Product Marketing: What is It and How to Start
Product marketing is a type of marketing that is primarily concerned with strategies to connect products with people. It is a laser focus on everything related to this task: point of sale, pricing, packaging, distribution, and so on.
Many companies need to work with it due to the different approaches required for the various types of consumers they have.
Although traditional marketing or inbound marketing are fundamental for putting your brand in the spotlight and standing out in the market, they are very generalist and lack tools to deal with just one product.
That’s why product marketing exists. It’s another resource in your toolbox. But like any tool, it needs to be handled correctly.
How to do this? Where to start with product marketing? This article will help you with that task. Let’s dive in!
What is product marketing?
Product marketing is a set of methods, tactics, and tools that seeks to create marketing strategies not for a brand as a whole but for each of its products.
Let’s take a quick example: a large dairy industry, Queen’s Dairy, has a portfolio of products with enormous variety. There are more than 50 different products.
These products, although quite similar in their composition, are very different in the audience that consumes them. Here are some of their products:
- Kids’ blueberry yogurt;
- Condensed milk;
- Chocolate cream with white chocolate (IôIô style);
- Sugar-free almond milk;
- Dietary supplements (Whey style).
A single marketing strategy for all these products is unfeasible. Just in these 5 examples, we can find at least 3 different sales points for each one.
And even within the sales points, there are variations in the department where these products will be displayed.
Products have specific needs that are easier to address through the micro and more targeted approach that product marketing offers.
The relationship between product marketing and product development
Often product marketing and the development of new products will go hand in hand. For example, Queen’s Dairy can perceive, through target audience research, the market demand for a new product.
But in other cases, the two concepts end up diverging considerably, especially in the creation of digital products and software by startups.
The development of these products has a series of specific methods that have nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with R&D.
Some of these methods, in fact, are counterintuitive in a marketing approach. Take, for example, the concept of MVP – minimum viable product.
Since the early 20th century, Claude C. Hopkins already alluded to the need for the best possible product to succeed in marketing. This notion was expanded and popularized by great creatives like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach (of DDB) in the 1950s.
The MVP – the smallest viable unit of a product – is the opposite of that. The important thing is that it works and fulfills the minimum promised at launch, with room for growth throughout its lifespan.
So, although the development of a new product starts in marketing, the process itself has crucial differences, mainly related to production reality and the business objectives of companies.
What is the importance of product marketing?
The great importance of product marketing lies in its micro vision, dedicated to one product at a time within a broad marketing strategy.
It is only through this more in-depth view that the marketing objectives of each product are achieved.
Moving away from the hypothetical field, think of Unilever, the largest food corporation present in Brazil. The holding company now has more than 400 different brands. Each of these brands has several products, also different from each other, although similar.
It’s as if Unilever had 400 Dairy Mumus, to use our previous example. 🐮
It is simply impossible to work on marketing that does not zoom in on the specific needs of each of these products and their target audience.
This more general marketing – which can be inbound or outbound marketing – cannot handle all the peculiarities of the products and would have many difficulties incorporating all the different audiences of all these brands into its message.
For the product to sell well, it needs a dedicated vision, its own studies, and unique strategies. This is only possible through product marketing, which has specific objectives focused on these needs.
What are the objectives of product marketing?
The central objective of product marketing is to boost the sales of specific products.
But for this broad objective to be achieved, it works with smaller ones, which together form the practice of its work. They are:
- Identify the target audience and product personas;
- Create the unique and specific product strategy;
- Work with the sales team to attract the identified audience;
- Determine the positioning of your product in the market;
- Ensure that the product meets the audience’s expectations;
- Ensure that the product delivers what the audience needs;
- Keep the product relevant over time.
These objectives are universal. Although there are differences between types of product marketing – retail and digital product, for example – the objectives remain the same.
The 5 Phases of Product Marketing
Now that we understand the objectives of product marketing and what it is exactly, we need to talk about the practice of the methodology.
In other words: for those who want to start now, what are the first steps? Is there a well-known path? When to implement each of its objectives?
Let’s discuss that now, in the 5 phases of product marketing. You will notice that they are quite intuitive, naturally leading to one another.
