What Is Product Marketing Interview 1: Rundown from a B2C Director

The goal of this series of interviews is to share current challenges, priorities, and strategies of product marketing in companies of different sizes, stages, and business models. This is the first post in the set. After interviewing, I pulled out what I thought of as the key takeaways as titles and then added a paraphrase from my interviewees below.

Background

• About the company: Well-funded, mid-sized B2C platform in San Francisco
• About this marketer: Previous experience at big tech firm, moved to small/mid-sized company to build out product marketing

Product Marketing came after SEO/SEM traffic, PR, and Community

When I started the company was invested in SEM/SEO and the insights from that traffic drove much of the early focus of product marketing — key words gave an understanding where our content is coming from. We tracked deeper metrics than first-stage sign-ups. We then built product marketing to move people past the initial sign-up to our target metric that was deep enough to give predictability on what we could expect for the business overall.

Eventually, we took those SEO topics and created landing pages for conversion that used rich content from our content marketing efforts and including some product data and information.

Product Marketing started with pre-sale feature marketing

The first goal when I started Product Marketing was not based on a metric— like driving adoption of a particular feature of platform - but was updating our feature page on the external website. The traffic to the features page was high, which makes sense since that’s the place where people understand how it works, so I worked to outline the core value proposition of each feature to use product information to support conversion.

Product Marketers need three things: Great and pithy writing, customer knowledge, and connection to Product

The most important skill set for Product Marketing is writing, and that’s definitely why I was hired. Yes, writing proper sentences and grammar is important, but it’s not at all being a copy writer.

The most valuable messaging and copy is short, sweet and fairly pitchy, condensed and punchy, and in our voice — lighthearted and friendly.

The core of being able to understand your audience and write compelling copy is knowing the information that they want and being able to prioritize the information based on what they need. You are being asked to simplify a technical product, so you have to speak in terms your customer uses.

Getting connected and trusted by the Product team is critical. I got put on a major launch soon after I started and took that opportunity to really get into Product’s process and become a part of their team. In my experience, writing is not most Product Managers’ strongest suit, so I ended up taking over their blog writing, sales collateral, and in-app language so it could be in the language of our customers.

Product Marketing works with UX by owning all in-product copy, connecting it to other messaging and education

Marketing has become the product copyrighter — writing labels and all in-app copy. Originally, UX said, “We got [the copy].” But really UX is functionally focused on the structure and design. We convinced the head of UX that we could help them write the content in-product, making it customer-benefit driven.

Internal communications is crucial if you want people to understand how and why to use the product

One of the ways we got cred with Product was to institute some process. After working at [huge tech company], I brought the idea of central “comm docs” early in our process. I created an internal hub for all internal communication — focused on the comm docs where we get on the same page. The documents include why the feature built, what it does and doesn’t do, and central points to share in external messaging.

How to think about the central facets of the product marketing platform — Help center, video, in-app messaging

Help Center — Help centers are the central, up-to-date hub. You have to have an understandable current help center. Our help center content is run by a Customer Service member because she hears all the current topics and can write in the best language for our customers. I meet with her on product launch content to make sure we are on the same page (and with the Comm doc), and she usually understands how to present it to customers better than I do.

Onboarding — We need to rework our onboarding. We have a series of interrupted screens right now, and that’s fine but the messaging and sequencing needs to be redone.

In-app notification — We need in-app notification and messaging that can either be prompted by one feature use (during use with best practices), the tier of interaction (power user!), or with new feature information. So many of our features are buried that the investment we are making in improving the product are not fully used.

Email — We don’t have enough segmentation of our users, so rather than personalize our communication by previous feature activity, we still pummel them. Our newsletter was created for existing customers to drive them back to evergreen content.

Video — Videos are great for when people want short format and don’t have the energy to read. Recently built a sizzle video for wider distribution. We publish to YouTube and other platforms and track both views and comparable marketing metrics, if we have included it with a CTA to educate on the platform.

We have built videos both for sharing the value of the platform overall and to highlight the value of individual features. We have done both live-action videos mixing in screenshots for the marketing site, and more short shelf-life videos on new features. We’ve done live-action feature videos with actors explaining key concerns and housed within help information. They are expensive so have to be used sparingly for areas where we think there will be a hurdle to address with users.

Defining metrics and testing frameworks is tricky

There are two key levels of metrics — Overall usage and adoption metrics and campaign level metrics for the campaigns product marketing is planning to move the needle. Our data around feature and platform adoption could be much better organized. There may not be enough data scientists in the world to get it perfectly useful.

Overall usage metrics — For a while, we were getting blamed for everything, but Product owned many of the levers that influence customer behavior. We needed to be able to set goals that we can actually influence, assuming that they ladder up to the overall goals. Example: At some points, I have only focused on downloads.

Campaign level metrics — We added internal framework for testing. It hurt our numbers short term because they did not tie to other reporting, but in the end allowed us to benchmark our work across time.

As a team, we are still outlining who is our most “valuable” user — is it the power user of the product, the social butterfly who could promote us to her network, or the biggest customer in each transaction.

Note: Axial, where I work, is the network and marketplace for the private capital markets. We are working to improve the self-service experience for our users and so are interviewing great marketers for what works on all types of technology platforms.