What you need to know:

• It’s too often underinvested in, but product marketing is a must-have third leg in a successful B2B marketing strategy for Airwallex global CMO, Jon Stona.
• The B2B marketing leader has invested in a comprehensive, strategic product marketing approach that’s been responsible for everything from major product launches to crafting custom product stories by vertical, persona, geography, segment, and use case.
• It’s a highly complementary construct alongside the big brand bets Airwallex has been making, including its F1 partnership, which has demonstrably lifted trust and brand engagement with customers against an increasingly sceptical consumer base globally.
• Airwallex’s growing marketing maturity and evolving product marketing approach come as the Australian tech darling celebrates raising another US$300m, bringing its total investment to date to over US$1bn. This has lifted its market cap to US$6.2bn.

Marketing teams are making a major misstep by not investing in product marketing, according to Airwallex global CMO, Jon Stona. Why? Because they’re too busy being visible through performance marketing. So this marketing chief is determined not to make the same mistake as he works to build awareness of and trust in one of Australia’s latest tech darlings, with a market cap of US$6.2bn and cool $300m of extra funding now under its belt.  

Founded in Melbourne by Jack Zhang with three university friends, it's since expanded to 25 offices globally, providing global payments, treasury, spend management and embedded finance solutions to circa 150,000 companies. The 10-year-old business completed a US$300 million Series F funding round last month, taking its total valuation to US$6.2 billion and boosting the investment coffers to over US$1 billion to date.

Notably, Airwallex is among the largest ever venture capital raises by an Australian company, and the first since Canva to score the backing of three of the largest VC firms: Square Peg Capital, Blackbird Ventures and Airtree Ventures. The company has US$720m in annualised revenue and more than US$130bn in annualised global payments volume. And although it’s reportedly not yet profitable, it achieved cash flow positivity last year, co-founder Lucy Liu recently told the AFR.

Airwallex is now in the advanced stages of applying for an Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (ADI) licence from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), potentially further expanding its capabilities within the financial services sector. The company is widely expected to go for an IPO sometime in 2026.

Its board and leadership bench strength has been beefing up accordingly. As reported by Mi3, Airwallex recruited former CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who has been appointed non-executive director on its board as well as strategic advisor to the group. Airwallex’s board also comprises Shannon Scott as executive director, alongside independent non-executive directors Sangeeta Venkatesan, Andrew Palmer, and Michael Venter.

Marketing’s two drivers in business

Marketing has likewise had to step up the maturity curve. When Stona joined two-and-a-half years ago, he found a nascent, federated function with “some talented individuals” largely reporting to sales teams, but a general lack of structure, defined goals or capabilities needed to hit those goals.

“I came on-board with a mandate to start to build out a global marketing function that could truly scale and help the business really drive two things, which I think are true of any marketing organisation,” Stona says. The first is drive the brand. “That can mean everything from awareness, familiarity, consideration – but really stewarding to help get that brand out to the world and to tell the story.”

Second is driving the business. “Oftentimes that's repeatable and predictable revenue. Those two work very nicely together – the more your brand equity rises, typically your business rises, and the better your business does. That also has positive impacts to the brand,” Stona says. “My real task at the time was how do we get take the broader goals of the organisation, then architect a structure, both within markets and with globally spread out teams, that would help us across those capabilities – product, marketing, field marketing, growth marketing, etc. – to get towards those two overarching goals.”

Cue the triumvirate of successful B2B marketing: Product + brand + performance

What Stona also found at Airwallex was a highly weighted approach towards performance marketing. Stona himself is delighted to see the growing resurgence of brand and performance in a more balanced formula for B2B marketing delivery. But he goes a step further, adding product marketing into his ideal marketing mix triumvirate.

“You have to always start with product marketing. One of the biggest missteps many marketing teams and many market leaders make: They don't invest enough in that,” he tells Mi3. Stona’s enthusiasm for product marketing derives from his belief in four core truths to entering any market.

“You have brand truth, which, in general, is going to stay constant across markets. You have product truth, and that's going to somewhat vary depending on product availability. You have user truth, which is going to vary a bit by the segment or user target, and you have market truth, what are the dynamics of that particular market,” he explains. “Product marketing really helps you understand in an abstract away the complexity from each of those truths. So when you're entering a new market, or when you're building an existing market, you understand that ideal configuration of how all those truths line up, and you can tailor your marketing accordingly. That also will then inform your distribution strategy, your messaging, and so on. But it all starts from product marketing.”

Stona’s definition of product marketing is “bringing the voice of the customer to the product, and the voice of the product to the customer”.

“This team sits at the intersection between product development and commercial go-to-market motions – they equip our product teams with the necessary insights that can be used to develop differentiated features that actually add value to our target audience. And they help our commercial teams [sales, marketing] articulate that differentiation to our target audience in ways that resonate [for example, using the right industry lexicon],” he continues.

Yet Stona doesn’t see many doing this and believes too many companies “tend to prioritise hiring marketing functions that have a visible impact on revenue, for example performance marketing”.

“For example, with paid media, it’s fairly straightforward to track what you get in return for every dollar you put in. With product marketing, direct attribution isn't as easy, and much of the value may come across as more abstract,” he says. “How do you reliably quantify the impact of exceptional messaging or insightful customer research? When missing, organisations feel the pain. However, when they are present, it’s easy to take them for granted.”

Inside Airwallex, product marketing managers (PMMs) are establishing a programmatic approach to collecting insights, including competitive benchmarking, owning and updating core messaging and positioning for its products, and accelerating the enablement of commercial teams “so we can sell and market more effectively”, Stona says. They’ve also been responsible for driving product launches such as Airwallex Spend and Airwallex Yield, and overall GTM strategy for specific products, and crafting custom product stories by vertical, persona, geography, segment, and use case.

Critical to building product marketing has been fully plugging the team into the day-to-day operations of product and commercial teams. “At the start, we tend to look for ‘full-stack PMMs’ – that is, those who are more generalist in nature and can own everything from conducting research to shepherding major product launches and GTM campaigns. As the team expands, we’d then look to bring on more specialist experience, such as domain knowledge in particular industries or regions,” Stona continues.

When establishing the PMM function, Airwallex focused on activity-based KPIs. “There was ample low-hanging fruit and the team was frequently moving across projects, building processes, and codifying playbooks,” says Stona.

“We’re now transitioning towards ROI-based assessments, with each PMM owning the end-to-end commercial growth of their particular products. For example, if the team is focused on a launch, they measure launch engagement [traffic, media response, signups, leads generated] and ongoing product adoption such as activation and feature usage [number of customers choosing our paid subscription plans, which ultimately drives revenue and retention]. 

“If they are working on updating our product positioning, we’ll evaluate the change in conversion rates on those particular product pages. We’ll also measure win rates on deals where new positioning was used, vis-a-vis the status quo, and assess qualitative feedback from Sales on the effectiveness of our materials and training.”

For Stona, it’s the job of marketing leaders to acknowledge these “more hidden, indirect contributions, as they can have a material impact on results”.

“It doesn’t matter how good your performance marketing team is if your segmentation, core messaging, and value proposition are incorrect. Product marketing needs to be the root from which all other marketing stems,” he argues.

So how does Airwallex’s F1 sponsorship, kicked off in 2024, fit into this picture? It’s all the above, responds Stona. As well as  global, regional and local reach and awareness, F1 offers a well of in-depth, varied touchpoints and associations including tech prowess and high-performance. Airwallex is backing the McLaren racing Formula 1 team with Aussie frontman, Oscar Piastri.

“Awareness gives us credibility. But a big prerequisite was we also had to be a true partner for McLaren and help power some of its financial operations as well. So it's not just the logo on the car, it's that product piece as well,” Stona says.  

Figures indicate it’s doing that job. A global brand study showed a 58 per cent increase in perceived brand trust among respondents who associated Airwallex with McLaren Racing, and a 70 per cent increase in the likelihood of considering Airwallex for payment needs.

“Our ethos is around being pioneering, optimism, challenging the status quo. So how we approach bringing this partnership to life wasn't through a talking head video or just a logo on a car, it was about you take sport, art, culture, technology and weave it onto something that humans would find engaging. How do you really challenge the status quo with what B2B brand marketing even is? Because that's how we've been able to get cut through, and that's how we will continue to get to get cut through,” says Stona.

“The single point I make here is we're not selling to business or marketing to business decision makers. We're marketing to humans who happen to make business decisions. That understanding and ability to connect, even though you're a B2B brand at a human level, is so critical at establishing that intimacy you need to really build trust and differentiate.”

The market Airwallex faces

As to the macro-economic conditions Airwallex needs to watch out for as a fast-growing financial services upstart and increasingly global corporate citizen, Stona is more broad brush.

“The reality is money will still move across borders, commerce will still happen, trade will still happen, regardless of macroeconomic factors,” he comments. “Airwallex strives in to abstract away the complexity of global trade and global finance. Where there is complexity, that is an opportunity to come in and say, let's simplify this for a business and continue to build products to do that.

“What we monitor quite closely is how are trade patterns changing: Essentially how is money moving across different corridors, and are there different verticals, different markets we're seeing opportunity in? Then understanding the local landscape of those markets, or understanding the local problems of those particular segments of business, or verticals, whether it’s travel or edutech, then building the right products. Our job as a marketing team is to understand the broader product strategy and then help the broader company’s commercial strategy and play an integral role in bringing that to life.”

What is clear is trust building is still fundamental to everything marketing needs to do at Airwallex. Edelman’s Trust Barometer has shown a deepening trust crisis when it comes to consumer trust in everything from media to government, albeit a fairly steady result when it comes to businesses. But in financial services it’s even more critical – just take those Royal Commissions and ongoing fines financial services providers continue to rack up locally, or the volatility of the next-gen crypto market and collapse of FTX in late 2023.

“Whether it's neo banks or neo finance writ large, financial services is still fundamentally about this: Do people trust you enough to want to do business with you and to put their hard-earned money with you? That is a very distinct marketing job to be done,” adds Stona. “Yes, it involves the entire organisation, but marketing has a critical role to play.”