#44 The Power of Great Product Marketing
In this episode, Christian and Alex dive deep into the world of product market fit and the pivotal role that product marketing plays in its success. Joined by special guest Martina, an experienced product marketer, they explore the complexities of finding the right market for a product, the importance of trust and customer feedback, and the distinct roles of product management and product marketing. With insights from Silicon Valley Product Group and Martina's expertise, they discuss strategies for effective product marketing, the challenges of high-velocity product cycles, and the future of this crucial function in the tech industry. So grab your headphones and get ready to uncover the secrets behind the power of great product marketing in this enlightening episode.
Martina on the internet:
Linkedin: @martinalauchengco
Twitter: @mavinmartina
Book: Loved
Table of content
00:30 - Episode summary
02:05 - Intro Martina Lauchengco
05:00 - How product marketing changed over the past 25 years
10:10 - Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager
17:10 - Finding product-market fit
21:30 - Everyone does product marketing differently
24:45 - The 4 elements of product marketing
27:50 - Communication as a Product Marketing Manager
34:10 - Hiring the first Product Marketing Manager
40:00 - Marketing = planting seeds
44:50 - Martina's upcoming book!
Meeting Notes (Transcript)
Christian:
Welcome to the product bakery. My name is Christian, and today I had the pleasure to talk together with my co-host Alex to Martina Lauchenko. She is part of the Silicon Valley Group and we talked to her today about everything related to product marketing.
Alex:
Yeah, it was a fun conversation, touching on what product marketing is as a function and where it fits in the organization. I definitely learned a lot. Christian, what was your highlight?
Christian:
One of my highlights was definitely the four elements of product marketing that Martina explained as well as finding product market fit versus market product fit. And lastly, what I really loved was discussing where product marketing in an organization should sit.
Alex:
Before we get into the full conversation, I just wanted to remind all of you that you can find us on all the different social media channels as well as on Product Minusbakery.com, where we put all our episodes, with some episode minutes, as well as the possibility to comment and interact with Christian and myself, as well as our speakers. So follow us there and looking forward to some conversations.
Christian:
Great. Don't forget to reshare the episode in case you like it. And with that, I would say let's get started.
Alex:
Hi Christian. Hi Martina.
Martina:
Hi Alex. Hi Christian.
Alex:
Before we jump into today's conversation, I quickly want to introduce you to Martina. Besides the fact that Martina actually has some history in Berlin, so I feel like there is already like some sort of a connection there. We managed to already have a short German conversation. Martina started probably around the time where I was born. She was working for Microsoft and she brought Microsoft Office to the market after that. Also similar task for Netscape Navigator that she successfully launched. And I think this is also like where her whole experience around product and especially product marketing is coming from. And since then, Martina is applying her experience in all sorts of different companies.
She's working as an advisor, she's in different boards, she's also operating partner, and she's a lecture. And I know, Martina, you're also working on another very big project at the moment, so maybe you can share some words about that project.
Martina:
So I'm trying to take all of that collective experience and roll it up into a book on product marketing. Yeah, everyone always asks me, they're like, hey, do you have any books that you recommend on product marketing? And they're books on positioning and books on competitive differentiation and books on advertising. But there are very few that cover the discipline of product marketing as it applies to technology companies because it is practiced a particular way there. And so this tries to articulate very specifically from the vantage point of people who are product people as opposed to just the people that are doing the job. What is the job of product marketing? How does it interact with all the other functions? What should you expect of it? How do you set it up for success? So just a lot of the questions that I've been getting over the last two decades and rolling that experience up so that people can be more knowledgeable and feel more comfortable in how they make decisions and also in what they expect from their product marketing peers.
Alex:
Very nice. So how does it feel to actually write? Is this the first book that you're writing?
Martina:
This is my first book. I went in knowing that it was going to be a challenging experience, but it's been way harder than I was expecting and for reasons that wouldn't be obvious. First it's hard just to get all of the ideas down on paper, but then you also want it to make it interesting to read as opposed to just like a textbook. So getting it down in a way that is compelling but also structured and organized enough for an engineer. The range in product marketing is an engineer needs to be able to understand it and so does a salesperson. And those are wildly different people in terms of how their brain works or what they expect. And so that's been the challenge, is threading the needle of getting this right for the audiences that it's intended for.
