How to Build a Product Marketing Strategy

Part 1 of many...

This week I was asked by the lovely folks at Point Nine to put together a talk on ‘How to Build a Product Marketing Strategy’.

I sat there for a while, reading the email again and again, and then finally thought to myself… ‘Yeah, actually, that would be a really handy thing to know how to do.’

So I went on Google, like any good marketer would do, and it turns out there really isn’t a lot of content out there on the topic. Or at least, it’s all very high level, abstract and not particularly actionable i.e this kind of babble (the #1 result on Google...)

I figured it might be useful to document some of my own thoughts about how to build a product marketing strategy from scratch, inspired by the past year at Whereby where I’m currently Director of Product Marketing. It’ll hopefully be useful to any product marketers trying to work out where to start when it comes to strategy, offering tactics and ideas that you’ll be able to get working on straight away.

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Strategy

I get a little skeptical when people talk a lot about strategy as it implies long-term thinking and long-term commitment, when the reality is that most tech startups need to be able to change course and pivot at any given moment.

I’ve found in the past that when someone gets involved in a project and says ‘We need to be more strategic here…’ it’s usually followed by the project grinding to a halt and/or being abandoned, because ‘being strategic’ is rarely accompanied by ‘having a plan’ or ‘doing some work’, so I will proceed with caution when trying to help you develop your own product market strategy.

Keep it agile

The key thing here is coming up with an agile strategy framework that’ll give you usable and actionable insights that will still be relevant. Even if your boss calls you up at 7am tomorrow morning saying ‘We’re moving into crypto. Quick, give me everything you’ve got on Bitcoin.’

Assumptions

Of course, it’s never advisable to make assumptions but I’m going to need to make some for this series to be useful. The product marketing needs of a Microsoft or a Proctor & Gamble are very different to the likes of a Revolut, Whereby or any pre-seed startup.

So I’m going to make some assumptions that’ll help you work out who this advice is for.

You work on a digital product

We’re not talking cornflakes or shampoo here. This advice is primarily for product marketers working on software, websites, apps or SaaS. (Not that I have anything against cornflakes...)

Your company has a Product team(s)

The hope is that your company has a Product team - or even multiple squads - for you to collaborate with on developing and executing a product marketing strategy.

Product and Marketing are partners

Regardless of whether you as a product marketer are part of the Product or Marketing department, it’s important that these two teams have a strong and collaborative relationship. Without this, no amount of strategy is going to help you.

It’s a relatively small PMM team

There might be a few of you. Or maybe it’s just you. Or maybe you look after multiple functions and product marketing is just one of them. Either way, this blog is for small teams looking to get started with creating a product marketing strategy from scratch.

Please subscribe!

If this all sounds like the kind of advice you’ve been looking for, please subscribe to the Product Marketer for weekly instalments on how to build your product marketing strategy. Plus, there’ll be the occasional bit of commentary on how other brands are doing it.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Rory