Mastering Product Marketing in AI: A Deep Dive with Aliona Margulis

Hi, Harshit. Thank you so much. I’m excited to talk to you today and probably share some experience with the other product marketers or some other professionals who would be curious to learn about conversational AI space in general. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, sure. I’ve had quite an interesting journey in my role as Production Manager. It’s been about eight years, of course, across various industries, and I started as an event Marketing Manager. While I was working, I gradually expanded my skills learning what is digital marketing, how to work with emails, how to write a copy, how to do market research, and stuff like that. The real turning point for me was working in a travel tech company for Satisfi Labs. That’s where I got the chance to build B2B marketing from scratch. I was the first B2B Marketing Manager, and the company was working across the globe. We were working with different markets. Talking about my responsibilities, we were talking basically about everything, starting from brand positioning and messaging to partnerships to event sponsorship to support and sales and leadership, so everything. It was challenging but incredibly rewarding. This is what made me realize what excites me most. This experience naturally led me to specialize in product marketing. I’m generally excited about the role here at Satisful Labs because it allows me to leverage the thread skill set that I’ve gained, but at the same time, focus on what I truly enjoy.

I like creating go-to-market strategies. I like creating positioning and messaging. I like acting as a bridge between products, account management, and sales. This is what made me become a Production Manager.

Yeah, of course. I’m passionate about this question because I genuinely believe that our product stands out in the market. Just to want to explain to our listeners, we developed a conversational AI platform that connects businesses with customers through chat. What we do, is we have those conversations. Now, let’s talk about what makes us unique. I will start with the fact that we provide the ultimate flexibility and control. What it means we combine some pretty advanced tech, our natural language processing model, and generative AI to create a solution that adapts to what our clients want. Let’s say they want They can choose how their bot is going to talk with their users. If they want to, for example, keep things consistent, they can craft pre-written notes that will always have the same text response. But if they’re after a more personalized touch, we can scrape our website or documentation and let our AI craft specific personalized responses based on what users are asking. This is a real combination of two technologies in one, which makes our products very advanced and diverse in how they restheytheytheyesponders. But that’s all he states

We not only can answer questions, but we can take action within the chat interface. Let’s say buy tickets, write within the chat interface, or colt user contacts, or add multimedia elements like images, gifs, videos, and buttons to reallyhmakesation rich and engaging. In these, we create this powerful conversational journey where users can have a natural back aback-and-forthrsation with the business and take action without feeling forced. Illy that perfect engaging customer journey.

Yeah, of course. We work in sports, entertainment, and tourism. I want to provide an example from the sports industry. Imagine a fan visiting a team’s website looking for ticket information, they might search for a specific event on the website, or they make a call to talk with the service team. It is usually time time-consuming with our chat, but the experience is much more intuitive and personalized. As soon as the fan starts typing their question, whether it’s about tickets parking information or te, am stats, the platform the context of the question and provides a highly accurate and relevant response in real-time answer questions. It can suggest topics to continue the conversation, eventually leading to a tick purchase and making this fan not just an interest interested person, but really for the brand. I just want to provide an apparent example with the same fan. This example was before events. They bought a ticket, let’s say. Now they are at the game. They are in the arena and they have a different set of questions. They can see a QR code on the wall, they can scan it and open the chat again, and they have different questions.

For example, Where can I buy craft beer in a hot dog? Our chat will respond to that as well, creating that engaging experience throughout the customer journey, be that before events, during events, or even after events. Interesting.

Yeah, of course. When it comes to developing positioning and messaging, I found that But all starts with really understanding the target persona, really knowing them, what gives them up at night, what gets them excited and emotiandwhaand they care about everything. One of my favorite strategies is to act down and chat with our existing clients. There is nothing quite like hearing what is right from them, like what feedback they have about our product, about the market in general, about the industry they work in. What else is important is which words they choose to speak about it. That helps me create that messaging as well. Then, of course, I dig into what makes our product special. From my experience, this part usually comes pretty easily from what I just told you about our product. When it comes to really creating that messaging, given all the foundation research I’ve done regarding the target persona in the market, I’m always trying to focus on the outcomes and the benefits. I constantly ask myself, What are they talking this, what I’m trying to say? It’s a little voice in my head keeping me honest every time I’m creating that messaging and positioning.

In the B2B business, I would say that it’s also really important to back up everything I say with numbers and testimonials. This is what works. It’s like a cherry on top.

Yeah. Our most recent go-to-market strategy was for a pretty cool tool that we developed. It’s called Input Director. It combines our NLP and LLM technology. What it does, is it lets our clients create and train per-written responses for specific user inputs. Think of it as a for them to guide our system on how to respond to particular questions. It wasn’t just new for our clients, it was a new territory for our internal team as well. My job was twofold. I had to figure out how to communicate it to clients, of course, but I also had to ensure that our sales and account managers could talk about it with confidence. I started with a series of internal training sessions. We’re talking about real practice where I made them create responses themselves in the dashboard. We were brainstorming potential use cases, and it boosted their confidence in discussing the new tool. When it comes to external communication, what I did, of course, I w diggiwasinto what was causing headaches for our clients in crafting per-wrprepre-wrpre-writtennsesnd how our solution would act those problems. This research became a foundation for our messaging.

