your team? </li>
<li>Tell me about your product marketing philosophy? </li>
<li>What mistakes do people make when building a new PMM team? </li>
<li>What’s your outlook on the career of Product Marketing? Is it a good place to be right now? </li>
</ol>

Thomas Dong

Thomas Dong

Podcast: Building Out a Product Marketing Team with Thomas Dong, VP of Product Marketing at Heap

AMA: Heap VP Product Marketing, Thomas Dong on Stakeholder Management

Heap VP Product Marketing, Thomas Dong

on Stakeholder Management

How does your company define the difference between Marketing and Product Marketing teams? How do the responsibilities differ?

If product marketing is a relatively new function at your company (relative to product), what advice do you have on becoming a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?

Article: Product Marketing's Silver Bullet: SEO

Article: The 4 Essential Templates for Building & Scaling Product Marketing

Article: The Essential Competitive Battle Card Template

Article: The Essential Messaging Platform Template

Article: The Essential Customer Journey Map Template

Article: The Essential Persona Archetype Template