Alex:
Very nice. And I guess with writing the book and also all the different questions that you got over time around product marketing, how did the function overall change, like in the last 25 years that you've been working in it?
Martina:
Yeah, the biggest change over time has been the speed and velocity of product cycles. And so when I started my career at Microsoft, as you were saying, Alex, we had two years to get ready, sometimes it was longer. And so that gave us a ton of time and it also made it that much more important to get things right because things were going to be stuck on a box for a couple of years and so you take a lot of time to try and get things precisely. And that has shifted massively to the current modern practices of product which are much more high velocity, which you might not even know what's happening next week, but all the go-to-market functions need more lead time to do what they do. So how do you take this high velocity model, some which are in continuous production and meld that with the go to market functions that need a little bit more time, a little bit more planning, to have these waves of I'll call them market crescendo, where people can take notice and then also it takes time for audiences to register what has happened. So even while the product might be changing constantly, the market awareness stays stuck in a point that you grow that awareness from and then you have to stick it at another point. So the cadences are different, but the velocity on the product side has changed massively. So the end result of that has meant that product marketers as being between product and the rest of the go to market functions have needed to adapt and somehow bridge these two worlds and these differences in cadence and expectations.
Martina:
So that's been the really big shift over the last 25 years.
Alex:
Yeah, it almost feels a bit like I do see some parallels between maybe launching something like Microsoft Office. As you say, you literally have things written on a box and you really need to think of what is there. It's a little bit similar to still how you would launch hardware products. Me and Christian worked for Sumap, so I also felt the pain of okay, we are now launching this in retail and we need to get everything ready for it and there is so many materials and it's all set in stone while there is no cloud to update. Yeah, that's the thing. The website, it also feels I think you get a little bit more sloppy nowadays, or at least it's so easy to say, okay, let's just put it on a website and we can think about this afterwards or whatsoever because it is important to launch fast. It will help us to learn. This brings me maybe also a little bit like to when and how should we start thinking of product marketing.
Martina:
I think of product marketing and product management as being two sides of the same coin. And so if you are thinking about a product, you need to be thinking about the marketing side and the go to market side and that is where product marketing is your partner in crime. So the very best practice of product marketing is when product management and product marketing see themselves as partners in how the product as well as the go to market gets developed. Because today the go to market should be embedded in how people think about how a product is developed and then that's going to shape and inform all the different ways in which a product might go to market. So they very much affect one another in a very dramatic way. So it should be at the very beginning. There are definitely places where it's like the product team does what they do and then they still just hand it over to product marketing. Now do go get it market ready.
Martina:
But I would say that's always an enormous missed opportunity in really tapping into the zeitgeist of what's going to make the market want to pull this product. That's more of a broadcast push model versus an interactive one where you discover what it is that will help propel the product because you know all the different hooks or the different audiences. That might be your early evangelists. And you know how to seed the idea even before the product might exist, even if you are building a hardware product that kind of like it's going to be launched on this date and everything has to be set in stone. But there's so much that you can do in advance of that. We'll take my book as an example. That's not software, but it's a six-month cycle. Like when you get it, it's six months.
That's an immovable object. But there are all these things that I'm going to be doing in advance of that. The publishing industry doesn't work that way. They're like, and when the book is ready, then we'll do these things. But that's not the way a lot of modern authors work, where they're socializing their ideas. They might have done years of blog posting of all of their ideas where the content's already out there. The same thing happens on the software or just the technology side. So you want to really be interrogating the market and simultaneously developing the product.
So the answer this is a long answer to your question, Alex, is it happens at the beginning in the best companies and the best instances, it should be right alongside product development.
Christian:
And I think also we have on one hand this process, but on the other hand, also the collaboration between the people who are at the same coin, but maybe on sometimes two different sides, the product manager and the product marketer. And I remember back then when I was working as a product manager, when I was working in smaller firms, I was doing all the things by myself. And I'm pretty sure I did a terrible job back then because I was always starting thinking about how to launch and publish it once it was ready. While in my previous job I had the pleasure to work with a very good product marketing manager, she was always kicking my ass and coming to me. Christian, what's on your roadmap? What's coming up? What can I do? How can I help you? When do you provide me with more information? So it would be interesting to me where I draw the line or if there even is a line between product marketing responsibilities and product management responsibilities.
