Using growth & product marketing strategy to position yourself on the right mountain
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When it comes to positioning, you only have a few mountains that you can climb before too many dollars and days have passed, so you need to ensure you’re at the right starting point.
In today’s “do more with less” world, it only takes a few bad assumptions when bringing products and features to market for a lot of time and money to get wasted. Product Marketers need to stop relying on old ways that rely too much on intuition and take too long before getting usable feedback from their market. We must sit at the intersection of how growth marketing approaches continuous improvement and the rigor of how product marketers create go-to-market strategies.
TL;DR: You must adopt data-informed techniques that give you more confidence in every aspect of your product marketing output.
Taking a position is climbing a mountain.
When PMMs take a product to market, they must find a position that sets it up for long-term growth. We can compare this to climbing a mountain and planting a flag on the summit. As we climb step by step, we’re expending resources and energy targeting audiences, messaging towards pain points, comparing to alternatives, and showing off differentiators.
This can be as simple as email copy to as complex as customer help centers and resource hubs full of PDFs, videos, and articles. When we look at the whole terrain of mountains that we can climb, it becomes clear that it’s a costly bet to choose a mountain without knowing if it’s the right one. A quick scan of the solutions pages of leading project management companies shows how many mountains there are to climb.
Climbing the wrong mountain is costly, especially now
When we look at the solutions pages for Asana, Notion, ClickUp, and Coda, they’ve explored many positions within multiple segments and use cases.
The resources it would take to best position for growth within these segments can be seen in the number of targeting options available in LinkedIn Ads.
When your budget for the advertising spend, and the time it takes to reach any audience and then figure out what kind of content and messaging resonates with them, it’s apparent that you only have a few mountains that you can climb before too many dollars and days have passed.
Unfortunately, even though it costs so much to try and climb a mountain and even more costly to climb the wrong ones, most PMMs don’t have a reliable approach to feeling confident in their positioning. They default to cookie-cutter approaches, mirroring competitors or overreliance on their past experiences.
Templates, copycatting, and intuition aren’t enough in a time of shrinking budgets and thinning marketing teams. PMMs need a new set of tools and processes for finding the right mountains and the safest paths up.
Applying a test-and-learn approach to collect data around the most critical positioning elements will create this safe path up. These positioning elements include:
Target Audiences
Pain Points
Alternatives
Differentiators
A test-and-learn approach is about publishing just the right amount of content (sometimes called “minimum viable”) and intentional messaging to learn about how effective your positioning is in the shortest amount of time with a controlled investment.
Drawing the map while we walk the path
A test-and-learn approach is an alternative to over-planning based on the wrong information. The experience you have now and the opinions in the room are just a snapshot of what’s already happened.
So many ways of messaging and positioning don’t work today, and what they are tomorrow can’t be predicted. All the potential positioning scenarios also can’t be held within a single PMMs experience. Getting objective feedback from your market rather than overly investing in what is said in a few Zoom strategy workshops is more reliable.
Your position becomes more defensible in whatever market you’re launching into when you’ve progressively put in the effort to learn using just enough resources. You have more attempts to get the message and audience profile right when you only have to re-design a single landing page and ad over an entire resource hub and website.
Testing a positioning path
Let’s run through an example of testing positioning for Asana.
They want to launch a specific marketing use case. This involves a product, development, and design investment for creating templates and workflows inside Asana that help marketing teams do their jobs more efficiently.
How can they produce enough content to learn if this is worth the effort? They need to answer two key positioning questions:
What types of marketing teams can get the most value from Asana?
What pain points resonate with marketers related to task management and collaboration?
Here’s what it might normally look like to support a GTM plan for marketing teams at startups and small businesses and how to create just enough content to test audience targeting and pain points messaging.
If we use the LinkedIn targeting options from before and narrow down the target audience to Marketing Leaders at startups and small businesses, then it’ll look like the chart below.
You can use three ads using static images highlighting three different pain points. These will be delivered to the target audience above with a limited budget (less than $750) and can be run at a pace of $75 per day for ten days.
Once the budget has been spent, you can run a simple analysis using these measurements:
CTR (clickthrough rate): How many people clicked the ads compared to how many people saw it would tell you how compelling people find the paint point messaging.
Landing page behavior (using Google Analytics and HotJar):
Time on site: How long did people stay on the landing page?
Scroll depth: How deep down the page did people scroll?
Heat map: Which elements did people click on?
Conversions: How many people submitted their emails with interest in the product?
The winning pain point can be used to design more developed landing pages and ads that focus on the winning pain point.
A similar process can be used to learn and verify your best positioning continuously.
What part of your positioning are you least confident in today?
Try designing a test-and-learn project like this one to gain the confidence you need to double down or make a pivot.
