Let’s face it, no two product marketing jobs are the same. Consider this random selection from current product marketing job descriptions:

• “In this role, you will work with others in marketing to establish compelling product positioning & messaging.”
• “Responsible for the cross-functional success of large projects and product launches—with a strong bias toward operational and organizational excellence.”
• “You’ll own the marketing strategy and product marketing campaigns for all business lines.”
• “…will be responsible for growing our customer base and understanding their needs.”

As you can see, the job descriptions are all over the place. The ideal candidate for one role might not thrive in another, given the distinct priorities each role demands.

The many faces of product marketing

Honestly, product marketing varies significantly across different organizations. This variability makes many product marketers akin to a Swiss Army knife, adaptable to any and every need—and believe me, the needs are plentiful. One day, you might be crafting customer communications for a crisis; the next day, you could be issuing a press release for a major new product launch, or even tweaking sales collateral over a single word difference.

I view product marketing as a gap-filler. In early-stage companies, these gaps are numerous. In more mature companies, the gaps narrow, filled by PMMs with specialized roles such as competitive intelligence or customer marketing, or by other teams like dedicated sales enablement, go-to-market strategy, or product operations.

Perhaps you’ll choose to specialize in areas like competitive intelligence, sales enablement, product-led growth, solution marketing, or another emerging niche within product marketing.

However, for the majority of PMMs, you’ll develop as a generalist. But to develop as a T-shaped marketer, you must identify where to dive deep—to advance your career and deliver the greatest value to your employer.

So, just like the job description examples above, should your focus be on positioning, crafting marketing campaigns, delving into customer insights, or leadership skills required to drive the product forward?

I’m going to give you my top three priorities that I think are most important to develop skills, experience, and confidence in as a product marketer.

Understand the customer…

First up, you need to develop the strongest skills and undeniable prowess at reading the room (i.e., your customers and the market).

I don’t just mean being able to fake up a persona doc (because, don’t forget, you should be discovering personas), or because you can run a customer interview. In order to understand the customer, you need to truly become the customer.

Building empathy will help you walk in their shoes. Watching sales calls will help you learn how to react to your positioning and sales pitch. Evaluating their buying journey means you’ll see the market from their perspective. Experiencing the product through their eyes (and support tickets) will give you unique context on their aspirations and frustrations.

But that’s the art side—don’t forget the science part too. Knowing your win/loss numbers, testing positioning accurately, and how to orchestrate your CRM data will give you unique insights and help you keep your finger on the pulse of your market.

… then build collaborative loops internally…

Here’s an unfortunate hard truth.

Unless you can establish effective, two-way relationships within your organization, the deepest customer insights won’t translate into successful outcomes. You could be a customer savant, but still struggle unless you can turn that knowledge into influence and execution.

Building these loops means creating continuous, robust channels for communication among marketing, sales, product, and customer service teams. It means sharing two-way honest, raw insights in the pursuit of growth.

Sharing insights, challenges, and successes regularly ensures everyone is on the same page and has the opportunity to share their unique perspectives – whilst also learning (from you, amongst other inputs) how the market is reacting. It’s about making sure that every team member understands their role in the go-to-market strategy and feels integral to both the process and the outcomes.

This isn’t just about coordinating projects. It’s about crafting a symphony of skills and knowledge that raises the entire organization’s ability to deliver on the promise of your product. That means tight relationships with every level; slightly playing politics, but mostly being true to the only person that matters (your customer, if you had to ask).

…before bringing the product to market.

Your GTM hinges on your ability to combine the first two priorities with a strong external marketing strategy. That is, how quickly and how well you work from insights, through influence, to execution.

I’ve made this mistake. I see many PMMs across businesses making this mistakes too. Too much work happens in the dark, and as we all know, plants grow best when exposed to sunlight.

Good product marketing means marketing the product. You need to go from a realization, to socialization, and finally implementation in as short a timeframe as possible (ideally in two weeks, not two months).

