When your company sells a range of products, marketing them all effectively can be challenging. Traditional single-product marketing strategies just won’t cut it – you end up with multiple messages all clamoring for your customers’ attention.

But never fear! Today, I’m going to share some strategies that’ll help you decide where to focus your efforts and simplify your offering for customers. 

Here’s a taste of what we're going to cover: 

  • What portfolio marketing is and how it's different in practice from traditional single product marketing.
  • The power of solutions marketing and how you can simplify the customer experience through tailored packaging and messaging. 

Let’s get into it.

What is portfolio marketing?

When I started thinking about how to explain portfolio marketing, I went back over 20 years to a classic: the BCG Growth Share Matrix. You might recognize this from your marketing classes in college. It's marketing 101 but still highly relevant today. 

The BCG Growth Share Matrix, a two-by-two grid with "market share" on the horizontal axis and "growth on the vertical axis. Top left: Star – High growth, high market share. Top right: Question mark – High growth, low market share. Botton left: Cash Cow – Low growth, high market share. Bottom right: Pet – Low growth, low market share.
 Source: Boston Consulting Group

It’s basically a quadrant mapping relative market share against market growth rate. It divides your portfolio into four categories:

⭐ Stars: High-growth, high-market-share products, which you really need to nurture.

🐮 Cash cows: Products with large market penetration but slower growth, which you want to milk sustainably. 

❓ Question marks: The low-market-share, high-growth products, which you need to decide whether to double down on or not. 

🐩 Pets: Products with low market share and low growth, where there's little reason to invest.

In my experience, strong product portfolios typically have stars, cash cows, and some smaller “question mark” investments. For now, I'll double-click into the stars and cash cows.

How metrics can fail you: A tale of two products

Let me share an important lesson, based on my experience as Senior Director of Product Marketing Portfolio and Operations at Veeam. 

We have a tried-and-true cash cow product that does backup and recovery for virtual machines (VMs). It has a huge market share, penetrating SMB and mid-market segments well. It's where the majority of our $1.5 billion revenue comes from.

However, we have to expand into other areas if we want to grow. So, other parts of our portfolio focus on other workflows and markets. In addition to VM backup, we do cloud backup, Kubernetes backup, and more. These are our star products. They only have a low market share right now, and they don’t bring in a huge amount of revenue, but that amount is growing.

If you had a dollar to spend on marketing for maximum return, which would you invest in – the cash cow or the star? 

Cash cow vs. star

The cash cow seems like the obvious choice because you know exactly what return to expect. It's stable and predictable. The star, however, has a lower market share in uncharted territory, so it requires more testing and experimentation. Plus, it’s in an emerging market, so there's less certainty.

Despite what past metrics suggest, you might want to put your money on the star. Why? Because if you only invest in cash cows, you’ll face diminishing returns over time. Meanwhile, your star products could be a wellspring of untapped opportunity.