Founder, Digital Day.
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Product marketing has been increasingly gaining importance in the advertising, marketing and communications world. It achieves the perfect synergy between product teams and marketing communications executives, allowing them to work toward a common goal.
What Is Product Marketing?
According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, more than 30,000 new consumer products are launched every year. Marketers also are aware of the 4Ps of a marketing mix that helps take a new product or service to market: price, product, promotion and place.
Acing these 4Ps ensures that your product offerings are aligned with your target audience’s needs. The 4Ps offer insights that marketing leaders can bring from media placement to a product’s placement in the market. Product marketing is all about establishing the positioning of a product, creating a messaging around the product, and building strategies for adoption by consumers.
Marketing leaders around the world are now finding themselves creating successful campaigns for all kinds of products. However, transitioning to product marketing is the way forward to continue leading in this space. Product marketing revolves around discovering the goal, strategizing, defining and finally implementing it. However, there is a slight difference between product marketing and conventional marketing. Product marketing is strategic and focuses on bringing demand, whereas conventional marketing is more all-encompassing. Product marketing is considered one of the significant components of conventional marketing.
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What Do Product Marketers Do?
A product marketer lies at the intersection of the product, sales and marketing teams. Their key responsibility areas include identifying the target audience and buyer personas to market the product to, building strategies to market to this curated audience, carving and continuing to enforce the product’s positioning in the market, assisting sales with marketing qualified leads, collating feedback, and informing the product development practices through marketing-first strategies like social listening, insights and recommendations.
Marketing leaders will have to go above and beyond to create a space and strategy that works for their product. Not only do they influence the product, promotion and place, but product marketers also influence the price of a product. Marketers can study the trends and data closely to either create competitive pricing, which is great for industries with many competitors creating similar products, or value-based pricing, which is beneficial for industries with lesser competition. A marketer is an expert in drawing out industry numbers as well as getting a holistic understanding of the market—both of which provide a competitive edge to pricing and marketing a product.
How To Build A Successful Product Marketing Team
Agility is of prime importance in marketing teams across leadership levels. It is this agility that helps marketing leaders become successful product marketers as they exhibit a high level of adaptability across roles and departments. So, when onboarding individuals to a product marketing team, it is important to look for agility and adaptability, among other aspects.
It is also essential to understand how a product marketer can impact your organization at scale. Following are some tasks and responsibilities that a product marketer is usually entrusted with:
• Collate internal and external data for analysis.
• Assist with the minimum viable product or prototype phase by leading product validation.
• Keep a close eye on the market to study trends.
• Study consumer behavior and preferences to detail the product positioning.
• Conduct interviews, surveys or discussions to attain more insight into consumers.
• A/B test go-to-market strategies and create a pipeline of resources required for the same.
• Generate marketing campaigns and optimize budgets to achieve maximum exposure for the product.
• Create content for blogs, datasheets, white papers, social media and other avenues to help achieve both integrated and omnichannel marketing.
• Collaborate across the organization to achieve synchronization on communication, positioning, language and product placement.
• Ensure timely execution and implementation of all strategies and campaigns with pre- and post-campaign deep dives into insights to inform future campaigns.
While these are broad areas of responsibilities allotted to a product manager, they often overlap and branch out into newer tasks that can be achieved through seamless collaboration across the board. A marketing leader can measure the progress of a successful product team by extending the usual performance indicators and creating new ones like:
• Churn rate.
• Feature adoption.
• New revenue.
• Expansion revenue.
• Overall revenue goal.
• Win rates.
• Product launch metrics.
• Product usage.
• User retention and life cycle.
• Market share.
One of the most defining characteristics of product marketing is that it is an open and level playing field that can be designed to suit your product’s needs. A marketing leader’s focus on building this team will help achieve alignment across the board and simplify the product’s journey to its consumer. Product marketing managers help bring the voice of the customer to the table, help personalize customer experience, reform marketing processes, as well as help sales teams with key assets to generate revenue.
The future of marketing rests in the hands of marketing leaders gradually moving their focus to products today by building sustainable product teams and creating exemplary campaigns that continue to push the bar of how far product marketing can help scale organizations upward.
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Author: Candice Georgiadis, Forbes Councils Member