Martina:
There definitely is a line. And you describe exactly, Christian, the scenario of why there should be a line because there are often times at small companies where a product manager is asked to do all of it and inevitably prioritize the product first and then they do all the go to market stuff. So it's good for early stage companies where you don't have the resource yet. It's good for a product manager to realize I'm doing two jobs and I'm simultaneously figuring out the market and the product side. That's going to help a lot in just thinking about what might I build differently as a result of what I'm learning from the market, or am I asking enough questions of the market to make sure that whatever product I develop is going to be successful and embraced, but you're identifying exactly why. Particularly at Silicon Valley Product Group, we talk about the fact that these are two very distinct jobs, partially because it's very overlapping in what both sides need, but the skill set and how to apply it is just different. So the product manager might take the exact same information and they apply it to what product gets built. The product marketer takes all that customer knowledge, competitive knowledge, and their discipline.
Is the market on all the levers and the channels inside the market? Who might be the best partners to help elevate what we are trying to do? What is the strategy that is going to help get us to where we need to go over the next 18 months? That's another difference also is the product marketer has to have a longer vantage point because markets just take longer to evolve, whereas the product manager can be like, all right, this release, we're just going to get this stuff done. It's an MVP ish, and then we're going to be able to rapidly add these other things and update it. Whereas the product marketer needs to know, in 18 months, I want to occupy this position and there are many things that I have no control over that simply must occur between now and then. And what are all those waste stations and are we doing the right things? Are there analysts that need to be involved? You can't typically influence their review cycles. Are there reviewers that are particularly influential in looking at our product? Or if you were producing an actual physical good that's going into retail might be like, it has to be ready by Q four. That's the immovable object because of so much market momentum that happens there. So the product marketer has to take those external factors massively into account in the strategy that gets articulated on the kit side. So that's why they're really such distinct jobs.
And it's the tapestries on which they paint. Even what though they use and need the same information to be thoughtful about their jobs.
Christian:
What do you think is the number one thing a product marketer needs from a product manager? If you would have to decide on.
Martina:
One trust, I'd say it's not a matter of what information does or doesn't pass through. The best relationships are built on trust, where things happen all the time that are mistakes, like, oh, whoops, I forgot to tell you about this thing. And you can say, like, well, that's going to build a wall between us because clearly you didn't trust me enough to tell me this or you don't respect me enough, or blah, blah, blah, those tensions. Like if there's a trusted relationship in place where it's like, hey, we're both going to try and do the very best we can, and sometimes we're going to make mistakes. If there can be trust and faith in that relationship, I think that's the best thing that both sides can bring to make it very productive. So I'd say that's the number one thing. If there was a number two, I would say it's sharing the customer insights that lead to product decisions. Because if the product team is taking that customer insight and translating it into a feature set, but if the product marketer understands the why behind the features, then they can position it with that context as opposed to just promoting the features.
And that might sound really small, but that nuance is cataclysmic in terms of the market's perception. Am I just getting features hammered at me or am I understanding why they matter and what benefit this has to me?
Alex:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I think it also gives a lot of importance to the whole research that needs to be done in is it discovery and also like the development phase? Because I definitely see this overlap. Okay, why are we building it? What is the feedback? Why are people excited about using it? And so on. And if you use it in the right way, you can also position the product well.
Martina:
Absolutely. And just what you were talking about, Alex, the why and the excitement, that's something that is massively underrated excitement, where I think a lot of people say, oh, this is useful, or even if people are trying to get a read on, do you find this useful? How often will you use it? Being useful and discovering something that people are wildly excited about are two different things. And so the more you can find that, the exciting stuff is the stuff that's easier to market and the stuff that can get purchased, where you can really help establish a flywheel of evangelism. And today that becomes the most important thing. It's not, did you get everything else right? It's sort of much more. Are people willing to talk about your product organically? How passionately do they believe in that product? And I'll give you an example from the companies that I work with, two companies that do very similar things. And one has a really, really great customer base, totally solid and very impressive names. The other doesn't have the same level of impressiveness of names, but all the customers are wildly evangelistic and everyone's taking notice of that and saying, why are those people loving this product so much? It just gives you so much more to believe in and to make you curious and want to dive in and learn more.
