Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello, I am Carlota, and I am the host of this podcast. Product Marketing Stories is the first French podcast dedicated to product marketing. Every week, listen to an episode where product marketers, but not only, share methodologies, tips, and concrete learnings so you can apply them in your daily job. The aim of this podcast is to make product marketing understandable and accessible to the French tech ecosystem.

• Speaker #1

  Hi, Chloe. Hi, Dan. How are you?

• Speaker #2

  Great. Great to be here.

• Speaker #1

  I'm very happy to interview you for doing the Product Marketing Summit. Can you present yourself and tell us what you're doing?

• Speaker #2

  Absolutely. So, hi, I'm Chloe. I'm a Product Marketing Director at Docker. It's a software company used by 20 million developers.

• Speaker #3

  Hi, nice to be here. I'm Dan. I am working with Chloe and her team as a product marketing manager and my focus is on partnerships.

• Speaker #1

  Chloe, this morning you did a workshop concerning how to deal with product storytelling. Can you tell us more about what is the subject for you at Docker and what are the main stakes that you have today?

• Speaker #2

  Yes, absolutely. So I spoke about evolving a product suite storytelling, and this is important to me for a few reasons. The biggest reason is things change. Our market changes constantly. And working in the tech industry, looking ahead to see what market trends will be in not just five years out, 10 years out, but six months out, a year out. is super important for thinking about how to position our products and grow continuously. For brands that have been around for five plus years, they need to be thinking about how to stay competitive. So that's one of the reasons why it's a really exciting topic to me. And the two things that I spoke about earlier today was evolving a product suite storytelling to reach new audience segments and then evolving storytelling to engage more deeply with a core user base.

• Speaker #1

  Do you want to add something, Dan, on partnership? How do you tackle this?

• Speaker #3

  In the industry that we work in, you're talking to so many people at the same time. In our case, we are talking to developers. They are at the core of what we do. But we also need to talk with the whole organization. We need to talk to their managers. We need to talk to the people who are driving the strategy. And in many cases, the sales process is also very complex. And you need to make sure that everybody that is working together with you to get your product to the right people also understands the story and the message and the narrative.

• Speaker #1

  And how do you do it?

• Speaker #2

  So something that has worked well is translating our features into value-based stories. That's something that Dan and I have worked with our sales team to make sure that If a sales rep is trying to sell to a customer in the finance sector, one of their primary concerns or use cases is the security of their software. So we want to make sure we have the narratives in place to support their higher level business objectives of being able to tell their customers that their money, their data, whatever the business is, is safe with them. And they're able to provide that safety in part through our product offering. So we have to have an eye between the features that are coming out of the product organization and the primary use cases where there's the most ARR or growth opportunity and try to find clear threads between those two things.

• Speaker #1

  But at the end you have one product page, one web page and it's difficult to get different audiences at one time.

• Speaker #2

  So as Dan mentioned, developers have been our core users and our core audience for a long time. In some ways, we do weigh more on focusing our product landing pages and primary messaging around the value that a developer needs. And we're selecting specific places on our website to market how we offer enterprise solutions for someone in a role like chief technology, like who's a chief technology officer. or someone in a role like VP of engineering, so that they have the right material. And we're giving them the material through our sellers, through targeted digital marketing campaigns, so they don't need to sift from the homepage all the way to find this content. But trying to find specific areas of our web pages to share the value for more secondary segments.

• Speaker #3

  One key aspect of the work we're doing is that we're telling the same story to different people, but what we're doing is highlighting different aspects of these stories. People can understand, you know, like, okay, so this is... This is the value that it brings, but sometimes this is translated into features if you're more technical or into some kind of competitive advantage if you're more business. And we started a program specifically with partnerships that was bundling content, creative and copy into a kit that partners could use. Whenever they were speaking to their customers, because those partners, the way those partnerships are structured, channel partnerships specifically, these companies are owning the relationship with the customers. So they are acting as trusted advisors. And they have a suite of products, a suite of vendors that they are coming in together. So by bundling these narratives in a way that partners can easily use it and they can easily identify when they should be bringing up a certain feature or a certain... aspect of the product. It made it much easier for them to promote our product and for us as well to share a consistent story both internally and externally.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, and talking about that, it's also the subject about the different channels that we have at our hands and that we can use. How do you handle it? Do you use always the same different channels or also depending on the audience?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, so like I was talking about the value-based marketing that we've been exploring with marketing to, in our case, a buyer audience. We create assets, content, whether it be a data sheet, a video, a white paper, a piece of content that speaks to that value in an expanded way and points to the features that deliver that value. We'll place the same assets not just in the hands of our sellers to have available at the right moment to hand to a customer. But we place those same assets in digital marketing campaigns, digital marketing campaigns that are structured around those value pillars. And we're running both of both pieces. We're running the same piece of content across both strategies at once. And so we're able to create feedback loops across product marketing and sales to learn what content is effective, how they're selling. so that we can understand the content gaps that we can provide messaging to support. And then we're looking at data from our digital marketing campaigns to see what white paper is driving these.