Product Marketing Management – What you need to know.
Table of Contents
Software is like a building that is constantly under construction. This means that it is always changing.
Unlike a building that is fixed to its’ base, software has the ability to move. Move into different markets, double down on different verticals, change its’ component parts and do all that in relatively small amounts of time.
A business that is built around software has the advantage of being agile against the challenges that face traditional businesses such as manufacturing and traditional retail thus allowing a software business to re-invent itself at the furthest end, or to simply evolve over time.
With software constantly evolving, traditional marketing is not enough. The value a software business provides will be continuously changing — and so the marketing of that value will always be coming back to the software of which the value is built from.
This documents outlines ‘what good looks like’ for Product Marketing:
> The role that Product Marketing plays in a software business
> What the skills are for the management of the role, and
> Lays out a framework to allow the role to thrive and drive value.
In addition, this document defines what Product Marketing is, and also what it isn’t.
Product Marketing through the Stages of Business Growth
Product Marketing evolves alongside the evolution of the business. As resources become more available, Product Marketing advances and the value derived from the function also increases. Depending on the business lifecycle, product marketing as a role, will often follow this path:
Stage 1: Startups will often have Product Marketing within the engineering function. Who knows the product better than those that build it? With very short feedback loops between the founders and the customers, the ability to quickly change both the marketing of the value and the value itself means there is great value in reducing layers of communication. As soon as some market traction is found, it becomes extremely unscalable to depend on the engineering function for marketing.
Stage 2: As a startup grows, they will often take on a Product Management function to manage the scaling of product growth. The Product Management function becomes the voice of the customer (VoC). This function is obsessed with building the right things for those that will pay for it. Because of this understanding of the customer, it is often left to the Product Management function to articulate the value of what is being built. This is an unscalable model due to the skills that are required at this stage in the business’ lifecycle.
Stage 3: As a business starts to ‘launch’ more than just a single product or proposition, often into a market it is already participating in, it becomes clear that a Product Marketing function is needed. This function is often assigned to an existing person that is tasked with the responsibilities to launch products. Often limited to collateral creation and not yet focused to the positioning of the product changes or linked to value realization.
Stage 4: Very soon after stage 3, as a company reaches the mature stage in its’ lifecycle, Product Marketing starts to own the go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This is the stage that most software companies sit at and this entails identifying new market positions, new buyer profiles and the product changes needed and then working with the internal stakeholders to position the product changes to the buyer profiles. Whilst the marketing function focuses on keeping the business front of mind, the constant ‘launching’ is required to support growth in a generally saturated competitive landscape.
Stage 5: The final destination for Product Marketing is to be strategic and accountable for revenue. This function now sits at the intersection of Product Management, Sales and Marketing and so has the potential to be most impactful function in driving growth.
What Product Marketing isn’t
Product Marketing isn’t Product Education
The goal of Product Education is to enable usage of the product by ensuring a good enough understanding of key concepts required to use the product effectively and then making available instructional procedures for using the features. It is assumed that the users are already customers and so the content is not designed to position the benefits based on the needs of the audience and so can’t be classified as a form or marketing.
Product Marketing isn’t Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the creation and distribution of content. The skills of storytelling and media production management are required and often social media is incorporated into remit of the content marketer. Their measures of success are often social channel or engagement growth and it’s assumed the strategy for that growth is linked to revenue realization.
Product Marketing isn’t Marketing
Marketing is a very broad business area that can encompass all types of marketing. Product Marketing can be a sub-function of the marketing function, however, the goals are different. For example, brand marketing is focused on the brand and is less changeable than product marketing. The measures of success are also broad from referrals, to customer acquisition costs, through to lead generation
Product Marketing isn’t Product Management
Product Marketing encapsulates the Voice of Customer (VoC) the ensure they are building the right things. They decide what to build, they understand the technology and manage scale. Their goal is to ship the product and their measure of success is often north start metrics such a positive user reviews or usage of a given feature. Product Management often utilize the insight from the Product Marketing function to help drive prioritisation.
What Product Marketing is
Product Marketing is accountable for the research of markets and segmenting of target customers. It delivers positioning and messaging of products and its’ features. Understands the competitive landscape and is tasked with securing product and message market fit. Ultimately, they drive demand and adoption of the product and examples of measure of success are user activation and overall brand awareness in a given market.
Where is your company on Product Marketing?
From a business perspective, where is your companies technology lifecycle at? If it is at the maturing stage, this may means it’s important that you focus on keeping your business font-of-mind in a market that maybe otherwise saturated (let’s face it, most technology businesses are fairly saturated when compared to just 10 years ago), and in parallel, to be focused on developing new technologies and new GTM strategies to support business continuity and continued growth. This means that you maybe at both at Stage 3 and Stage 4 in Product Marketing against business growth stages and are fast approaching stage 5.
You may need a role or function that is solely dedicated to understanding market and buyer needs and then using that knowledge to ensure you business executes a compelling marketing and sales strategy.
What does good Product Marketing look like?
