The startup founder’s guide to product marketing
What exactly is product marketing – and does your startup need to hire someone to do it? How is it any different from growth marketing – and which one is right for your company?
Great ideas are abundant everywhere, but shaping them into a new product and successfully taking it to market is hard, especially for first-time founders. If you’re currently trying to figure out why, when, and how to do product marketing, then look no further: this guide is for you.
This article will break down the building blocks of a successful marketing program and show you how to do product marketing from day one.
Before we begin: I encourage you to bookmark, save, read and re-read this guide from time to time. It’s not just about physical products; it’s about software, services, solutions, and digital goods alike. Your startup will grow with the right amount of dedication, work, and know-how. Your product marketing needs will change as you evolve from a small, bootstrapped operation to a reputable, well-financed industry name. You can always come back to this article for reference. And when you finally outgrow everything that you’ll learn, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for more – we’re just scratching the surface of what product marketing is today.
Why does my startup need marketing?
First, let’s talk about marketing in general. If you’ve somehow managed to build a product and are just now wondering how to market it, then you need to know that you might be trying to sell something unmarketable.
That’s because all modern products and services that we see around us have marketing baked in from the product ideation stage. There is no single successful product that you can think of which hasn’t first answered questions about the market. The right questions will allow you to understand how your MVP (minimum viable product) needs to evolve to be more than a demo you show to friends and investors. The right questions will give you answers that will shape the direction of your startup – here are a few examples:
Who is going to buy my product? Who will use it?
Establishes a target market, identifies buyer and user personas
How am I going to convince my ideal customer type to buy from me?
Allows you to craft the messaging for your buyers, based on value propositions and differentiation points
When, how, and at what costs can I reach my potential customers?
Gives you an idea of the right channels and methods to reach your customers and whether you’re sufficiently well-funded to afford the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
How will my customers get my product? How will they use it? How will it help them?
This question chain can help you remove pre-purchase friction and set the right pricing method, improve user experience, or set up a feedback loop to discover more about what’s working for your customers.
And perhaps more philosophically:
Why am I doing what I’m doing?
This might sound like a weird question on the surface, but it’s a way to discover your values, mission, and vision, and thus build a strong story around your brand
If you’ve ever pitched your startup idea to investors, you already know they’re going to ask those questions – not only to see if you have all the right answers but also to see if you ever thought about these things in the first place. Thus, since marketing is the process by which your desired customers come to know and use your products, you need to start doing marketing as soon as possible.
Here’s how marketing is going to help your startup:
Your idea will become an actual product.
Just thinking about the way to take your product to market and answering a few questions like those discussed previously will help you take your product from idea to fast-selling wonder.
You will get users faster.
If you’re just starting, you need to gather a critical mass of customers – and fast. The right marketing campaign, at the right moment and in the right context will take your user growth to the moon.
You will show investors you know what you’re doing.
If you have a great product but don’t know how to sell it, don’t expect investors to throw their money at you. Demonstrate that you know what you want to sell and you know how you want to do it, and they’ll give you the resources you need to make it happen.
Customers will love you.
People don’t experience products in a vacuum. You don’t just buy a car – you buy the brand, the status, and the behind-the-wheel experience. It’s the same for every product: customers appreciate so much more than just the product itself.
You will love it.
Let’s face it – marketing can be really fun. And if it solves a problem for you and you start seeing the value in it, I guarantee you’ll get hooked for life. Marketing can truly change the world.
What do I need first: growth marketing, content marketing, or product marketing?
This is probably the marketing version of the “chicken or the egg” problem.
In recent years there has been a lot of hype about different types of marketing: growth, content, and product have all had their moment in the limelight. But how can you cut through all the buzzwords and decide what’s right for you?
Here are some quick guidelines for you:
You need product marketing if:
There are still things about the target market that you don’t know
Your value proposition, messaging, and positioning are not yet fully developed (and it’s driving you mad!)
You have little experience in bringing products to market
You need to focus on operations/raising funds but developing your product is taking too much of your time
You’re prepared to let someone else take serious decisions about your products
You need growth marketing if:
You have proof there is a product-market fit and you just need to scale
Your value proposition, messaging, and positioning are perfect, but not enough people know about your product
You haven’t done any kind of promotion before and you need to test everything out
You don’t know how organic and paid media work
You have the budget to spend on ads
You need content marketing if:
You already nailed product and growth
You need to feed the growth marketing machine with more stuff every day
You have plans to grow your brand in the long run
Customers want to know more about you and your product
You need to educate or entertain your customers to give them that extra nudge not to switch to another company (AKA your competition!)