Starting:
Phase 1: profile, positioning, and message
The first phase of product marketing is preparation, research, and data interpretation.
The first step is to conduct a target audience research, either with internal resources or through a third-party company. In our article on the topic, we showed some tools and strategies to conduct it.
The research will seek to identify who your audience is. Their demographic information, their needs, their motivations when choosing a product, etc. The final result of this research will be a buyer persona.
With the persona identified, the next step is to determine how your product will be approached, its positioning in the market.
For example: is your audience more exclusive, from classes A and B? Your market positioning needs to take this characteristic into account. Price, points of sale, and marketing strategies will have distinct characteristics from other products.
The message is the final step and is related to your USP – unique selling proposition. What are the differentiators of your product? And how do you highlight them in your communication materials?
With this resolved, you are free to move on to the second phase:
Phase 2: GTM strategy and Sales Enablement
A go-to-market strategy (GTM) determines the necessary steps to take your product from prototype to shelves – or to the internet, in the case of digital products.
This strategy seeks to identify the best points of sale for your product according to your target audience, conduct competitive analysis to seek a competitive price – adjustments to your positioning come into play here if necessary – and determine an action plan for the distribution of your product.
Also included here is the formalization of advertising campaigns that will accompany the product, as well as the creation of promotional materials for the retail points of sale, etc.
Sharing all the work done in phase 1 with the sales team is called sales enablement. Offering all possible resources about the product and training the salespeople to sell it is fundamental for this phase.
It is very common in product marketing for phases 1 and 2 to be somewhat mixed. The identification of the target audience is done separately, but the GTM strategy, positioning, USP identification, and sales enablement are often done together.
Phase 3: launch marketing
You will notice that these phases merge into each other, making it quite difficult to delineate where one ends and the other begins.
During the creation of the GTM strategy, another type of marketing begins to emerge: launch marketing.
It is very important for the product to reach shelves or be available on the internet and have a large volume of immediate sales.
I separated the launch marketing phase from the previous one because, although they complement each other, the GTM strategy is fundamental to determine the course of launch marketing.
Knowing the retail points of sale and distribution channels, as well as your target audience, launch marketing requires combining this information with expertise in marketing campaigns, creating campaigns that will engage consumers and increase initial profits.
Phase 4: continuous improvement of strategy through results analysis
A GTM (go-to-market) strategy applied in conjunction with launch marketing will provide you with a lot of data about the consumption of your products and their market acceptance.
The fourth phase of product marketing, already quite advanced and extending throughout its lifespan, is monitoring results for continuous improvement.
In the case of digital products, Google Analytics is your best friend. It will indicate the number of visits to your main sales pages and user actions on them.
For physical products, it is necessary to work with business intelligence to capture and gather different sales data. With this data, it is possible to make sales projections and create new strategies for the future.
Phase 5: recurring competitive analysis
In addition to analyzing your own data, it is also very necessary to analyze the market behavior as a whole.
Recurring competitive analyses – meaning those that will accompany your product throughout its lifespan – seek to understand how the market is doing, complementing the analysis of your own results.
Look for information about your competitors, understand how the country’s economic scenario is, and even try to understand the movement in the retail points of sale where you are selling.
With this and combining the knowledge obtained in phase 4, you have a wealth of information about the performance of your product and the market in which it operates.
The 9 Most Important Product Marketing Strategies
Okay, so far we’ve talked a lot about how to start your product marketing strategy, how to keep it running, and how to improve your metrics every day, right?
But what about in practice? What kind of tools does product marketing use in its daily activities? What concepts are important to know?
That’s what we’re going to talk about here in this article. I’ve outlined some fundamental practical strategies applied by top brands when it comes to product marketing.
Let’s dive in and learn more!
Packaging
An important part of product marketing, packaging branding, and the consumer’s experience with it are relevant considerations in the early stages of the process.
A product’s packaging or its online presentation are factors that are relevant both in the customer’s choice of your solution and in their experience and preference.
CS and CX
Customer success and customer experience are also very important concepts in product marketing, directly related to user experience.
