During one of my interviews, I encountered an interesting prompt: Who do you think is excelling in product marketing in the B2B space? Why do you feel this way? What examples support your thought process?
This inspired me to create a compact case study that dives into some captivating PMM best practices.
My choice of top product marketers for 2022 goes to Grammarly, not just because the company is founded by my fellow Ukrainians, but just because they are that good!
Executive Summary:
Let’s examine Grammarly Business and discover why it’s a shining example in the product marketing realm. Here are a few compelling reasons:
- Creating a new category: Grammarly ventured into uncharted territory by forging a new product positioning category of communication and writing assistants, distinguishing itself from competitors.
- Capitalizing on consumer brand: Grammarly owes part of its success to the seamless integration of B2B and consumer offerings, resulting in efficient growth loops and leveraging its powerful consumer brand to boost product positioning.
- Enhancing product-market fit through analytics: Grammarly’s analysis of millions of consumer interactions provided invaluable insights, enabling them to craft a top-notch business solution. This data-driven approach is essential for tailoring a product to a target market’s needs.
Grammarly has delivered a product that customers adore, and it has been tremendously successful in the market. Boasting 30 million users, $400 million in funding, 50,000 Pro and Enterprise clients, and recognition as the Most Influential brand by Times and Forbes, it’s evident that they’ve hit the mark. As a product marketing consultant, I attribute Grammarly’s success to its ability to create a new category, capitalize on its consumer brand, and employ data to refine its product-market fit.
Introducing Pentagon Framework:
Successful product marketing involves delivering the right product to the right audience using the right message, and I believe that Grammarly has effectively implemented this mission. To demonstrate this, I will analyze their work using my five-step product marketing framework that helps dissect product marketing deliverables.
- Market Analysis: At this step, a product marketing consultant would understand the market problem(s) and the company’s unique ability to solve it. Tools such as segmentation, customer research, analytics, competitive analysis, and simple Google/ChatGPT research can all help with this step.
- Product Focus: This step is about articulating product strategy and calibrating it based on the market response. A product marketing consultant would partner with PMs and UX on product research, prioritization, road mapping, and naming.
- Business Planning: At this step, a product marketing consultant would collaborate with GTM teams to create messaging, packaging, and pricing to help communicate solutions to market problems.
- Go-to-Market Strategy: A product marketing consultant engages in crafting market-ready comms such as sales enablement assets, thought leadership, narratives, ads, and industry offerings.
- Product Adoption: A product marketing consultant develops enablement content and tools to support revenue expansion and product adoption.
How Grammarly features in this framework:
While not comprehensive, this section will provide a few examples from Grammarly Business for each step in the framework.
Market Analysis:
Defining the problem
Finding a product-market fit can be a challenging journey, and Grammarly faced its share of obstacles. They started with a niche product called MyDropbox, which successfully addressed plagiarism detection. However, it was only a narrow academic use case with limited potential. Grammarly needed a larger total addressable market and a more comprehensive use case to scale up the company. This led to a new vision – “help everyone write and communicate better.”
Defining the problem statement was a critical step in Grammarly’s journey to finding a product-market fit. While the problem of poor writing and communication in the workplace is straightforward, its impact is significant. For example, research by analyst Josh Bernoff estimated that poor writing costs $400 billion in lost productivity each year. Poor writing can also have negative consequences like poor customer service, inconsistent branding, and more. Grammarly excels at defining the problem and making the target audience acutely aware of its negative consequences.
Differentiating from competition
At the time, the main competitors were the spell checkers integrated into word processors like MS Office and G Suite, which had some major flaws. They were built into the product and primarily focused on spell-checking, rather than contextual spelling or style. Research showed that professionals needed a more comprehensive solution, and Grammarly created a new category of writing assistants that professionals can take with them anywhere they write and that businesses can customize for their brand guidelines. Although there is plenty of competition today, Grammarly’s established brand and entrenched distribution set it apart.
