Choosing a product marketing firm for AI tools
With new startups and tools emerging every day, the market is becoming saturated with the “latest and greatest” AI demos. But when evaluating whether a new AI tool is right for them, potential customers often have questions like:
What data does it use?
How secure is it?
What’s the quality of each output?
What is the return on my investment?
These questions, among many others, are why it’s so important to properly position your AI product. You want to make sure that you’re accurately communicating what it does, what the benefits are, how to use it, how it differs from competitors, and more. To do that, you’ll need the right product marketing firm—one that can turn a compelling AI product demo into a unique, trustworthy customer promise that holds up against technical and buyer scrutiny.
Explaining the AI product through a customer lens
From the customer point of view, it’s important to not only understand what your AI product can do, but to know that it’s trustworthy and applicable to a real-life use case.
Your marketing materials should provide potential customers with a clear understanding of who your AI product is for, what challenges it helps with, and where human intervention is still needed. It’s important to be clear and honest about what you’re offering—this is the best way to build credibility.
The right product marketing firm will take the time to learn the in’s and out’s of your product, diving into conversations with product experts and customers about how your AI improves workflows. With this understanding, they will be able to accurately describe the benefits of your product, making a clear distinction between available features and planned features. At the end of the day, the right product marketing firm will want a deep understanding of your AI product so that they can best explain its capabilities in a way that buyers will recognize and trust.
Verifying what can be claimed
Honesty is key in building buyer trust. Overhyping your product’s capabilities with misleading marketing claims is one of the easiest ways to discredit your product (and lose a potential customer).
To get started, explore what claims can be made. Focus on the evidence behind each one, and make clear distinctions between a feature shown in a demo, internal observations, actual measured outcomes, and a wished-for result a customer hopes to achieve.
Before sharing any claims externally, it's important to have a clear claim approval process. You’ll want to:
Confirm with product and technical teams the accuracy of each claim
Document all supporting evidence
Have legal and/or security teams weigh in where appropriate
Establish a process for updating published claims when the product changes
For example, let’s say you want to claim that your AI product “reduces manual review.” What would your product marketing firm need to verify or qualify before publishing?
First, they’d want to talk to people on your product team to ask for real examples of the product reducing manual review time. They’ll want to hear about how much time a particular workflow took before using your product, as well as the time that same workflow took after adopting your product. They’ll also want to gather and document more than one example to establish that this claim is a reasonable outcome customers can expect and not just a one-off result. From there, the claim (and its documented, supporting evidence that was gathered) should go through legal review for approval to share publicly.
How the firm addresses buyer concerns
Buyers will have questions beyond what your product does. For example, they might want to know things like what data your AI product uses, whether it trains on their company’s data, how reliable its outputs are, what happens when it gets something wrong, and more. To address these common questions and concerns, it’s important to clearly communicate the answers in your marketing materials.
To get the answers to frequently asked customer questions, your product marketing firm should connect with your product, security, and legal teams. They should never guess at what the answer is—it’s important to be accurate when building trust and credibility. Once they have these answers, they should transform them into usable, engaging copy for your website, demo talking points, sales FAQs, and any other marketing material where these questions may come up.
To set yourself up for success in the future, ask prospective product marketing firms how they would handle keeping buyer-facing materials up-to-date as your product or policies change. Knowing how they would manage and maintain your materials is an important consideration as you begin to scale.
Run a short claim audit to vet prospective firms
There are a lot of product marketing firms out there, and it’s important to pick the one that’s best for you (and your AI product). To help you select the right partner, we’ve put together a practical exercise you can use.
Provide prospective firms with three sample claims for your AI product:
A real, evidence-backed claim
An unclear claim that could mean several different things
A hoped-for result that has not yet been achieved
After presenting the firms with these three claims, ask them to determine which could be used in marketing materials now, which would need qualification, and which should wait. This will help you to understand their reasoning. In reviewing their answers, look to see if the firm asked any further questions like where the evidence came from, whether a claim holds true under normal use, or whether a claim is describing a product capability vs. a customer outcome. By asking further clarifying questions, you’ll be able to see how thorough a firm is in understanding your product, as well as how much they value providing clear, accurate information to buyers.
Choose a firm that makes your AI product’s value clear
A strong product marketing firm will be able to explain your AI product through the lens of the customer, highlighting how it can be used in a real task. They will clearly position the product with unique messaging. They’ll make evidence-based claims and accurately answer buyer questions. These core product marketing principles can help evolve your product beyond an impressive AI demo into a credible, trustworthy, and memorable experience, driving customers to purchase.
To make sure you have the right product marketing firm working for you, keep these tips and considerations in mind, and use the claim audit example we provided—it will help you vet prospective partners, saving you time (and money) in the long run.
Ready to make your AI product story clearer and more credible? Let’s talk.