Don't fall at the
last hurdle with your
product marketing

This is about people as much as products

You spend a lot of time and money developing a product or service for a specific market. But all too often, sales are underwhelming simply because the way the product is marketed.

It’s a tough job to view your products from a customer’s perspective — from inside the jar it’s difficult to read the label. Even the largest businesses make this mistake — 268 new features with this release!

The challenge is not just to move from features to benefits (today that’s table-stakes). The real challenge is to establish a way of talking about your products that fits seamlessly with the real-world customers find themselves in (and which motivates them to take the next step).

And that’s where we come in.

 

Focusing on what really matters

There are many things you could say about your products and services. Too many. Customers don’t have the time, patience or inclination to read walls of text and complicated specifications (who does?).

It’s why in every product marketing project, we ask 10 simple questions:

01. What is the simplest way to describe what the product/service does?

02. What is the customer’s context in finding out more about this product?

03. What are the one-to-three big challenges it helps them make progress on?

04. What language do they use to talk about these?

05. What’s stopping them from making a purchase?

06. What are their other options?

07. What would they need to believe to take the next step?

08. What do we have in the product/service to support this belief?

09. What’s the most motivating, customer-focused way to position the product/service?

10. How will we get this in front of the people that matter?

Learning, testing and adapting

In every engagement, you can expect us to have in-depth conversations with your sales team to find out what it’s like to sell your products in the real world. We’ll also interview customers to gain insights in what it’s like to buy these products and what’s going on behind the scenes. And we’ll read win:loss reports if you have them (if you don’t, we recommend starting).

Importantly, when we have candidate messaging, we’ll mock it up into a sample webpage and test it with customers to get their unvarnished feedback.

From here, we’ll iterate and adapt to what we learn.

The result? Product marketing that’s battle-hardened and customer-ready.