1. Product Marketing is essential to launching and marketing your product
effectively and ensuring that your message of your product’s unique value
proposition reaches the right target market.
We’ve seen many mistakes made by Product Marketers as they attempt to
connect with their market. Here are the…
Mistake #1: Going After The Wrong
“Low Hanging Fruit”.
I think we’ve all been there in management meetings and product development
strategy sessions, where, as you begin the discussion about the best markets to
go after initially in order to test your product and gain some traction in the
marketplace, some executive pipes in: “yeah… that manufacturing and supply
chain segment is perfect. Our solution is perfect for their order fulfillment pains.
It’s the perfect “low hanging fruit”, it’s a slam dunk. We’ll go after this market
first then move on to our core strategic initiative”.
The rest of the room nods their collective heads. It completely makes sense.
Or does it?
Have you heard this before?
Yes. I think we all have.

2. Going after the “low hanging
fruit” markets, in and of
themselves is not a bad
strategy. In fact, often,
because they can often be
reached fast and with the
least amount of effort,
attacking those markets and
setting up beachheads in
order to go after bigger
markets could be a smart
move.
The important aspect to understand here is that just because a particular market
has a need your product or solution can easily solve, it doesn't mean it will
actually be profitable to chase it. In fact, those low hanging markets may
actually be detrimental to your business by delaying entry into your most
strategic markets; losing focus for your organization. In other words, as you
chase deals in these “low hanging fruit” markets, it may end up distracting you
from potentially bigger and more profitable wins in your key markets.
What organizations need to ask themselves first is if this “low hanging fruit” is a
stepping stone to bigger and better markets or is a diversion that will make your
company end up in dead-end drive, is this fundamental question:
What is our distinctive competency?
This means two things: what does our organization do better than any
other, AND, how does that manifest itself in our product or solution?
Organizations must understand what it is that they can do that gives them that
unfair competitive advantage and drives their product strategy and positioning.
Then, an organization must understand:
Which markets stand to benefit the most from our solution and our distinctive
competency? Is this market big? Is this market willing to pay for our solution?
Understanding this is absolutely crucial for long term positioning. It’s fine to go
after markets that are within reach with a solution but NOT if that market itself is
not going to be reference-able and leverage-able to bigger follow-on market
initiatives.

3. So as your start planning your first product launch of your “low hanging fruit”,
pause for a moment, and ask yourselves whether it’s the right “low hanging
fruit”.
Mistake #2: Too Much
Product Marketing “Blah Blah”.
How does the following sound to you?
“With personalized and flexible web integration options, our best-of-breed
technology can help you dramatically reduce the cost of operations and allow for
greater scalability towards meeting your customer’s self-service needs”.
What does this even mean?
I’m sure at some point some Product Marketing person looked at their product
and thought to themselves, “hmmm I think our product does allow you to pick
your own style…, so that’s personalization. And it definitely gives you choice on
how you want to embed it into our website, so that means its pretty flexible…
and…..if you measure things correctly the way we say, it does help reduce your
operation costs, so let’s leave that in there… and…”
I think you get the picture.
We’ve all used and heard of these terms before. Some call it “throw-away”
terms. Others call it generic. We call it “blah blah”, because to your buyer, that’s
what they hear and read, “blah blah blah…” similar to what Charlie Brown’s
teacher sounded like in those old Peanuts cartoons.
Here’s another example (borrowing from a well-known computer company):
“A lightweight, compact and portable audio device with large storage capacity.
Perfect for all lifestyles.”
How well did this product sell? Well, as of September 2012, it had over sold 350
million units. So glad you asked. Pretty well.

4. But we cheated here. This device wasn’t first introduced to the world with the
above description line, though, all elements of the product description itself are
factually true. The device was indeed a high storage audio device; it was light
and small and it did appeal to many consumers’ men and women, young and old
of all races and lifestyles.
This product was introduced in 2001 and it was introduced with this delightful
tagline:
“1000 songs in your pocket.”
We all know the company and product. The company was Apple and the product
was the iPod.
Instantly those words meant something to us,
it allowed use to imagine what the product
could do and how it might look in our hands
and the enjoyment and benefit that we could
get from it. It was brilliant, yet so simple. It
was brilliant because it was simple.
True simplicity is the ability to remove all the
noise and the clutter, the unimportant and
leave only what matters.
Your buyer is tired of reading the same
Product Marketing “blah blah” that is
pervasive in sales collateral. Reach out to
them with real words that mean something.
Something simple… and brilliant.