Some external product marketing launches will need the whole shebang from press releases to teaser marketing and the kitchen sink. Some will need minor tweaks to the website and some sales enablement. Either way, every thing you ‘launch’ into the world should be something you’re proud of.

A big part of this is positioning, messaging, and your website as the shop window. These should be closely integrated as part of your priorities above, as they provide metrics that directly correlate (through lead-gen, conversion, and sales win rates) to the impact and influence of your product marketing role.

PMM is the chameleon of marketing

As a lifelong product marketer, I’m biased… but product marketers are the most capable people I’ve ever worked with.

Product marketing is crucial, but nobody really understand why. It’s multifaceted, but often underestimated. It’s strategic, but can be seen as tactical. It’s about leading change, but also about ensuring consistency. It’s visionary, yet grounded in the day-to-day realities.

By keeping these three priorities—understanding the customer, fostering internal collaboration, and mastering market strategy—at the top of your agenda, you can’t go wrong. Commit to these priorities, and you’ll navigate the complexities of product marketing with confidence and effectiveness. No matter the challenges that come your way, developing intuition and expertise will ensure you remain agile and impactful in your role, continually driving your product—and your career—forward.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build positioning, messaging, and narrative that is memeable.

And I don’t mean putting your positioning statement over an image…

Or coming up with a quirky tagline to fit in a meme like this one…

But I bet that, regardless of whether you’re extremely online or not, you instantly understand these memes.

You know when these are used, how they’re used.

The emotions they’re conveying.

You’ll know the format of the text that should go over the images, even without seeing them before.

And what’s more, you’ll share them and maybe create them yourself. You can share ideas, emotion, logic, and pretty much guarantee a reaction – with just an image of a cat.

You need to do the same for your positioning.

The essence of your positioning needs to transmit all the same things: the idea, the vision, emotion, targeting, and a reaction.

The goal is for those who hear your positioning to understand it, to embody it, and to transmit it onwards.

To grasp the idea, for it to stick.

And, as the definition of positioning says, to ‘occupy a space in the mind of your customer’.

But, JDP, how?

I honestly think it’s pretty simple, but it needs dedicated effort – and an understanding that positioning is an evolving journey.

1. Define a niche group of target customers
2. Talk to them – understand what their lives are like
3. Find the patterns that exist in their jobs, pains, gains, and triggers
4. Connect the dots between the value they want, and how your product helps them
5. Define a heart-and-brain narrative based on unconventional wisdom
6. Test it, and see what feedback is like

In my free Customer Value Positioning framework, you’ll see that I focus on defining the heading and paragraph that exists in your website homepage hero section.

This is, without a doubt, where your memeable positioning needs to work the hardest. As soon as someone lands on your site, they’ve gotta ‘get it’. Fully, deeply, instantly without delay.

So experiment with the language you use. It’s so easy to fall back to boring professionalspeak that ultimately says nothing.

You want your customers to understand innately, to feel something, to be motivated, to feel urgency… so your language has to reflect that.

What to avoid

I don’t think you can build memeable positioning that:

• Has been crafted internally, without basing on hard evidence from your target customers
• Focuses on features and benefits, instead of value
• Is broad and untargeted – remember, it’s better to be the thing for someone rather than something for everyone
• Doesn’t use the same language your customers use
• Isn’t focused on your customers – you need separate messaging for your PR pitching, for investors, for employees
• Isn’t connected to a part of their lives that they recognise – it must be connected to an aspiration, a fear, a thought they all have

Meme once, repeat ad infinitum

Really, memeable positioning is just good positioning.

And so long as it starts – and ends – with how your customers are living their lives, you’ll be on the right track.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Your pricing page is the second most important page of your entire website (after the homepage). It’s probably your second most highly-trafficked page, it can make or break someone’s decision to sign up for your trial or request a demo.

And unless you work at a large company with pricing analysts or deep pockets for expensive pricing consultancy projects, the design of your pricing page is probably going to fall down to two groups: product marketing, and brand design.