Product Marketing Framework
Putting all of that together, the diagram below demonstrates the ‘flow’ on information that is used by Product Marketing from the distilling and condensing of the market information, the passing of that information to guide the product roadmap and identify new product gaps, through to supporting influencer marketing and providing full strategic GTM plans of which can be executed on.
PMM Accountabilities
Product Marketing need to be accountable for the market success of the product portfolio. This means they are accountable for the product success in the long term and should be empowered to make the changes needed to drive that success. This could include revenue plans by product, customer loyalty plans, buyer process optimisations, partner programme optimisations, They’ll need to have touch points on all the things that drive market success.
Product Marketing needs to build a deep knowledge of our market, our customers and our competitors. They will help guide the product roadmap, the product strategy and help guide the sales and GTM efforts. Having the mindset of the customer is what will ultimately provide the most value to your business. From that content can come. The saying ‘rubbish in rubbish out’ springs to mind as a good demonstrator of value for product marketing. Specific touch points include market planning, segmentation and user cases, competitive insights, detailed customer needs, pricing strategies and market gaps and opportunities.
Product marketing needs to be able to communicate the market position that is differentiated, clear, defensible/credible and profitable. The communication method could be social media posts, partner and reseller forums or soirées, or even the print collateral such as a pricing and proposition document. For example, decisions such as should we differentiate on price, or be the highest quality product or something else that articulates value. Examples touch points include messaging and positioning, the content marketing strategy, the sales strategy, the website and other collateral, even influencer marketing and media outreach.
Product marketing need to be able to arm sales. This could be anyone that influences sales. That means both direct and the channel sales teams. They need to arm those teams with the knowledge and tools they need to be successful. Afterall, those teams will be communicating on behalf of product marketing function and also the business. This is referred to as Sales Enablement. Touch points include the enablement tools and readiness. Training on using the tools and indirect readiness such as channel. Proof points to help with credibility and defensibility. Objection handling is also a touchpoint for product marketing.
PMM Skills
Because of the breadth of knowledge required and in some cases depth of knowledge, a good product marketer needs to have a broad set of skills across business, marketing and industry.
They need to have the basic fundamentals of how a business is run, to be comfortable with financial analysis and will have run their own business previously.
They will need to have a broad understanding of marketing. How campaigns work. Lead generation, sales and acquisition management.
They need to have enough knowledge of the industry to be able to understand the mind of the buyer.
Having both left and right brain thinking is important. To be able to be data and numbers driven and revenue orientated but also creative and to be able to think outside of the box and come up with different ways of thinking.
Finally, as Product Marketing is a revenue orientated role, having sales experience is very important. The ability to influence buyers is the ultimate goal.
Product Marketing against the Product Lifecycle
The product lifecycle is well known model that describes the phases a goes through from Opportunity through to eventual End of Life (EOL).
The product lifecycle is well known model that describes the phases a goes through from Opportunity through to eventual End of Life (EOL).
Here examples of where Product Marketing add value to each phase:
Market Opportunity
PMM create Market Plans. They develop customer segmentations. Report on opportunity analysis as well as market requirements and the competitive landscape. This is provided in a Market Requirements Document (MRD).
Product Design
PMM will help create the customer requirements, develop use cases, establish the buying criteria, develop the pricing strategy and packaging the product up and the positioning.
Build
During the build phase, the PMM will develop an advisory council to provide constant feedback, locate early adopters, develop customer references and proof points and start to work with influencers.
Launch (Growth)
This is where the media outreach begins. Sales enablement tools are developed and friction is reduced. GTM tactics are developed and lead generation is optimized with clear win/loss metrics to evidence the effort.
Sell (Maturity)
Customer retention becomes the focus and upsell and cross sell activated to maximise the value
EOL (Decline)
The start of product bridges and customer bridges are established in order to bridge to new products that ensure the continuation of growth.
Product Development to Launch
In summary, the Product Marketing function develops the market requirements and passes those requirements to the Product Management function. Whilst the PM team are developing the product requirements document that established the business case for product change, the Product Marketing function develops the Messaging Document that outlines the messaging, positioning and content and then supports the creation of marketing and sales enablement materials.
Summary
Technology is evolving at a faster pace and buyers are better educated than ever before. On one hand, having a business built around software allows more flexibility and speed to adapt, on the other hand, seeing the opportunities and ensuring messaging resonates with the buyer is becoming more complex.
Supporting in these circumstances requires an agile and focused Product Management function.
This document outlines the framework for Product Marketing, the accountabilities and skills needed as well as an aligned understanding of what PMM is, how it works with Product Management and how the PMM evolves alongside the business growth stages.
What level is your business currently at? If you see multiple levels (e.g. product diversification), the PMM role may need to have split accountabilities until the functions around it have matured to then move into the ultimate stage and become accountable to revenue.
This content was written for the CEO of a company that wanted to understand what Product Marketing was. There were differing views between myself and the CRO which prevented the CEO from making decisions on the subject. More often than not, writing down your thoughts can help with alignment as it forces you to go deep and truly understand the subject, reflect on experience and put yourself in the shoes of your audience so they can understand better.