Go-to-Market Strategy: Telling Your Product’s Story

Bringing a product to market is a lot like telling a story: you have to attract an audience, draw them in, keep them engaged and leave them wanting more. As a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Flashpoint, I use a variety of storytelling techniques to communicate the features and benefits of our new products to customers—and convert them from “casual readers” to loyal fans. Let’s take a look:

Know your audience and their needs

To craft a good product story, it’s critical to understand who you’ll be telling it to. It’s important to know who the audience is, what their challenges are, and how your product can stop, solve and mitigate the risks they face. But you also need to determine why the same product may appeal to a range of buyers. That’s where use cases come in.

At Flashpoint, we follow a use-case driven approach to determine who we’re targeting and why we’re targeting them. Our use cases include cyber threat intelligence, corporate and physical security, fraud, insider threat and vulnerability management. With this approach, I can shape the messaging to market our products to different teams, at various sized organizations, in dozens of industries. It’s sort of a “choose your own adventure” story instead of a “one size fits all” narrative.

Break your approach into “chapters”

Like any good story, your go-to-market approach will unfold as a series. Here at Flashpoint, we use a phased approach to bring products to market, using a checklist to make sure we have the critical elements covered every step of the way:

• Chapter 1: We start by nailing down the use cases and problems we’re solving—and detail how the product will address these challenges.
• Chapter 2: Once we’ve signed off on the product proposal, we build the product and launch a beta, testing to make sure the product fits the use cases, works as we anticipated and addresses customer pain points.
• Chapter 3: In this phase, we put marketing in charge of the messaging and campaign strategy, educate sales and focus on internal enablement and alignment.
• Chapter 4: With the crucial elements in place, we release the product to the market and continually track KPIs.

Set your story apart

Articulating the ROI of your products is paramount—and competitive research plays an important role. For us, that means doing research to understand the positioning of our company and products within the market and ensuring that our offering is clearly differentiated. 

Remember that less is more

When you’re crafting your marketing materials, keep in mind that your reader’s usually looking to get a job done as quickly as possible. The Flashpoint team follows this advice by using graphics, shortlists of tips and tricks, annotated screenshots or videos instead of paragraphs of copy to relay our key points. This helps showcase the product and keep our users engaged.  

We’ve also moved away from inundating our customers and prospects with emails. Instead, we educate our customers via our platform to showcase new features and releases and drive engagement. And finally, we work hard to cut the fluff in the language we use. Your users can spot marketing “talk” a mile away, so it’s important to speak in clear, concrete terms using words that resonate. If you need a sanity check on language and messaging, your product manager will have the answers.  

Review, revise, repeat

The best stories are edited and rewritten, again and again. The same holds true for bringing a product to market. To get the feedback you need, release your product internally first to ID and eradicate any bugs, making sure you have budgeted ample time for this process. And, as I mentioned above, consider doing a beta before you release the product externally. Being very critical of your product will help you home in on where your product works best, as well as what modifications are needed before you share your product story with the world.

Olivia Henderson, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Flashpoint

Olivia Henderson leads Product Marketing at Flashpoint where she focuses on the go-to-market strategies for all products, services, and data integrations.

Previously, she led marketing for a cyber threat intelligence managed service, overseeing all strategy development, planning, and execution of full-scope marketing and communications content development to increase brand awareness, drive sales, and revenue growth.

Prior to her work in product marketing, Olivia was an intelligence analyst focusing on Latin America, conducting research and analysis of emerging threats within the region. Olivia leverages over 8 years of experience in risk intelligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), marketing, and product go-to-market strategies.

Olivia holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS) in International Politics with a concentration in International Security from Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and a Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Integrated Marketing and Communications from the School of Continuing Studies, Georgetown University.  

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