The Product Marketing Manager: Responsibilities and Best Practices in a Technology Company by Lucas Weber

Author:Lucas Weber [Weber, Lucas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

In-Product Marketing

While marketing and sales material are great for attracting prospects and upselling to existing customers, in-product marketing is a wonderfully effective method for upselling.

My very first lesson about in-product marketing came while working at a company that centered all of its products around a central admin tool. This admin tool was responsible for storing licenses and usage logs for every one of the products installed on client machines which would call the admin tool to consume a license and generate a log whenever they were used. At one point, two PMs and I were on tour in the USA, visiting our largest customers. During one of these visits, I witnessed a user navigate to the Licenses & Logs page. What she saw on this page was a tab for each of our different products. When she clicked on the first tab (product), I saw that she had copious amounts of licenses remaining and had generated thousands of logs in the past month. However, when she clicked on any other tab, she was confronted with a blank space where the license and log information should be. These tabs contained no information because her company had not purchased or used any of these products.

What I saw here was a golden opportunity to sell the unpurchased products to her and our other customers. After the tour was over, I sat down for a chat with our Director of Research & Development and agreed that marketing those products inside of our admin tool could lead to increased sales. Together, we created a mock-up, which our UX team later implemented, in which each tab of unpurchased product would now include a brief description of the product, a link to a tutorial video, and a link to the product’s page on our website. Suddenly, we had a centralized admin tool that also marketed and sold all of our other products to existing clients. As a result, sales increased and we kept vigilant for other opportunities like this.

Development teams may also turn to the PMM to write and approve in-product instructions and tips; i.e., the best way to word a phrase or sentence within the product itself to make it as self-explanatory as possible. This can be a slippery slope that consumes more and more of your time. While you can play a large role in supplying the best in-product copy and instructions, it is better to work alongside other stakeholders such as the PMs or a technical writer who can spend more of their time handling the details so that you do not become derailed from your priorities.

Instead of doing it all yourself, partner with the PMs or technical writers to ensure that the same terminology used in the marketing and sales collateral is also used in the products themselves. This also applies to user manuals, online technical support articles, and other types of technical instructions and content. The actual writing of this content may be handled by other people in the organization but the PMM can make sure that what is written aligns with the same terminology that is used elsewhere.

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