Product Marketing: Crafting an Effective GTM Strategy

Product Marketing isn't about creating product collateral, doing sales enablement or managing bunches. The primary goal is to drive product adoption by shaping the market perception around the product with strategic marketing activities that drive your business goals.

Pitfalls?

• No clear purpose?

-> competitors and market work against you!

Product Marketing:

1. It brings stategic intent to market facing activities

2. Coordinates a winning plan across the entire GTM engine

3. Provides the foundation for teams to succeed

4. Strategic and Tactical

Why does Product Marketing matter?

1. Modern development tools have made every product landscape increasingly competitive.

What has been fueling this growing competitiveness?

1. API economy

2. Web 3.0

3. Product led growth

4. Search engines

5. Social media

6. More Influencers

7. More ways for people to discover new products

8. Identical claims on similar features

What has this led to?

Information overload for all consumers.

So where does a GTM engine come into play? Being carefully coordinated and holding a clear market position.

Traditional Marketing vs Product Marketing:

While traditional marketing you're focussing on creating demands and acquiring marketing qualified leads. Generally, by the sales team. Everything after this is no longer a part of traditional marketing.

In case of Product marketing you're focussing on the entire sales funnel, where product is the primary driver of acquisition, you might be familiar with Products which offer trials (any web based online tool, say for signing pdfs) or freemium (Social media platforms like X or LinkedIn with a free tier and a premium tier)

Product marketing tries to drive product growth across different stages of the customer journey, starting from

Activation -> Adoption -> Retention -> Referral

Spotify as an Example:

Traditional Marketing Campaign:

1. Writing ad copy

2. Create landing pages

Activities geared towards driving awareness and getting qualified leads.

Product Marketing Campaign:

1. Driving engagement within the app

2. Increasing freemium to premium conversion

What do you decide on as a Product Marketer then?

1. What aspects of a product do you promote?

2. Who do you target?

3. Why would these target customers care about your product?

4. Which channels would you do it through?

These questions help you bridge between product based organisation and traditional Marketing & Sales organisation.

Four Foundations of Product Marketing:

Foundation 1: Market Insights

Everything a product market does has to be grounded in customer or market insights.

What do they generally work on?

1. Segment your customers

2. know their pain points

3. define the steps a customer takes

4. what makes them loyal?

5. understand which activities engage future and existing customers

Foundation 2: Develop a Go-To-Market Plan:

When you take a strategic outlok at how to develop a plan that aligns with companies broader business goals, it is encapsulated under a GTM plan.

A good GTM plan generally consists of four key questions:

1. Why?

2. What?

3. When?

4. How?

For e.g

1. why a customer would want this product?

2. How likely are they to find it?

How PMs use Discovery Techniques:

Product managers generally determine 4 key aspects around a product.

1. Valuable

2. Usable

3. Feasible

4. Viable

Foundation 3: Product Positioning:

Marketers often say "No publicity is bad publicity" which relies on the underlying aspect that not everything that is said about the product is in a company's direct control but the foundational positioning work that shapes how the world thinks about the product should be in their control. This is generally a long term activity that requires perseverance and patience. Generally this is achieved through good Story Telling. The human brain processes stories differently than facts, Products with an emotional aspect might resonate deeply with consumers as compared to fact based marketing. The point I'm trying to build here is Positioning and messaging is best done through Stories.

Foundation 4: Customer Evangelism:

The last foundation of Product marketing is where product managers create an environment that motivates and empowers customers to promote your product. This stage generally involves finding the most meaningful influencers, mind you, when I say influencers, for your product your influencers could be your customers or analysts or the press or bloggers or even social influencers. Inspiring your influencers with stories and evidence can turn them to become advocates of your product.

Let's delve deeper into each of these foundations.

Market Insights