7 minute read
Product marketing connects products with the people who need them most. Learn what product marketers do, why they are essential to a product’s success, and how you can build a career in this field.
It’s an age-old question: If a tree falls in the woods but no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? In the product world, we might reframe the question as follows: If a company builds a great product, but no one knows about it, does it impact the market?
This explains why product marketing is essential to a product’s success. Without a deep understanding of how to talk about your product and generate excitement for it, your product may see a lackluster launch and underperform. Luckily, by understanding its key functions and how to incorporate them into a broader product strategy, you can use it to your advantage and support business success.
Ready to learn how? Keep reading or use the links below to explore the topics that most interest you.
- What is product marketing?
- What does product marketing do?
- Why is product marketing important?
- How to build a career in product marketing
What is product marketing?
Product marketing is the process of bringing a finished product to your market, positioning it effectively, and communicating its value to the target audience.
To do this right, you must understand your market’s problems and how your product solves those problems. Armed with that information, you can shape your product positioning, messaging, and channel strategy. Product marketers can create buyer personas, product positioning statements, and go-to-market plans to shape their marketing and communication strategies.
What does product marketing do?
Product marketing sits at the intersection between product, traditional marketing, sales, and customer experience. It takes information from many different sources and influences how a company talks about a product and who it talks to. To accomplish this, product marketers are typically responsible for product positioning and messaging, marketing strategy, supporting customer onboarding and retention, and sales enablement.
Product Positioning and Messaging
Simply put, product positioning is what you want to communicate, and product messaging is how you will communicate it.
Product positioning involves documenting market needs and articulating how a product meets those needs. It’s also an opportunity to show that your product beats competitors’ products. Ultimately, completing product positioning will help you define how your product stands out in the market and exceeds what competitors can offer.
Product messaging helps all your marketing materials sing from the same songbook. It’s a blueprint for communicating how the product solves market needs, why it will resonate with buyer personas, and exactly why it’s different from competitors’ products.
In a nutshell, messaging is the game plan for communicating the broad ideas identified through positioning.
Product Marketing Strategy
Strategy is how a company positions, prices, and promotes a product from launch through the product life cycle.
- Product positioning helps teams decide how to talk about the product to its target audiences.
- Product pricing involves determining the best price for the product based on its value for customers, competitors within the larger market, and company goals such as driving revenue or retaining customers.
- Promotion encompasses the plans for bringing customers to the point of sale, the messaging you’ll use, and the channels through which you’ll engage prospective customers and nurture them to the point of purchase.
Product management is responsible for building products the market loves, and product marketing ensures that the target audience knows about those products.
Supporting Customer Retention and Onboarding
Remember, product marketing doesn’t end after launch —it supports the product’s success throughout its life cycle. Products, markets, and target audiences may evolve and change over time. These strategies help companies retain customers who may otherwise consider and purchase other products. It can also engage and convert new customers who may not have known about the product when it was released or who may benefit from new features.
Aligning Product Marketing Strategy with Business Goals
Product marketers are often tempted to focus on metrics like paid ad click-through rate (CTR), leads, or the PR’s earned audience value. However, it’s important to remember that the business’s goals are your goals. If the company aims to sell a new product or upgrade existing customers, product marketing goals must be tied to primary business objectives like sales, revenue growth, or customer acquisition and retention.
To show their impact, product marketers need to demonstrate how their marketing initiatives support business growth goals.
Why is product marketing important?
Product marketing is important because it gets the product in front of the right people and encourages them to buy it. A product management team might build an exceptional product, but it won’t matter if your target market doesn’t know about it or see its value.
Aligning Teams Around the Customer
Product managers develop products from concept to launch, but product marketers are responsible for promoting them during launch and beyond. To accomplish that, they must ensure that all teams—including sales, operations, customer experience, and product, are attuned to how the product solves customer needs. They use buyer personas and market research to craft messaging, product positioning, and sales enablement assets.
So, product marketing ensures that all outbound communication and customer interactions are guided by the customer’s needs (not just the company’s revenue goals).
Driving Product Growth and Innovation
Because of their close partnerships with marketing and customer experience teams, product marketers are often among the first to hear feedback from product users. That feedback might come from social media sentiment, reviews, or support call logs.
That creates a unique opportunity to escalate customer pain points to product teams. Additionally, that information can inform how sales teams approach conversations with their prospects or how marketing communicates important product information.
It’s not all negative! Positive customer feedback can encourage product teams to focus on experiences that users love and even shape marketing campaigns.
Sales Enablement and Cross-Functional Collaboration
Product marketers’ first-hand market insights can benefit sales teams, too. They can leverage their knowledge of the market to help create sales enablement tools, resources, and training. They can also share common market pain points and articulate how the product solves them. With this information, sales teams can build scripts and think ahead to counter common concerns.
How to build a career in product marketing
If you’re interested in a career in product marketing, you’re in luck! It is a fast-growing field with no standard career path. Professionals in these roles often have backgrounds in traditional or digital marketing, product, sales, and even engineering. Product marketing managers are often called a “Swiss Army Knife,” so an unconventional background or skillset can work to your advantage.
Origins of Product Marketing
Historically, marketing focused on growing the brand and driving sales. Product marketing began to gain traction as companies moved toward product-led growth (PLG) in the 2010s. PLG is a business strategy that relies on products to acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and achieve business goals. PLG prioritizes specific products over the brand and enables prospects to engage with your product through the sales cycle.
Key Skills Needed for Product Marketing
Product marketers must balance hard and soft skills to succeed in their roles. This field is deal for professionals who enjoy working on dynamic, evolving projects and have the skills to work cross-functionally to bring a product to the market and ensure its success.
Hard skills:
- Market research and competitor insights: Knowledge of the product’s market, target markets, desirable audiences, and competitors.
- Product and positioning expertise: Thorough understanding of the product and the market problems it solves.
- Marketing strategy and channel knowledge: Understanding how to leverage different marketing channels and tactics to encourage audience members
- Data analysis: Ability to analyze marketing campaign and performance data to gather insights into campaign performance and adapt strategy based on findings.
Soft skills:
- Project management: Monitor and update messaging strategies, channel selections, and marketing budgets based on product priorities.
- Communication: Proactively share updates with internal and external audiences/
- Collaboration: Work with cross-functional teams to ensure campaigns launch on time and with the latest and greatest messaging while securing stakeholder support for major initiatives.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, honing these skills can set you up for success as your career progresses into leadership roles.
Difference Between Marketing vs. Product Marketing
While both require knowledge of industry trends and best practices, there are some notable differences. Product marketing supports specific products by increasing awareness, generating leads, and driving sales. Product marketers’ work extends beyond the go-to-market strategy and product launch and supports the product’s entire lifecycle through growth, maturity, and decline. On the other hand, general marketing might focus on growing the brand itself or divide its focus amongst the company’s entire portfolio.
Product Marketing Career Paths
Professionals in this field often begin as or become Product Marketing Managers in the early stages of their careers. From there, they might evolve into a Director or Vice President (VP) of Product Marketing role. These roles might best suit professionals passionate about supporting specific products rather than brands.
By branching into broader channel marketing experience, product marketing professionals might take on Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or VP of Marketing roles. Those more passionate about feature development and market research may pursue a product leadership role like VP of Product or Chief Product Officer (CPO).
