The Four Pillars of Product Marketing

We all do product marketing a little differently. I can’t say that I’ve heard of two product marketing teams that operate the exact same way. We aren’t accountants. We don’t have that kind of standardization. And that’s okay. But there does need to be more definition and consistency than we have today.

There are a lot of good articles out there on product marketing in general, but I don’t find that they don’t provide enough specificity for practitioners.

Product marketing being squishy and ill defined means that other teams or leaders will define it for you based on their experience and assumptions. I’ve seen it happen. And it means that we will have a harder time of deepening our skills and cultivating our craft if team members don’t have clear career paths.

So after years of interviewing dozens of product marketers, reading everything on the subject, and hotly debating this subject in several SaaS companies I have a simple answer.

There are four core pillars of product marketing.

1. Intelligence
2. Positioning*
3. Launch
4. Enablement

And each of these four pillars has four components. In this post, I’ll break down each piece and how they work together.

The four pillars of product marketing

Intelligence

If you don’t understand the market and your buyers, how can you create any sort of informed go-to-market strategy? This first pillar of product marketing is all about gathering the qualitative and quantitative research you need to inform the rest of your efforts.

Product marketing is responsible for gathering market and customer insights both qualitatively and quantitatively. The goal of this work is to (a) inform positioning and messaging (b) validate the market needs identified by product management (c) inform demand generation and sales strategies.

This work includes these four main components:

• Market research: Market research serves so many objectives — but it’s really about developing the “outside in” perspective for your business. Identify the top challenges of your target buyers and users. Understand what they care about and cultivate this understanding through informational interviews and survey work.
• Customer research: Talk to as many customers as possible! I find talking to customers as the most rewarding part of the job. Set a goal for a certain number of conversations each month. Never lose touch with your customers. Join Zoom calls with sales reps or listen to recordings if you use tools like Gong. Or, pay for interviews with GLG or Alphasights. A regular cadence of surveys will also help you understand your customers on a macro-level. Key here is sharing insights with your counterparts across the company regularly.
• Competitive intelligence: You have to understand the competitive landscape. Researching your market and all the players can take a lot of forms — talking to sales reps, buying analyst reports, surveys, desktop research, leveraging Crayon or Klue. All this serves to inform battle cards for sales reps, competitive digests for product teams and Execs, and your overall understanding of the dynamics of your market.
• Win/loss analysis: Quantitative win/loss analysis pulls data from sales deals and the sales cycle from your CRM to understand which competitors you’re winning or losing against and why (to an extent). Qualitative win/loss analysis involves interviewing customers who bought and who cancelled to understand why. Companies like Clozd will run the qualitative analysis for you.

If you’re lucky enough to work with a customer-driven product management team, your market research should supplement their customer and competitive research. Product management is a research-heavy function. This work should not replace their work. It should compliment it with more of a market-first and demand generation lens. Product management defines what problems to solve for your customers and what to build. Product marketing defines market demand and gathers validation for product management. And sharing insights between your two teams should be a collaborative and on-going process.

In addition, your market and customer research should inform your demand generation strategies like targeting, content marketing, etc. The competitive intel and win/loss analysis should be sent to sales and teams to inform their competitive tactics and training strategies.

Product marketing is the voice of the market. Share your research findings far and wide across the company to ensure your organization is more outside-in than it is inside-out.

Positioning

Don’t kid yourself — positioning is not some vague elevator pitch. It’s art and science. It’s the bedrock of your go-to-market message. There are several frameworks for positioning. None of them will be effective without the right buyer personas defined through market research. And you can’t build effective messaging frameworks without research, personas and positioning. This is where it all comes together. This is not fluff work. Do not take this lightly. Language is powerful. Words matter. Slack could position themselves as a chat app. Or, they could position as “the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done.” You tell me which is more valuable.

• Buyer personas: Positioning always starts with who is buying. Different from user personas or other key stakeholders, build in-depth, data-informed personas based on what you gather through your research.
• Positioning: Align on one positioning statement for your product. This articulates who you serve, what you do, and how it’s different compared to the rest of the market. Positioning is a process. It’s an exercise in focus and saying “no.” Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Positioning is also a team sport. You need to get input and buy-in from Executives, sales and success leaders, front-line teams, etc. Check out Obviously Awesome to get started.
• Audience messaging: Build messaging houses. A messaging house is a framework that articulates and simplifies your value by key audience or segment (i.e. enterprise buyers vs. small business). This artifact helps align all of marketing to your key go-to-market messages.
• Product or feature messaging: Build product or feature messaging frameworks. These artifacts focus on the key messages or benefits for each product or feature. They answer the question, “What problem does this solve and why does it matter?”

Audience and product messaging are highly related. Audience messaging needs to speak to what you do. And product messaging needs to be written for the audiences you serve. After you’ve completed a positioning framework and have alignment/agreement on each of the components you can build a messaging house for each target audience. Messaging is not copy. Messaging is an exercise in distilling down the core value and benefits of your product.

After you’ve built a messaging house you can start to create more granular messaging for specific products and features. I’m a big fan of a very simple feature messaging framework — need, feature, benefit. Really good product manager should essentially give you the customer’s needs. If the product team is building something and can’t articulate the need — Houston we have a problem!

