Product marketing refers to the process of launching a product to market. This contains deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching it, and providing salespeople, and customers with an understanding of it. This method desires to drive the requirement and usage of the product.
Product marketing doesn’t cease once the product has gone to market. Marketing a product as the last step guarantees the right people are aware of the product. Those who know how to use it according to customers’ requirements and feedback are listened to over the product’s lifecycle.
Let’s talk about where to begin and what other aspects of your business can support this as it grows without any big help from a digital marketing agency.
An ideal way to start brainstorming your campaign is by enforcing inbound marketing methodology into your strategic plan.
You can attract, engage, and entertain your customers with other aspects of your business, including methods that specify your target audience, deliver a specific positioning or marketing message, and countless other ideas. Beginning your product marketing strategy with this model and understanding the inbound methodology can put your business up for triumph.
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The Product Marketing Framework
Product marketing sits at heart, the intersection. It’s essential and exciting – but it can be a little complex.
Our Product Marketing Framework wraps all the critical areas needed to navigate the journey, from A to B to C to D… the list goes on.
The framework describes five fundamental phases of product marketing. There are discover, strategize, express, get set, and also grow. We suggest familiarizing yourself with the entire framework to grips with each moving part.
But in the meantime, here’s a whistle-stop tour:
Discover – This is when you gather the info and insight to turn your assumptions into an educated hypothesis. Customer feedback and checking out the competition are just two critical components involved. They’re both product marketing gold dust.
Strategize
Powerful product marketing always comes with a plan. Whether it’s product-market fit, your GTM plan, or your pricing.
Define
This is about specifying your personas and applying what you gained from your discovery stage to shape customer journeys and communications.
Get set
It’s time to harness all your hard work with activity, sales enablement sessions, and marketing campaigns, so your team is prepared to take the GTM by the horns and run with it.
Grow – This is where your post-launch procedure requires you to kick in to guarantee your product resume will flourish and grow in its market.
Why Is Product Marketing Important?
If the associated responsibilities and deliverables list didn’t convince you of product marketing’s importance to a business, we’d drive the point home again.
Product marketing reached into its own in response to the advancement of marketing technology, especially, Software as a Service.
The SaaS boom introduced a boosting list of competition in the technology industry. This development made it challenging for buyers to determine and prioritize vendors.
As anyone in marketing would tell you, positioning and brand messaging are essential to stand out in a crowded space. And that is the attractiveness of the modern product marketer.
Today’s product marketers aid builds brand narratives as part of their competitive plan.
At Drift, we utilize integrated marketing campaigns to organize our go-to-market (GTM) motion. Product marketers engage at the very heart of this process. Specifically, they create the narratives that guide these quarterly campaigns’ programs, offers, and strategies.
Seven Critical Steps of Product Marketing
When product marketers understand whom their product caters to, the marketing can start. Here you can find seven things product marketers may do before, during, and after their product enters the market:
1. Product Research
A valuable and well-made product isn’t created in a vacuum, and it isn’t marketed in one. Before a product launch, product marketers work with the product’s creators to test the product internally and externally via controlled beta environments.
2. Product Story
Products also get to market in the shape of a story. What problem does the product crack? Who’s encountering this problem? How does it solve this problem? Also, what does it do those competitors don’t?
3. Product-Focused Content
Product marketing’s next stop is at the desks of content creators. Here, product marketers may create and A/B test different copy, blog content, case studies, and landing pages on their website, all of which are dedicated to describing the product. Knowing more about product-led content can help you with this even more.
4. Product Launch Plan
Your product marketing team should write a launch plan at this point. This plan must be spelling out every last stage of the marketing procedure and who’s reliable at each point. This step is important because of the power it holds over the budget. It can show you whether you’re cutting the fees with digital marketing services or not.
5. Product Launch Meeting
When the product is established, everyone engaged meets the day it’s moved out. Much like a rocket launch, this is the product marketer’s best hour — it’s the climax of a product marketing campaign.
6. Community Engagement
As product marketing develops enough buzz around the product within the industry, it’s standard for the marketing team to capitalize on what the market is saying about them. This contains reaching out to partners, influencers, and existing customers for commentary.
7. Sales Enablement
Since a product is designed for the marketplace, the sales team is waiting in the wings to boost sales around this new business opportunity. The product marketing team’s job is to meet with sales staff before, during, and after the product is rolled out to the public. This obviously guarantees the messaging created for this product is constant through to the first sales call.