What is Product Marketing? Core functions of product marketing

Product marketing is a critical function that connects product development and sales to ensure a product’s success in the market. It involves understanding customer needs, creating compelling product messaging, and developing go-to-market strategies.

By aligning product features with customer expectations and enabling sales teams with the right tools, product marketing not only drives product adoption but also accelerates growth. In this guide, we’ll explore the core aspects of product marketing and how it helps businesses thrive.

The Evolution of Product Marketing?

The evolution of product marketing has undergone significant transformation over time, shaped by advancements in technology, changes in consumer behavior, and the rise of digital platforms.

• Traditional Marketing Era: Marketing focused on mass advertising through print, radio, and TV, with little personalization.

• Customer-Centric Focus: Businesses began segmenting audiences and tailoring products based on consumer needs through market research.

• Digital Marketing Revolution: The internet introduced websites, social media, and email campaigns, allowing direct engagement and more measurable results.

• Personalization and Data-Driven Marketing: Big data enables marketers to target individuals with tailored content and personalized product recommendations.

• Content and Influencer Marketing: Brands shifted to content marketing for value and trust-building, while influencers helped promote products authentically.

• AI and Automation: AI and automation now optimize marketing by personalizing content, predicting trends, and automating repetitive tasks.

Read more: AI Marketing: What, Why and How to use Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

The evolution reflects the constant need for adaptation in an ever-changing marketplace, with a strong focus on creating more meaningful and personalized connections with consumers.

The Product Marketing Framework

Product marketing is crucial to every company’s success, sitting at the intersection of various departments like marketing, sales, and customer success. Product marketers play a key role in helping the business meet its goals. While it’s exciting and crucial, product marketing can be complex.

This framework covers all the key areas needed to guide you through the product marketing process step by step. It outlines five key stages: discover, strategize, define, get set, and grow.

• Discover: This is where you gather the necessary insights, such as customer feedback and competitive analysis, to build a strong foundation for your product marketing.

• Strategize: Here, you develop a plan, whether it’s product-market fit, a go-to-market (GTM)strategy, or pricing decisions.

• Define: In this phase, you identify customer personas and use the insights from the discovery phase to shape your marketing efforts.

• Get Set: This stage is about preparing your team with training, sales enablement, and marketing campaigns, so they are ready to execute your GTM strategy.

• Grow: Post-launch, your focus shifts to ensuring the product thrives in the market and continues to evolve.

By following these stages, you’ll be equipped to navigate the entire product marketing journey.

Product Marketing vs. Product Management

Product Marketing and Product Management are two closely related but distinct roles in business, each with its own focus and responsibilities.

Product Marketing

Focus: Promotes and positions the product in the market.

Responsibilities:

• Understands customer needs and market trends.

• Develops marketing strategies and campaigns.

• Communicates product value to customers through messaging, branding, and advertising.

• Works closely with sales teams to drive product adoption and customer acquisition.

• Analyzes market feedback, competitors, and sales performance to refine marketing tactics.

Product Management

Focus: Develops and oversees the product life cycle.

Responsibilities:

• Defines the product vision, roadmap, and features.

• Collaborates with engineering, design, and other teams to build the product.

• Prioritizes product features based on customer needs, market demand, and business objectives.

• Oversees the product development process from conception to launch.

• Gather feedback to improve and update the product over time.

Examples of Product Marketing In Action

One challenge of product marketing is that it surrounds us daily, yet many people find it hard to define. To make it more transparent, let’s start with what product marketing isn’t. For example, Coca-Cola’s polar bear ads don’t focus on a specific product. They aim to create positive associations with the brand, which is brand marketing.

In contrast, ads like the “Diet Coke Break” directly promote Diet Coke, which is product marketing.

Product marketing goes beyond ads and includes:

• Deciding if Diet Coke is a premium product and if people will pay more for it.

• Determining how to sell it - through stores or subscriptions?

• Choosing the right packaging - 330ml cans or 500ml bottles?

• Identifying the target consumers - office workers or construction workers?

• Understanding whether people like the taste.

Now, imagine a company in the B2B SaaS space develops new marketing automation software. A product marketer might identify that small businesses need affordable tools. This insight would shape the pricing, subscription options, and marketing message, ensuring the product fits the market and drives success.