And that ultimately is on the marketing side that's really important.
Christian:
Can we take a step back when it comes to positioning? Because for sure, on one hand we have the excitement and the right marketing message for the right people. But I would also because I recently was working with a client who builds a very fancy enterprise product. So a lot of time, a lot of money has been spent also market research to build that product. They realized that the enterprise business companies, they don't want this product at the moment because it's too young, so it's not stable and scaling enough. So product Market Fit was obviously not there. But we also realized that younger companies and smaller companies love the product. There was maybe not in the first place product Market Fit, but there was a market that has a product Fit. So how do you approach the definition or the identification of the right market in first place?
Martina:
So that's the very delicate and black art of Product Market Fit. And what you're talking about, Christian, is the market side of Market Fit, where it's like you've discovered a product that is useful, but what is the market in which it best fits? And the crucial thing to understand there is the technology adoption curve. Because ultimately this might be a great product for enterprise companies after it's been established and proven in absolutely a segment that can absorb it and use it and prove it. And so a big part of that Market Fit component was not just who are we designing for this for? And where might it be useful ultimately, but it's who are those first customers that can use it that are willing to take the risk? And the big Market Fit question there that wasn't addressed the first time around was will they buy it from us? There was much more interrogation around utility and value, as opposed to would you value it from us at our stage? Would you trust us to provide it and scale it? And so that's part of the Market Fit part. And that's why you asked, when's the right time? You want someone engaged asking those questions and understanding that right from the start. So what you experienced was who is the right initial market to start with, even if our longer term prospective market is a much bigger company.
Christian:
And I have to say the product marketing manager was missing, who asked us back then, who will be our first customers and do they want to buy from us? And yeah, I just happy to realize that was missing because if you would have told me back then, I maybe have said no. But now I understand better.
Martina:
Yeah. And I'll say too that it's not obvious because when you're trained on the product management side, is this product going to be valuable? Is it feasible? There are all the standard questions that you ask yourself and it's possible to answer yes to all of those without having done the full market exploration.
Christian:
We did the market research, we talked to the customers, and we identified that what we are building is the right thing. But this little piece was missing. And the reason why I'm also sharing this to our audience is sometimes these are the little things that can make a whole project or product fail. So that's why it's highly recommended to go the extra mile and ask a couple of more questions.
Martina:
Yeah. And I would say if there's nothing else that people take away from this podcast, if that's not going the extra mile, that should be table stakes for how you develop your product at the beginning, which is you have to ask that question, are you interested in buying that? Would you buy this from us? What would this displace? Would you be willing to change something for this value from us? That from us is key because it's like, oh, you did all the value establishment. And if a company that they already had an established relationship with offered them the exact same thing, they would buy it tomorrow. But to your point, yeah, you're a young company. I don't know if I trust you. Which is why those first customers are always and customers being I'm willing to pay you money, not just I'm willing to give you design feedback or design partners. So that's why Silicon Valley Product Group always says, like part of that initial group of customers, that customer beachhead that you're using to make the discovery assessment, they have to be willing to actually pay for the product as opposed to just design it with you.
Alex:
But this actually brings me to a question, right? You just shared how important it is to actually ask these questions. You also mentioned the trust. Now, I think also from the story, from Christian, also in my experience, I've seen a lot that companies don't know much about product marketing. They don't really know the function or the value. It's like the product managers doing it. And I almost feel like in some companies there is also product managers who feel like, okay, I can totally do this job. So even if we talk about the trust, there is not really this massive understanding of, oh, that's really a super valuable function that I need to have in every team. Now maybe also because you've seen a lot and I think with the Silicon Valley Product Group, you also see a lot of different companies and geographics and so on.
Do you feel like that the function is more and less developed in certain countries? Because it's really not something that's very much discussed in at least Germany or Europe where I've been active in.
