Hey Corinn here, founder of Speckled, the tool that helps PMs build the
right thing at the right time.
And today we're going to be talking about product marketing.
What do you do if you don't have a product marketer on your team?
We're going to discuss what a product marketing manager or PMM does, why product
marketing is hard, what getting better at product marketing can do for you, and some
tips on how to get better at doing so.
So let's jump into it.
First, what is a PMM?Well, a PMM or product marketing manager or product
marketer is the person who is worried about getting people to buy your product.
Now, you know, as a PM, you're worried about building your product.
They're kind of worried about mostly everything else.
They can ensure that when you are ready to say, Hey, we have this
thing, it's ready to go live.
Let's launch it.
That everything from marketing messages to customer support documents
for new features are in place.
Now, if you're in a small company, it's likely that you don't have a PMM on
your team and either you or someone from marketing or sales or customer support or
heck even the founder is taking on some of the product marketer's traditional tasks.
Now, considering you're probably already swamped it's with managing the
development and direction of the product that you're managing you now also have
to figure out how the heck to get this thing that you built out into the market.
And marketing is hard, you know.
You need to get to your customers at the right time, time and
be in their mind, you know?
When they're ready to make that decision and it's hard and it's
scary putting something out there.
So you're going to need to learn how to see things from the customer's
perspective, you're going to be able to have to tell a great
story, and set your product apart from the rest of the competition.
So, yeah, it's a challenge, but you know what, if you can get good
at product marketing, it's going to open up a world of opportunity.
Obviously all of us want our products to be used by people.
And if you can become a better product marketer, you're going to have a
product with more customers and more customers equals more motivation, more
momentum, and maybe even more budget for you to do the fun things that
you want to do as a product manager.
You'll also learn what goes into building a successful product
beyond just the actual building process and beyond just the product.
And you're going to better understand your customers and your non-customers,
which is going to help you build something that will really stand out in the market.
Okay.
So how the heck do you get better at product marketing?
Well, let's go back to basics.
If you remember from basic business 101, the four PS of marketing are
product price, place, and promotion.
So I'm going to assume that you have that product part locked up and you're
ready to go on that part and you just need a little help and understanding
about pricing, placement, and promotion.
So to learn a little bit more about pricing, you can do a bunch of reading.
There's a lot out there on this subject, but you're going to want to get familiar
with different pricing strategies, things like value based pricing, cost
based pricing, competitor based pricing.
You may also want to learn how to run a pricing survey to find the
optimal price for your product.
So those are two things you can do to learn a little bit more about pricing.
Okay, next up...
placement.
This is where your customers are hanging out.
If you don't know where your customers are hanging out right
now, you really need to get on that.
So try to figure out where they're hanging out, if you want to talk
as a customer, next time you're talking to them, just see where they
like to get their information from.
That's a great way to get started.
Quick google searches are also going to be helpful.
See what they read, what forums they're on, what conferences they attend.
You know, you just want to be where they are and that that's, you
know, most of what placement is.
Okay.
And next step is promotion, and this is the trickiest one, and this is what
most people associate marketing with.
And there's a lot of ways to tackle this one.
But you're going to want to test out some different marketing channels.
There are a lot out there that are available to you.
To see a list of them.
I would definitely, I recommend checking out the book Traction - that's going
to give you a whole bunch that you can start from, but just start with one
promotion channel and really see if you can get that one to stick before
moving onto another, you know, you're going to have to work on figuring
out what your positioning is, you're going to have to write some ad copy.
You're going to have to work on your placement.
You know, this is going to be a lot of writing and creative work.
So this is definitely something that's going to come with a lot of practice,
but the more you do it the more comfortable you're going to be with it.
Okay.
So we talked about what a product marketer does, why product marketing
is hard, how you can get better at it, and some tips to do so.
If you like this content and be sure to subscribe to our
blog at getspeckled.com/blog, just drop your email there.
And every Sunday we send out a newsletter with the top three
articles of the week for product managers at small software companies.
In the meantime, happy marketing.