Product marketers should not decide on the problems your product solves. They should tell the story of why that problem matters to the marketplace and how your company uniquely solves it. Easy to say. Very hard to do well.

Launch

In partnership with product management, product marketers create launch strategies for how to most effectively take a new product or features to market. A good launch strategy begins to form before the product is even built. Product marketing needs to partner with product management on the use case they are trying to solve and leveraging the market intelligence (the first pillar) to validate the customer need. A launch strategy includes product and business success metrics agreed upon by product management and other key stakeholders. I like having four launch tiers (from major launch to small enhancement) based on size of impact for a particular product/feature and size of audience. Launch strategy and activities are scoped according to launch tier.

• Strategy: Articulate what you are trying to accomplish in the market with the launch. The launch strategy could be about creating differentiation, introducing new positioning, entering a new market, driving customer retention. Be clear on the story you’re trying to tell internally and externally. What is the primary job the launch has to do? And how will you accomplish that?
• Metrics: Depending on your strategy, define the metrics of success to guide your decision making, investments and align teams. Launch metrics should include both leading and lagging measures. Depending on your launch strategy results may take multiple quarters to realize. Metrics include revenue, pipeline, usage, awareness, press coverage, etc.
• Process: Create a documented process for how to engage cross-functional partners around launches based on size of impact. This includes gathering feedback, meetings, communication cadence, training, etc. How you engage and enroll partners across the business is critical.
• Bill of materials: The standard list of materials (explainer video, slides, white paper, talking points, nurture emails, etc.) required for each launch. The list expands and contracts based on the launch tier or size of impact.

I cannot stress enough how much the launch pillar is about building bridges and engaging the whole company. The role of the product marketer is to be the evangelist inside the company and out. This is about hearts and minds people! It’s the ultimate in cat herding. You need to get everyone across the organization rowing in the same direction and excited about the launch. Internal launch stakeholders include Legal, Communications, Sales, Success, Support, IT, MarTech/Ops, Content Marketing, Brand, Social, Digital or Demand Marketing, Analyst Relations, Customer Marketing, Events/Field, Product Management, Engineering, UX Design, Executives, etc. External launch stakeholders customers participating in case studies, industry analysts, journalists, influencers, etc.

Enablement

Product marketing focuses on the strategy for market-facing assets for Sales and Success teams. They own building assets and collateral for sales that communicate the value of particular products/features and foster value-based conversations with prospects and customers. Unlike content that is used at the top or middle of the marketing funnel (like ads, white papers, webinars), product marketing takes the role of the content strategist for sales collateral. They also partner closely with sales leaders and sales training or sales enablement teams to build internal tools and talking points used as part of the key sales strategies, playbooks, and tactics. Sales training/enablement is accountable to ensuring sales and success reps know how to use the customer-facing collateral produced by Product Marketing.

• Storytelling: Give revenue teams the key stories to tell with prospects and customers. This can manifest through elevator pitches or sales decks. The core deliverable here is that everyone is aligned on the story you are consistently promoting in the marketplace.
• Buyer enablement: Create materials to help sellers and CSMs understand the market, all stakeholders (buyers, influencers, users), competitive alternatives, and case studies. Help them know who to target, why and how to win.
• Product enablement: Clearly and concisely package up everything sellers and CSMs need to know about all of your products/features. Don’t dump detailed documentation on them. Keep it simple. This includes who it’s for, why it matters, how it works, what to say about it.
• Assets: This is content aligned to an objective or sales process stage. Sales assets created by product marketing include sales kits/playbooks, talking points, email templates/nurtures, slides, one pagers, sales decks, case studies, etc. Manage these assets and track their usage with tools like Highspot.

In a nutshell, product marketing helps sellers with all the knowledge they need to be successful. Sales leaders and sales trainers or enablement teams help sellers put it into process and practice.

*Pricing

Pricing is not one of the four pillars because it’s even less defined than product marketing. I believe it’s part of the positioning pillar, but for the sake of keeping things simple I’m including it as an asterisk depending on your org design. How you price your product implies your position in the market. Are you a premium product? Are you a low-cost leader? Is your packaging bundled or a la carte? All of the pricing and packaging decisions impact where you sit and how you’re speaking to the market.

Pricing takes your core messages and helps you quantify your buyer personas, understand their feature preferences and how to build packages/SKUs that fulfill their needs. Pricing is about finding the intersection at which you’re delivering the highest value to each segment you serve while also maximizing your market share.

If you’re still throwing darts at a dartboard to determine your pricing, you’re doing it wrong.

How it works

The product marketing 4x4

All four pillars of product marketing work in concert. You can’t build sales assets without first understanding the market and competitive landscape. You can’t formulate a launch strategy without strong positioning and messaging discipline. Product launch performance and results should feed new ideas for research and key messages. Each of the four pillars feed each other in some way.

Many B2B product marketing teams tend to serve just one or two of these pillars (usually launch and enablement). In reality, however, to deliver on the full value of our function you need to fire on all cylinders. How you execute on these four pillars may change depending on the organization and the top business objectives at the time. But you must strive to do all of it in order to drive success for your company — and your customers.

There you have it. The four pillars of product marketing. I hope this helps provide more consistency for this dynamic and challenging function we all love.