Product Marketing

In my previous posts I have tried to establish differences between a Product Manager and a Product Marketing manager. The posts have been more on the Product Manager point of view so I also wanted to visit the world of Product marketing too as they overlap to some extent. Let’s start with a definition: what is product marketing? Hubspot.com puts it well: “Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product” Good sources for further reading:

• What is product marketing?
• Defining product marketing
• Product management vs. marketing

Product marketing (source: 280group.com)

What is Product Marketing? Product marketing is the process of facilitating a product’s journey to market. This involves determining the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring that both salespeople and customers understand it. The goal is to drive demand and usage of the product.

Product GTM strategy

According to Hubspot, “Your go-to-market strategy should be a handy roadmap that measures the viability of a solution’s success and predicts its performance based on market research, prior examples, and competitive data. Ultimately, you want to create a plan that sets the product apart from the competition and generates leads and customer retention.” They continue, “I’ve seen two major methods for developing a go-to-market strategy: the funnel and the flywheel. While the traditional, one-off funnel method focuses on attracting leads and nurturing them into sales, the flywheel approach uses inbound marketing and other strategies to build long-lasting customer relationships.”

Product Marketing and Go-to-Market

• Competitive differentiation
• Positioning and messaging
• Naming and branding
• Customer communication
• Product launches
• Press and analyst relations

The Basics of Product Marketing:

• Strategic Plan: Involves creating a plan focused on attracting and turning the audience into loyal customers.
• Product Story: Develop a compelling narrative, defining buyer personas and articulating the product’s value proposition.
• Long-Term Success: Regularly revisit product marketing strategies to ensure sustained sales over time.

Starting Strong: Act, Engage, Delight:

• Attract: Capture consumer interest through attention-grabbing tools like ads, videos, blogs, or social media posts.
• Engage: Encourage interaction through strategies like email marketing and chatbots, identifying and managing potential lead sources.
• Delight: Keep customers coming back with tailored experiences through automation and smart content creation.

Finding Focus: Tell Your Story: Define and communicate your product story by answering key questions about the target audience, outreach methods, product benefits, and points of differentiation.

Seven Critical Steps in Effective Product Marketing:

1. Product Research: Test the product internally and externally before launch.
2. Product Story: Present the product in the form of a compelling story.
3. Product-Focused Content: Create marketing content, including copy, blog content, case studies, and landing pages.
4. Product Launch Plan: Develop a detailed plan outlining each stage of the marketing process.
5. Product Launch Meeting: Coordinate a meeting involving all stakeholders when the product is launched.
6. Community Engagement: Capitalize on industry buzz by reaching out to partners, influencers, and existing customers for commentary.
7. Sales Enablement: Work closely with the sales team to develop a consistent sales strategy before, during, and after the product launch.

The Role of a Product Marketer: Product marketers, also known as product marketing managers, are responsible for promoting a product’s value to the target audience. Their duties include determining the marketing content mix, managing budgets, collaborating with content creators, and overseeing the content calendar. Their goal is to effectively communicate the product’s features and benefits to attract customers.

Another important aspect is STP, or Segmentation, Targeting (selecting the wanted segments), and positioning. STP model can be explained as follows:

1. Market Segmentation: This initial step involves dividing the market into distinct groups of consumers who share similar needs, characteristics, or behaviors. The purpose is to identify segments that are most relevant and valuable to the business. This can be achieved through various criteria such as demographics, psychographics, geographic location, or behavioral patterns.
2. Market Targeting: Once segments are identified, the next step is to evaluate their potential and attractiveness from a commercial standpoint. This involves assessing factors such as segment size, growth potential, profitability, and compatibility with the company’s capabilities and objectives. Based on this evaluation, marketers select one or more segments to target with their marketing efforts.
3. Product Positioning: With target segments identified, marketers develop a positioning strategy for their products or services within each segment. This involves creating a distinct and appealing perception of the brand in the minds of consumers within the chosen segments. Positioning is achieved by highlighting unique features, benefits, or values that differentiate the product from competitors and meet the specific needs and preferences of the target audience.

P.S. Marketing for startups

1. Customer development
   1. Find a extremely specific target customer segment
   2. Find a small group of customers who need your unique selling points that competitors don’t offer.
2. Validate the small groups of customer’s needs and willingness to buy
   1. Validate group’s problems
   2. Validate your unique selling points (USPs) and differentiation
      
3. Build a target customer segment roadmap that provides
   1. The best first sub-group of customers to target
   2. A minimum feature requirement list to win sales (table stakes)
      

In other words, you try to find a tight customer segment and find actual customers who buy your solution preferably before you have built anything – you have just sold it. Working closely with your early stage customer’s by iterating your offering based on customers’ needs, you get you then close to PMF. But please remember that what customers say is not usually what they actually need, and you will need to be able to deliver the same thing to all customers.