The Ultimate Guide of Product Marketing in 2021
The driving force behind getting products to market – and keeping them there – is product marketing.
Product marketers are the overall consumer voices, masterminds of communications, sales boosters, and adoption accelerators.
All of this is happening at the same moment. Product marketers are some of the most skilled plate spinners on the planet.
Product marketing is where product strategy, sales, customer success, and marketing all come together.
While this highlights the enormous influence that goods marketing may have, it also makes defining goods marketing more difficult (especially when you start comparing product marketing vs. product management).
With that in mind, we prepared this guide to assist explain what product marketing is, what a product marketer’s responsibilities are, how to quantify product marketing success, and much more.
What is Product Marketing?
If you Google the word “product marketing,” you’ll get a slew of definitions attempting to capture the core of what product marketers do.
However, the majority of those definitions come from out-of-date marketing textbooks or provide contradictory interpretations. One can argue that product marketing is associated with the product, while another would argue that product marketing is associated with sales.
Many people concentrate on what a product marketer must accomplish or perform, while others try to describe it in terms of the company’s position. However, none of them seemed to provide a sufficient definition of the term.
So where’s the confusion coming from?
One cause for this might be a misunderstanding of what product marketers perform.
Most of us can comprehend what results in the bulk of functions inside a company are accountable for producing, even if we have little awareness of their day-to-day tasks.
Salespeople generate greater revenue. Finance is in charge of keeping the books in order. Engineers are the ones who make the product. And customer service contributes to consumer satisfaction.
A product marketer’s main role in certain firms is positioning. Others are only focused on sales enablement or are in charge of increasing demand and adoption. Then there are firms where a product marketer is in charge of everything.
What Is Product Marketing Actually Responsible For
We’ll go through the obligations that fall on product marketing’s shoulders in this part. Then we’ll look at how goods marketing varies from traditional marketing and product management on a basic level.
Product Marketing: Pre- & Post-Launch Responsibilities
Product marketers are in charge of positioning, messaging, customer feedback, and the complete go-to-market plan for a product before launch.
Product marketers assist with sales enablement and focus on boosting demand, acceptance, and overall product success after a product launch.
This description, which looks at what product marketers do before and after product releases, is the best we’ve found for explaining the function of product marketing.
Knowing this, product marketers must have a thorough awareness of the client and the market to guarantee that:
• A product is still appropriately positioned, where mostly its additional features.
• To attract new consumers, sales and marketing professionals have all of the required expertise and materials.
• The product will meet the demands of the target audience and eliminate their problems.
• As the market changes, the product remains relevant.
A product marketer’s efforts usually yield the following concrete outcomes:
• Buyer personas are fictional characters who give a corporation structure and information.
• Attract and convert prospects and leads through strategic positioning and messaging.
• Materials to aid sales staff in closing more transactions
• Competitive intelligence that provides a thorough insight into the market for the team.
• The product’s go-to-market strategy and launch plans spell out how it will get promoted and marketed.
Product marketers are going back and forth across departments to assist with go-to-market operations.
Product Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing, such as demand generation teams, promotes a company’s brand and ensures that the marketing message is consistent. To position the firm, product marketing collaborates with these groups.
goods marketing, in particular, assists marketing teams by:
• Creating messages for thought leadership
• Getting in touch with thought leaders to help with top-of-funnel marketing
• Writing narratives that serve as the foundation for demand generation teams to build outbound initiatives across the funnel.
Product marketing also includes customer marketing, demand generation, and adoption – all with the objective of producing satisfied, successful users.
Product Marketing vs. Product Management
Professionals in product marketing and product management are not accountable for the same things.
A product marketer’s role is to bring new goods and features to market, just as a product manager’s role is to build and define them.
The product marketer is concerned with story and position, whereas the product manager is concerned with execution and solutions, as indicated in the diagram below.
Even though these two professions have very different ends, they are nevertheless in constant contact, especially when it comes to roadmaps and communicating those roadmaps to marketing teams so they can prepare properly.
Why Is Product Marketing Important?
As part of their competitive strategy, today’s product marketers assist in the creation of brand narratives.
We coordinate our go-to-market (GTM) motion at Nummero using integrated marketing strategies. Product marketers play an important role in this process. They specifically write the narratives that lead the quarterly campaigns’ plans, offerings, and strategies.
Following the creation of storylines for a specific campaign, product marketers collaborate with demand generation to develop quarterly program themes.
This is why goods marketing is so important in marketing: it gives context to the campaigns you run, the offers you make, and the GTM message you utilize.
Product marketing has seen a lot of traction in recent years. It is now an essential component of every product-based marketing team.
Richard King, the Founder, and CEO of the Product Marketing Alliance discuss how far the goods marketing profession has progressed.
What Is a Product Marketing Strategy?
