Product Marketing Management
Product Marketing: What Should be Its Scope?
Product marketing is often elastic and manifests itself differently depending on the type and the stage of your business. It can establish a narrative with your customers and mold public perception. It can mobilize sellers and partners with a consistent solution story that resonates with prospects. It can find the customers who should buy or use your products and services, and compel them to do so directly. And it can establish, grow, and activate an ecosystem. Among other utilities from product marketing, it is generally expected as a highly leveraged function in your organization, and often drives product, go-to-market, sales, public and analyst relations, and more.
In a typical engagement, after walking through your particular needs and concerns, we will produce a proposal that consists of a full set of activities we recommend, and solutions we can offer. This varies from client to client, but some common areas most companies needed help in are listed in the following sections of this page.
In principal, there are a number of ways we can create more scope from your product marketing investment. These include, one, scaling your team to effectively support a broader and deeper service or product portfolio without growing headcount at nearly the same rate; two, scaling your solution and product-
stories through the field to create a louder and more unified voice for messages that resonate; three, scaling your brand and product stories and category messaging to customer segments in a way that is both targeted and consistent; four, scaling geographically and ensuring your product marketing is addressing a global market and not marketing to the US then merely modifying or creating new locally; and five, establishing a scalable product marketing organizational model that trains excellence, builds breadth of experience and perspective, and systematically improves your product marketing leadership pipeline so your product marketing organization and bench is a strategic advantage.
Thought-leadership and Messaging
Thought leadership and excellent core messaging is typically the first priority product marketing leaders refine or create. The tangible goals include delivering a strong category narrative and messaging document; compelling product, service, or brand web pages; appropriate white paper coverage for the key category topics; great content and sessions for industry events;
and industry-specific narratives where needed.
In a typical engagement, we help your business achieve these goals through close collaboration with your public relation and analyst relation, keynotes, strategic communication and speech, service leadership and product, and industry marketing.
Adoption and Sales Enablement
Awareness, perception, and service adoption focused product marketing brings new customers into your business ecosystem. Product marketing achieves this by delivering great company-level or product-level first call decks for sellers; delivering effective competitive assessment and comparison materials for the field; delivering effective video demos, tutorials, and webinars; enabling field marketing campaigns, including large-scale perception change or lead generation;
maintaining our presence at the top of category search results through search engine optimization and online channel marketing; retargeting abandoners who started adoption but left before completion and representing your brand at important category-specific third-party party events. Adoption product marketing leverages your organization through business development and sales, field and partner marketing, events, evangelism, and outbound product marketing teams.
Engagement
Onboarding, engagement, and cross-selling usage product marketing ensures your business is growing usage among your company’s existing and from acquiring first-time customers, and drives revenue in the new feature or product, and across solutions. Product marketing achieves this by delivering triggered “path to success” campaigns via email, retargeting people off our sites, and ongoing tuning for messages and the targeting; console placements, onsite merchandising, and generally improvising how you help customers get more benefit from your products and services;
hackathons, how-to events, and other in-person engagements; and “service alpha to service beta” users content for the most effective next-logical service promotion identified through customer adoption patterns and propensity modeling. Engagement product marketing leverages your organization with evangelists, marketing infrastructure teams like the email marketing team, service business intelligence teams to identify adoption patterns, content development through business development and sales engineers, and the console team.
Advocacy
Product marketing can identify and magnify user, customer, and partner advocacy. It identifies and nurtures people and companies who are strong advocates for your brand and enables them to become more effective at telling your story in their words. It develops compelling case studies and customer references that inspire potential customers; quantifies your momentum story; builds your “product heroes'' community by onboarding
customers and engaging them as a community; meets your community where they are already engaged like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and GitHub; and build and improve marketing partnerships in areas like marketplace apps, sports, and education. Advocacy product marketing leverages the organization with business development for identifying fans and scaling references and field and partner marketing to broadcast the compelling references and stores.
Pricing and Packaging
Pricing determines whether you have a viable business, its growth curve, churn rate, and upsell (upgrading from one package to another) path. Most companies follow one of, or a hybrid of, the following models.
Cost-based pricing: The model in which a company defines its pricing by enumerating all variable costs and adding a markup or premium to justify its business operation. For bootstrapping startups, this is where everything starts. The founders need to have a clear understanding of the customer lifetime value and the average cost of acquisition to ensure positive cash flow.
