How to build a killer Product Marketing Strategy and Execution Plan…
What is Product Marketing?
So, let’s start at the beginning and level set, what is product marketing? There are many definitions out there but I really like the one below from Hubspot.
‘’Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding the product's positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product.’’
What are the 3 core benefits of having a Product Marketing Function?
Economies of scale: By laser focusing on the mid-bottom of the marketing funnel a PMM’s strategy and subsequent execution plan by design is to maximise return on investment. During this unprecedented time where the marketing tap for many companies has been turned off, a strong PMM can identify, quantify opportunities to test and learn against that would translate in a strong business case to rationalise marketing investment.
Connective Tether: Through an interwoven relationship with Product teams, PMMs can be that connective tissue between the product teams and the rest of the organisation and end customer. This is achieved by adding more colour to a specific product by highlighting who the target customer is, their customer pain/pinch points, baseline performance benchmarks and the value proposition to set it up for success. This creates clarity, a purpose, accountability and also credibility for the product/feature itself.
Growth focused: I personally believe another title for Product Marketing Manager is Growth Marketing Manager. The ideals are the same. The focus for the majority of PMM’s is to identify how to grow the business and influence a set of metrics. Therefore, a strong PMM will be data-driven and leveraging a lot of what’s taught in the world of consultancy to bring an opportunity to life whilst deftly switching to the right side of the brain to come up with creative and holistic ways to land a marketing message. The title doesn’t really matter, it’s the output that is the most relevant thing here to call out.
How do you build a killer Product Marketing strategy?
Context is important, I’ve read so many articles online that try to answer this question but don’t quite hit the mark because it isn’t an exact fit to my needs, therefore adapting it to my needs is difficult. I’ll aim to address the one key scenario I believe is quite common. Leave a comment if you want to ask me about others.
Scenario: A suite of new features for an app have been developed and are ready to go live. How do you prioritise and build a GTM plan to set them up for success?
Step 1: GTM Inbound Analysis:
Select a few products to build a GTM plan for, give yourself roughly a quarter to land 2-3 products/features (resource dependent).
To prioritise which product could benefit the most from a GTM plan, you need to lead with the data and set up a GTM candidate workshop with Product, Research, BI, Brand, CRM, and Comms teams to figure out what to prioritise. Try to address the following questions in that workshop:
What product/feature has the biggest commercial opportunity?
How strong is the product-market fit?
What are the current emotional and functional barriers/triggers?
What is the size of the audience? (e.g. segments, CLV, Recency, Frequency)
What are the use cases and does the product/feature address customer pain points?
What are the KPIs (and targets)? If you don’t have any targets, challenge the teams to create a baseline by either looking at similar products or agree to run an alpha/beta to collect these.
What does success look like? What is the Northstar here?
Align on what the unique value proposition is. The phrase ‘Value Proposition’ is touted a lot with different interpretations which may be quite confusing to translate to your business. Put simply, this is a statement that aims to capture the emotional and functional benefit the product/feature services provide to the customers and is typically 2-3 sentences long.
You’d need to assess all the items that have been developed and ascertain which would benefit from a GTM plan and which wouldn’t. You should also create a GTM marketing calendar to reassure product teams that certain features that add value will have a GTM plan for them in due course.
It’s fine to not have all the answers immediately the key here is to align on what is likely to make an impact. With the SME’s in one forum, they’ll have enough expertise to select the right candidates.
Step 2: Developing & Executing the GTM Strategy
After identifying a couple of candidates, the job now is to build out the GTM execution strategy. This will be easy to write as you’ll have all the answers from the workshop. However, it is important to write a very succinct document (1 pager) that becomes the one version of the truth for the candidate that highlights the key points.
Rhythm: Make sure you create a planning document and have regular weekly syncs with cross-functional partners with clear milestones to hit and use this forum to address any issues.
Create your Marketing Plan: Create an Owned, Earned and Paid marketing plan by collaborating with the different marketing teams, and ensure you add test & learn opportunities here (i.e. test a new mechanic or channel). The idea here is to translate the inbound research you’ve collated into tangible and clear actions. In addition, leverage the value proposition you devised in step 1 to build out your value messaging statements.
Ensure agreed KPIs are tracked: Work with the necessary BI partners to ensure a dashboard or reporting system is on track to be developed to monitor performance
Localise your content: Ensure you have a localisation contact that would not only translate your content but trans-create them to be super relevant for each of the markets you want to go live in.
Build your rollout strategy: In this scenario, the product is ready to go live. To set it up for success you need to build in a staggered launch strategy. I encourage you to use the following approach
Employee Beta: If there is some overlap with the target audience and employees and you have a decent amount of employees (approx. 200) then test it with them! Use it as an opp to capture NPS/CSAT, leverage their input to identify what product refinements are needed. Also, use this group to test and validate the impact of the marketing messages.
Public Beta: Identify a few regions (I always stick to 2-3) to launch initially with a subset of users, that will allow you to maximise learnings quickly to refine the product experience.
When identifying what regions you want to go into, select the ones where you know that there would be enough volume to capture quality feedback quickly and also 1 non-English speaking market to capture behavioural traits from a different perspective.
Set a performance benchmark (i.e. revenue, adoption rate, NPS etc.) before moving into full release. Make sure it’s communicated as a Beta to consumers so that they’re aware it’s not the finished product (they’ll be more accepting of bugs/crashes).
With more users consuming the feature you can use this window to a:b test creative, messaging and user flows and let the data to help you identify what the most effective E2E user experience.
Full Launch: The difference here compared to the Public Beta is that the product is communicated as fully launched, and the marketing tap is turned on.
Start rolling out more broadly within the beta markets and monitor KPIs. You can do this quite quickly.
Then develop the playbook to enable the remaining markets to launch seamlessly. You would have gathered enough feedback from the launch sequencing approach that would translate into a robust playbook.
Step 3: Measurement & Closing the project
Performance Measurement: My recommendation is to assess performance across 3 lenses and identify what customers are Feeling, Saying, and Doing. By focusing on these areas you’ll gain a better understanding of the performance. By focusing solely on revenue you miss out on the crucial context and result in missing opportunities.
Feeling: This bucket should capture sentiment scores such as NPS
Saying: Verbatim feedback, social media feedback, customer care feedback etc.
Doing: Behavioural and Transactional performance tracking (acquisition, engagement, monetisation rates). By leveraging this approach it becomes easier to write commentary for decks, emails, and exec briefings on how a specific product or feature is doing.
Retrospective: Run a retro with the team. I recommend creating a survey and capture feedback to be discussed in the next GTM sync. This should be structured to understand what you should Stop, Start and Continue doing.
Closing the project: Closing out a project/program can be as challenging as deciding when to stop the regular syncs isn’t always clear. In my opinion, once the playbook has been built and a few more markets have been successfully launched I would recommend to stop the sessions and individually track the performance via the dashboards/reporting systems.
Post-launch: I’d recommend keeping a pulse on the performance and aim to tease out key consumer pain points, and product deficiencies and feed this into the Product team. I would do this 6 weeks after closing out the regular GTM syncs.
