Product Marketing’s Secret Weapon

While a tech company's Product Managers work to get new products and features "on the shelf," as a B2B Product Marketing team, Kaila and her crew were responsible for translating the highly technical product features into benefit-driven stories that an entire sales field could speak to, and a non-technical prospect could latch onto. 

Kaila found that her in-house design team was submerged in splashy and exciting, high-priority brand projects, and so it was hard for her to keep her customers (the Sales team) satisfied with the assets they needed, when they needed them.

Since every department at her tech org was waiting in the same design queue, it could take upwards of two weeks to get a single slide back. 

So we asked ourselves, what if Product Marketers had direct access to a team of visual storytelling experts who could deliver world-class slides and materials quickly and iteratively? Could that dedicated partner help marketers focus on strategic initiatives, rather than burning hours attempting to design in PowerPoint?

And that, friends, is how GhostRanch was born.

We started taking on a few core slides for Kaila's team. Then a few more slides. Then a series of PowerPoints. Then a vision PPT for unit's GM. Pretty soon GhostRanch became the go-to presentation design outlet amongst Kaila's team of Product Marketers.

When it came time for the annual customer conference, Kaila knew who she could call upon to become deeply embedded in the creation of the division's Product Keynote, a big stage presentation with massive implications, as prospects, customers and analysts alike would be in attendance. 

One challenge we tried to solve in creating the product keynote, was to help the speakers show their audience (marketers) how the suite of tools would help them do their job, and what that would look like for their end customers.

To help tell a series of stories to make sure the conference attendees "get it," we created a fictitious company, Durham Denim—with brand, products, email campaigns, websites and plenty of personas (shoutout "Greg") for the presentation to live within, and then built out a handful of vignettes from this “world”. What would be the buyer’s priorities? Pain points? We mapped all this out like a screenwriter would a character’s backstory.

At the event, we heard some great things about the presentation, but the greatest thing of all was the bond we forged with an amazing team of product managers and marketers.