Competitor-focused pricing: The model in which pricing starts from the outward comparisons with similar solutions. This model often is also introspective as in deeply understanding one’s product (and all its features and capabilities), and then cross-referring with others’.
Value-centric pricing: The model that bases pricing on the value it creates for the customers. This is the pricing style that’s often talked about but rarely adopted and
some even consider it anti-economic or simply naive.
The value-centric model is heavily reliant on robust customer research and understanding, as well as on good positioning (where is our market; how big is it or what’s the TAM; who is our buyer and their personas; what do they desire, use, and must have; what’s the expected customer lifetime value; etc.) This model can become invaluable when it comes to packaging - how does a company buckets different product or service features for different customer profiles. The pricing page needs to be intuitive to each of the customer segments about what each package’s value is and pushes them toward the premium model.
A strong product marketing team should take the lead in coordinating core pricing updates and how the company communicates the pricing (e.g. pricing page, press, etc.) It should combine insights from product development, sales, finance, and marketing, and advise the management team on pricing strategy.
Go-to-Market Framework (1/3): When to Adjust?
A go-to-market framework effectively brings a new product or product feature to market. A typical Go-to-Market strategy should identify a target audience, produce a product-market FAQ, produce a launch marketing plan, and outline a sales strategy. For many technology companies, the Go-to-Market process dovetails into the tail end of the Product team’s roadmap process or in some companies, its working-backward press release process.
An effective Go-to-Market process helps businesses standardize marketing support, align launch expectations across product, marketing, and sales; refine a process that can be increasingly automated, and ready for scale; leverage marketing teams’ expertise, insights, and data early in the launch
planning; and enable warm-up marketing experiments, PR/AR drumbeats, and build a longer runway for organic channels.
Unlike common business operations or strategic pipelines, it is not, however, advisable to frequently revamp the Go-to-Market progress.
Go-to-Market processes touch a wide matrix of functional teams, place substantial faith in select key champions (typically the product managers and the product marketing managers) to glue workstreams and rally stakeholders, and commonly can expand anywhere between six to thirty months. It is a widely recognized practice, for leaderships, to be patient and give adequate time, resources, and room for mistakes, for a Go-to-Market process to become fully
lubricated over time and through trial and error.
Maplerivertree has engaged primarily in building Go-to-Market from scratch for businesses in the following circumstances: one, when a company’s engineering and product organization was proposing new development roadmap processes; two, when a company recently reached the post-startup phase (in some verticals, signals would be 30 million in annual revenue, or when the exit horizon is crystal clear), and is investing in new product marketing functions; three, a critical flag-ship launch is planned and the company wants maximum launch support (one-time effort). These are all the right times to test and iterate a new standardized process to bring new features and products to the market.
Go-to-Market Framework (2/3): Who is Involved and How?
The primary drivers for a Go-to-Market process should be the product management and product marketing teams. Product managers interface with and represent the development team, user experience, quality assurance, and documentation, and Product marketing managers interface with and represent wider marketing, business development, sales, and customer support. In a joint effort, product managers and product marketing managers bring a diverse set of company functions together, lead a Go-to-Market process, and co-own the launch calls. Depending on the tier of the launch, some Go-to-Market actions may shift between the product management and product marketing management teams; for more information on this, refer to the dedicated section below.
On the marketing team, Demand Generation, Content, PR/AR, and Events and Webinar teams are the owners of the launch activities. These single-threaded leaders will champion their respective programs’ strategies for an upcoming launch and own the reporting of key post-launch metrics.
The sales team, both the account executives and the sales development representatives, will be involved in the pre-launch Go-to-Market process as (planning) reviewers, and in post-launch as stakeholders. During planning, sales development teams can help inform whether a new feature warrants a dedicated outbound campaign at the announcement.
At launch, the sales development team can expect a key output of the Go-to-Market process: messaging and updated sales tools around who to sell to, what we are selling, and how we can best sell, as well as updated top collaterals.
Other functional teams, such as account-based marketing, advocacy, agencies, regional marketing, and partner marketing are integral to successful launches and are contributors in various stages of the Go-to-Market process – refer to the process review table below for more information.
Go-to-Market Framework (3/3): Decision Trees
It’s important to separate ongoing, minor feature releases from the ‘twice a year’ major product launches and assign different levels of Go-to-market processes accordingly. Comparatively, a business can be more lenient to feature releases’ rollout windows and provide more agility and autonomy to the development team. Some features also do not impact customers, and thus do not require an advanced level of Go-to-Market or even sales and marketing actions.
