Everybody knows what marketing is. Who wouldn’t? Organizations can’t get very far without a marketing team paving the way for them. However, do you happen to know what product marketing is? That question entails a much more negative response, and asking a bunch of people would often leave you with a plethora of answers to choose from, not knowing which one is right.
Product marketing takes a much more focused path to get your organization’s offering out in the market. So, what is product marketing? Well, there isn’t one straight answer to it. However, if you were to define product marketing, it essentially involves serving as a connective web between new innovations from organizations, and their clients.
With around 63% of businesses having raised their marketing budgets in 2022, quite a few of them have started directing funds specifically toward their product marketing efforts.
But, what is product marketing? How will a carefully-crafted product marketing strategy boost your ROI churn?
Read on to delve deeper into these questions and understand more about product marketing!
What do you mean by Product Marketing?
Source: Drift
So, what is product marketing? Product marketing refers to the process of bringing a viable product innovation to the customer, and it entails positioning the product in the market according to the customer’s needs.
In essence, product marketing simply brings the new product into the current market, and tries to bring in conversions. However, unlike traditional marketing, this practice revolves around the product, not the brand.
A product marketer’s mentality must be set to identifying and understanding the customer’s problem, and offering their product as a solution. Once you understand the holes in their current system, you can contact targeted CEOs and other influential decision-makers to help them understand your product’s value.
This ‘Marketing strategy for products’ is generally followed by indulging in messaging, writing positioning, conversing with clients, releasing and launching brand-new product features, and so on.
Since product marketing brings in considerably higher targeted prospects, companies have increased their overall digital marketing budget by 14%, contributing much more to the product marketing efforts.
As a result, the product marketing team for any organization sits at the intersection of customer success, marketing, sales, and product strategy teams. Certain companies employ their product marketers to work on just product positioning.
On the other hand, some might hire one to get rid of their product adoption and demand-driving needs. Lastly, some might employ them as a one-size-fits-all solution for all the above problems.
With some clarity on ‘What is product marketing,’ let’s head to the next section of the blog that talks about the various types of product marketing.
What are the different types of product marketing?
In essence, there are about four distinct types of product marketing. They are as follows:
• Traditional Product Marketing
Traditional product marketing refers to the most basic rendition of this practice. The method leverages traditional media channels to market the product across the target clientele.
These traditional methods generally include radio ads, prints, TV commercials, and so on. Although this type of product marketing can bring in good revenue, it will take a large chunk from your pockets as well.
• Online Product Marketing
The digital forefront of product marketing, online product marketing, leverages the internet to push their product out to the people.
Online product marketing is quite popular, since it can enhance your product’s visibility in front of a much larger crowd, for considerably less investment. However, without a proper setup and reliable online presence, online product marketing is seldom fruitful.
Furthermore, ensure you have accurate contacts to connect with CFOs and other important decision-makers from target prospects.
• Guerrilla Product Marketing
Marketing practices that generally involve unconventional methods to push the product into the market are called Guerrilla Product marketing. These marketing techniques can grab the target prospect’s attention a lot faster than traditional methods.
However, holding control over Guerrilla marketing can be tedious at times, and it might not give you the desired results every time.
• Word-of-Mouth Product Marketing
This is a rudimentary, yet effective way of product marketing. This practice relies on your pre-existing customers spreading the word about your product. Existing clients can refer your products or services to other contacts, bringing in more attention to what you are selling.
However, this practice does have its pitfalls, and can be challenging to control at times.
• Word-of-Mouth Product Marketing
This is a rudimentary, yet effective way of product marketing. This practice relies on your pre-existing customers spreading the word about your product. Existing clients can refer your products or services to other contacts, bringing in more attention to what you are selling.
However, this practice does have its pitfalls, and can be challenging to control at times.
How do Traditional Marketing and Product Marketing differ from each other?
Source: Userpilot
Although the two terms are often confused with each other, the product marketing vs marketing discussion does bring out some stark differences between the two.
Firstly, let’s focus on how they differ in basic functionality. Traditional marketing generally refers to promoting the entire company brand. On the other hand, product marketing solely relies on driving awareness and demand for the particular product produced by your company.
Traditional marketing is leveraged to get more people excited about your brand, and build trust with targeted prospects. However, product marketers focus all their efforts on isolating target audience groups, and working towards getting them to buy the product and converting them.
This includes catering to new audiences from time-to-time, while ideating and innovating to make the existing clients stay as well.
For instance, if a product marketer needs to market to the client persona of VPs, they will understand the specific problems that are recurring in this particular level of the C-suite.
Their goal is to market the products in such a way that it brings up product adoption, revenue, win rate, and overall customer value. Moreover, unlike traditional marketing, product marketing does not stop at customer acquisition. It further ushers in product growth throughout various stages of the customer journey, and keeps adding value.
The Role of a Product Marketer
Source: smartsheet
Unlike other forms of marketing, a capable product marketer’s role involves being the customer’s voice. What problem is the client-facing? Can this issue be addressed? How can your product bring value to the client? How quickly will it implement said changes?
A product marketer has to ponder all these questions, and more, and truly understand the viability of your product from a client-centric perspective.
They focus on creating narratives that are derived from collated customer insights, and position their product as a means for the client to reach their desired goal. In essence, a product marketer is involved in the product development phase, and stays on top of the product journey long post-launch.
Furthermore, some of the key responsibilities of a product marketer include the following:
- Taking critical calls entailing product messaging and market placement.
- Assist the sales team in understanding the product better, and closing a higher deal volume.
- Preparing the overall GTM strategy (Go-To-Market).
