{"id":15460,"date":"2018-05-16T16:18:50","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T15:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=15460"},"modified":"2020-12-12T20:51:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-12T20:51:38","slug":"the-importance-of-an-effective-product-marketing-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/the-importance-of-an-effective-product-marketing-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Product marketing strategy at a product first company"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of \u201cif you build it, they will come,\u201d it\u2019s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Why?<\/p>\n

First, most founders don\u2019t have a background in either sales or marketing, and even though they\u2019re told to \u201cstart marketing the day you start coding<\/a>\u201d, they just don\u2019t know where to begin, or they\u2019re incredibly overconfident. Sure, they probably know enough to build a landing page for capturing email addresses, but do they know what to say on that page and how to say it? Do they know where to go to promote their product, and how to do it once they get there?<\/p>\n

Getting through the first product launch requires more than a marketing Band-Aid; it requires instilling a company-wide philosophy that marketing and product aren\u2019t two antithetical forces but two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n

In this article, you’ll learn how to:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Understand the role of your product marketing strategy<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Start creating your product marketing plan<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Create alignment between product and marketing<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Walk into any product-first company and you\u2019ll notice the common misconception that \u201cmarketing\u201d is a dirty word. Many startups build something for themselves only to discover that other people want it. Eventually they start selling it via word of mouth and little else before realizing that they need some sort of coherent marketing strategy if they want to accelerate growth.<\/p>\n

    At that point, they hire someone to run marketing<\/a>, but leave that person to their own devices. Rather than truly invest in the department and integrate the marketers with the product team, they believe great products sell themselves.<\/p>\n

    When I was recruited to join Intercom as our first marketer, I remember receiving a LinkedIn InMail (back when people still read those) from Eoghan, our CEO, who sold me the opportunity of building a marketing team at Intercom, while also trotting out that exact clich\u00e9: \u201cThe product almost completely sells itself.\u201d Luckily, when I sat down with Eoghan and Des, it turned out they were much bigger believers in marketing than I initially thought. They believe that neither product nor marketing can excel in isolation, which has become a core principle of our go-to-market strategy today.<\/p>\n

    Understanding the role of product marketing<\/h2>\n

    Anyone who thinks marketing can\u2019t add value to and accelerate the growth of your business is just plain naive.<\/p>\n

    There\u2019s a famous blog post from Fred Wilson<\/a>, a cofounder of Union Square Ventures, titled nothing more than \u201cmarketing,\u201d where he makes broad statements like \u201cMarketing is what you do when your product or service sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n

    This post is highly cited by product-focused people as one of their many justifications for not doing any marketing at all. If you build the perfect product, the theory goes, they (paying users) will eventually come to you. I\u2019d argue that mindset is completely wrong. Anyone who thinks marketing can\u2019t add value to and accelerate the growth of your business is just plain naive.<\/p>\n

    When I arrived at Intercom, a bunch of people were wearing marketing hats in disguise: Des (one of our co-founders) owned the blog, the product managers wrote product announcements, and Eoghan (our CEO) created the homepage of the marketing site. Everyone was doing \u201cmarketing\u201d, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it. Why?<\/p>\n

    I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of product marketing<\/a>\u2019s role. In the new world of SaaS, marketing should be involved at every stage of the funnel, from the first point of contact (your website) to the decision to purchase (the page users enter their credit card information), as well as ongoing product education (docs, demos, messages and webinars). Every step of the way is an opportunity to help people feel good about the decision they are making and each requires a different set of specialized skills.<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s why it\u2019s a mistake to think of marketing as a single team. PR, demand generation, content marketing, product marketing<\/a> and events are all key to a product\u2019s long-term success. Without any of these components, you can build a product, but not many people will show up to buy it. Those that do will likely be confused as to what you\u2019re actually selling.<\/p>\n

    How to start creating your product marketing plan<\/h2>\n

    Step 1: The easy part: Hire a marketer.<\/h3>\n

    For Intercom, that was me, a product marketer to communicate to the world what Intercom was building and why people should care. Throwing money into ads to reach new customers is easy, but it\u2019s likely a waste of money if you don\u2019t get this part right first.<\/p>\n

    I started with Intercom\u2019s homepage, the most obvious place because it\u2019s the first, and often last, impression people get of the product and company.<\/p>\n

    \"Intercom's<\/p>\n

    The majority of people who visit your marketing site don\u2019t have the time to invest in learning what it is you actually do. If you can\u2019t communicate that clearly on your homepage<\/a> they\u2019ll just bounce, quite literally, off your site \u2013 an opportunity gone.<\/p>\n

    Step 2: Tell customers what you’ve been building<\/h3>\n

    The next most important step is amplifying the things your product team is building. A lot of the time, product teams build entire feature sets without telling anyone about it. They\u2019re too shy or too naive, or simply don\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019ve seen teams release huge amounts of work or improvements to the world in the hope that new or existing users might stumble onto them, only to find two years later people are still asking in forums for features that are already inside the product.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019ve written before about prioritizing product announcements<\/a>, so let\u2019s focus on the biggest two fallacies of deciding what to announce and how, at a product-first company:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. It was hard and took a lot of time, so it must be important<\/strong>
      \nYou might be working with some of the most talented engineers in the industry, who have spent six months refactoring your code to make the best app in the world. And they might be extremely excited to share what they\u2019re working on with the world. Unfortunately, that\u2019s no guarantee people are going to care. When it comes to announcing new features, don\u2019t equate effort and importance with what\u2019s appealing to your customer.<\/li>\n
    2. Overpromising<\/strong>
      \nWe\u2019ve all read that big flashy blog post that promises something that is going to change the world, then ultimately (often eventually) it ships and flops. People will remember that for a long time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Here\u2019s an example: A big colorful company is going to change the way people see the world! They\u2019ll call you an \u201cexplorer\u201d from here on out, but it\u2019ll cost you $1,500 for a pair of blurry glasses that make you look like a tech-weirdo from the 1970s. Don\u2019t overpromise on something before it’s ready \u2013 or just as importantly, before the market is ready.<\/p>\n