Martina:
So you're getting to why I'm writing the book. I don't think that it's. I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley, and part of what happens is, unlike product management, where I think there is at least a baseline expectation, I would say people's impressions of product marketing and what is possible is shaped very much by wherever they worked and what their direct experience with a product marketer was. So it's not practiced one way, and I can say this now, having looked at hundreds of companies, there's no one company that practices it the same way. The very best companies are the ones that treat it as a first class citizen and massively strategic function and there salesforce is a great example. Microsoft is a great example. Famously, Microsoft called the product marketing function product management because they wanted to distinguish it from the these aren't people that just market stuff and put together collateral. They are in charge of driving the strategy and really helping us understand how to bring this product to market.
And the level of product knowledge that was expected of them was really different than what was practiced in most other companies. So the very best companies are the ones that have created sort of the best-in-class imprint. But that means 90% of what people have experienced is not. So it's not surprising that I don't think it's a geographic thing. I think it's much more people's experience based. It sounds like, Christian, you had a great partnership with a great product marketer. I assume that was in Germany somewhere.
Christian:
The end of my career, yes.
Martina:
Okay, so it's not a geographic boundary so much as it is how the function has been designed and modeled and how empowered the function is by how it's structured inside an organization. And it does take somebody that has experienced that at somewhere in their life to set it up that way. So it's less geographic and more experiential. I'd say that shapes how likely it is to take shape in a particular way.
Christian:
Can we dive into the role definition because we know now how companies should treat product marketing. We know how they are involved in the process. But I try to better understand what exactly differentiates a product marketing manager from a product manager. And I know you also talked about these four elements of product marketing elements.
Martina:
Yeah, happy to talk about with them. So the four fundamental aspects of how product marketer is number one is they're the ambassador around the customer and the market. And this is the ambassador on both sides to the product as well as to the go to market teams. Number two is they're the strategist. They are trying to discover what the best product go to market is so people will find and want the product. And it's not a linear thing. It's going to be a little all over the map. But it's discovering that along with everything, all these inputs and being the strategist and thinking about it from that strategic vantage point.
So an example just yesterday, I wind up doing a lot of product market thinking or product marketing thinking with the companies I work with. I literally just do out a diagram where I took one company's press release and I compared it against another company's press release and I said here are the markets, here are the advantages that are being promoted, therefore here are the targets. I literally had this blue circle. Here is the area of opportunity. This is where we need to have something from product. I don't care what it is, but that's the opportunity zone. So that's the strategist aspect. Then there's the messenger aspect which is shaping how the world thinks about a product.
So that's positioning and messaging. But it also can be where are the conversations, what are those conversational nuggets people can have? Which leads to the fourth element, which is being the evangelist by inspiring others and enabling evangelism. And that's the one that I'd say in the modern era is much more influential than people realize because most folks begin their journey hearing about a product from a peer or just googling and trying to find something. So it's the one or two degrees removed from anything official that people are first hearing about something or perceiving something. So that's the evangelism aspect and why it's so important to make sure a really good foundation is in place for that. So those are the four primary foundational principles that are at the heart of product marketing. Every action that a product marketer does should be in service of those things. So sales tools and sales enablement, that's about enabling evangelism and being a great messenger and having the right strategy.
It's all the different things that they do need to be in service of those. And I'd say what happens oftentimes with product marketers is becomes a list of 35 things that need to get done and they just start checking the list and managing projects and people lose sight of the purpose of the function and what all of that activity really is supposed to roll up to and add up into.
Alex:
Beautiful. Yeah, maybe also as we're discussing a little bit more the definition also of the role, I mean, hearing it and thinking of companies where we didn't have product marketing as a function, I also see all these massive overlaps as you just said. Is it the sales team with the tools? Is it also branding overall? Because also there you have this aspect of positioning, of tone, of voice, how do we communicate and so on and so forth, performance marketing and so on. So if we step out of the, let's say, product organization, who is really defining and building and shipping the products? How do you see also the function working with the rest of the organization?