5. Mistake #3: Forgetting to Define the Persona,
Not Just the Target Market.
So you’ve sat down with your key internal stakeholders, senior managers and
decision makers. You’ve thought about the most appropriate target market for
your solution and you’ve decided on ….web designers and developers!
Your new SaaS-based Web Site Builder (WSB) is revolutionary. It’s going to turn
the entire web design and development vertical on its head and with some top-
down analysis, it looks like this is a billion-dollar industry and the addressable
market early on looks huge. OK – start building. Let’s get launch plans ready.
Let’s get some targeted messaging aimed at web designers and developers
created. Go!
Stop! Hold on!
Many product marketers, companies and organizations for that matter, make the
critical mistake of doing some rudimentary analysis on target markets –
comparing one market to another and deciding that one or a couple target
markets (or vertical industries) look more amenable to consuming our product
than others. While this may be true, there is a crucial next step that many
organizations forget to do.
And the next step is further identifying and creating personas of the end user,
the economic buyers, the influencers and other users who will be involved in the
Buy Cycle. Collateral, communication and sales tools created and written absent
these personas tend to be written too broadly rather than targeted for a specific
audience.
Your identification and knowledge of the user persona is going to help you build
your product to razor sharp requirements and with targeted and succinct
messaging. As you ask yourself such questions as: is this user technical or not?
What is it that they do on an hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis that your solution
will help with? What are their job duties and pains that they typically experience
in their work setting? What limitations do these users have? What are their
attitudes towards new solutions?
Your economic buyer has a deep and integral set of characteristics that you’d
need to fully understand in order to help them become aware of your product
and compel them through the sales cycle. Understand their behavior patterns,
goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to
make the persona a realistic character. And get detailed into the job profile, their
tasks, their job duties, their pains.

6. By taking the time to drill down to the persona level in a detailed way, your
ability to come up with great copy and clear messaging (and avoiding Product
Marketing “Blah Blah”) and your ability to connect with your target user is greatly
enhanced.
Mistake #4: Not Selling the Benefit and
Only Selling the Product (Features).
As you’re working through the product development lifecycle and whether you
interface with a technical product manager or if you wear both the product
management and product marketing hats, its easy to get caught up in what we
call “feature-land”.
Yes, you’re product is comprised of features and these features provide a bunch
of functionality and when you compare your features to your competition’s
features, you get all excited because your features are better than their features
and so when it comes down to crafting the message, creating the collateral and
formulating the positioning, its hard not to include a feature or two in your sales
tools.
This is where it takes discipline to stop and take a few steps back and look at
your messaging to your target market. Are you engaging a feature-war with your
competitor and trying to “out-feature” them? Is that thought process permeating
itself into your collateral? Or are you selling the benefit? The value? What they

7. can achieve through using your solution and how it impacts their daily
operations?
Don’t get us wrong. There is a place for a list of features in a piece of collateral.
It’s a called a Data Sheet and it's an appropriate piece of collateral for a
particular buyer at specific point in the sales buy cycle.
Other than that, features are just a means to an end.
We encourage you to do something that we call: “take your solution away from
your prospect”.
If your solution was at one point in the hands of your customer, but it was taken
away, how would their lives be impacted? Does your solution make it harder for
them to invoice customers through the online site? Does your solution make it
impossible to track the number of activations originating from a social media
property?
What is it that your solution allows your customer to do most efficiently or cost
effectively or more profitably, that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do?
Once you've identified what this is, then that is what you market and sell.
Mistake #5: Not Knowing How to Leverage
and Measure the Impact of Social Media.
Most of the Product Marketers that we’ve seen don’t use Social Media in their
daily professional activities. And if you asked how Product Marketing should and
could leverage Social Media, they’ll often give you a blank stare as if you’re
talking nonsense.
Parts of this blame lies with companies themselves as many companies have
plunked Social Media responsibilities into a corporate marketing function. So this
results in Product Marketing continuing to use the old and tired tools in order to
communicate their message, build the product awareness and build customer
community. It means Product Marketing still tends to rely on the same limited
sales channels, beta programs and user groups that they’ve always used. And
the bad news is that these channels and groups are becoming more and more
irrelevant to influence buyer behavior.