Why Product Marketing Matters and How It Supports The Sales Team?

Why Product Marketing Matters:

Product marketing plays a critical role in bridging the gap between product development and sales. It guarantees that the appropriate message reaches the right audience and emphasizes the product’s unique value. Here’s why it matters:

• Positioning and Differentiation: Product marketing helps clarify what sets a product apart from competitors, ensuring it stands out in a crowded market.

• Targeting the Right Audience: It identifies the ideal customer base, ensuring marketing efforts focus on those most likely to benefit from the product.

• Driving Demand: Through well-crafted messaging and campaigns, product marketing builds awareness and drives interest, helping to generate leads for the sales team.

• Aligning Product with Market Needs: Product marketers translate customer needs and market trends into product features and updates, ensuring the product remains relevant and competitive.

How Product Marketing Supports the Sales Team:

• Providing Sales Enablement Tools: Product marketers create materials like brochures, case studies, demo scripts, and presentations to help the sales team communicate product benefits effectively.

• Educating the Sales Team: They train the sales team on product features, target audience, and messaging, so salespeople can confidently present the product’s value to potential customers.

• Clarifying Messaging: Product marketing ensures that the product’s key benefits and selling points are clear and consistent across all channels, making it easier for the sales team to convey the value to prospects.

• Gathering and Sharing Market Insights: Product marketers provide the sales team with data on competitors, customer feedback, and market trends, enabling more informed sales strategies.

• Nurturing Leads: Product marketing efforts, such as email campaigns or webinars, help nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel, making it easier for the sales team to close deals.

What Are the Key Responsibilities of Product Marketing?

1. Creating Product Messages and Positioning

Having a great product is important, but you can’t expect everyone to buy it with a single, generic message. That’s where product marketers come in.

The goal of messaging and positioning is to understand what makes your market interested or uninterested, and then present your product in a way that connects with them. To do this, product marketers often use two common tools: messaging hierarchies and positioning statements. These tools help answer key questions like:

• Who is this product for?

• What problems does it solve?

• How is it different from competitors?

• What value does it offer to customers?

Read more: How to Make Successful Positioning Strategies in Marketing?

2. Managing Product Launches

Managing product launches is a key part of product marketing and involves carefully planning and coordinating the introduction of a new product or an update to the market. Whether it’s a small feature update or a completely new product, the product marketer’s job is to make sure everything runs smoothly.

The product launch doesn’t just happen by itself. Product marketers work with different teams, including sales, engineering, customer success, and finance, to ensure everyone is prepared for the launch. They make sure the product is ready, the sales team knows how to sell it, and the marketing team knows how to promote it.

In short, product marketers are the ones who bring everything together, making sure every department is up-to-date and working together to release the product to the market at the right time and in the best way.

3. Creating Sales Tools and Resources

Creating sales tools and resources refers to producing materials that help the sales team explain and promote the product to customers. These materials can take many forms, and the amount of work involved depends on the size and importance of the product launch.

For smaller updates that only affect a few existing customers, the sales collateral might just be a quick update to the website or a short meeting with the Sales and Customer Success teams to go over the details. However, for bigger product launches, you might need a lot more, like demo videos, detailed guides, new website content, updated product messaging, and even sales training sessions.

It’s important to remember that creating these materials is only half the job. The other half is making sure the sales team and other customer-facing teams actually use them. So, delivering the collateral effectively is just as important as creating it.

4. Researching the Market and Customers

Customer and market research involves gathering information before, during, and after any product launch. This research helps you understand who your target audience is and what they need. Questions to consider include:

• Who are the potential customers?

• What are they looking for in a product?

• What makes them unique?

• What do they like or dislike about your product?

• Why do they prefer your competitors?

• How can you improve based on their feedback?

• Are there any positive comments that could be used as a case study?

This research is essential for ensuring your product succeeds. Without it, you’re just guessing what might work.

5. Tracking Product Marketing Results

Tracking on product marketing success can be a bit unclear when it comes to specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Some product marketers have KPIs, while others may not. Here are a few common examples of what to track:

• Daily, active, or monthly users: How many people are using the product regularly?

• Revenue goals: Are the product’s sales contributing to the overall revenue targets?

• Win rates: How often is the product chosen over competitors?