- Formulate a reliable roadmap, followed by the commercialization of new products.
- Offering a boost to overall win rates, demand, awareness, and deal sizes.
- Delve into an in-depth understanding of the target market, and analyze the exceedingly competitive landscape.
All these key responsibilities amalgamate to create the role of a product marketer. With all the pointers in this list checked off, product marketers should be able to develop a rather successful product marketing strategy.
In essence, these product marketers are responsible for formulating the foundation that other teams will further leverage in order to efficiently position and sell their products.
What do you mean by a Product Marketing Strategy?
According to a certain study conducted by Harvard Business Review, about 75% of the total products launched to meet an early death and end up failing.
Despite the quality of your product, the inability to invest in product marketing and carry out the launch smoothly, will absolutely destroy your product’s market image.
As a result, you need a set roadmap to help you navigate the road from product development, all the way to launch. This is where a product marketing strategy comes into the picture. This marketing roadmap will reveal ways to promote and position your product in the market, and it also offers assistance post-launch.
Source: Peekage
Furthermore, here are the various facets critical to a successful product marketing strategy. They are:
1) Customer development
For you to even market your product, you must first know who you are marketing to. So, to conquer the art of product marketing, understand your target client base inside out.
The first step to understanding your target client would be to formulate accurate user personas. This exercise will surely help you understand your client’s needs, expectations, and interests, allowing you to offer them a personalized customer experience.
In conclusion, you will be able to come up with product messaging that the target clientele will relate to.
2) Messaging and positioning
Once you filter out your target clients, you need to figure out how to approach them. Targeted product marketing only works if you manage to initiate communication with the prospect just right.
Bring in all the target audience data you have gathered, and build your product’s narrative around it. The narrative must be such, that it must highlight your product as a solution to their issues.
Lay emphasis on pointers that show the uniqueness of your product, giving them reasons to rule your opposition out of consideration. Spin your conversation around the following pointers:
- What is the functionality of your product?
- What is the purpose of the product?
- Why should the client even use your product?
- Why must the client adopt your product/service now?
- How does your product differ from/beat your competitor’s product?
Your messaging is clearly working if the buyer gets these answers out of you quickly. Once your cards are on the table, keep them engaged with personalized product benefits to add further value.
Lastly, every member of your company must be on the same page pertaining to deal progress. You don’t want to overwhelm the client with multiple different messages at once. Therefore, consistency and accuracy is key in brand messaging.
Furthermore, consistent messaging will also mean that the marketing team can start pouring in work to come up with the perfect Go-To-Market (GTM) message.
3) Preparing a launch plan
Having a launch plan at your disposal is crucial to having a successful launch. Ideally, the product launch involves coordination from teams across the entire organization.
It is the product marketer’s job to create the whole launch plan, and constantly coordinate between all these moving parts. Also, keep in mind that you must work backward in order to get to the rollout on time.
Set the launch date beforehand, and plan things accordingly.
4) Getting launch content ready
Launch content is the one thing that holds your entire launch plan together. This is because your launch content includes everything from pitch decks, product screenshots, demos, blog posts, and landing pages, to sales training material, one-pagers, and so on.
Keep in mind that despite the fact that all this content is being developed as a combined effort, it must be tracked by the product marketing team. This is the only way to tell how well your content is really doing.
5) Get the team prepped
Internal communication is key for a successful product launch. You must make it a point that the entirety of your team is prepped about the launch, and are on the same page.
This includes things as small as checking website condition, to prepping the support team to deal with chats and calls.
6) Product launch
This is where you shine as a product marketer. The rubber has now touched the road, and the prospects will start coming in.
Keep in mind that things won’t always go as smoothly as planned, and you might need to improvise.
7) Post-launch
Once your launch is done, it is time to reflect. Call for a retrospective meeting, and understand the areas you could’ve done better at. Remember that you must also measure your launch plan’s success through internal and customer feedback.
Once you have these insights, you can leverage them to then cross-sell and up-sell.
Wrapping Up
Product marketing requires a wide range of both hard and soft abilities, intricate coordination between departments, and the capacity to switch between tasks at any time.
Product marketers are exceptional people that can work across disciplines while staying focused on their respective objectives and projects. Remember that with the right tools, and timely monitoring, your product marketing team can drive your revenue through the sky!
F.A.Q.s
Q) What are the various challenges product marketers have to face?
Some of the challenges that entail product marketing are as follows:
- The constant disconnect across organizational teams.
- Lack of customer data.
- Inefficient product messaging and market positioning.
- Difficulty in proving product marketing ROI.
Q) What are product marketing strategy questions?
Product marketing strategy questions refer to the questions that help your team determine how to compete and surpass the competitors.
In essence, the question set clearly allows companies to figure out the answer to ‘How do you plan on competing with opponent companies?’
Q) What are some questions you must ask before you allow your product to enter the market?
Some of the questions you should ask before the product enters the market are as follows:
- What would be an accurate name for the product?
- What does it do?
- Does it have a good online presence?
- What about the business model?
- Can the product itself be modularized in any way?
Q) Why do you need a product marketing strategy?
A Product marketing strategy will go a long way in helping you focus and zero in on your target demography. As a result, you won’t waste your marketing resources trying to be everything to everyone.
Q) What are the primary differences between traditional and product marketing?
The critical differences in the argument that entails ‘product marketing vs marketing’ are as follows:
- Traditional marketing focuses on putting your brand name out there, whereas, on the other hand, product marketing does the same, but for just the product.
- Traditional marketing caters to new audiences. On the other hand, product marketing markets across existing customers to bring in an influx of new revenue.