Martina:
Because I think that's such a great question, Alex. And I would say this is where it's a bridging function between product and the go to market functions. And most of the time product marketing sits inside of marketing organizations. And so how they engage with performance marketing, corporate marketing, which is where brand might live, communications is they help direct those efforts through the lens of the product go to market strategy, corporate marketing group that might be handling brand. They have a broader objective around the company and what the company needs to mean. The product marketer's job is to provide what's necessary to leverage the product into that broader message. So it might be, let's say, global company X. They are meaningful because they have.
Five different product lines and to make the global company X message meaningful, they're picking and choosing what they want from each of those five product lines. It's not everything from all of them. It's what's most meaningful for what they are trying to mean in the market. So that's how it rolls up into a broader corporate marketing function and things like brand, how that then trickles back to the product team around tone around message. It might be, hey guys, so this is happening at Oracle. They're trying to be a little more human, a little softer, a little more organic. It's not just red. And how does that filter through in something like dialog boxes or how easy it is perceived to set the product up on onboarding? So it might be, are we doing enough, are we asking ourselves enough questions on the product side to deliver against the brand promise that the company now wants to represent in its relationship with customers.
And so the product marketer might be that ambassador to basically say, I don't know if we're doing enough to represent what our brand wants to evolve toward in the product's experience. The product managers figure out what must be done. But it might be the product marketer who's that go between saying there actually needs to be more because they understand the product implications, whereas the corporate marketing team is just thinking about our brand needs to mean this to our customers. Similarly, on the performance marketing side, that's one where it's so data driven and it's so about are we getting the right unit economics and is this campaign succeeding? That's where the product marketer needs to say, is this adding up to the position that we need to occupy? Like we might be getting our clicks, but is someone else in the market actually perceived as more innovative than we are? And if we're just getting our clicks but we're not convincing people that we're innovative enough, can we change the tone of our campaigns so that they are equally as effective but emphasizing innovation a little bit more? So that's how that product marketer functions inside of the broader marketing behemoth at larger companies.
Alex:
Is there anyone the product marketer is not working within a company?
Christian:
It's similar to product management, right?
Martina:
So you are also in this interface that is exactly right. If you're doing product marketing while you're interfacing with all of the go to market functions, including legal. Okay, do we have the trademark rights or in another way, for example, that brand comes up is the product marketer is aware of a set of features that really should have its own branded language, because that's just going to make it stand out more. The product marketer, the product team might not care. It's like, oh, this is features X, Y and Z. And we're like, you know what, we should call it X, Y and Z Technology X because that's going to let us hang our hat on AI, which is so important for the position we're trying to occupy. And it's going to feel like marketing extraneous, blah, blah, blah to everyone in the product organization like, oh, whatever, sure. But it might wind up being really important.
Because if the company is trying to be perceived as innovative and is trying to occupy the space in AI, and that being the new place in terms of how the most modern companies are developing technology, then product lines one through five each need to have something to contribute to that AI storyline. And is that product marketer that needs to figure out what that is? And does it need its own brand or subbrand or name feature category definition that encompasses that so that it's more evident and visible for anyone that's looking.
Alex:
Maybe just to pick a little bit. Like on what Christian also said to me, it almost sounds if you have a well functioning product marketing function in place, actually product management should not have to work so much with marketing, right? It should almost allow them to focus more on the product aspects where product marketing then bridges the gap.
Martina:
Beautifully said, Alex. And in my book, one of the things I say is I give indicators of whether or not the partnership is working as intended and that's one of the biggest ones is do you feel like you're able to spend less time on supporting the go to market functions if you capably enable your product marketer? They're that front line stuff might still come to the product team, but it should feel like less and they should be able to focus on the product side more.
Alex:
And let's say I don't have any product marketing person in my company. Who should be the one to hire it? Who should be the driving force to say we need product marketing? Is it like the CPO head of product or is it more like the marketing side? Who should drive these decisions?
Martina:
I would say nine times out of ten, I've seen it driven on the marketing side. But I would say it's whoever thinks of it first. I would genuinely say this is my call to arms for all people in product. If you don't have it, you should be asking for it. And I have seen now increasingly people realize that it should be my first marketing hire. So I don't hire someone that's in charge of marketing and then that person hires a product marketer. The very first body in this company needs to have really good facility with product marketing. Even if they aren't a dedicated product marketer, they need to be able to do all of those functions.