If there are no product marketers involved in your pricing page design, then what are you still doing here? Go and start collaborating on it now!

In an absence of direction, it can be difficult to know how you should think about the pricing page, let alone what should go on it.

Here are some of the core considerations that I’d think about when crafting a compelling pricing page.

What’s your pricing page hero heading?

Don’t just put ‘Pricing’ at the top of your pricing page. It’s a wasted opportunity to frame the rest of the page and set the scene for how you want potential prospects to interpret the dollar amounts that follow.

Take a look at these random samples from a selection of SaaS companies.

What do you notice?

Some are focused on their pricing being straightforward, simple, transparent. Start for free. No credit card required.

Others reiterate the value of the product. Build stronger relationships, organize your work, make teamwork more productive.

Others choose to highlight a combination of pricing and product value: everything you need, always know what you’ll pay.

Takeaway: Reiterate value

Hopefully, at this stage of your buyers journey, you know that buyers have questions they need to answer before they can move forward.

For some types of product, this might be something straightforward like “Is there a free trial?”, or “What’s included in the price?”, or “Is the product worth this price?”. It might be more complex, requiring your hero heading to elaborate on the specifics of your product, pricing, and value prop.

What should you call your product packages?

Most SaaS products will use a three-plan Good/Better/Best packaging structure, all increasing in price. Sometimes you’ll have a freemium entry tier too.

When developing these packages, we’ll stress for days on the dollar amounts but give little thought about the descriptive names that we’ll use internally and externally that almost everyone who engages with your brand will encounter at some point.

Generally, there a few options.

A ‘Good/Better/Best analogy’ approach will see you name plans in increasing levels of specialness, like:

• Silver, Gold, Platinum
• You can even get creative, like Freshdesk did with a nature-themed Sprout / Blossom / Garden / Estate / Forest

You may want to help users self-select a plan that’s right for them, like:

• Starter / Professional / Expert
• Team / Growth / Enterprise

Or maybe it’s about product capabilities:

• Support / Engage / Convert
• Inbox / Chat / Integrate

Takeaway: It depends (start with the customer-centric approach first)

Ultimately the names of your product packages will depend on the way your product is architected, whether compartmentalised by capabilities or if features can be accessed by different tiers of customers.

I recommend starting with the customer approach first – what will resonate with customers as they scan your site? What phrasing will they self-select as?

What plan should we highlight?

This isn’t even a question – the real question is, which plan to highlight?

Adding a border, additional coloring, or badges can help a plan stand out. Usually, you’d use this to highlight the plan that most customers will select – the one that should catch their eye.

But it doesn’t have to be. You can experiment with placement, and depending on the intention of your design, highlight other plans that impact the perception of others.

Take Zendesk’s pricing page for example. They’ve highlighted their Suite Professional plan as an anchor, their highest page. Your eye is drawn there first. £79! Does that mean the £39 plan or the £65 plan is actually a great deal? I think so.

And now Asana: their £9.49 plan feels like an absolute steal compared to the £20.99 plan.

Takeaway: It’s all about perception

Unless your TAM is extremely small, we’re thinking about visitors in groups of thousands. What is going to have the biggest impact on the majority of visitors? Not edge-cases; the broad strokes of normal folk that visit your site.

All you can do is create multiple variations, and test in-house to see how they feel. Pricing is just as much as art as it is science.

The big one: to price, or not to price?

It really annoys me when I see Twitter and LinkedIn influencers trashing companies for not publishing pricing on their pricing page.

In my opinion, it’s 100% acceptable to have ‘by application only’ pricing on your website. If your customers are comfortable with that.

In an oft-quoted trope, customers that have small budgets will sweat the small stuff, bargaining over $5 discounts. Smaller customers are more likely to want – NEED – pricing on your website to decide whether they continue to evaluate or not.