Using customer segmentation to grow
Grammarly used customer segmentation to grow its user base. Initially, their tried and tested use case involved educational institutions and their students. Further research revealed more use cases and willingness to pay from digital professionals for writing resumes, emails, and other professional work. This was followed by marketing, HR, engineers, lawyers, consultants, salespeople, journalists, and pretty much any knowledge worker using digital communication who would benefit from having a second eye check their writing. As a result, their proof point changed from “Trusted by 300,000 students” to “Trusted by millions of professionals.”
Product focus:
Grammarly has a well-defined product strategy that directly addresses the challenges of its target audience. They’ve continuously improved this strategy by gathering customer feedback, research, and analytics. According to one of the founders, their product strategy focused on reducing customer friction. They didn’t want to bring users to Grammarly; they wanted to bring Grammarly to everywhere people write. They understood that copying and pasting text into a spell checker created too much of a hurdle for a tool that you need to use almost all the time.
To solve this problem, Grammarly made significant product investments in office plugins and a Chrome extension that is available anywhere a text is created. This investment has clearly paid off, as it has reduced friction for users and made it easier for them to access Grammarly’s tools. This is a great example of a product strategy that focuses on reducing friction for customers and making their lives easier.
Business planning:
Pricing and Packaging
Packaging Grammarly into a B2B solution required more insight and differentiated value. The new insight was about maintaining professionalism and a unique brand voice, powered by a custom style guide. Most importantly, they packaged the solution for people, not faceless enterprises.
Take a look at this clever pricing widget:
Keeping in mind that businesses and enterprises are run by people who don’t want to read complicated plans (like any consumer), Grammarly uses interactivity to help create various pricing scenarios, explain the value, and get people to use the product as quickly as possible.
Messaging and positioning
Grammarly Business positioning statement:
Drive Business Results with Effective Communication. Empower every team member to communicate confidently to close more deals, improve customer satisfaction, and build a stronger brand.
Let’s break it down:
Target audience: businesses that want to build a strong brand and improve customer satisfaction Benefit: drive more business and close more deals How: empower your employees to communicate confidently
Sign me up!
Beyond the core positioning statement, Grammarly is effective in communicating its solution to HR, marketing, and education industries, among others. As they began to sell to larger companies, security, and privacy became extremely important. Grammarly spent significant effort communicating its enterprise readiness.
Go-to-market:
Grammarly Business marketing leverages the comprehensive marketing strategy used for their consumer brand. When they identify a significant number of consumer accounts within a company, it becomes a perfect time to sell to the company. Some tactics they use include:
- Content Marketing: Grammarly publishes insightful content about effective writing and communication, aimed at educating its target audience and showcasing the product’s value. They use different formats like articles, videos, infographics, and quizzes to engage users.
- Social Media Marketing: Grammarly has a strong presence on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. They share valuable content and engaging posts that demonstrate the product’s benefits and generate interest among professionals.
- Referral Programs: The company has a referral program that encourages existing users to invite their friends and colleagues to try Grammarly, thus expanding its user base through word-of-mouth marketing.
- Customer Success Stories: Grammarly features success stories from businesses that have improved their writing and communication using their platform. These stories provide a form of social proof to convince other companies to adopt Grammarly Business.
Product Adoption:
Grammarly uses a combination of effective onboarding, support materials, and resources to ensure users adopt and fully utilize their product.
- Onboarding: Grammarly has a simple, intuitive onboarding process that helps users get started quickly. Users are guided through the process of installing browser extensions or plugins, setting up an account, and exploring the various features available.
- Support Resources: Grammarly provides an extensive help center with articles, guides, and FAQs that address common questions and issues. These resources help users troubleshoot problems and learn how to use the product effectively.
- Webinars and Workshops: Grammarly hosts webinars and workshops to provide additional support and training to users. These events cover topics like best practices, advanced features, and industry-specific use cases to help users get the most out of Grammarly Business.
In conclusion, Grammarly Business excels at product marketing because it understands its target audience, its pain points, and its aspirations. They’ve built a product that addresses these challenges head-on and has effectively communicated the value of their solution to the market. By continuously refining its product strategy based on market feedback and customer insights, Grammarly has managed to establish itself as a leader in the writing assistant space.
As a product marketing expert, I find Grammarly’s success both inspiring and informative, as it demonstrates the power of effective product marketing in driving business growth and customer satisfaction.
