610. Mergers and acquisitions 😅
A guide for marketing teams on how to integrate new products
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
What to expect when you’re acquiring
A marketer’s guide to the M&A aftermath of adding more products to your platform
When I was working at Buffer, we had the privilege of acquiring a social media engagement product and incorporating it into our platform. Easier said than done!
You’ve got to figure out:
PR & comms
Brand marketing fundamentals
Product marketing strategy
Customer comms — both the customers you already had and the new ones you acquired
Internal team decisions on who does what
And the list goes on and on …
Since then, I’ve had several chances to work with marketing teams who are navigating the post-M&A complexity. It’s been a big part of our advisory business at Bonfire in fact. And while I’d like to say that the more practice you have with unifying two different products the easier it becomes, the reality is that it isn’t ever an easy process—but it can be a familiar one.
So I thought I’d share some of the main themes we work through with post-acquisition products in case this info is helpful to anyone currently integrating a new product or anyone anticipating doing so in the future. (Or you can always call us on our Bonfire phone to come help out!)
The 5 key areas of M&A integration for marketers
1 - Craft the story for why this M&A matters
You’ll need to have a story to share with customers (new and existing) and with your audience. Often, this becomes the very first thing you create because it gets sent out in your press releases and announcement comms from the very beginning.
A few things to note:
The actual reason you acquired this company may not be the actual story you tell about the merging of the two brands. For instance, you probably don’t want to lead with “competitive takeout;” instead, you can find an angle about “added functionality.”
Your story for the public might be different than your story for customers. In particular, know that customers will care about “what’s the impact on ME” moreso than the public will.
You’ll want to play around with two different “altitudes” of story:
1 - What this M&A means to the company’s vision
2 - What this M&A means for the product roadmap
2 - Decide on your brand and product architecture
As you bring new products into the fold, it’s really important that you determine how they fit within the architecture of your brand and the universe of your product.
For brand: Do you want to be a house of brands or a branded house?
A house of brands means each product keeps its own distinct identity (think Unilever with Dove, Axe, and Ben & Jerry’s). A branded house means everything lives under one unified brand (think Apple with iPhone, iPad, and MacBook).
Most often, you’ll be choosing a branded house, with the newly-acquired product living under the unified brand. This is a slightly more streamlined direction to go and does not require you to maintain and grow two totally separate, distinct brand identities. Of course, you may end up choosing to do a unified branded house and also decide that you want to do a total rebrand of the newly-combined house, including a new name. Oof big job!
For product marketing: Do you have a platform with multiple solutions or a product with a bunch of features?
A platform suggests a suite of solutions that work together but can stand alone. A single product with features keeps everything tied closely to one core offering. Deciding this will influence everything from your website navigation to how you structure pricing plans.
3 - Integrate all the tech stacks
Once the branding dust settles, there’s the less glamorous but absolutely crucial work of integrating the tech. Here are a few of the major software considerations:
CRM: Will both brands continue using their own systems, or will you merge into one? How many Hubspots is too many Hubspots? :)
Analytics: How will you track shared metrics moving forward? This is hugely important for your go-forward data insights but also for how you think through historical benchmarks. (My advice: Unify everything into one analytics stack moving forward, and write down the baselines and benchmarks from the tools that are going away.)
Email and lifecycle: Will you combine email lists, and if so, how will you segment for relevant messaging?
Billing and subscriptions: What happens if customers use both products — will they have one login or two? (This one is a bit outside of marketing’s wheelhouse, thank goodness, but will have impact on pricing.)
Having a strong Marketing Ops or tech lead involved early can save a lot of headaches later.
4 - Map the customer journey and audit all touchpoints
Think like a customer: what happens the moment they hear about your new, combined offering?
Website: Does the homepage reflect the new reality?
Onboarding flows: Are new users guided seamlessly through both products?
Support: Is your help center updated with answers about the integration?
Nurture emails: Do you have campaigns ready for existing customers, new leads, and cross-sell opportunities?
Work through these questions from both the perspective of your current customers and also from the customers of the newly-acquired product. This can all be mapped out into a customer journey map in Figjam or Miro.
Then, after going through your ideal customer journey, switch gears to what that journey looks like today by completing a full-on audit of all the existing touchpoints. Audit every customer touchpoint — from social and ads to emails and in-app messages — and document what needs to be updated, changed, edited, or removed. A big one: What will you do with the social profiles of the companies you acquired? With their G2 and Capterra pages? With their website??
5 - Redirect, reforecast, re-sell, and rejoice!
Finally, it’s time to go live! But it’s not just about flipping the switch.
Redirect: Ensure all old URLs (from the acquired product’s site) point to the right places on your new combined site. Same with social profiles, review sites, and other market-facing collateral from the acquired brand.
Reforecast: An M&A event can be a big shock to the system of your growth model, so it’s important to reforecast revenue: what is going to get cannibalized with a combined userbase, what momentum will you get from the announcement and the new audience, etc.
Re-sell: Equip your sales team with new positioning, battle cards, and answers to tricky customer questions. Or get your website ready to welcome a whole new set of users who can buy and expand within your existing packaging. You acquired a product but you also acquired an audience!
Rejoice: Celebrate the launch internally and externally. Get your teams excited and your customers intrigued.
M&A integrations are never “easy,” but they can be incredibly rewarding. Keep in mind that you’ll need a clear strategy for storytelling, decision-making around architecture, resourcing for tech, time and space to rebuild the customer journey and audit all touchpoints, and a focus on relaunching (and reselling) well.
Good luck!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
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