Role of Marketing
This diagram outlines the key stages of the funnel and maps the goals, the teams, and the tactics of each. Early stage companies will need to address most or all of the tactics with their small scrappy team.
Often times when we meet with founders to talk about doing some marketing work, they say things like “the product practically sells itself” and “we haven’t done any marketing”. This is never true. Some people think that marketing = spending money on ads. But marketing is a broad, dynamic discipline and every founder has done at least some marketing, even if they didn’t call it marketing.
Reach Strangers
Getting in front of new people to make them aware of your brand and what you do.
The Teams
Demand Gen
Event/field marketing
PR
Tactics
Hosting events
Ad campaigns
Giving talks
Press
Attract visitors to your website
Pulling people to come to your website through strong SEO and valuable content
The Team:
Content marketing:
leads most of these tactics but product marketing should support in SEO efforts. Product marketing should lead webinar work with the help of product but this area is grey and really depends on the subject matter. Thought leadership with the CEO might be handled by content marketing and PR. Product tactics will be handled by product marketing and product management.
Product marketing
The Tactics:
Blog articles
Infographics
Gated guides (such as white papers and e-books)
Webinars
SEO (product marketing is also responsible for SEO)
Convince visitors to become customers
Compel visitors on your website to convert to sign up/try/buy.
The Team:
Product Marketing
The Tactics
Website and landing pages
Sales enablement
Competitor intelligence
Customer testimonials (sometimes the content team handles this but we recommend product marketing owning it)
Educate customers to become power users
Teach users in your product and on your help center how to be successful with your offering and get the most value out of the product.
The Team:
Customer success (sales team)
Product education (marketing team): at first you likely won’t have a single person or team devoted to product education and it will be shared among customer support, product, and product marketing.
The Tactics
Onboarding flow
Best practices content
Product documentation
Customer webinars
Delight power users to become promoters
The Team:
Shared across the company, especially falling to event/field marketing, product management, product marketing, customer support, and sales.
The Tactics:
Customer events and meetups
Office Hours
Customer Advisory Board
Random acts of delightness — Envoy sends cupcakes to new customers. Intercom used to send a deck of cards artfully designed with product best practices. New Relic sent the “Nerd Life” t-shirts.