More mature businesses usually move slower. They don’t make rash decisions. Budgets are larger (but not unlimited) … but everything can be negotiated. There’s a process for that. If the product says it does the right thing, we’re potentially interested. And so exact pricing is not necessarily required at the point in their journey in which they visit your pricing page (but they may want a ballpark figure in the discovery call).

Takeaway: It depends (on your pricepoint)

If your product is primarily self-service, then show pricing. If it’s mostly inbound-sales under $20k a year, show pricing. If it’s over $50k you’ll probably need to sell the value as well as the pricing structure, so don’t show pricing.

Of course you can always experiment. If you do show pricing, try ‘Pricing on request’ in place of a $ amount for your highest plan and see if you can eek out higher ACVs. Or if you’re already hiding pricing, try showing a ‘Starts at’ $ figure as a benchmark to set expectations.

Build, measure, learn

The last tip I can leave you with, is pricing is never done in a vacuum. Your product progress, sales skills, market landscape, the macro-economic environment, and whether Mercury is in retrograde can have a huge impact on how your pricing page is perceived by potential prospects.

Make sure you have a strong cadence to iterating. Put something out there, build a hypothesis for it. Measure the numbers, review the metrics. Make inferences, get feedback. Try again. Good luck!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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It can be difficult to understand how all the product marketing puzzle pieces fit together.

It’s a question that comes up often throughout our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. What’s the difference between an ICP and a persona? Is an ICP the same as the target market? How about positioning, narrative, and messaging – do you need one for each persona?

I personally found it hard to grasp all of these intangible elements. They often appear disjointed, especially when used by those without deep experience.

Here’s my attempt to show how I think all the core pieces of the puzzle fit together:

Breaking it down

The target market is the overall serviceable group of potential customers. Think “APAC fintech companies”.

Your go-to-market strategy encapsulates all the elements required to launch, sell, and market your product to the target market. This includes the. components listed below, as well as how your customers will buy (e.g. inside sales, product-led growth, etc) plus pricing and so on.

Your GTM strategy is based on your ideal customer profile, a niched definition of what a perfect customer looks like. We’re usually looking at a company or segment level.

Next we bring in your positioning and narrative. Positioning is about defining the space your business occupies in the mind of the customer. Narrative is the story you tell to your customers: why you exist, how you help, how their lives will be different. If you have multiple products and ICPs, these still need to make sense together as they explain your focus and priorities.

The ICP is the defined group of customers that you’re solving problems for. These are the customers that your sales and marketing team will focus on attacking to build traction. Think “Fintech startups based in India or Singapore, under $10m in revenue, over $10m in funding, using Stripe.”

Within each ICP, you’ll identify key personas. These are the people and roles that you’ll cater to in marketing and sales.

You’ll want to understand the buyer journey to craft a marketing and sales experience that has the best hit rate for turning those personas within your ICP into customers.

Finally, you can create stage-specific messaging along the buyer journey to drive prospects from problem awareness to purchase, activation, and expansion.

Over time, you’ll either expand your ICP to include adjacent customers, add additional ICPs to cover new segments, or pivot completely to a new ICP as you learn about your product/market-fit. This might require new/additional buyer personas (and therefore buyer journeys and messaging), or different go-to-market motions (for example, adding a self-service GTM).

Where’s best to start?

If you’re attacking a brand new business from scratch, I think it’s best to start by defining your ideal customer profile. From here, you can move down to deep-dive into the specifics of who’s involved and how you can reach them, and move up to build positioning and align the business around a go-to-market strategy.

What would you change?

I think every product marketer probably has a slightly different approach to connecting the dots and I’m excited to hear how you think about how the product marketing puzzle fits together. Drop me a note or comment below!

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I was a quasi-product manager for the activation and conversion experience at Kayako – everything from signing up for a free trial to the first payment was in my purview. This was pretty unusual: I was a product marketer with no product management experience.

Usually, product managers or growth marketers might have high-tech, data-driven ways of optimizing these experiences – but as a small team, we didn’t have data analysts, in-depth product tracking, or trained user researchers.