• Product marketing asset usage: Are sales and marketing teams using the tools provided, like brochures or presentations?

• Sales team confidence: How comfortable and confident are salespeople when presenting the product?

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs): How many potential customers are being generated by marketing efforts?

• Customer satisfaction: This can be tracked with metrics like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which measure how likely customers are to recommend the product.

These metrics help evaluate the effectiveness of the product marketing strategies and where improvements can be made.

Read more: SQL vs. MQL: What They Are and How They Differ

6. Directing Content Marketing Campaigns

Content marketing can include various materials, like whitepapers, blogs, case studies, product guides, social media posts, and sales one-pagers.

As mentioned earlier, how much you’ll be involved in writing content depends on the company. If there’s a dedicated team of copywriters, you might not have to handle it yourself.

That said, some product marketers are more comfortable with writing than others. It’s common to see requests for courses on improving copywriting skills, and there are plenty of resources out there to help those looking to improve in this area.

In essence, content marketing plays a key role in communicating the product’s value to customers and supporting sales efforts.

Read more: TOP 17+ Best Content Marketing Tools

7. Maintaining the Website

Managing the website usually isn’t the full responsibility of the product marketing team, but they play an important role in keeping certain elements updated.

This involves making sure new products and features are clearly visible on the site, updating messaging and positioning so it reflects the current market and customer needs, and ensuring everything is optimized for a smooth user experience (UX).

Additionally, product marketers may be responsible for managing in-app messages, ensuring they are scheduled properly and are helping users navigate and interact with the product effectively.

8. Planning the Product Roadmap

Product roadmap planning is a key part of the role for product marketers, though some have more involvement in it than others. The insights and data you gather from customers should guide the roadmap, helping the team prioritize features and improvements.

For example, if a significant number of customers request a specific feature, it needs to be added to the development pipeline. Or, if a new product is set to launch in a few months, product marketers need to know what steps to take to ensure the launch is smooth.

While Go-To-Market strategies are essential for a successful launch, the product roadmap is the bigger picture, guiding the team through what needs to be developed and when. Without a solid roadmap, there’s nothing to launch.

9. Helping With Customer Onboarding

Onboarding customers is crucial for keeping new customers engaged after they’ve made a purchase. If you don’t offer support after the sale, they may lose interest quickly. First impressions matter, and a well-structured onboarding process ensures customers get the most out of your product from the start.

«««< HEAD In this digital age, content is the king. It is the most reliable marketing strategy. Product marketers should invest time in creating high-quality content that talks about your business in general, and your product in particular, like a digital catalog for example. ======= The specifics of onboarding vary depending on the product. For instance, guiding new users through a B2B SaaS product involves different steps than introducing a consumer to a B2C product. The goal, however, remains the same: help customers feel confident in using the product so they stick around longer.

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What’s the Most Crucial Aspect of Product Marketing?

Here is a list of the most crucial aspects of product marketing:

• Understanding the customer: Identify your target audience and their needs.

• Product positioning: Clearly define how your product solves a problem and why it’s different from competitors.

• Building messaging: Create strong and clear messages to convey the product’s value to customers.

• Market research: Gather information about the market, competitors, and trends to optimize your strategy.

• Go-to-market strategy: Plan how your product will be introduced and distributed in the market.

• Sales support: Develop materials and tools to assist the sales team in promoting the product effectively.

• Tracking performance: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing efforts.

• Customer feedback: Use feedback to improve the product and adapt your marketing strategies.

How Does Product Marketing Differ From Other Marketing Functions?

Product Marketing vs. Marketing Communications

Here’s a comparison table specifically for Product Marketing vs. Marketing Communications:

Product Marketing vs. Brand Marketing

Here’s a brief comparison between Product Marketing and Brand Marketing based on the provided content:

Product Marketing vs. Demand Generation

Product Marketing vs. Field Marketing

Conclusion

Product marketing is the vital link between a company’s product and its target audience. It ensures that the product appeals to customers, is positioned appropriately in the market, and satisfies both customer needs and business objectives. By focusing on messaging, positioning, market research, and sales enablement, product marketing helps drive product adoption, boost sales, and fuel business growth. Its impact spans across the entire product lifecycle, from launch to continuous improvement, ensuring long-term success in a competitive market.

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