8. Even for B2B corporate buyers, peer-to-peer influence is the single-most
important piece of “information” that will help them in the purchase decision. It’s
why they often ask for customer references right before they are about to make
the purchase.
And there is more than just one kind of peer. There are their peers in their
vertical (say health care vs. technology vs. finance), their peers by profession (a
fellow marketing research analyst or a business process consultant) and their
peers by shared business pains (I want to be able to sync customer data from
my customer relationship management system to my accounts receivable system
and I want to know how others do it).
Social Media is just another tool, but it is and should be the single-most powerful
communication tool in the daily activity of any product marketer. Whether it’s
Twitter or Facebook for building customer communities and fostering the growth
of customer advocates, whether it’s YouTube channels to create viral excitement
of new branding and product development, Social Media is the perfect customer
response/customer community-building channel.
According to a study from Pew Research (2011): “nearly 60% of Americans
research a product or service online prior to purchasing and almost 25% of them
will leave some kind of online comment regarding the purchase”. That’s a lot of
influence by your peers happening.
Another challenge for Product Marketers is that they fail miserably at measuring
the success of their posts and comments, their content and their programs.
Simply getting Followers or getting Likes is not good enough and in it of
themselves, not the end goal.
Product Marketers need to be
measuring the captivation and
evangelism levels of their
programs, namely, measuring
things like the number of
comments or replies they get on
their posts or tweets, counting the
number of shares and re-tweets
they receive, and the number of
likes, +1s, and favorites they
receive on individual posts*.

9. These are the metrics that matter. These are the metrics that measure your
community engagement.
So to summarize these are:
Conversation Rate = # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post
Amplification Rate = # of Retweets/Shares Per Tweet/Post/Video
Applause Rate = # of Favorite/+1s/ Likes/Clicks Per Tweet/Post/Video
And Social Media, done correctly, adds to your organization’s bottom line. So this
also means measuring conversions.
It is crucial that Product Marketers, the owner of the message and the
positioning of the product or service in a typical company, master Social Media in
order to leverage this new channel, measure its effective and ultimately drive
sales and conversions leading to success. It’s not easy and it takes a lot of effort.
But if you do this right, your customers will be your best sales evangelist that
money can’t buy.
*Credit to Occam’s Razor for the use of these metrics.
Mistake #6: Not Fully Understanding
the Sales Buy Cycle.
I think at some point all Product Marketers need to try Sales. Because if they did,
they would appreciate and understand their prospect’s Buy Cycle, and then be
ready to deliver the marketing programs, and produce the sales collateral and
tools that match the needs of what the prospect is needing to hear at each stage
of the cycle.
Depending on who you ask, most sales and channel practitioners will agree that
there are four distinct stages in the customer buy cycle.
These are the following:
1. Awareness. Most prospects don’t even realize that they have a need or a
pain until somebody or some business points it out to them. For example,
you don’t realize you have a need for an email marketing campaigns tool until
your business colleague tells you about how easy it is to send out scheduled
formatted targeted emails to your base, something that always takes you
hours and hours to do manually.

10. Info-graphics, topical webinars, SEO on key terms and engagement in social
media channels are perfect building the awareness needed to draw prospects to
your business. Social media in particular should be leveraged to build a mass of
evangelists who will communicate the message for you on your behalf.
2. Research and Evaluation. Prospects start evaluating your offering versus
those of others and figuring out through conversations (and being told) what
features are mandatory and what features are optional. And then try to map
it back to their business needs to start ranking the solutions.
Your prospect is looking for product guides and in-depth content like
whitepapers. With attention spans decreasing everyday it seems, product videos
or setting up YouTube channels with short 30 second to 2 minute videos can
help your prospect in the evaluation process.
3. Purchase.
The prospect has made the
decision to purchase but is
constantly looking for information
that re-enforces the decision to
buy.
Unless you’re dealing with the
bleeding edge buyer, most buyers
want to know that others like
them, with similar needs and
goals, have bought your solution or a solution like yours. And even the bleeding
edge buyer wants to belong to a community – a community of bleeding edges.
Regardless, set up customer forums in Facebook, post great content about
customer success stories, create customer case studies, and encourage
conversation and engagement. Your prospect will feel that they are joining a
“family”.
4. Post-purchase. We’ve all heard of Buyer’s Remorse. The customer now is
looking to be supported and looking to build strong long-term relationships
with your company. They need more help here to strengthen the perception
that they’ve made the right decision.

