What does great Product Marketing look like?

They say you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Well, one of the people I spend the most time with is three years old. My son, and the little guy is?obsessed?with sea creatures. We read about them, draw them, sing songs about them, and talk about them — a lot.

Modern, product driven marketing is being rethought right now. Smart companies are spending more time on product positioning and narrative design — with great success.?But there is still a lot of bad product marketing out there.?Even though we have better tools and processes to help. One big reason people fail is because they can’t connect the dots. They run ICP studies, do competitive intel, create positioning, and design their narrative.?But it’s all disconnected and weird.?B2B CMOs want to implement this stuff, but they can’t figure out who should do what and how the strategies and teams should work together.

To help, I’ve been trying to?visualize what great product marketing looks like?and how it works. The relationship between positioning, messaging, and story. How one feeds another and how to execute them so they bond. Guess where my mind went??You’re damn right — sea creatures.

Introducing - THE JELLYFISH MARKETING MODEL?

The Jellyfish is a visual representation of how great product marketing comes together.?

Why a Jellyfish??

The Jellyfish emerged from a whiteboard session. I was trying to visualize three ideas:??

1. Great positioning is the foundation to a great narrative. Without a well positioned product, it’s impossible to tell the right story. You can certainly tell a good story without positioning. But it’s a safe bet it won’t work how you hoped it would. A story without positioning communicates the wrong value, about the wrong product, to the wrong buyer. That is bad, no matter how good it is… if that makes sense.?

2. Great company or product narratives don’t just build on positioning, they bring it to life. Positioning at its best is a one page, internal only, google doc. But a great narrative can become a 500 page book, a 30 minute keynote, or a content strategy that carries on for a decade.?

3. You need meaningful research and data to build great positioning. I put a few of the typical data sources I use when building positioning, then drew some lines.?

After putting these on the whiteboard I stepped back and thought. “Hey, it kinda looks like a jellyfish.”

I recently sat down with Bobby Narang and we discussed the “jellyfish model” on his awesome podcast Growth Marketing Camp - listen here.

The Layers

Each section of the Jellyfish involves many teams, but also typically has a single leader. I went with “layers” over “sections” because of course there are layers of the ocean! Which, you guessed it, we learned about in the sea creature books. I’ll go through the layers starting at the bottom. Bottom to top is the order of operations if you’re trying to think about how you can put this to use.?

The Raw Data / Research Layer?

Positioning can be boiled down to a really powerful single couple of sentences. Ogilvy described it as “what the product does and who it is for”. All you need is enough words to answer that question completely (easier said than done). If you think that’s too simple to be effective you’d like April Dunford’s awesome book. She defines positioning this way?

"Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about."?

Either way you slice it, you need data and insights to do this well. What exactly is our product? Who can’t live without it? What alternatives do they have? Where is the product headed? If you don’t understand this stuff you cannot properly position a product.?

In my experience the right “lead” for this layer is your Product team. If we’re talking about a B2B software company, a PM is usually going to have a ton of this information for their specific product.?

If you’re looking to get started here is my “short” list of places to start:?

Ideal customer profile: What are the characteristics of the accounts that can’t live without your product? What customers are a bad fit? CS and Sales will also know this, but for many products. The PM has already talked to CS and Sales about their product.? This will always be a moving target but creating an ICP is a great exercise to help your company focus.?

Competitive intelligence: If you’re lucky you have a specialist in house who owns or it’s part of the Product Marketing teams scope. But for any given product your PMs are also going to know this well. They’ll know all alternatives too, not just other competitors in the market. Often the biggest “competitor” is just doing nothing.?

Market trends: What’s happening in your space? What new strategies are emerging? How is user behavior changing? What practices are going away??

Jobs to be done: What are the use cases or “jobs” that customers hire your product to do? Lots out there on the internet on this one but your PMs should know.?

Product data: How are people using your product today? What segments have a high NPS? What features are used most, which are ignored? Use a product analytics solution like Pendo.io here to get lots of quantitative data fast.?

Product roadmap: Where is the product headed and why? What’s the strategy? What’s launching this year? A deep understanding of the product roadmap is key to setting up the story you want. Product is going to know this best.?

Customer feedback: What do customers demand? What are they not talking about? Why??

The Product Marketing Layer

I’m a Product Marketer, I live and breathe this stuff (and sea creatures) if that weren’t already obvious. This layer is what you think of when you think of Product Marketing. For a strategy like the Jellyfish to work your CMO, CPO, and CEO need to believe in it or at least the idea of it. If all they care about is leads, it’s not going to happen. But it’s likely going to be Product Marketers who push it from an idea to reality and keep it going when it starts to lose momentum. That being said, this layer really starts with Product.?

75% of positioning happens as your Product Team works on a new feature. By the time that feature gets to Product Marketing it’s usually pretty well formed. PMMs might not love to hear this, but that’s a great thing. If this happens it means Product has defined a clear problem through customer discovery, and built a valuable solution that they’ve tested against customer feedback (not all product teams are good at this).?

I’m not going to go in-depth on Positioning and Narrative Design in this post. But I will share my go-to resources.?

Positioning: April Dunford is a great follow and re-wrote the book on Positioning. Read her book and figure out how to put her approach into practice. I used her book to create a positioning workshop that I often run my product teams through early in a product's lifecycle.?

Narrative Design: If we’re being boring and literal, Narrative Design (for business) is a storytelling framework. One that I created after years of struggling to crack the code on what makes a great B2B marketing story. But a narrative isn’t the same thing as a story. A story is something you tell your friends at the pub. A narrative is a way of looking at the world. It’s much bigger and more meaningful. The idea that your company should have one isn’t new. Every company has a narrative, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. Most companies don’t take the time to design their narrative. To craft it and use it as a weapon to help them succeed. If you’re interested check out the Narrative Design course I built with the Product Marketing Alliance .?

The Marketing Layer?

The biggest mistake I see most marketing teams is that the marketing tactics they deploy are disconnected. Disconnected from the product, disconnected from each other, and sometimes disconnected from reality. Smart people end up doing silly things usually in the pursuit of traffic or leads or just because they have run out of ideas. In practice this looks like blog posts, webinars, podcasts, events, etc, that are all over the place. The content may be "good" but because it's so disconnected from their product and ideal customer profile it has no impact.?

The companies that get it right, create connected marketing. Content and campaigns that are clearly tied to their product and the overall company narrative. This is where your narrative does some unseen heavy lifting. When your marketing tactics "emerge" from your larger narrative, they are connected. Not every single tactic tries to tell the complete narrative, but they were all born from it.?

Not to confuse you with another analogy but you can think of it like a tree. The trunk is the core narrative and the branches off are the little stories you might tell in a blog post or webinar on your website. They are all connected, but the branch can’t exist without the trunk.

Good Marketing that’s Bad?

I’ve talked a few times about this idea. It’s possible to do really “good” marketing that’s bad. Meaning — it’s well written, or creative, or captures leads, or interesting but disconnected and doesn’t help achieve your business goals. Marketing teams that take a more strategic approach to their product marketing, and think about how these strategies are going to work together before applying them will achieve greater success. I think the Jellyfish can help. When you step back and think about the idea of it, teams will understand how they are all part of a larger — connected — effort.?

If you think this is interesting or disagree with it or just want to talk about sea creatures connect with me on Linkedin and drop a comment. Thanks for reading.