Portfolio Marketing: Strategic Product Marketing at Its Best
Imagine earning a dollar every time you hear someone say, “we need to be more strategic.” You’d probably be lounging on a private island by now. Interestingly, portfolio marketing might just be your golden ticket to streamlined and effective strategic product marketing.
What is Portfolio Marketing?
Simply put, portfolio marketing involves strategies to highlight and market the overall value of your product portfolio to specific market segments, while also incorporating the marketing of individual products. The emphasis is on the strategic value of the entire portfolio, with individual products playing supportive roles.
The Problem with Traditional Product Marketing
When you market products separately and work in isolation, achieving maximum potential for strategic value becomes challenging. Working this way makes everything harder and less efficient. The combined strategic value of your entire portfolio far exceeds the value of individual products.
Moreover, marketing products individually, especially against best-of-breed competitors, weakens your unique selling proposition—your integrated platform that helps customers break down silos in their own businesses. When integrated well, this message resonates deeply with customers, reflecting their industry and business context.
Does Portfolio Marketing Stop Us from Selling Individual Products?
Not at all. In fact, it elevates the messaging for individual products. Portfolio marketing follows a top-down approach, leading with the strategic value of your entire portfolio, aligning closely with the priorities of your target customers. Each product is positioned to help overcome specific hurdles, making for a clear and relatable message for executives, department heads, and users alike.
Does Portfolio Marketing Change Our Messaging?
Yes, and it’s for the better—it simplifies and clarifies your communication. Traditional product marketing, which centers around buyer and user personas, often complicates things. It requires multiple versions of positioning, and overlooks influential figures like department heads, VPs, and directors. Additionally, not every product is inherently strategic; crafting strategic value messages for them can be misleading.
The Benefits of Portfolio Positioning
The real beauty of portfolio positioning is its simplicity. Whether you communicate value from the top down or bottom up, the narrative remains cohesive.
Top-down explanation:
– The portfolio helps customers improve their business by…
– Removing operational obstacles in certain departments with products that…
– Have features that make users significantly better at their jobs.
Bottom-up explanation:
– Well-designed features enhance users’ performance, leading to…
– Better departmental performance with products that…
– Enable the customer organization to execute strategies and overall business improvement through your portfolio.
Eliminating the need for personas, this approach relies on thorough customer discovery, making your messaging easier to create, understand, and repeat. This enhances your credibility with buyers since you’re speaking their language.
The Most Crucial Aspect of Strategic Product Marketing
The key to successful marketing and sales enablement is understanding that customers engage or buy because they believe you understand their market and operations, sometimes better than they do. Traditional product marketing tends to be tactical, focusing on individual products with limited strategic value. Conversely, portfolio marketing leverages the collective strategic value of all products, focusing on customer outcomes with measurable strategic benefits. Individual products serve as proof points within this broader strategy.
Product marketers, here’s an important takeaway: Spend more time collaborating with your fellow product marketers to amplify the strategic value of your portfolio. This approach yields better results with less effort and stress.
Explore more and learn the easiest way to master product management, marketing, presales demos, and customer success with hands-on learning. Check out our Product Management Framework, which uses customer outcomes as the foundation for building, marketing, selling, and delivering strategic value.
Additional Resources
– Product Management Courses
– Product Marketing Courses
– Pre-Sales Product Demo Courses
– Customer Success Value Skills Courses