For ongoing feature releases, most can be categorized into somewhere between three to six tiers, depending on the size of the business and the nature of the product offerings. From tier six to tier one, each tier of feature release requires progressively more marketing support. A tier six release is not customer-impacting and typically includes internal, backend, or data improvements. The Go-to-Market process is not triggered for a tier six release.
If a release impacts customers but is not customer-facing, the product manager and the product marketing managers are responsible for proper internal or corporate communications and offering reactive support to the customer success teams regarding internal materials such as technical Q&As. If the release also adds value or solves a pain point for customers, then an in-product or in-app communication will be required. Tier five and four supports are considered reactive communications.
If the release impacts customer workflows, affects any usage thresholds, or touches pricing, it should be categorized into either tier three, tier two, or tier one - all of which are requires proactive communication. Tier three release does not introduce a differentiator, and for which the marketing team should provide basic online channel supports, such as customer emails, beta page updates, webinars, help hubs, blog posts, and social channel announcements. If a release is a differentiator, additional
support should be considered, such as influencer programs, homepage and product pages updates, sales collateral and sales tools updates, review site updates, and PR and media outreach. If in addition to being a differentiator, a release also creates a new lead funnel or an acquisition driver, marketing should plan paid, ROI-based, and programmatic marketing programs, and devise win-back campaigns.
For major product launches, the ranking is in comparison simplified and, in most businesses, consists of only two tiers: a planned new product will qualify as tier one should it, 1) enables the business to ensure a new market, 2) introduce customers to a new product or software offering to the existing market, 3) change the customer experience in a significant way, or 4) supports an M&A effort. A tier two product launch predicts that the new product will close known competitive gaps, address renewal risks, reduce customer churns, increase product adoption, or alter pricing models.
Messaging Framework
The purpose of the messaging framework is to capture the key information needed to create or revise the press release and prepare additional narratives (also part of services we deliver).
Our team works with the product management teams and service stakeholders of your organization to build alignment on the highest priority problems, benefits, and differentiated capabilities, and how to explain them.
The general skeleton of a messaging framework from our service consists of six parts.
Part one addresses your target audiences, including one, the type of the organization, such as large enterprises who have migrated to your service A, or financial verticals; two, the description of end-user, such as enterprise developers/architects using message brokers on-premises; three, a clear understanding the decision-makers, such as enterprise IT leaders, CTO, CIO.
Part two outlines positioning, including market category description and succinct examples. An example can be “Maplerivertree participates in the fast-growing KRN market segment,
we estimate the software component of KRN addressed by Maplerivertree to be $1.7B in 2027, growing to 4.1B in 2031 (X% CAGR). Maplerivertree believes its long-term entitlement to be at least a 7% market segment. The primary segments driving the growth of the addressable KRN market segment are alpha, beta, and delta (X% share). M-competitor is the existing leading provider in the market segment along with alpha, beta, and delta. In Q3, M-competitor had over 2m monthly active users, and by comparison (…) .” Part two also explains how the new product or service sits within your existing portfolio, internal positioning vs. substitutes, or entryway.
Part three provides a succinct service description, typically in the range of 150 to 400 words.
Part four in the messaging framework follows a narrative hierarchy where it firstly presents a one-sentence value proposition, such as “Maplerivertree makes it possible for developers to get started with commodity hyper-trading by providing a development environment to do alpha, beta, and delta.” This is followed by the problem statement, such as “the existing development toolkit for carbon trade integration is fragmented in the market, hard to configure, and costly.” This problem statement then is detailed through one, a clear description of issues or customer pain points (e.g. how is it fragmented, and what challenges does it present for our target audience), for example, “broker setup involves the procurement, installation, and configuration of a new server and installation and configuration of messaging software. Ongoing administration and maintenance of message code includes software upgrades
and patches, security updates, and monitoring. On-prem brokers have significant hardware investments and require expensive upfront fixed-term licensing commitments;” two, why Maplerivertree’s solutions address such issues and what the delivered benefits are, for example, “offload overhead- easy to set up and operate X brokerage system and reduce TCO by over 12%;” three, how the solution delivers the aforementioned promise through its differentiated capabilities, for example, “fully managed broker setup, administration, and maintenance, infrastructure automatically provisioned for high availability;” four, list of distinctive features that clarify what customers will use or experience, for example, “automatic provisioning of X infrastructure, and automatic software installation;” five, lastly Part 4 will conclude by offering Getting Started Experience guides or resource depositories, such as interactive demo tools, webinar walkthroughs, or podcast recording.
