The Grithaus Guide to Transformative Product Marketing

Bea Alonso; Advisor and Strategic Consultant

For any business today, excelling in the marketplace goes beyond having a great product. A solid product marketing strategy and an expert team to execute it are equally important.

You may be wondering: what exactly is product marketing? And how is it different from corporate, content, or digital marketing? As defined by the Product Marketing Alliance, "Product marketing is the driving force behind getting products to market - and keeping them there. Product marketers are the overarching voices of the customer, masterminds of messaging, enablers of sales, and accelerators of adoption."

Your organization may already have a product marketing team in place, or this mission may just fall within the wider marketing and communications strategy. Having worked with dozens of technology companies over two decades, our experience shows that product marketing often doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's either not properly cascaded throughout the organization or fails to permeate the company's messaging, media relations, and thought leadership content.

Enter Grithaus, the perfect ally to help you flawlessly integrate your product marketing strategy with your company's overarching message. Our team has substantial expertise delivering product marketing for some of the key technology leaders in the industry, with a track record of helping businesses define their offerings, gain internal alignment, and refine their overarching company message. 

After working with our product marketing team, many of our customers have noticed a significant impact in how their offerings are perceived both internally and externally. This includes empowering their staff to effectively communicate the advantages and unique selling points of their solutions, gaining interest from high-profile analysts and trade press, and receiving prestigious awards. Ultimately, collaborating with Grithaus to define their product marketing strategy empowers our clients to position themselves as industry leaders and helps them attract new customers.

Here’s what our approach to product marketing and sales enablement typically looks like.

1. Aligning Your Offering With Your Audience

A well-defined product marketing strategy aligns product development with buyer needs, ensuring effective reach and preventing even the best products from missing their market potential. An expert team is necessary to execute this strategy, as they possess the skills and knowledge to understand the market, craft compelling messages, and use the right channels to reach potential customers. In addition, an external partner will help you distinguish your messaging so it rings true with customers - product teams, who become so intimately involved in every detail of product development, often lose sight of the bigger picture that will resonate with their customer.

This combination of a great product, a solid product marketing strategy, and an expert team to execute that strategy is what ultimately drives success in the competitive marketplace.

Whether you have a product marketing team or need extra support for your strategy, Grithaus will first endeavor to understand your unique needs and goals. Then, together with your stakeholders, we’ll develop a winning strategy that aligns with your company's overall message.

2. Defining Your Product / Solution / Service

Once goals are clearly agreed upon, we start by creating comprehensive Solution Briefs. These are internal-only, highly detailed documents that help our clients define their offerings (whether a product, a service or a wider solution), in a clear, concise manner. The briefs guarantee alignment both across your organization and with our team at Grithaus, serving as the foundational cornerstone for sales enablement, future campaigns and content creation. 

Each solution brief is carefully crafted to clearly highlight your value proposition, starting with an elevator pitch that captures the essence of your offering. Briefs outline your unique selling points (USPs), features and benefits, market context, and competitive analysis. Once approved by all stakeholders, these documents enable our collective teams to confidently and effectively promote your offerings. Below are some of the immediate benefits introduced by well-aligned solution briefs:

• Keep teams in the know: All teams work with the latest information, minimizing repetitive phone or email updates and removing barriers to productivity.

• Quickly iterate on additional content: Empower Grithaus content and digital marketing teams to quickly and easily create impactful materials such as blogs, bylined articles, white papers, lead generation content, social posts, and more.

• Significant time savings: With Solution Briefs powering our marketing and communications efforts, we’ve found content to be 90% on-target in the first draft, reducing review and approval to a single cycle.

• Keep content fresh: Easily update briefs through quarterly checks, ensuring new content opportunities are identified.

Ultimately, solution briefs enable your sales and marketing teams to all "sing from the same sheet" and feel confident they're leveraging the company's latest messaging. 

3. Crafting Your Overarching Story

Having clearly defined your company's offerings, the Grithaus product marketing team can now work closely with your team to jointly define your overarching company message, through a collaborative process that includes workshops, market research, and review cycles. The final result is a messaging brief that includes the company's values, mission, vision and offerings, often drawing from the key messages from each solution brief. This clear, concise, and well-defined company message empowers your sales team to present a consistent, compelling story to prospective customers.

4. Rolling Out Your Story

From this point forward, the Grithaus team is perfectly positioned to create an array of valuable content, such as compelling website copy, engaging blog posts, and lead-generation resources such as downloadable playbooks - all drawing from the solution briefs and core messaging. Furthermore, we offer comprehensive support to empower your key stakeholders, ensuring they can communicate this messaging with precision and impact. This is achieved through a well-planned sales enablement strategy and targeted media training, tailor-made to meet the unique needs of your organization.

We’ve successfully implemented our product marketing program for a diverse array of clients, ranging from global media services organizations to smaller players looking to gain aircover and boost their lead generation efforts. Our unique approach to product marketing has yielded remarkable results across the board, leading to increased visibility and improved sales performance.

Ready to Reap the Benefits?

At Grithaus, we focus on helping our clients craft their pathway to success. And we'd love for your business to be our next success story. If you're ready to explore the potential impact that a solid product marketing and sales enablement strategy can have on your sales and marketing performance, let’s discuss today!