Based on that, I crafted compelling messages that were used across the board for the Resource Center, educational videos, email campaigns, you name it, and all the channels that we use to launch a go-to-market campaign. What else I like to do is I like to share with the internal team our go-to-market plans, day by date sdayat we are internally aligned on what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week so that they are prepared to Probably client questions coming to account managers. Just internally, we’re aligned on what we’re doing. But yeah, as a result, we hit our target of product adoption. I want to say it was massive for us. Excited about this project and proud of how it all came together.

In the end, I think measuring product adoption is zero or one, whether your client has tried the tool, or has used the tool or not. But of course, there are more specific metrics that we measure, like monthly active users, bot performance, and feature adoption rate. It could be different month by month. It’s really important metrics, as well as some business performance metrics like customer lifetime value, and revenue growth when it comes to measuring what we’re doing on the prospect side and a chat to new clients to work with us. Sometimes we measure NPS scores. I would say we could have done it more, but because We are such a small team, we just don’t have enough time to do such feedback surveys regularly.

Yeah. I’m excited about how AI is transforming those industries. Just this week, I was at Google’s webinar about evaluating generative AI tools, and they shared some exciting stats. That’s their customer stats research by McKinsey. Customer service teams could save up to 45% of their costs by using AI. That’s huge, like 45%. But it’s not about just saving costs. We are hearing from our clients, from the sports, entertainment, and tourism, how AI is a game changer for their customer service. It’s handling those repetitive questions, bringing up their teams to provide truly personalized service where it matters the most. Our customers are loving it, too. They’re getting instant answers and when needed, they have that personal touch. They don’t need to search for an answer, scanning countless pages on the website. They don’t need to call for support, asking simple questions. Every interaction with the business is now simplified in a format that we are the most used to, chat interface. We’re used to using WhatsApp iMessage or Instagram direct messages, and why not automate that channel? But yeah, I think it’s pretty cool how it’s transforming everything around us.

I believe that trends will be around taking more personalized action using conversations. For this reason, we recently acquired an omnichannel marketing platform that does a lot of outbound. Let’s say SMS, outbound, email, outbound, creating customer journeys, and all that stuff. Our product roadmap focuses on merging our technology with theirs to build intent-based customer journeys. I will explore. Let’s say users inquire about premium tickets or specific food items. With our advanced intent recognition, we will be able to trigger super personalized marketing flows, sending very targeted communication about premium tickets or food. Let’s say I’m asking about craft beer, and in five minutes, I receive an an email with a coupon to buy that craft beer. Of course, I will buy it. That’s what we’re focused on. I think the trend is creating those granular, personalized experiences that enable taking action.

I would say that keeping up with AI tech has been quite a ride, especially with the introduction of generative AI, ChatGPT, and all that stuff. For me, it was practically going back to school once again and trying to become an AI expert once again. It was a challenge, but I would say it’s It was a challenge for the whole team because we needed to understand where we wanted to go as a team, as a company, as a product. But this is the reason I love product marketing, to be honest, because it keeps me on top of things. I’m pushed to stay at the cutting edge of that. It’s a challenge, but at the same time, what makes me excited about it.

Yeah, I would say while I was working for the travel tech company, it’s just an interesting example. Because I was working with diverse teams from different cultures and different countries with different sales managers. They all had their requests. For me, it was like playing favorites with your kids, impossible and guaranteed to upset someone because we had very limited resources. We had just a small marketing team, but a lot of different markets to work with. It wasn’t just our problem. It was also the product team that received requests daily, very market-specific, and they had decided where they wanted to invest their resources. This is how I solved this problem. Data, more data. I’m not sure that every marketing move was backed by cold hard facts. It was my secret weapon, I think, for achieving consensus. Plus, it gave teams some concrete goals to shoot for. The next time they requested something from the marketing team, they backed their request with some data points and explained how that could impact their business. That simplified my decision-making and their understanding of how we work.

Yeah, great question. I think our core values are truly the foundation of everything we do, including marketing strategies. We always put the client first, focusing on quality and authentic communication. At the same time, we’re not afraid to be bold. That’s why we’re trying new things, and developing new product features that make our product amazing and unique. We take responsibility for our actions and results. Internally, we have a spotlight channel where we thank our colleagues for doing something great. In this thank you letter, we always back it with some of the core values of our company. This thing that you’ve done is so great. It proves that you are shooting for quality and boldness, for example. Core values are with us every day.

Sure.

I think it would be Instagram. Yes, because it’s something that I use for my free time. For me, it’s a way to keep up with my friends who live all around the world. I understand what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, where they’re traveling. I love reels. I think it’s so much fun. I love it there. But I’m trying to spend less time watching that because it can be very time-consuming.

I don’t know. My biggest fear is probably that I will die alone.

I know it’s a bad choice, but I would love to try to be the CEO of the company for one day, though I know how hard it is and how many decisions you need to make every day. But just trying to experience that just for one day would be, I think, super helpful for me.

My last Gen AI prompt was probably to rewatch I write my email for clarity. Yes, this is what I use most.

Something extraordinary that makes people experience different emotions, usually negative ones. Sometimes marketers use it negatively, fighting for the views and engagement and likes and retweets. I don’t like this technique. I don’t think that marketers should use it too much. But I would say this is one of the most extraordinary things that marketers could do to play with negative emotions.

Thank you, Harshit. It was cool talking to you. Yeah, I appreciate it it.