And part of what you're getting to Alex, is whether or not you have someone with the title, the work has to get done. And you could solve it this way. You could say, you know what, we're going to spread the function across. We're going to invest more in product managers, and we're going to spread initially the function across all of our product managers because we want them to be more market focused and we want them to develop that muscle before we transition it to someone that thinks about that exclusively. That's a perfectly valid choice as long as the head of product knows what to ask and is resourcing them well enough that they can do all those jobs. But that's perfectly reasonable to develop that skill set. Something we talk about, actually all the partners at SVPG is, you know what? If we had known all of this stuff, we would have been far better at product when we first started our careers. And similarly, my work at Costa NOAA, I work with almost exclusively engineering and product people who are starting their companies.
And so none of them start with a product marketer. And all of the stuff that we do is training that muscle for them as founders and as product people so that they know how to process market signal as they're doing all of this early work. So it's totally possible to do it without the dedicated body, as long as you understand that you will have to dedicate part of your work and your brain to learning the skills.
Alex:
I think the biggest mistake probably is to just not be aware of it and to have people building it and then performance marketing, throwing money at a market and the two not meeting in between. And that's also something that, unfortunately, I've seen a couple of times in different companies.
Martina:
I see it more than a couple of times. I see it all the time where people say, like, we'll build the product, and then the very first thing they think is, so what we need is demand gen or performance marketing, if you're more consumer oriented, because they just think, now that we have product, we just need the engine of promotion and lead generation. And if you don't have more of that fundamental understanding in place, you can pour it's just like you said, you can pour tons of money against this ton. And the moment you start like your SEO, people were like, oh yeah, that's 10,000, 20,000 a month at least.
Alex:
But I think one thing, and maybe we're also going too deep now, but I can also understand it, right? Because if I have performance marketing, online marketing team, it's also super measurable. Right. I think I can say, okay, this was the conversion rate that this bundle generated. This is the money that I have to spend. This is when we get the money back. I feel like product marketing is still bigger. And maybe you have also some advice on how to best measure it or how to also show the value of having product marketing involved right from the beginning.
Martina:
Yeah. And so I would say this is where the strategist component comes in, which is, you want to have a map for how to get from A to B. And that's what the product marketer does. This is go to market. Let's think about it. Holistically. What's that map within that? There's always going to be developing a customer pipeline regardless of what your business is. And the answer there lies in a lot of targeted experiments.
It's just like product management, but you're doing market based experiments. Let's do this search. We're going to do a mobile test for one month. Then we're going to do website and digital tests. Then we're going to do a PR test. You do time boxed experiments to interrogate and understand the market, then make decisions about what you want to put more investment into. So by the time you do have someone in demand generation or performance marketing, you actually know why you're doing it and why you've made that choice. Why would you choose someone that is a digital specialist versus choosing someone that's a technical evangelist and builds things through community? You shouldn't hire that person and then see what they do and then figure out your strategy.
You should be running the tests, which is what a product manager is a generalist that should be able to do all of these things and answer the question. I think these three things will be most significant in bringing us to market. That's where we should make an investment. And so you should be able to measure and understand each of those things. And that's part, it's not even a long term measurement. It's just like, okay, let's answer this question for ourselves about the market. Run a test go. Now let's answer this question about the market.
Run a test go. So you should constantly have market questions and market answers based on experiments that get run to get all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. That's what modern product marketing looks like. Old school was I needed to figure that out, and then I just needed to execute it. But new school is I have no idea what the answer is until I actually get into market. And then I run experiments, time boxed, get some of those answers, and then double down where it makes sense for me to invest.
Christian:
And to me, marketing is also like planting seeds. If you do performance marketing, if you have money, you can already shoot out your campaigns and you can start measuring. But I've learned it with my own product when I started blogging, when I started with this podcast, because I realized, okay, from day one, I should have a newsletter in place when I want to do SEO optimization. I need to do it from day one because it takes maybe six months till a year until you get out of the Google sandbox and I can go for hours. I don't want to bore you with all the details, but product marketing is also a mid and long term investment, having it from day one in place and also not underestimating the power of the strategist, for example, or even the people who execute to be involved as early as possible. Because there are certain fundamentals that need to be set from the beginning on.