Instead, we relied on good ol’ research interviews, a couple of other tools, and an iterative mindset to go from low conversions to high growth. In this post, I’ll cover the main lessons that have stuck with me since then.

Before you go further, you might want to read From failed product launch to $2m ARR, where I talk about the challenges we faced as we turned a failed launch into growth momentum.

And of course, I’ll caveat by saying that these lessons were extremely relevant in our context at the time, and your mileage may vary.

The first-run experience is crucial

I highly doubt that your customer, when they sign up to your product free trial for the first time, goes in thinking “Wow, I can’t wait to get set up and configure my account!”

Most onboarding advice is focused on reducing your customer’s ‘time-to-value’, i.e. getting them to a point of success as quickly as possible. That might work well for some, but not for products that require a decent level of configuration.

At Kayako, our original experience was focused on setting up the account: adding an email address, inviting the team, and adding some rules. Customers ignored it, and it didn’t work.

Through interviews, we found that customers instead were still exploring whether they should commit time to evaluate the product any further. The first-run experience was not an evaluation: it was an evaluation as to whether they should evaluate.

With this insight, we moved away from focusing on ‘time to first value delivered’ and instead focused on ‘first value potential’.

As well as interviews, we used Fullstory to watch sessions of successful users in the product who converted. From here, we created a simple Trello board – what I now know is a basic job-to-be-done map! – that detailed the questions and tasks they would complete.

First, our customers needed to learn the product. Their goal was to understand what working in the product would feel like.

Unlocking this added so much value for us. It meant we could instead educate users on the value of Kayako, and showcase all our differentiated features in context of the problems they were facing.

As soon as someone signed up, we showed a two minute intro video, then we hit them again with three key points to drive the message home.

We added empty stages and dummy data that demonstrated the full range of capability, without requiring any setup. Our goal was to get to a place where users could see what working in the product was like from the moment they signed up.

Ongoing education

One of the most interesting things we found in our research, mainly through watching Fullstory sessions, was that most signups went straight to the admin area of the product.

Obviously, we hadn’t paid it any attention.

When we asked customers why, they said that they wanted to understand the product’s capabilities and features. But without seeing these in context, It was confusing, technical, and off-putting.

Could we convince them to go elsewhere? Absolutely not.

So we took the education to them instead.

Empty states

Empty states are placeholders, shown when there’s no data to display to the user. Rather than have empty space, we showed fun illustrations and added context to educate users on what would usually appear there.

Here’s a beautiful example from Shopify. When a customer on a free trial is browsing around the admin area, they see an eye-catching illustration with a great explainer of the benefit they can gain using this feature.

Dummy data

We needed customers to imagine what working in the product would really feel like. Random and incomplete juxtapositions of test data wouldn’t cut it.

We created our own fictional world, Brewfictus: a coffee equipment and supply retailer that had multiple customers and storylines – all built to showcase our product features in a seamless, organic fashion.

We didn’t just throw any old copy up – we put thought into the vibe we wanted our customers to experience, as if they were actors playing our script. We also used the same contexts in our demos, videos and images on the website, and in design mockups.

Did this help impact conversion? Not sure. But I hope it showed that we cared.

Nudge users to easy next actions

We found our customers would get distracted, clicking out of our guided tours to explore on their own, or just dropping off the session altogether.

This meant we struggled to get users to go through the entire experience in one sitting. And that’s fine: life happens.

We used our basic JTBD map from above to track the key events a user had completed, and then followed up with behavioral nurture emails. Rather than focus on the broad progress a user had still to make, we used urgency and simple messages to encourage users to complete one simple next step.

With a 14 day trial we could email users almost every day and always provide an actionable, low-effort next step.

Bringing it all together

Combined with our educational first-run experience, our context-sharing dummy data and empty states, and behavioral email nudges, we saw successful conversions increase within our trial period.

Even without dedicated data analysts, we were able to listen to our customers, understand what they were trying to accomplish, and build an onboarding experience around their needs.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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