Many people underestimate what it takes to be an effective product marketer. Not only do you need to wear many hats and keep a finger on the pulse of the market, but you also need to be a master storyteller, data analyst, and have the communication skills to continually prove the viability of your products (and marketing efforts) to stakeholders at each turn.
But here’s the good news; every product marketing challenge has a solution. In this guide, we will run through some of the common challenges that product marketers face and then give some quick tips and strategies on how you can overcome them.
Defining Your Go-to-Market Strategy
One of the first hurdles is figuring out how exactly to take your product to market. This means coming up with your:
- Ideal customer persona (ICP): Who is your product perfect for? Get ultra specific about their goals, challenges, and needs. This sounds simple but really defining your target customer is a challenge (yet critical). Conduct user interviews, analyze your top customers, and use the data you have at your disposal to build out detailed persona profiles.
- Total addressable market (TAM): How large is the opportunity to sell to your personas? Determine the maximum market size given your planned positioning. Study macro trends, analyst data, and growth trajectories to accurately size your TAM.
- Competitors: Who else serves your ICP? Discovering direct and indirect competitors guides your differentiation. Competitive intel should inform your messaging and roadmap prioritization. Set up alerts to track new entrants.
- Pricing framework: What pricing model aligns to your customers’ buying criteria? How much is your solution worth to your users? Model this out early and continue testing. Anchor to customer value over internal costs.
- Sales channels: Which routes to market—self-serve, sales assisted, partnerships—are appropriate to land your target persona? Evaluate your product complexity, deal size, and required sales touch points before finalizing GTM motion.
With that said, developing a comprehensive GTM strategy is not exactly a walk in the park. While coming up with a solid plan on your own is possible, working with an experienced product marketing agency simplifies the process and ensures your efforts are driven by a clear sense of purpose and direction. Not only will these digital marketing services make your processes easier to measure and monitor, but it will also allow you to benchmark and optimize your strategy as you go.
Creating Compelling Positioning
Now you need to craft a unique yet credible positioning for what you’re selling. This is crucial for breaking through the noise. You need to really nail your value proposition and key messaging. To do this, make sure that you are absolutely clear on:
- The problem being solved or need being met
- Defining product attributes and differentiators
- Proof points like ROI or customer stories that back up claims
- A resonant brand identity
The more clarity you have in positioning, the easier it’ll be for buyers to grasp your product’s promise and for your marketing to attract the right customers. Work closely with product, sales, and customer success teams to pressure test your positioning.
While this will require a significant time investment, creating an internal wiki including messaging frameworks, competitive differentiation, and FAQs is one of the best ways to ensure that everyone is aligned.
Driving Product Qualification & User Adoption
Congratulations—you launched your brilliant B2B SaaS product! But now too few users are signing on or showing high activation. Slow adoption is incredibly frustrating. Carefully evaluate metrics for conversion fall off points. Identify exactly where you’re losing potential users and double down on those areas, whether it’s:
- Clunky onboarding flow
- Confusing UI/UX
- Lack of proactive in-app guidance
- Overwhelmed users who don’t connect value to core workflows
Don’t be afraid to optimize and refine based on user feedback. Fight inertia and continually improve activation drivers through:
- In-app messaging to direct users
- Enhanced help center documentation
- Proactive live chat or in-app support
- User conferences and training certification
Creating systematic ways to continually qualify product value to new sign ups and guide them to first value is essential to compounding growth. Specifically, focus on driving product qualification early on through in-app interactive walkthroughs. Embed step-by-step guidance directly into key workflows. Make it extremely easy for new users to experience core value.
Pair this up with proactive behavioral triggers, like email or in-app notifications, when expected actions are not taken. Guide users based on where they are getting stuck. The more you can systematize steering customers to activation channels, the greater adoption velocity you’ll achieve.
Aligning Go-to-Market Priorities
Balancing your focus on brand building, demand gen, product marketing, and sales enablement is always a challenge in the B2B tech space, especially if you have limited time and resources. It’s easy to get sucked into reactive mode without proactively managing your priorities across the customer journey.
- Map out critical funnel stages from awareness -> consideration -> conversion -> loyalty
- Identify required deliverables to move users along each stage
- Conduct ROI assessments to guide activity sequencing
- Establish KPIs to track progress towards desired outcomes
Building alignment across teams on shared goals is crucial, but way easier said than done. It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a department and lose sight of the bigger picture. Sales cares deeply about leads. Marketing tracks campaign stats. Product is heads down building new features. Meanwhile, no one’s connecting the dots.
You’ve got to get everyone rowing in the same direction towards the things that are truly vital, or you’ll spin your wheels. Ruthlessly focus on the 20% of activities actually driving 80% of pipeline and revenue. This is Marketing 101, but in the word of real work chaos, those Pareto principle best practices fly out the window.
Overcoming Data & Analytics Gaps
As a data-driven marketer, product and market blindspots can severely limit your effectiveness. Key questions you want answered are:
- How are prospects interacting with our messaging?
- Where are users getting stuck trying to activate value?
- How should we be positioning against our competitive landscape?
But limited visibility into end user behavior means guessing versus gaining true clarity. Push past this by:
- Instrumenting your product experience to capture engagement data
- Building feedback loops with sales and customer success
- Creating a VOC program to gather direct user input
- Testing positioning regularly via surveys
- Building an analyst relations strategy
Don’t settle for poor visibility and flying semi-blind. The highest performing product teams have invested in data infrastructure to unearth real market truths that enable them to inform their strategies with eyes wide open.
Wrapping Up
As we have covered, product marketing comes with its fair share of challenges – but none of them are insurmountable. The key is to stay laser focused on delivering value to users first. Build your stack around understanding personas, mapping journeys, and continually qualifying product value. Make it simple for the right customers to activate. Do this while balancing longer-term brand building and messaging.
With the right vision and game plan in place, product teams can power through roadblocks to achieve product-market fit, scale new solutions, and help shape product categories.