      How to avoid making these mistakes<\/h2>\n

      The key to stop yourself falling from into either of these traps is setting the right expectations inside your company, from day one. For example, you\u2019re not going to get TechCrunch to cover that insanely complex feature you spent months building, so your startup shouldn\u2019t waste time building a landing page for it.<\/p>\n

      A good story captures people\u2019s attention and motivates them to take action.<\/p>\n

      It\u2019s not because the feature isn\u2019t interesting, but rather because there\u2019s not a good story to be told, which is typically the most important piece of effective marketing. As we saw earlier, a good story captures people\u2019s attention and motivates them to take action.<\/p>\n

      Here\u2019s a solid example from my earliest days at Intercom: When we finally released custom event tracking<\/a> we could have just said, \u201cOkay, you can now track custom events in Intercom\u201d, but most people probably wouldn\u2019t have cared. Yes, that accurately describes the feature, but that doesn\u2019t tell anyone anything about why they would want to use it or how it\u2019ll make their lives better.<\/p>\n

      The value in the Intercom Events feature was that you could send messages to customers at a perfectly timed moment, which wasn\u2019t possible before. You could reach people when they logged in for the first time, or maybe when they cancelled their account \u2013 so that\u2019s the story we went with. I focused on highlighting the things people wanted to do, rather than the feature itself, because people understood the value in doing them. This was a breakthrough. It wasn\u2019t too long before the product managers realized that they should give us a heads up before they were ready to ship something, rather than after.<\/p>\n

      Your product marketing strategy should appeal to the market’s understanding<\/h2>\n

      About two years ago, I wanted to launch one of our new products as Intercom\u2019s \u201clive chat\u201d. The product team, however, were adamant that live chat was a relic of the past. Instead, they wanted to go to the market with a \u201cseamless asynchronous messaging product.\u201d<\/p>\n

      If the product team\u2019s job is to innovate and build the product of the future, then surely marketing\u2019s job is to dissect that to make sure that the market can:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Find that product<\/li>\n
      2. Understand it<\/li>\n
      3. Be convinced they need it<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Marketing needs to help build a bridge to the future.<\/p>\n

        While we were building this product we discovered there were 100,000 global monthly searches on Google for \u201clive chat software<\/a>\u201d and almost zero for \u201casynchronous messaging.\u201d Sure, the search term was less crowded, but nobody knew how to describe that future yet, let alone buy a product to solve that problem. If ever.<\/p>\n

        Similarly, when we launched our new knowledge base<\/a> product in December 2016, it became clear that product and marketing were not aligned on what the product was, let alone how we should take it to market.<\/p>\n

        This small exchange between Paul, our VP of Product, and Raechel, a product marketer on my team, sums it up well.<\/p>\n

        Paul: \u201cEducate is not a docs product\u201d
        \nRaechel: \u201cWhy does our own knowledge base, powered by our new product, live at         intercom.com\/help\/<\/a> then?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

        Now, of course there was a rationale to both arguments. Paul was (rightly) arguing that the product was more than a knowledge base and that we needed to help build a bridge to the future. But marketing had to get people to that bridge first. This is not about marketing dictating what product to build, but rather about determining what position you want to hold in people\u2019s minds. Here\u2019s a great article<\/a> that goes more in depth about the role of product marketing when building a product.<\/p>\n

        Correcting this misalignment delayed the launch of the product by a couple of months, but it was the right decision to give the product the best chance of success when it launched.<\/p>\n

        Alignment is key<\/h2>\n

        Fast-forward to today, and Intercom\u2019s teams now hold themselves to a new rule: If we\u2019re launching a product and want to spend more than a week on it, the product manager and product marketing manager must align on the story we want to tell come launch. George wrote a fantastic article<\/a> detailing how to determine the product marketing strategy through beta products<\/a>.<\/p>\n

        This was a fundamental shift in how we build new products at Intercom. There\u2019s always tension involved, and getting that story right is hard, but it creates a better outcome for everyone, including our customers.<\/p>\n

        We still hear \u201cwe\u2019ve got a great product, now we just need to add marketing\u201d all the time, but at least now we know that there\u2019s a lot more to it than that. Don\u2019t delay aligning your product and marketing teams. If you do, you\u2019ll live to regret it.<\/p>\n

        \n

        Want to learn more about how to build your brand and sell more products in a non-spammy way? Download your copy of our book, Intercom on Marketing<\/a>:<\/em>
        \n        <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Despite the mountain of evidence contradicting the mantra of \u201cif you build it, they will come,\u201d it\u2019s still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Why? First, most founders don\u2019t have a background in either sales or marketing,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":15458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[12897],"tags":[70,529,336],"coauthors":[364],"class_list":["post-15460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-marketing","tag-product-launch","tag-product-marketing"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy A Product Marketing Strategy Is Always Necessary [2021]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In order to accelerate the growth of your business, it is important create an effective product marketing strategy to go alongside the product you\u2019re building. 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