How your team can prioritize product marketing for growth? – PART 3

G. Developing your product marketing strategy

So we’ve got all of these fantastic benefits a product marketing team can bring to your business. How do you turn these benefits into a reality and create a product marketing strategy that works? It’s time to create a repeatable formula you can use for each product or feature so you can enjoy the outcomes and start profiting from your efforts.

Define your personas

First on your hit list is to define your personas. Who are you talking to, and why do they need your product? Get a clear idea of their pain points and motivations.

Once you’ve understood this, you can start to flesh out your personas. Give them names, ages, hobbies, the works. Every member of your team needs to understand and visualize who your customer is and what they need.

Align on positioning and messaging

The second focus in your product marketing strategy checklist is product messaging. Why is your product the best in the market, and where does it stand amongst your competitors?

This is not just so your marketing team can portray the product in its best light. It’s also to equip the sales team to defend the product and better sell it. Lastly, this product alignment stage helps to inform the product team, so they can continue to work on creating the best version of your product possible.

Set your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

KPIs differ drastically, depending on your business growth goals. Make sure your product marketing KPIs match up and align with the business mission goals. Are you looking to build product engagement? Are you looking for more lead to win conversions? Perhaps, you’re looking at improving the company bottom line?

Whatever KPIs you set will determine the targets the head of product marketing is chasing with her or his strategy and give a clear idea of where they should prioritize their efforts.

Structure your pricing

Next up, it’s time to set your pricing structure. This is best informed by competitor research and aligning with your business development team to identify the margins you need to meet to be a healthy and profitable company.

Is it normal to build some sort of freemium version of your product to prove its value before introducing a paid-price plan with more benefits? Think of low-lift ways to get your product in someone’s hands – or on someone’s screens – to win them over and convince them to invest.

Create the content

This is a huge step in your product marketing strategy and one that needs a lot of time if you’re going to launch well. You’ve already identified your product pain points, its competitive differentiators, and its messaging for personas. Now you’ve got to put all of that research into action and create some content.

Nothing builds trust and brand affinity like quality content. Keep this in mind as you go about creating. Plus, make sure you create for specific channels. There’s no use building content with ratios that don’t work or are not practical for where your target demographic is sitting or where you’re publishing your work.

Identify niche channels and content avenues in relation to your demographic, then create content that attracts, converts, and retains customers specifically for that avenue.

Launch your product or new features

Next, you’re ready for the most exciting part of your strategy: Launch day.

It’s a good idea to run a soft launch of your product or feature internally. Be that with your team or existing users. This softer launch will give you an idea of how your new feature or product is received, if your messaging has its desired effects, and will highlight any tweaks you may need to make before going to the masses and acquiring new leads.

H. Successful product marketing examples to emulate

A few brands have really nailed product marketing, whether it’s for adapting to their customer needs, finding and showcasing a competitive edge, or simply nailing product messaging. Let’s explore those that are doing it best.

Mailchimp

A 2020 report revealed Mailchimp covers 60% of the email marketing industry, and its closest competitor to hold 9.3%. How did they do it? In an interview with Forbes, Mailchimp Chief Marketing Officer, Tom Klein, spoke of a recent acquisition.

He said: « We’re a purpose-driven company, and we really mean it, which means we are very much dedicated to making our customers more successful ». Mailchimp’s dedication to making their customers more successful, rather than focusing on acquiring new ones, led them to shift their messaging and rework their personas.

Over the years, Mailchimp went from « Send better emails » to « Smarter marketing for big ideas » and « Do it all with Mailchimp ». They created tag lines that better resonate with their personas, Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs) rather than the corporates they used to chase.

Billie

The beauty brand, Billie, quickly shot to stardom by identifying their product differentiation and running with it. They became the first beauty brand to celebrate culturally implied « imperfections ».

Billie shows body hair in their product marketing and celebrates diversity across all spectrums – designed for anyone who identifies as female. In their most recent campaign with PrettyBird UK, they published a video that encouraged a world in which people stop apologizing for their appearance and start owning it.

Their vision is heart-warming, and their competitor research and brand differentiation in product marketing see them go from strength to strength.

Hey.com

Just because brands tell you we’re in a visual-first world doesn’t necessarily mean your product niche is. Hey.com broke the traditional home page rules for years upon launch. Their product marketing team did their homework, identified their audience, and created content that appealed to that audience – not what other businesses told them they should be doing.

The result? An all-text homepage. No hero image, no video, just fantastic copy. Why? Because they realized that this is what would resonate with their customers.

Hey.com took a risk, but accurately showcased their product in a content format their audience is familiar with while showcasing their product as a solution. Why? Because « email sucked for years » and Hey.com is out to change that.

Zoom

The chances are you had a Zoom call at some point in 2020. The year saw a drastic change to remote work across all businesses; some were ready for it; some were not – most turned to Zoom to keep their culture and communication thriving.

Zoom showcased exceptional product marketing agility in 2020. Zoom’s product was no longer for remote-first companies; it was for everyone. It meant their traditional personas were quickly joined by an onslaught of new customer types: Teachers, therapists, gym instructors, even the royal family. Zoom had to accommodate everyone, and some were not as tech-savvy as others.

Yet the company prevailed. At its peak, Zoom counted 300 million daily participants and predicted to take $1.8bn by the end of 2020 – around double its original forecast in March of the same year. They even built and launched a new product, « Zoom for Home », and for all of this, are the perfect example of agile and rapid product marketing.

Final thoughts

There’s no questioning that product marketing should be an essential department within your business and can be a key player to your business growth. If they’re to be successful, product marketing teams need to be cross-functional, agile, and data-minded both in long and short-term strategies.

There’s certainly a mountain of benefits that come with onboarding a product marketing team and product marketing strategy. It’s important to build yourself a repeatable success recipe, hire great talent, and don’t be afraid to take data-driven risks if you want to truly own your industry niche.