Implement an Effective Product Marketing Action Plan

Case Study: A fast-growing technology company gets clear on its product marketing process and builds their marketing engine

Situation: A fast growing technology company developed a cutting-edge mobile product but hadn’t documented any information about it – nothing official on how it was used or what it looked like or what the product features were. Everyone inside the company knew this information, but it was all in their heads. This made version control very confusing. As well, the lack of documentation made it impossible to develop marketing or customer messaging.

Task at hand: The first thing we did was to acknowledge that everyone in the company was walking around with various bits of information about the product and service in their head. They’d talk to each other and agree with what each other knew, but little of it was written down. Talking to each person was like discovering many more miraculous things this product could do. We agreed to do a massive interview session with everyone to document everything everyone knew about the product.

Action taken: This is where we started with the product marketing action plan. We interviewed each person starting with the W5 questions (who, what, when, where, why) and then asked them to install the product then show us how to use it, then trouble shoot problems that came up during this process. We found some discrepancies in the understanding of the product capabilities, and too we learned so many more amazing things about the product.

Results: Within a short period of time we had complete technical documentation, product documentation and user manuals. We then developed the marketing messaging and were able to produce the marketing materials (website, datasheet, case studies, packaging, sell sheets, sales presentations). An additional benefit of this process was that each person in the company was enthused by and supportive of the marketing efforts, as they had literally helped write them.