That’s a simple way of looking at things, and things get more complicated along the way. But if you’re doing those right, you’ll get more help along the way. You will grow to the point where you’ll be able to onboard people who know every marketing secret. You will get to do it all. You will make mistakes, but it’s important to get the basics right. And right now, figure out if you need one, two, or all three of the above, and focus on what’s important.
To be frank, most startups fail because they never find the product-market fit. A mistake I see all too often is going straight into the growth stage without the right positioning and messaging. So startups burn through a lot of cash before going back to the drawing board. And that’s if they ever make it back to the drawing board.
So what can you do as founder and CEO?
Product marketing.
How to do product marketing as a founder
Founders are secretly the company’s first product marketer, just as CEOs are the most important product marketers in larger companies. It’s their job to think about strategy, product-market fit, or product lifecycle management after all.
This is how product marketing as a function appears in most companies: the founder handles every important aspect about positioning and the way the company presents the products to customers and investors. Then, at one point the startup is no longer just a startup – it’s a growing company that needs a CEO to oversee not just the product, but finance, org charts, and board communication among many others. At this point, the founder-CEO is forced to give up some of their previous product attributions in exchange for more time to focus on running a profitable operation.
Before that happens, you as a founder mustn’t neglect your responsibility in doing product marketing. After that, it’s equally important that you appoint somebody to take over and not leave a hole in your product strategy.
We’ll deal with delegating product marketing in the next section, so let’s focus on the basics of do-it-yourself product marketing for founders right now:
1. Cover the entire marketing mix
The so-called 7Ps of the modern marketing mix refer to a series of tactics you need to employ to satisfy the needs of your customers and occupy a position in their minds:
Product: this is your fundamental product or service that satisfies core needs for your customers. Don’t think of it as a static thing, your product should grow and change along with your understanding of what your customers want.
Price: establishing your price (and pricing methods) is the only marketing activity that will generate revenue instead of incurring costs – so take the time to determine what and how customers want to pay for your product.
Place: this is where customers can buy your product from. It can be either physical, digital, or both. Keep in mind that customers need to have easy access to your product, so placement is extremely important. However, depending on where you choose to place your product, your startup might come to depend on intermediaries for distribution.
Promotion: probably what most people think of when they hear the word “marketing”. Promotional activities ensure that your customers receive the right message depending on their stage in the buying process, and it’s where growth marketing usually operates.
People: more and more companies show a “human face”. Even in B2B, people like to buy from other people. And so everybody in your company represents the image of your startup. Especially if you’re offering a service or you’re a B2B startup, the way your employees interact with customers is part of the marketing mix.
Process: if you ever tried to improve the way customers interact with your product, you’ve dealt with a process. The customer journey has many steps – and each one requires a different process, from making an inquiry to purchasing and then receiving support for their issues.
Physical Evidence: especially when buying from a startup, people will need evidence that the product you’re offering is legit, so show some social proof. Physical evidence can be in the form of online reviews, photos of the team, or magazine articles about you – but don’t neglect to reassure customers (and investors) you’re running a reputable business.
2. Put your customers first
It’s said about product marketers that they represent the voice of the customers inside the company. As a founder, it’s your responsibility to balance inside-out thinking (based on intuition and internal thinking) with market-based evidence. This way, you’ll make sure everybody stays in touch with what customers want and need. Do you know the adage “if you build it, they will come”? Well, even if you built it, they won’t come unless it’s attractive. So get feedback with every chance you have, and make your customers’ wishes your priority.
3. Determine your message to the world
Even at late stages in your company’s development, you will need to own the story and the message you’re putting out there. Nothing dilutes authenticity more than allowing groupthink to influence your messaging from week to week or from medium to medium. If there isn’t a product marketer to own a product’s messaging, then it falls to you as a founder to keep the story consistent.
4. Determine the right metrics to track
What gets measured gets done. Use the information you get from the data to make decisions that improve your results. Don’t have analytics yet? Make them a priority.
5. Test, adapt and be ready to pivot (but not too often)
Last but not least, test every assumption. The quicker, the better. It’s indeed better to fail fast than to die slowly, but if you learn fast enough, you’re not going to fail. You’re going to adapt and pivot to whatever you see is working for your startup. A word of advice: don’t go chasing every new trend you see. Don’t need blockchain for your product to work? Then don’t waste time and money re-working everything to run on it. Pivot only when it’s advantageous to do so.