Parts five and six focus on competitors and differentiated capabilities comparison, which starts with competitor descriptions and ends with a chessboard illustration of where each of the key players stands within all capabilities, and rank differentiations by strong (Maplerivertree expects GA functionality to clearly outrank alternative solutions), medium (similar capabilities or possessing an advantage that a large number of prospects will not notice), and red-flags (aware that select Maplerivertree functionalities are noticeably inferior in the market).
Prospective clients are welcome to request a messaging framework sample in the RFP submission.
Narrative Framework
For the core product or service narratives upon your request, here is the typical structure we apply.
One, we include the most impactful information, and avoid covering every trend and every product or service offered by your company.
Two, we tell stories, and each section of the document provides new information but also sets up what’s to follow and ties back to what came before. The sections should flow into each other.
Three, we write for your audience. Most narratives start as an internal document that salespeople, new employees, and others will use to learn about the industries, verticals, or applications and how your company uniquely supports customers. We write to be clear and make it easy for the reader to take away a few key points.
Four, all writings have a message. In a typical narrative, we go beyond the accumulation of information to deliver select memorable and differentiated key messages about your solution for the specific industry.
Five, we cover the critical “must-haves” and the differentiated services or features. The solution we offer customers is made up of “table stakes” (features and capabilities that customers cannot do without) and “delighters” (differentiated features and capabilities that solve problems and open new possibilities). Include both in your story.
The general skeleton of a narrative framework from our service consists of five sections.
Section one provides the executive summary, a brief paragraph that captures the key
takeaways. It covers the status of the industry/vertical with key trends/issues, the primary challenges customers face and technology limitations, a summary of your companies’ solutions, a high-level summary of products/features and their benefits, and concluding sentences that emphasize key messages.
Section two outlines an industry overview and typically starts by providing a snapshot of where the industry is right now (e.g. it’s growing, shrinking, or consolidating), and an opening paragraph that introduces key trends or issues. This paragraph starts with a topic sentence, such as “the ride-sharing industry is in a period of enormous growth due to the technology advances and demographic shifts creating an increased demand for rides and for part-time employment.” Subsequent paragraphs should go into more detail about the trends and/or issues identified in the opening paragraph.
Section three dives into challenges. It provides an overview of the technology challenges customers face as a result of the issues or trends raised in the intro section and begins with a transition paragraph that ties the intro to the challenges. This paragraph starts with a topic sentence: “while the ride-sharing industry’s explosive growth is creating enormous opportunities, companies are struggling to differentiate themselves from their customers and building loyalty.” The transition paragraph then lays out, at a high level, the technology limitations that are creating this business challenge. Subsequent paragraphs should go into more detail about eh challenges introduced in the opening paragraph
Section four narrates your solution and starts with a paragraph that provides a high-level
look at all of your existing product or service portfolio. This paragraph directly responds to the challenges and limitations laid out in the “challenges” section and gives an overview of your products, features, and benefits and how they support the specific industry. Then it opens with a transition sentence that takes the reader from the challenges to the solution, such as: “Maplerivertree provides services shared ride companies can use to run their operations, collect vast amounts of data, organize that data, and use it to understand their customers better and develop new offerings that are innovative and distinctive.” It delivers a high-level message about how you service the industry in a differentiated way. Subsequent paragraphs go into more detail about the specifics of your solution and the unique benefits it offers. These paragraphs bring the message to life and “prove” it through feature and benefit examples. A concluding paragraph brings everything together and suggests the opportunity ahead, such as: “Even in a crowded market with new entrants appearing every day, Maplerivertree services can help ride-share customers stand out and win loyalty. With Maplerivertree, they can focus their resources on gaining insights from their data and creating innovative services that delight customers and open new paths for growth. Services, such as something, something, and something, easily scale and make it easier for customers to provide a more personalized rider experience and respond quickly as preferences change.”
Section five provides appendices, such as a competitive matrix to validate claims of differentiation, customer examples that support each benefit, FAQs, and related sales tools. ■