When to outsource product marketing
There tends to be confusion around the function of product marketing and when to bring it into your company. Depending on your startup’s stage, product marketing can support positioning, messaging, storytelling, enablement, pricing, and taking new products to market. Regardless of what stage you’re at, one thing holds true - product marketing is essential.
Product marketing sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales. It is the sum of all efforts to research, frame the message, and promote a new product to ensure it resonates with the target customer. Product marketers have a wide range of responsibilities that involve close collaboration with product teams and other marketing functions.
Olivine is a product marketing agency with expert consultants that have worked with companies of all sizes and stages who’ve opted to outsource some or all of product marketing to support their various goals. To help your company figure out if it’s time to outsource product marketing, we’ve highlighted what to look out for across every stage of a company’s lifecycle.
Product marketing for early-stage startups
An early startup’s survival depends on its ability to quickly identify, speak to, and resonate with its target customers. The right positioning, messaging, and storytelling can be the difference between finding product-market fit - or not. Many founders are heads down building their products and raising capital in the early days, often throwing together their best first-stab at a website in those in-between moments. Once they start talking to prospects (or the lack thereof), they often realize customers are confused about what they’re selling or aren’t fully grasping the full suite of what their product has to offer and why they should trust them.
Olivine helps early-stage startups solve this problem with branding and website support paired with product marketing principles.
Blameless is a B2B startup that handles reliability orchestration. After raising their seed round, Olivine’s product marketing, design, and copywriting consultants partnered with them to create a full brand identity, positioning, and go-to-market strategy. By helping them understand their target users, company goals, and brand values, Olivine helped Blameless create a new brand identity with strong positioning. Their messaging was anchored to SRE, an emerging trend in the DevOps space, to help establish a clear perspective as they spread the word about their product and company.
As a newly funded startup, this branding and website work paired with product marketing principles helped get Blameless off the ground, driving both users and revenue. It can be hard to find that one superhero with all the skills needed for an initiative like this, and you might only have the budget for one hire. Outsourcing with an agency like Olivine packages up many different skill sets that would be hard to find in a single person (i.e., product strategy, copywriting, design, etc.). Rather than trying to make the right full-time hire(s) to execute on this, a time-intensive and expensive undertaking (two things early-stage startups rarely have), Blameless outsourced this to consultants who could strategize and execute quickly and effectively.
Product marketing for growth-stage startups
Companies in the growth stage usually have product-market fit and are laser-focused on scaling. Even with a large ad budget and content engine, if your messaging and positioning isn’t there, this can end up being difficult and/or more expensive, sales cycles will be longer, and losing prospects to competitors will happen more frequently for reasons that will have your team banging their heads against a wall.
Growth-stage startups typically have a marketing team built out but often lack a product marketing function - that’s where Olivine typically comes in. We help design and build out this function and even support hiring additional product marketers once there’s a foundation in place.
Even if companies have a small product marketing team, they often need extra muscle to execute large product launches or a company-wide repositioning effort. Outsourcing your product launch or re-positioning effort to consultants who can work collaboratively with your team to align on goals and strategize on go-to-market efforts results in wider reach, higher conversions, faster sales cycles, and increased retention in a shorter amount of time.
Envoy, a startup modernizing the workplace experience, asked Olivine to establish product marketing best practices and take their newest product to market. Our team of consultants worked with their director of product marketing and led the Envoy team in developing their go-to-market strategy, and executed the announcement of their latest product, Rooms, into private beta at an NYC conference. Launching a new product is high stakes and stressful, so ensuring your company has the resources behind it to make the biggest impact possible is worth the investment. Olivine later helped Envoy write product marketing job descriptions and interview candidates as they turned their attention to building out their team in-house.
Product marketing for mature companies
When a company is mature and has many different product suites, aligning all the different teams on a company-wide repositioning effort and ensuring it’s supported with the right sales collateral is no small feat. Established companies often have product marketing managers and directors working on their respective products but need high-level strategy and execution support for go-to-market and enablement. A third party can help orchestrate all the moving parts of a repositioning effort and bring more hands on deck to create sales collateral that reflects new packaging and pricing for a sales kickoff.
Hiring a product marketing agency brings a ton of fresh ideas for your positioning, messaging, and storytelling. Plus, consultants can play bad cop when necessary as a neutral third party to move things forward and make sure all your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted for a successful company-wide launch.
Diligent, a modern governance company building solutions for Fortune 500 boards, hired Olivine to do just that. Our product marketing consultants were tasked with repackaging and repricing their existing solutions and creating the sales collateral to support these new offerings. Olivine took Diligent through Persona and Jobs to Be Done workshops to guide their new strategy and then assisted in the new pricing and packaging roll out for their sales kickoff, with new enablement assets like new platform sales pitch decks. Then, Olivine focused on verticalizing the sales platform pitch for different industries.
The case for bringing in product marketing consultants
Whether you’re an early-stage, growth-stage, or mature company, there is always a case for outsourcing product marketing to help you hit your goals. From product and customer insights that unlock new market opportunities to laser-focused messaging that drives revenue, or simply building out a comprehensive sales resource center that makes closing deals faster and easier, bringing in an expert third party solely focused on helping you strategize and execute your go-to-market plan effectively and efficiently is an asset for any company.
Interested in learning more about how Olivine can support you? Talk to our product marketing consultants.
