MarTech Interview with Reshma Iyer, Algolia’s Head of Product Marketing and Ecommerce

Product marketing is an essential element in the overall marketing ecosystem; but what does it really take to drive product marketing goals and effectiveness? Reshma Iyer, Algolia’s Head of Product Marketing and Ecommerce has some insights:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Reshma, tell us about your B2B tech journey as a marketer and more about your role at Algolia…

Having been in – and around technology disruptions – I’ve been fortunate to chart my path through subdomains in marketing and then settle into my sweet spot: product marketing. To a large extent this was influenced by new technologies and how they were applied to form solutions plus versatility in sales models (for example, specializations that emerged in marketing with the advent of SaaS). In short, I am a full stack marketer with a special corner for product marketing where I’m able to straddle the world of product and marketing to deliver the right message with the right audience at the right time.

At Algolia, I lead Product Marketing for the e-commerce business. My focus is to help brands deliver exceptional AI-based Search and Discovery experiences for their customers. I’m equally passionate about engaging with tech and business personas.

What would you say are the five pillars of B2B product marketing?

• Storytelling & narrative development: How can you creatively and uniquely talk about the product and what it can do?
• Buyer persona understanding: Who is the economic buyer of the product and is that different from the practitioner getting deep on what they’re looking to solve? This may also look different by account size.
• Value prop & messaging: Crisply capture differentiating messages you’d want the audience to consume instantly and remember. What is going to want to make them buy your product and how is it different from competitors?
• Inbound product research & roadmapping: To keep the continuous cycle of innovation and staying relevant to your user base, understanding the evolution of customer needs and product feedback to keep improving is central to avoiding churn.
• Driving product adoption & growth: Supporting go-to-market motions geared towards product adoption and being able to track usage of features and capabilities to know where exactly a push is needed.

Take us through some of your most relied on marketing strategies and the martech that you’ve used to drive impact from them when driving product growth in a new market?

Bespoke messaging & experiences for enterprises – The complexities and needs of ‘whale sized’ businesses demands a unique approach. Account-based marketing makes it possible to deliver personalized experiences at scale, throughout the duration of a deal.

Community-based learning and advocacy – The notion of  independent learning serves for convenience. But when you bring a group of users of your product together, the cross-sharing can result in nuances that are invaluable.

Driving adoption with lifecycle marketing – While this strategy has been around for sometime, it is sparingly (well) implemented. Today, CRM platforms make sophisticated lifecycle marketing a possibility. This is really powerful when accompanied with compelling content at the right product adoption milestones.

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When it comes to product marketing challenges that plague marketers today: what are the top few that come to mind and the top best practices you’d share for them?

1. Prioritization –

In an ideal world, product marketing needs to be an independent organization. This is critical to ensure the best outcomes are advocated company-wide and customer-first. If a product marketing team is housed within the revenue organization, priorities can become disproportionately focused on short-term goals. Providing a pulse checking on the product marketing team’s OKRs from time-to-time is important to ensure it’s not just about the next fire that needs to be put out.

2. Message testing –

Messaging is one of the most opinion inducing areas, everyone feels entitled to have a say and in the end, you have to question whether what you’re looking at best represents the product promise and will connect with the audience. Messaging testing is a heavily underutilized gateway. Put stuff in front of a panel or even customer friendlies to pulse check if you’re on the right track.

3. Revenue attribution –

How does product marketing impact business? Without a doubt, this is one of the most opaque functions, needing to  pay attention to intangibles and problem solving, all while shipping. Oftentimes, it is also the group that is heavily working behind the scenes. When asked “who will do this in the absence of a PMM?”, it becomes clear they are the quarterback who you can’t afford to not have. Hence revenue attribution looks different for this function – it has to be a multi-touch model, it has to be about deliverables that are not MQLs and pipeline and most importantly, it has to be about product usage and adoption.

How do you feel product marketing as a function will evolve down the line?

I believe that product marketers will play a more prominent role in being the glue that creates the loop with customers and prospects to gather insights for roadmap development.

Contributions by product marketing to other scaled marketing channels will start to become more specific, almost like product marketers as SMEs of the product or a topic are tapped into by channel owners.

Increasingly, product marketing will also become the external facing voice and face of a topic. This also means product marketers must start preparing to hone in on those skills whether it is a customer presentation or speakership at an event.

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If you had to share five thoughts about the state of martech in the next decade, what would it be?

I’d take a page from composable commerce and apply it here – lots of point solutions will emerge with the ability to plug and play. The question is who becomes a platform?

Composability will become a need where businesses want to be able to customize their MarTech solution and will want endpoints that a developer can tinker with.

Winners for AI based solutions will have emerged for each category.

Martech will not just be a “marketing” thing. Orgs company-wide will be interested, involved and impacted by what the martech stack can accomplish.

Human resources will be less involved with labor intensive tasks which should open up thinking blocks of time.