How to hire and grow the product marketing team
At one point in your startup’s growth, your responsibilities as founder will outgrow your capacity to handle all the nitty-gritty of product marketing. Inevitably, a successful startup that manages to prove the value of its product and receive funding will start growing wildly. So when exactly do you need to give up the product mantle yourself and hire your first product expert? And how should the team grow?
1. Form the product team
If there’s already somebody who knows the product better than you do on the team, it’s a great opportunity to create an official product management function within the company. A great product manager can do product marketing, and vice versa. If you’re looking to do things right, have a product manager and a product marketer work together on internal development and market development respectively. Keep the chain of command short initially – you’re probably still the most knowledgeable person at your startup when it comes to the product you’ve built. So work closely with the product team for a while.
2. One to two segments per product marketer
Every product marketer thinks they can take on the world – but in truth, it’s difficult to keep up with more than one to two customer segments at a time. The amount of work that goes into defining customer profiles, target messages, and keeping up with competitors’ moves simply makes it impractical to burden a product marketer with more than two customer segments at a time.
3. Grow cross-functional teams
Don’t allow product marketing to operate in a vacuum. Founders are also responsible for establishing the company culture and the way people interact at work with each other. So make sure product management synergizes with sales, engineering, marketing, and customer care to deliver better outcomes.
Top 5 product marketing mistakes to avoid
This guide wouldn’t be complete without some product marketing mistakes you need to watch out for. These are meant to serve as reminders for startup founders that are not expert product marketers. Whether you catch yourself or your team doing either of these, they can spell trouble for your company.
Mistake #1: Not taking the time to think about the product strategy.
Maybe the product you’re working on needs to be shipped tomorrow. Or maybe it needed to be shipped yesterday, and you’re running on fumes. But if that’s not the case, take the time to lay down your product strategy. It’s okay to do it in broad strokes, but you need to be thorough and not ignore any important aspect of the marketing mix. At least have an idea of how the puzzle pieces all fit together.
Mistake #2: Marketing without an end goal.
Disregard vanity metrics at early stages. Yes, views and reach are important – to companies that have the budget to do big awareness campaigns. If you need more users, get the traffic and pay for the app downloads you need. If you need the press mentions, focus on doing PR. Whatever your goal, don’t do marketing without a reason.
Mistake #3: Not connecting sales and marketing.
We’ve talked so much about product marketing – but how about your sales team? Do they have all the info they need to talk about what you’re doing? Are they sufficiently trained to demo your product? Good product marketers bridge the gap between product and sales. Make sure someone empowers sales folks at your startup.
Mistake #4: Going from framework to framework.
Look, there are many great frameworks for doing product marketing out there. But take it from someone who’s learned most of them: you probably only need one. Frameworks tend to rely on the same common body of knowledge, but they break down the process differently. Yes, there are differences, but the biggest difference is between not using any and learning to do things efficiently. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few (equally good) options:
The Pragmatic Framework: probably the most exhaustive product management framework you can find
Product Marketing Framework: easiest to get into, and with very good free learning options
Lean Canvas/Business Model Canvas: quickest templates to get you going, with the added benefit that they make you think about operations and resources as well
Plus the traditional models that people study in business school: the 7 Ps of the marketing mix, combined with Porter’s 5 Forces and a PESTLE analysis separate aspiring entrepreneurs from real business-minded founders
Remember, learn and apply one, and then focus on the results. This takes me to the final mistake you need to watch out for...
Mistake #5: Falling in love with the process instead of striving for results.
Remember when I said you’ll come to love marketing? Well, be careful not to love the process more than the results it’s getting for you. Always strive to achieve more. Don’t lose too much time on trivial details.
From startup to unicorn (and beyond): how product marketing evolves
In this final part of our guide, I want to touch briefly on the way product marketing changes depending on the stage of your startup. Several factors influence exactly what needs to be done, but two of the most important are the market stage your product is in and how large your delivery capacity is.
The typical four market development phases are emergence, growth, maturity (or commoditization), and decline. These refer not only to your product but to the industry you operate in as a whole. Product marketing approaches things differently in a fully commoditized market in which the only possible differentiator is the price (fast food, oil etc.) from an emergent market in which everything goes (think NFTs or the metaverse right now).
Lastly, you also need to think about your capacity to deliver actual products. Product marketing cannot be successful in the absence of a product. That’s why product marketing is only a component of the puzzle founders everywhere are trying to solve. With the hope that this guide made one part of the puzzle easier, we welcome your comments and questions – and don’t hesitate to reach out!
