Product Marketing Goals: What to Expect in Quarter One
I’ve always loved the exercise of planning and goal-setting before starting any major activity. It was easier in school and college because there was a clear link between what needed to be done and how to be successful. Managing adulthood and life goals, in general, isn’t as easy. Or so I thought until I discovered a simple life hack that’s made the exercise more efficient and a lot less overwhelming– I call it the 30/60/90-day rule. It refers to breaking down any large goal or plan into smaller, manageable increments that are easier to control.
I’ve been thinking about whether the same rule can be applied in the context of product marketing goals at a young, growing tech company. Turns out, it’s a great way to organize product marketing goals and deliverables irrespective of where you are in your product marketing journey.
Whether you’re setting up a product marketing function at your company, refining and streamlining existing processes, or wondering if you even need product marketing to begin with – here’s a realistic breakdown of the first 30, 60, and 90 days of your product marketing journey and how to get the most out of the experience.
A realistic breakdown of the first 30, 60, and 90 days of your product marketing journey and how to get the most out of the experience
Discover the product from the user’s perspective
Good product companies love their products, but great product companies are obsessed with their users.
Learning to manage the fine balance between product knowledge and user-centricity is the first, most important role of the product marketer. This helps you understand the technology being offered without compromising on the value being delivered. It also helps to get a firsthand experience of the product before speaking with the rest of the team or going through existing documentation.
Create a trial account, listen to sales calls or demo recordings, go through support conversations, and experience the product like a new user. This initial, unbiased perspective is priceless for identifying missed opportunities or ways to augment your existing product adoption journey.
Get to know your friends and allies
Product marketing is one of the most cross-functional departments, and success depends on building successful relationships across teams. Talk to product, engineering, sales, and CX folks and understand what they need to succeed and what’s missing currently. This also gives you a sense of how they see the product and understand how messaging percolates throughout the organization.
Are they all speaking the same language? If they’re not, that’s your problem to solve.
Do a recce of what exists
Now that you have a basic understanding of the product and have a sense of what important stakeholders think, you’re in a good place to spot opportunities and improve workflows. Your plan should start to take shape now, and you’ll have a good understanding of what’s missing and how you can help bridge those gaps.
Start discovering your ‘Jobs to be done’ from a product marketing perspective
There are two aspects to this – now that you’ve spent time with the product and understand it from the other stakeholders’ perspective, you can start to define the jobs-to-be-done framework that would maximize the chances of turning a potential buyer into a paying customer.
The second part involves identifying the areas where product marketing (you) can contribute and strategizing on how to make that happen. Prioritize the processes that need to be put in place, identify content gaps, decide on deliverables, and set timelines to get things done.
Set up tools and analytics
This is often ignored but is the most crucial part of any product marketing success story. You can only understand and improve what you can measure, so adopt tools and processes that let you monitor what you’re building.
It’s tempting to get to the doing and creating part of the job before setting up the analytics and data processes to track what you’re doing. But this is a step you don’t want to miss. Take the time to set up tools and infrastructure that can support you on your journey. This often includes cleaning up a lot of data and redoing what exists but the right way. Not the most fun work (unless you’re a born data cruncher a.k.a. number-loving person), but very important.
Talk to your new friends
It’s time to share your plan with other stakeholders and validate if it resonates with them. If you’ve done a good job of the steps above, your team is probably already thanking the Gods for your existence. If they’re not yet at that stage, educate them about what product marketing can do as a practice in general but more specifically for the product at its current stage of growth, and define potential impact. It’s your job to paint a picture of your product to the audience; start by painting a picture for your internal stakeholders.
Test it out with something small
You don’t need to launch into a messaging overhaul in month two (and hopefully you don’t need to), but pick something small to begin with – maybe the onboarding sequence, micro product copy, or try launching a new release or feature to put what you’ve learned into action. Keep an eye on the indicators of success (qualitative and quantitative) and refine based on what you see. And give yourself a pat on the back. You’re in action!
Continue to execute and refine
The most important lesson for any young product team is that structure and processes are not set in stone. Especially over the first few months and years, constantly refine and improve the product marketing function based on what you see and observe. There’s no golden formula that works for every product, and as a product marketer, it’s your job to understand the product, the market, and the industry and educate the rest of the organization about how to stay one step above the rest. The voice of the customer is everyone’s responsibility, but no one owns it as much as product marketing.
I’ve always felt that product marketing is one of the instantly gratifying disciplines in marketing. The results of your work are almost immediate if you do it right. Unlike content marketing or community building, it doesn’t take too long before you see a visible difference in everything from product adoption, conversion rates, and even customer satisfaction metrics.
But more than anything, it’s the most fulfilling (read: least soul-sucking) of marketing disciplines because many people's lives become a lot better if you do your job right.