Loved - Product Marketing for Tech Products

Loved by Martina Lauchengco focuses on the product marketing discipline and is part of the Silicon Valley Product Group series of books.  The book outlines the four fundamentals of the role and includes several frameworks and examples.  The book is on the longer side, glosses over some subjects, and wanders a bit between topics (kind of like a series of unrelated blog posts), so I'll summarize the highlights here in my own way and take liberty in adding my own thoughts.  So don't take this as a direct summary, instead just me filling in some blanks.


What is product marketing?

Lauchengco provides a definition of product marketing:

Product marketing's purpose is to drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that meet business goals.


Fundamentals of the Role

She outlines four fundamentals of the role:



Gather and Share Customer & Market Insights

Market Sense

Product marketers need to develop a deep sense for the market and convey that understanding in team discussions that shape product, marketing, and sales strategies.  They need to be able to answer the following across the entire buyer's journey:

  • What problem are customers trying to solve?
  • Do they recognize and prioritize this problem?
  • What is motivating them to solve the problem?
  • What compels them to take action?
  • Who is most likely to value and buy this product?
  • What starts the journey toward acquiring the product?
  • How might a product get discovered and become more desired over the entire journey?
  • How might we reduce friction in acquiring the product?
  • What do people need to see or hear to become customers?
  • How can we delight customers so much that they want to talk about the product with others?


They should answer these questions through direct customer interactions or via quantitative data gathering (surveys, analytics, etc.).  In addition, they should also monitor what third-parties are saying about the problem and solutions in the market.


Competitive Intelligence

Your positioning in the market can change from actions competitors take, including new product releases, changes to their sales processes, changes to their messaging, press coverage, or promotions.  It's important to keep track of these actions as they may be a trigger for you to adjust your own strategy as your position in the market (i.e. the minds of customers) may have changed.


Direct Go-to-Market

Pricing & Packaging

There are three main aspects of pricing to decide on:

  • Monetization strategy: Deciding how and when you'll make money.
  • Pricing strategy: Determining the price for products.
  • Packaging strategy: Creating bundles that serve different customer, market, or use case segments.


Here are some pricing best practices:

  • use a metric that reflects the value of your product and grows as your product provides more value
  • simple enough for customers to do the math in their heads
  • easily measurable
  • something a CFO or procurement person will understand as they compare your cost to others


Aligning Product Go-to-Market Activities

The Product Go-to-Market (GTM) canvas aligns teams on the strategies the company will use to maximize adoption over the next few months or quarters.  It ensures that everyone's efforts are working towards the same goals.  The process is as follows:

  1. List key events about customer and outside environment
  2. List any known product milestones
  3. List your marketing strategies
  4. List key activities supporting strategies
  5. Work from the outside edges in (i.e. start from how you want the year to end and work backwards)
  6. Revise


Here's what the canvas looks like:


 

Develop Positioning & Messaging

Positioning

Per the book:

Positioning is the place your product holds in the minds of customers.  It's how customers know what you do and how you differ from what's already out there.


I think the book Obviously Awesome does an amazing job of outlining how to develop and capture your positioning.  Definitely check that book out or my summary.


Messaging

Per the book:

Messaging [are] the things you say to reinforce your positioning, making you credible so people want to learn more.


The one-page messaging canvas is a way to capture your messaging:


This is similar to the Messaging Framework from Product Marketing Debunked or the Value Points Boilerplate from Obviously Awesome.


Enable Evangelism (aka Field Enablement)

The product marketer's job includes telling the story to the market directly (e.g. getting on a call with a prospect or talking to a journalist or analyst), but it also includes getting others to tell that story for you.  Specifically, systematically enabling others in your organization to influence the market on your behalf using your story.

Depending on the size of the organization, that could include:

  • sales
  • marketing (social media marketing, content marketing, PR, analyst relations, technical evangelist, community managers, field marketing managers, event managers, partner marketing)
  • customer success
  • business development
  • investors

These folks will in turn be enabling folks outside your organization to tell the story.  Again, you could also be doing this yourself (e.g. doing a call with an important analyst).  But this amounts to a ton of training and as a result requires collateral to help support that training.  In general, the collateral or materials you create should inspire evangelism rather than just promoting the story directly.  In other words, they should lead with something that makes people care and want to share the story (and potentially benefit from sharing it).


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