Let’s take a closer look at a product marketer’s responsibilities at each step leading up to a product launch to have a better idea of what they do:
Customer Development
A product marketer’s role before launch is to establish the target market and get to know the potential consumer.
Positioning & Messaging
The product marketer’s role is to transform learnings into action after customer persona building. A positioning paper or a list of key messages are examples of this. With their positioning, product marketers attempt to address three questions:
• What is the target market for this product?
• What exactly is the function of this item?
• What are the benefits to customers of using it?
• What distinguishes this product from others?
Sharing Positioning & Messaging
The product marketer’s task now is to make sure that everyone in the firm is aware of the positioning and message. Positioning will only be effective if everyone is on the same page. As a result, product marketers must gain buy-in and communicate crucial ideas throughout the business.
This sort of action is critical to your bigger brand positioning, as it allows product marketers to collaborate with other marketing people to create a powerful GTM message.
Creating a Launch Plan
Product marketers are in charge of developing a launch strategy, which often involves teams from throughout the company, including conventional marketing, sales, and support.
Most product marketers are judged based on demand at the end of the day (whether it be new sign-ups, cross-sells, or feature adoption). As a result, developing a good launch plan is essential.
Creating Launch Content
The glue that holds every launch strategy together is the content.
On launch material, product marketers will collaborate with a variety of internal organizations.
Demo decks, images of products, sales materials, blog entries, landing pages, and website updates are all included in this content.
Preparing the Team
For a product introduction, internal communication is equally as crucial as external communication.
Before a product launch, the product marketer’s role is to ensure that the entire team is prepared and ready to go.
This often entails anything from ensuring that the website is ready to go live to ensure that the support team is prepared to handle phone inquiries and chats.
Product Launch
For a product marketer, the actual product launch is the defining moment. When the rubber strikes the road, consumers begin to pour in.
Post-Launch
Finally, you’ll want to assess your launch strategy’s effectiveness. Monitor consumer and internal feedback to do this. Assess the launch’s success using important measures such as adoption, up-sell, and cross-sell.
How to Measure the Impact of goods Marketing
The KPIs for product marketing will differ based on the composition of your team. For example, if enablement managers do not work in goods marketing, their internal KPIs will be unconnected to product marketing performance.
So, how should product marketers evaluate their success in general?
Databox questioned product marketers to find out which KPIs were most important to them. Product marketers, according to the study, are always focused on the client in general.
Product Marketing Examples
Let’s look at four real-world instances of excellent product marketing.
1. Apple
Apple is a household name for cutting-edge technology and applications.
Its goods are not only beautiful to look at, but they are also quite functional.
However, Apple’s goods marketing focuses on the user advantages rather than the numerous product features.
Apple doesn’t just list the outstanding features of its goods.
It utilizes those characteristics to tell people who they might be and how they could function if they bought those items.
They use their items to create a story and persuade others to buy in the process.
2 Cola
Did you know that over 95 percent of the world’s population recognizes Coca-Cola and its red and white branding?
This is not surprising given that the majority of consumers request a “Coke” when purchasing a soft drink or cola.
The brand is so well-known that Coca-competitor Cola’s Pepsi utilized it in its Super Bowl advertisement.
Coca-Cola has become a genuinely worldwide household name and product through highly targeted positioning, repeating advertising, and consistent branding.
3 MailChimp
There are hundreds of email marketing solutions on the market, but MailChimp is unafraid of them.
It has gone above its competitors by portraying itself as more than just an email marketing tool: it is an all-in-one marketing platform that assists firms in growing.
MailChimp, like Apple, emphasizes its advantages to the end-user rather than its product features.
This story was reinforced by a recent rebranding and site makeover.
Start Marketing Your Products
Product marketing is the process through which a firm introduces a new product to the market.
As a product marketer, you are at the crossroads of your company’s marketing, sales, and product teams.
You play an important role in your product’s success because you design and manage your product’s unique marketing plan.
But you also act as a liaison between all three of these departments, ensuring everyone is on the same page with your product, its features, capabilities, and more.
So, begin planning your latest product’s marketing strategy to assure its success with your target demographic and customers.
Should Product Marketing Sit with Marketing or Product?
Before we go into the members of the product marketing team.
Let’s speak about where goods marketing should place.
Product marketers were polled by the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) to better understand the condition of goods marketing.
According to their research, around 62 percent worked in marketing.
However, we were startled to find a lot of different reporting structures in addition to product and marketing.
Product marketing is sometimes combined with the product team in some businesses.
In others, it has to do with marketing.
In marketing, we believe that goods marketing is the ideal policy for an agile GTM approach.
Conclusion
Product marketing is still an important role in today’s intensely competitive technology sector.
We hope this essay has helped to give a more accurate image of what current goods marketing entails.
We have a proposal for those of you who are still wondering how to take your product promotion to the next level: start by upgrading your website.
You may get in touch with Nummero if you are looking for the best digital marketing services.