Alex:
How you get from the seed to the flower to the final breath.
Christian:
And you're just stealing my metaphor.
Martina:
Alex well, we forgot something important there. So it's like seed to shoot to seedling to flower. Like flower, you're in full bloom, you know exactly what you're doing. But planting the seed is making the investment in the discovery part. And then having the shoot is when you're doing the experiments and trying to understand, you're not sure which direction you're going to grow. You're not even sure which direction the sun comes from until the shoot is out. And then after that, okay, here's some leaves. And now we have enough energy and momentum to grow a flower, and then it could be in full bloom, and then we do all these other glorious things.
But it is a growth process that you can't skip the step. You can't go from seed to flower. You simply must. You have to grow along that path. And the most important thing is to make sure you're not missing the learning along the way, because then you have confidence when you are in full bloom that's not just one flower. Like the first time I grew a tomato plant, I literally had two tomatoes total on the whole plant. I was like, oh my God, what did I do wrong? And it was so disappointing relative to the investment. And you don't want that to be your company worth yeah, we planted it, we watered it, we had fertile ground.
We only got two tomatoes. What happened? And you want to understand all the steps along the way so that when you get to fruit or flower, it's as bountiful as you want it to be.
Christian:
And that's what makes also the most fun, right? The whole process of it is what I at least love. And with that said, we do have still companies out there who are maybe not as advanced as companies in, for example, Silicon Valley. My final question to you would be, what do you think are the most important steps a company should take to go into the direction of being better at product marketing?
Martina:
Well, the first step has to be you got to have that intimate customer and market knowledge. And I don't think you can even create a product without that. But no one realized that it needs to apply to the market side as well. That's the part that often gets stepped or missed. So you got to start with that customer and market knowledge. But the second thing is you have to have that strategy, and strategy needs to precede all those other things, because if you know which markets you're trying to target and why then that shapes the messages and the positioning that you want to occupy. And similarly, if you understand your strategy, then you know where evangelism fits or what type of evangelism is most important. Do you just need to have digital coverage and have recommendations on recommendation and comparison sites? Or do you need a technical evangelist that's growing its own? Or should you start with an open-source community and see if that's the right way to grow? The answer lies in the strategy, which is very, very tied.
Then this is the product go-to-market strategy, which is very tied to product strategy. So that's where that strategy part. That's the number let's just take as a given. You got to have customer market knowledge. I hope all companies know that. The part that everyone misses is they go straight to we have this product idea and this customer and market knowledge to, here are the 30 things we think we need to do marketing. The missing step that everyone should stop and take time to do is figure out the strategy. Why are we doing this? What is it all adding up to so that we know and to your other point, Alex, we can measure and understand if we're actually getting to where we think we want to go from a market perspective.
Martina:
Without strategy, it's just a bunch of activities that you check the box on that don't necessarily add up to the market meaning and position that you want to have at the end of it. So that strategy is the most often misstep for people that don't have a product marketing resource, or even if they do, that's not what's asked of them. They say, oh, great, you're here. Do collateral, support the sales team, do all these other things, or make sure the website is up to date, stop and take the time to figure out the strategy first.
Christian:
Very good point. My final question would be, what's the ETA of your book?
Martina:
Unfortunately, you guys know some of the backstory, but we've had to delay it. But we are targeting I know we're targeting very early, the very beginning of 2022. So that's my goal. It's like everyone can start off the new year with a new book in hand. And I would love and if people listen to this and there's specific things that they want to hear and learn more of, just tag me on Twitter, on LinkedIn and give me your questions. I want to make sure that this is a truly valuable resource for everyone that's trying to understand how to leverage the function better.
Christian:
We will add all your contact data in the description as well as on our landing page. And we would also love to have a glance maybe before you even launch it.
Martina:
Absolutely. Oh, by the way, it's going to be called Loved how to market products that customers adore.
Alex:
Amazing. Looking forward to it. Can't wait.
Christian:
Wishing you all the best and fingers crossed to be able to read it at beginning of next year.
Martina:
Yes. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Bye.
