For a 100% “product-driven” company, developing its marketing is not always easy. Yet it is an essential step in the growth and development of the company. How can marketing manage to find its place when the product culture is particularly strong? Lucie de Antoni shares some keys for product strategy and marketing strategy to feed each other.
This is a frequent fault in BtoB companies – and in particular technology startups carried by engineers: marketing is not an immediate reflex. What matters above all is the technology or the product – whether SaaS software or a mobile application or for example. In these product-centric companies, the emphasis is therefore above all on innovation, technological quality and the performance of the product or service. The marketing function, when it exists, operates with generally limited resources and budgets.
The reasoning is simple: “What’s the point of ‘marketing’ your product if it is the best performing on the market? It will sell itself ” Yet things are rarely so obvious…
Remove the barriers to change
To find its place in a “product-centric” organization, marketing must, more than elsewhere, demonstrate its value and interest. It is therefore necessary to show pedagogy by raising awareness of the role and importance of marketing – without going into the details of the various mechanisms deployed – and to obtain the first rapid successes – the “quick wins”.
Often, the lack of marketing know-how in “product-first” organizations results in confused marketing positioning, poorly optimized expenses and sometimes a dispersion of forces. The room for improvement is therefore strong at the beginning, provided that you choose your battles and your priorities. Knowing how to communicate about your victories – small or big – is therefore key: increase in the number of visitors to the site, increase in the number of leads generated, highlighting in the press, etc. These are steps that make the service and the strategy grow. They should therefore not be underestimated.
But the biggest – and most time-consuming – struggle for newcomer marketing teams is often to break down the barriers to change to raise awareness of the importance of marketing across the entire organization. The challenge is all the greater when the product has always been “sold” without marketing, or with a marketing strategy reduced to its simplest expression.
Gather around a common point: the customer
Many consider that the primary role of marketing in BtoB companies is to support the sales forces, it is actually the opposite that should prevail: marketing reveals all its power when it is a driving force and gives commercial impetus. , especially through lead generation strategies. Marketing must also be used to feed the product teams by providing feedback from the field.
Indeed, product teams and marketing teams must have a common obsession: the customer – or more precisely the user. To develop the most relevant and useful functionalities, product teams have every interest in being as close as possible to their customers – by analyzing feedback from the implementation department or customer success teams, by collecting feedback or by testing upstream some features.
This obsession with the user is also in the interest of the marketing teams: by knowing the company’s customers and prospects as well as possible, marketing makes sure to highlight the good benefits of the product, to offer the most more relevant and to target the right acquisition channels, each time with the right messages.
Product and marketing teams therefore have every interest in exchanging regularly to feed each other with their knowledge of customers and the market. For example, marketing can inspire new functionalities through its knowledge of the field, while the product, thanks to its exchanges with users, can allow marketing to adapt its discourse to gain impact.
It is only by integrating the marketing strategy into a virtuous approach – product – marketing – sales – and by collaborating closely with the various entities of the company – from the product teams to customer service – that marketing will succeed in proving its value and to find its place in a 100% product organization.
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