strategies or tactics that make it into a plan can include a wide range of marketing levers—partnerships, channels, branding, pricing, or communities—but what they're in service of is clear.
Remarkably, the strategy building blocks for a product's go-to-market inevitably fall into some variation of these themes:
Enable growth to hit a revenue or business goal
Improve conversion of specific customers
Generate awareness, improve discovery, or build a brand
Define, reshape, or lead a category, ecosystem, or platform
Engender customer validation, loyalty, or evangelism
Find and develop new customer segments, partners, and programs
Some worry taking the time to be strategic in a product's go-to-market slows things down or makes marketing less dynamic. Done well, it's an accelerant.
In part 3, I use a few examples to show how a strategy for one company can be a tactic for another. It all depends on stage and goals. I also introduce a lightweight product go-to-market canvas that combines all important market elements in an easy framework that makes planning across product and go-to-market teams easier.
How Company Maturity Evolves Product Go-to-Market
For a startup with one product, everything you do in market is part of a go-to-market puzzle. You're experimenting rapidly, learning about market dynamics, which customers are good ones, what product to build, and the best ways to bring it to market—all at the same time.
It's why the product go-to-market is your go-to-market strategy at the earliest stages of a company. It's also why product marketing plays such an important role at startups and why I advocate making a product marketer your first marketing hire.
At more mature companies, the go-to-market machinery is much more established and complex. The work is as much about internal coordination as it is about accelerating product adoption in the outside world. A product's go-to-market strategies might look similar to earlier stage companies but the work is done by the GTM engine of marketing and sales. Each has their own strategies and agendas, which can at times be challenging for product marketing to align. Parts 2 and 5 of the book explore much of this organizational challenge.
Regardless of where your company falls on the maturity spectrum, a product marketer is responsible for crafting the marketing strategies that shape a product go-to-market plan to keep activities aligned with what the business needs.
Once in place, you need a story that shapes how the world thinks about your product. That is where positioning and messaging comes in.
Chapter 5 Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product
Remember how the Word team talked about feature improvements focusing on how people actually used word processors? Or how Pocket showed how saving content to view later was part of a bigger behavior shift driven by the rise of mobile devices? Both are examples of positioning through a bigger story narrative.
Building a great product isn't enough to succeed if you don't also take the time to position it in the market. Don't make the mistake of assuming the world knows how to think about your product and why it's valuable. You must frame its value. If you don't do it, other market forces will.
That said, positioning a product well is much harder to do than it looks. It's more than just data, stories, claims, or a positioning statement. It's the collective outcome of everything you do to bring your product to market over time.
Positioning and messaging are both important and often get conflated with one another. The differences are:
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.
Messaging includes the key things you say to reinforce your positioning, making you credible so people want to learn more.
Positioning is your long game. Messaging is your short game.
Part of the confusion between the two comes from a formula that was popularized for writing positioning statements. You can find it easily if you look online for “positioning statement generators.” They all churn out some variation of the following:
This formula became the straight jacket of positioning. Teams took its output and applied it—as is—all over product materials. They assumed because it's called a positioning statement, they'd checked the box on positioning.
This overly simplistic approach is unhelpful to customers or worse, confusing. It's why shaping how the world thinks about a product is Fundamental 3 of product marketing and one of the most important parts of the job.
Use Formulas as Input, Not Output
Positioning starts with knowing the story you want to tell about your product—and having the evidence to support it. The most visible place this happens is in a product's messaging.
Formulas can push teams to think through their audience, a product's unique value, and the reasons to believe claims. It doesn't work well when teams rely on formulas for their final messaging. For starters, formulas tend to generate messaging that's derivative, dense, and jargon filled. It makes what something does or why to care hard to decipher.
But second, and more important, formulas focus teams on what they want to say and not on what is most important for customers to hear. The right level of detail or if you should orient toward technical or business value depends entirely on the audience and how well known a product is.
Let's look at two companies at the height of their head-to-head competition in the business analytics space. Both served the same audience and offered the same value proposition. One of them did okay despite having a four-year head start. The other got acquired by Google for $2.6 billion after just seven years.
Can you tell which statement belonged to which?
“[Company A] is the best tool for running a data-driven online business. Data-driven decisions lead to better results.”
“[Company B] re-invents business intelligence. Our modern data discovery platform takes a markedly different approach to analytics. Because it operates in-database, all your data is inherently drillable and explorable.”
Company A is messaging something everyone knows to be true: “Data-driven decisions lead to better results.” Does that help a data analyst understand why they should pay attention to this product? It could be talking about Microsoft Excel.
While the message is simple, it does