11. Help them get through this period with strong customer sales support collateral,
helpful training videos, and more case studies of implementation successes and
options. And regardless of whether you win or lose the deal, following up with a
Win-Loss report will help you understand what worked (or did not).
Ultimately, you’re never going to have the perfect piece of collateral, blog
content, video, or sales support tool to cover off all of your buyers that come
down the pipe. But it is essential that Product Marketer’s create the program and
processes to quickly build something that your prospect can consume with the
right calls-to-action to get them moving to the next stage.
If not, your Sales team will take it into their own hands to fill the product
marketing void and create their own. And if that happens, who knows what kinds
of message they’ll craft and what they’ll say to help close those deals.
Mistake #7: Not Continually Testing
and Refining Your Message.
If you’re not guilty of any the mistakes listed above, then congratulations! You’ve
done a fantastic job of zeroing in on your buyer and user in your target market.
You are fast on your way to developing a long-term product strategy. It’s now a
matter of executing and creating that simple, yet succinct message that will
resonate with all your key audience members along the buy cycle.
Done! Your job is finished and now you can put your feet up and see the deals
start coming in watch as your product gets used by thousands, if not millions of
users worldwide!
Well, if product marketing were this easy, there wouldn’t be a need for
companies like us.
In most organizations, Product Marketing is responsible for creating the
messaging that is associated with any product or solution. This includes and is
not limited to the tagline, the elevator pitch, the message on the differentiators,
the main features and benefits and the positioning of the unique selling
positioning.
And as more applications move to the web in a SaaS or cloud model, it’s a no-
brainer to keep testing, testing and testing.

12. For instance, test your landing page for your
offers; see which landing pages generate the
most downloads of your latest white paper or
your product video. Test your headlines, your
content and even the special offer itself.
Many organizations use Google PPC (Pay Per
Click) as a way to generate leads. PPC is the
perfect avenue to A/B (split test) your message,
your value proposition and any other data point
by teasing out and testing solution benefit #1 vs.
solution benefit #2 to see which solution benefits
resonates more with your target audience.
If you are adopting a messaging used by a
previously regime, all the more reason to test
and do your own analysis – don’t let it become a
matter of opinion.
Make it a matter of fact, data and reporting!
And a bonus one…
Mistake #8. PowerPoint Bulleting
Me To Death.
We’ve added this one in as a
bonus because we all know that
as Product Marketers, creating
PowerPoint decks are part of our
DNA, whether it be for our own
presentations or for making sales
decks to be used by our sales
channel.

13. And the worst thing you can do is to create a 30 slide- bullet-point laden slide
deck for a 30-minute product presentation. It’s the ultimate sleeping pill that only
a poor insomniac can appreciate.
Studies show that the average
human only has an attention span
of about 10 minutes for
presentations. After that their
minds will start wavering. They’ll
be thinking of what restaurant to
get take-out from for tonight’s
dinner or the amount of laundry
that’s piled up at home.
In order to keep their attention, follow these golden rules for PowerPoint
presentations:
First off, no bullet points. I’ll say it again, this time in caps: NO BULLET
POINTS. Unless it’s meant to be a “throw-away” slide that lists a whole bunch
of stuff that is not meant to be actually read but more meant to be just a laundry
list of…”stuff”, do not use bullet points. Instead, use thoughtful, creative and
zippy language and limit yourself to about 5 or 6 words per phrase, and keep the
number of phrases to no more than three per slide. Three is the magic number.
Secondly, use vivid images, photographs, and visuals. Talk about the benefits
and talk about the value while capturing your audience’s attention with a visual
that encapsulates the message you are trying to convey. Is a picture worth a
thousand words? On a PowerPoint slide it sure is.
Thirdly, as a rule, use a 2:1 ratio for presentation time to the number of slides. If
you are on for a 30-minute segment, the maximum number of slides you should
have is 15. For a thirty-minute presentation, 10 slides will work just fine. Instead
of rifling through a slide a minute, take time to show your visual, make your
audience think and reflect on your key phrase and most importantly, talk and
create a story and meaning behind your slide. Insert a short video, do a quick
demo and keep your presentation hopping along.
And finally, keep your language simple. As we’ve mentioned before in this paper,
keeping things simple is not easy. In fact, it’s very, very difficult. Often we have
to restrain ourselves and look at ways of reducing the amount we want to say.

14. And in the end, we use a lot of meaningless jargon that just bores our audience
leaves them thinking of a million other things, none of which is what you happen
to be talking about at that time.
Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electrics once said, “Insecure
managers create complexity”. Product Marketers should look to exude confidence
and security: speak and write simply.
We hope you enjoyed reading this.
Take care and remember to keep things simple!
Created by Dean Ara, Product Marketing Professional, 2013
From Beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia