Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market, promoting it, and selling it to a customer. Product marketing involves understanding the product’s target audience and using strategic positioning and messaging to increase revenue and demand for the product.
What Makes Product Marketing Unique? How is it different from conventional marketing? Let’s unpack the differences.
Product marketing is considered a component of conventional marketing. In fact, if you look at the seven PS`s of marketing, you’ll see that product marketing is one of the most important aspects of a company’s marketing efforts.
Product marketing focuses on driving demand and adoption of a product among existing customers. It focuses on the steps people take to buy your product so product sellers can build campaigns to support this work.
Product marketing is about understanding the audience for a specific product on a deep level and developing that product’s positioning and messaging to appeal to that audience. It covers the launch and execution side of a product in addition to the marketing strategy for the product, which is why a product salesperson’s job is at the core of a company’s marketing, sales, and product teams.
Conventional marketing focuses on broader topics under the marketing umbrella, such as lead generation, SEO, and anything related to acquiring and converting new leads and customers. It is about promoting the company and the brand as a whole, including the products that are sold. These marketers ensure that there is a consistent brand message behind all of the company’s content.
How to do product marketing?
Product marketing is the art and science of defining your product’s position in a market and getting it to the people who want to use it. It starts with the foundation of an existing product strategy and builds into a marketing program to build awareness, convert sales, and increase revenue.
A strong approach to product marketing comes from a combination of market research and close collaboration across multiple departments. For example, product marketing and product management team will work closely together. They will share tools like personas, user stories, and journey maps, but each will use them for their own unique functions.
The core of any product marketing approach is the person in the role of product seller or product marketing manager. They are the ones who know everything about your product, they are the ambassadors between the departments and the one who is listening to their customers. Since they cross so many disciplines, it’s easy to get confused about what their responsibilities are. Here’s a look at what product sellers actually do.
Product marketers can move fluidly between the disciplines of sales, products, marketing, and customer solutions. You can see them at a marketing operations meeting, a product development roadmap meeting, and a customer solutions performance meeting on the same day. So what team are they on? They are most often placed on the marketing team, but they could also sit with the product team. However, no matter their organizational team structure, they always work closely with product managers.
So what exactly does a product seller do? They start by defining your product’s position in the market, presenting a launch strategy, long-term performance and communication plan, and orchestrating marketing execution across teams. Easy to say, complicated to do. Just defining the product’s market position can take long research cycles and require in-depth customer interviews.
How is a product marketed?
There are already many good answers about this, so I won’t try to create one from scratch:
Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding on product positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring that sellers and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive product demand and usage.
Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market and monitoring its overall success. Product sellers focus on understanding and marketing to customers. They drive demand and usage for the product, which often includes writing positioning and messaging.
The role of the product seller is to accelerate product growth by advocating for the customer, communicating the value of the product, and driving distribution.
TLDR: These are all good definitions, use the one that suits you best
#Everything. But seriously, product marketers have a wide range of responsibilities and it will vary depending on your organization and your team, but here are four areas where product marketers play a key role:
- Role 1: Associate with the product in the product roadmap
- Role 2: Create the messaging and positioning of the products
- Role 3: Execute the go-to-market strategy
- Role 4: Drive ongoing sales enablement and distribution
Objective: Partner with the product to influence the roadmap based on the customer’s vision
It’s about partnering with product management to help them build the product roadmap. Using your understanding of the customer, the business, and the person you are targeting, you work with your PM colleagues to figure out how to build the product (or build the next version of the product) in any product, there are plenty of great ideas for the roadmap, it’s your job to help PM identify and prioritize what needs to be built, for whom, and when.
What is product marketing?
Product marketing can be defined as the process of bringing products to market. But that can imply a lot or a little. Where does product marketing begin and end? There is no direct answer to this question. Some companies have laser-focused product marketers on new product launches. But others extend the scope of product marketing to inform and guide product development as well as ongoing sales strategy years after a product’s debut.
To take a broader view, think of product marketing as the intersection between products and the market. Market demands will inform what products are made and how they are presented to potential customers in each marketing campaign. In this sense, product marketing can encompass all aspects of developing, launching, and selling a product.
Because the definition of product marketing can vary, it follows that the roles of product marketers can be quite different depending on their industry and company. Product marketing can be a shared responsibility across several different people and departments or it can be a role held by a product marketing manager. There could even be a dedicated product marketing team. Some of the key responsibilities of product sellers include:
Product marketing is different from other types of marketing in that it is purely product-focused and based on the belief that the product that best serves the market will always win, regardless of other influences. In other words, that a great product can make the market.
Brand marketing, on the other hand, is based on the belief that those other influences determine what wins. This could mean that a brand’s established emotional connection with a customer will influence them more than product details. Sometimes, especially in smaller companies, marketing managers will be responsible for both product marketing and brand marketing, and marketing campaigns can include elements of both.
What are product strategies in marketing?
Your product marketing strategy is a roadmap on how to position, price, and promote your new product in the marketplace.
It’s what tells you where your biggest fans are and how to reach them.
A good product marketing strategy helps customers perceive you as a better product for their needs, and through the constant feedback loop, it becomes the best solution.
Convertkit was launched in 2013 to take on early competitors like MailChimp and Constant Contact. Rather than quit after a slow first two years, founder and CEO Nathan Barry doubled down on a niche: email marketing for bloggers.
Barry used product marketing to identify Convertkit’s positioning and messaging and evolve into the specialized email marketing suite it is today.
The platform cannot compete with the big players on features, so it focuses on specifically and purposefully addressing the needs of its users through content.
Start by analyzing the customer data that you have access to. What does your sales data reveal about territories, customer types, average sales, and pricing? Financial data can provide insights into what kinds of products bring in the most profit.
Collect external data from government and local organizations. Data.gov and eurostat offer volumes on demographics, economy, trade, and production in the US and Europe, respectively.
It supplements this with reports and studies from trade associations, industry magazines and the media, and trade marketing data.
What are the product marketing strategies?
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The process of making the marketing mix is necessarily influenced by the variables that make up a company’s offering. Among the most important should include the product life cycle (product life cycle), defined as the set of phases that characterize the evolution of a product over time and in the reference market. The permanence time of a product in the market cannot be established a priori, but it strictly depends on the conditions of the external environment and the emergence of the new needs of the end customers.
Four main phases of the life cycle can be identified: product development with subsequent market introduction, growth, expiration, and decline.
Although many companies show a certain familiarity with the concept of the life cycle, few can count on being fully aware of the benefits that its proper management would bring to their business. However, this implies the need to continually change your marketing strategies based on the different phases of the product life cycle. In this perspective, the marketing mix plays a particularly important role, since the four levers on which it is based (product-price-game-promome) will inevitably meet some changes, as explained below.
The first phase of the product life cycle is the relationship with its development and its introduction on the market. At this stage, rather slow growth in sales is attributable to such common factors as market diffusion into a product that has not yet experienced, difficulties in changing buyers’ consumer habits, and indirect competition against replaceable products. To support sales, the company could use a marketing plan in which promotional campaigns aim to make the new product, its features and benefits known. Regarding pricing policies, the product could be priced higher than the main competitors in case it is an asset that cannot be easily imitated in the market, and vice versa.
If the product becomes popular, sales begin to rise gradually until the break-even point is reached: the growth phase begins. The entry of multiple competitors in the market can cause a reduction in price compared to the introduction phase. From the point of view of promotion, not having the need to publicize the characteristics of its product, the company could point to messages that induce the consumer to choose its brand compared to competitors (brand awareness). In addition, the offer of post-sale services related to the product becomes crucial to increase customer loyalty.
What are the example product strategies?
According to Wikipedia, a strategy is “an overall plan to achieve one or more general or general objectives under conditions of uncertainty.”
Without uncertainty, you don’t need a strategy. You can go directly to a detailed plan.
In uncertain circumstances, you must rely on a high-level master plan. One that says what you want to achieve, but leaves well enough alone. Gives direction without specifying speed or means of movement. It guides everyone’s actions and decisions without telling them exactly what to do.
A product strategy, then, is a strategy for creating and further developing a product to achieve one or more business objectives.
In an uncertain environment, it’s hard to know if what you plan to do will pay off. But you still need to make decisions and produce results in line with your business goals.
You can’t get from A to B without a travel plan and regularly checking where you are. And you’ll have to adjust along the way. You’ll have to avoid other boats (you’ll be surprised how many you find out at sea) and adjust for currents and wind. You may even have to adjust your entire travel plan to avoid a hurricane.
Your product strategy is the journey plan for your product.
A product strategy is important because it helps you focus. Stay on course and resist the lure of that pretty tropical island down the road.
Many people think that approach is about saying “yes” to something and ignoring the rest. It is not. The approach is about saying “no” to everything that sounds good but doesn’t fit into your overall idea and planning.