Product Marketing for B2B SaaS

Product marketing is a function that has been around for just about a decade. You’ll most likely see the job title Product Marketing Manager in the tech space. In this blog, we'll unpack the magic behind product marketing for B2B SaaS companies. 

Let’s dive in.

What is Product Marketing?

Internally, think of product marketing as an intersection between product (or sometimes just engineers), sales, and marketing. For a product-led company, customer success will also be part of the picture, too. 

Though it varies from one company to another, largely depending on the stage of the company and where the product lifecycle is, one key element in product marketing is go-to-market. 

Product marketers operate like a bridge between the product and marketing team, making sure your product is well understood by your target audience in terms of the problems it solves and how it solves them, so that you can successfully bring your product to the market.

Why is Product Marketing Important?

You may wonder–I already have my product and marketing team, why do I need a middle person standing in between? 

Product marketing is a critical function to help you scale your marketing efforts and promote your product in a strategic way, with regularly reviewed positioning and messaging targeted at your customers. When your product team is busy building features, having product marketers constantly engage in the customer feedback loop to communicate the user needs to the product team can give you great insights into what your customers love and what they don’t.

Without effective product marketing, even the most innovative products can go unnoticed. It's about creating awareness, generating interest, and ultimately driving conversions and customer loyalty.

B2B SaaS Product Marketing

In the realm of B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, product marketing takes on a strategic role in showcasing the benefits of the product to businesses. It's about understanding what your product does, and translating them into compelling value propositions that resonate with users and decision-makers.

Go-to-Market Strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan and roadmap for launching and promoting your product. For SaaS companies, product releases happen frequently, so it’s important to take a structured approach.  

Ideal Customer Profile

In the B2B context, especially if you’re a horizontal SaaS, defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can efficiently increase your trial-to-conversion rate and sales win rate. 

ICP should guide your marketing efforts toward the right audience. It involves defining characteristics such as industry, company size, pain points, and buying behaviors to target customers who are most likely to benefit from your offering.

Cross-functional Collaboration

Alignment is critical for successful go-to-market planning. For a product to successfully handed to the customer, the product marketing function will need to collaborate with the product team to know who’s the product (or feature) for, what pain points they are solving customers’ problems, and how it works. 

Oftentimes, product marketers work on a go-to-market strategy with the product team’s help as the latter owns the entire product strategy and knows your user personas the best. The collaboration with marketing is where the strategy is translated into go-to-market tactics and channel marketing strategies. 

Product marketing is in charge of creating sales enablement materials for your sales team to make sure they know where your product wins in the marketplace, and how it benefits your ideal customer. It’s also important to train your customer success team so for any launches, they are aware of how the features work and their limitations. 

One important facet of product marketing that often gets neglected when things get busy is data. It’s the best scenario when you have a data analyst on the team, so that you can work with them and your engineers to set up product analytics and campaign tracking. This way, you’ll have some baseline numbers to improve your strategy. But if not, there are no-code solutions like User Flow, User Pilot, and Pendo that are helpful for the product marketing team to gain insights into product usage. 

Develop a Product Marketing Strategy for SaaS Companies

Crafting a winning product marketing strategy requires a structured approach and attention to detail. Note that it’s not always a linear process. Here’s what I do when developing a product marketing strategy for SaaS companies. 

Research Your Competitors

Imagine you’re playing blackjack, how much would it help you play your hand if you knew what’s in other players’ decks? 

That’s why doing competitive research helps in clarifying your competitive advantage–what card you can play to win against your competitors.

You can start by gathering some information from review sites like G2, Trust Pilot, or Capterra. If you’re just starting out and haven’t figured out who your direct competitors are yet, I’d recommend that you go to the product category and sift through the list of companies within the same category. This is important for you to know which other companies in the same category are offering the same solution to the same customer segment, so you can narrow down your list to direct competitors. 

Then, you can go through the reviews to find out what customers like and dislike about your competitors’ products. Pay close attention to the dislikes, because those are potentially the pain points that you can step in to solve.

Other than reading reviews, you can also sign up for your competitors’ newsletters and their product trials. This will help you stay in the loop of their product updates and feature availabilities for your product roadmap planning. 

Document your findings, ideally in a side-by-side comparison chart so you can glance over for quick information. 

Identify Your ICP and Build Personas

You may not have all the data yet, but you can start piecing together the information you have. If your product is still at the early stage, you may have multiple use cases and customers across different industries that you can’t really find patterns yet. 

And it’s okay. 

Create a table with Use Case, Industry, Company Size, Pain Points, How Your Product Helps, and Persona(s) as the header of columns. Start jotting down the information every time you hop on a call with a prospect. 

Over time, a pattern will start to emerge. The key here is to know what not to pursue just yet, because you simply don’t have enough resources to go after every customer profile. 

If you already entered the mainstream market, refining your Ideal Customer Profile involves continuous learning and adaptation. Your CRM is a good place for you to dig into for ICP refinement. 

Use the reporting feature in the CRM to segment your customer data by industry, company size, use case, user personas, and annual contract value. 

Pay attention to the win/loss report, if you have a win/loss program at your company. If not, going through the notes of each paying account your sales team made is helpful to get qualitative data like what pain points they had when looking for a product like yours, and why they ended up choosing you. 

It's about leveraging data and insights so that you can tailor your product marketing strategy to address specific needs and pain points in your messaging.

Create Positioning & Messaging

Positioning can be done contextually, by framing your product in the context your customers can use it, or against your competitors, placing the focus on how your product can solve your customers’ problem in the ways your competitors can’t. 

Your positioning is the single source of truth for all your marketing materials. Once you have it, you can start crafting your messaging. 

Based on the unique values your product offers, you’ll create messaging that’s going to get your prospect to the problem space, understand why they need a solution and need to get it asap, how it helps them solve their problems, and most importantly, why they need to choose you but not other similar solutions in the market.  

It's about articulating what sets your product apart and communicating its value proposition in a way that resonates with your target audience.

Develop a Go-to-Market Plan

Now you have all the elements, putting together a go-to-market plan feels natural. Start this step from your go-to-market objectives. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? Is it to generate more revenue, retain customers, or increase your customer lifetime value? 

If you don’t know where you’re going, planning the tactics seems directionless, and you won’t know how to measure your success either. 

So, pick your objective first, and write down the measurable key results and related metrics in various marketing channels you plan to use. Don’t forget to set up proper event tracking on Google Analytics and the product analytics tools you use so you’ll have some numbers to measure your campaign performance. 

Conclusion

Product marketing is like the glue that brings together product development, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring your product's value shines brightly for the right audience. It's the secret sauce for growing your business in the B2B SaaS world, building relationships with customers, and driving that all-important growth. 

Ready to rock your product marketing journey and take your business to new heights?

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