In fact, everything in UX studies – or user experience – has a significant impact on product marketing and should be prioritized in its early stages.
CX is related to the user’s experience throughout the buying journey, or how they feel at each stage. Is your product easy to find? Does your product motivate the consumer to solve a problem they have? These are determining factors in the sale.
CS is a bit different and much more complex. It usually happens after the sale, being related to support and assistance from the brand in using your product, focusing on the objectives that customer has.
The customer success area is always one of the first to be developed in companies that sell digital products in the SaaS model. You’re not just selling a tool: you’re selling the solution to your customer’s objectives.
Win/Loss Analysis
Phases 4 and 5 of product marketing implementation deal with performance analysis and the performance of your solution, as well as market analysis, right?
Win/Loss analysis is a model that seeks to identify sales won and lost in the market. In retail, it is applied by monitoring sales evolution and comparing them with competitors, as well as individual sales data.
On the internet, this is much easier to determine. Win/Loss analysis can be done by checking the quantity of abandoned carts, for example.
By analyzing this sales data, you begin to understand points in the customer journey that are becoming bottlenecks and act on them to increase your sales.
Pricing
A pricing strategy needs to take several factors into consideration. Geographic location, intended profit, competition in the region, the target audience being approached, etc.
Within the product marketing implementation phases, pricing is by far one of the most important aspects. The price of your product has a direct impact on its popularity.
Inbound Marketing and Flywheel
Inbound marketing is one of the main modern marketing strategies for launching products on the internet and keeping them relevant over time.
The issue is that its process is lengthy, and launch marketing requires a greater focus on other short-term strategies, such as paid media and outbound marketing in general.
The flywheel, a method created by HubSpot (also responsible for creating inbound marketing), seeks greater inspiration from the product as the sales engine.
In this methodology, the product is at the center, and a circular structure is built around it, consisting of three main phases:
- Attract: use marketing campaigns to attract customers who are not yet familiar with your brand or have never had direct contact with it;
- Engage: offer special offers and conditions for these people to try your product or leave their contact information, eventually resulting in a sale;
- Delight: with a good product and great work on CX and CS, it is possible to stimulate repurchases and increase demand for your product.
Personas
Developing personas is also a crucial part and one of the biggest tools in the early stages of product marketing.
Identifying the target audience is the most complicated work of these first two stages. And once it’s identified, it can be very difficult for everyone on your team to remember all the information that a detailed study brings.
Personas work as an average. Through them, target audience information becomes easier to understand and transmit to the entire team working in product marketing and beyond.
OKRs and KPIs
OKRs are Objectives and Key Results, while KPIs are Key Performance Indicators.
These two concepts have a broad application in product marketing, specifically in the early stages and the final stages.
OKRs are large overall goals, such as “achieving $1 million in revenue in the first 6 months of product launch.”
These goals, of course, are created in conjunction with all stakeholders in the company and need to be achievable and realistic, like all goals.
KPIs are indicators set within these overall goals that will determine if you are progressing towards achieving the goal. For example: “monthly sales variation.”
Technical Writing and Documentation
Those working with digital product marketing, especially software, need to pay attention to one last point when developing the product: its documentation.
It is very common for software developers to work with extensive documentation, often transformed into wikis to make life easier for the customer and your support team.
This work is usually done by UX Writers, tech writers, or the developers themselves — although the latter is not recommended.
It involves detailing the technical functioning of your product, creating manuals and instructions for simple and complex uses of the tool.
This is a point that cannot be ignored by those working in this field. The documentation of a product is part of marketing because it helps users understand the product in depth.
Ready to Start Product Marketing?
All the tips I’ve shared in this article work best with a product still in the development phase, in the early stages of creation.
If you work with a product that’s already established, it’s best to apply the last two phases of product marketing, seeking to better understand its behavior within the market.
Then, with this information at hand, you can opt for rebranding, a fresh start for your product, if sales are falling short, okay?
In the meantime, you can test Leadster for free today! We offer a chatbot platform that helps your users navigate through your Sales Funnel.
Just click on this link to learn more and start your free trial today – no credit card required.
Thanks for reading!
