A Beginner's Guide to Product Marketing - Part 1

This is the first of a three-part beginner guide to Product Marketing.

About 30,000 new products are launched every year. Most of them fail.

The biggest reasons? Poor product-market fit, positioning, and messaging. If these terms are too convoluted to understand, it effectively means, companies don’t understand their customers, where to play, or how to win.

Many companies are so focused on building the perfect product that they put off their growth efforts until it’s too late. But contrary to popular belief, marketing your product from day 1 is not merely a good thing to do, but rather a necessity. If no one knows what you’re building, nobody is going to buy what you’re building. Simple.

Welcome to Product Marketing 101

It’s true what they say - Product Marketing suffers from an identity crisis - where neither most people nor companies understand what its role means or where it belongs. I talk about this in-depth in my very first article on Product Marketing. Give that a read before you proceed.

To define Product Marketing in simple terms, it’s the process of bringing a product to the market by communicating its value both externally in the market and internally within the company.

“But where does one begin to look?” I often used to ask this question when I first started in my role as a product marketer. Without proper guidance, you could just end up doing a bunch of marketing and content stuff with minimum to no real impact on your product and later have no clue why you couldn’t meet your KPIs! After thorough research, reading, learning, and iterating, I found out that product marketing need not be an ad-hoc exercise you do only when a new product needs to be launched, and you need to define its messaging and positioning. It’s an entire function in itself, and when implemented correctly, could translate the difference between a triumphant and a poor product.

But first things first…

No matter where you go or what you do, product marketing in most cases will lie at the intersection of product, marketing, sales, and customer success. Not within just product or marketing. Your role, responsibilities, and KPIs would look very different when the product marketing team is put under any one team exclusively, and you’d end up delving deeper into either the product (when placed into the product team) or the marketing and content efforts (when placed in the marketing team). It will also highly depend on the company and the goals it needs product marketing to accomplish.

So, what’s a product marketing strategy and how do you build/get one?

A product marketing strategy is a roadmap for how you position, price, and promote your new product in the market. After a careful understanding of your product, you build a strategy along with your head of product, product managers, and product marketers.

Here’s what goes in on building an effective strategy - it needs to integrate with your product lifecycle to decide how you market your product from development to growth to maturity. Based on the stage, your product is in the product life cycle you adapt or decide your marketing strategy.

According to the classic sales curve, products go through four stages:

1. Development;
2. Growth;
3. Maturity;
4. Decline.

Depending on which stage your product lies in, you can define a product marketing strategy for it. This can help you build a good product marketing strategy.

But a great product marketing strategy is usually based not only on the product lifecycle but also on a Buyer’s Intelligence.

Buyer Intelligence = what your target customer thinks + how they respond to a certain message.

Buyer intelligence gives you insights into why a customer buys, how they make purchasing decisions, and what marketing and product messages are likely to hit home (or not). It’s knowing & understanding exactly what your ideal client’s challenges and priorities are right now.

Here’s how you can do that:

Step 1

Identify the following for your ideal customers-

• Pain points and challenges
• Designed gains
• Priorities
• Goals for this year
• Their jobs-to-be-done

Step 2

Craft messaging that will resonate with you if you were the person in step 1 (i.e. crafting messaging for the ideal buyer)

A good product marketing strategy helps customers perceive you as a better product for their needs, and through the constant feedback loop, you become the best solution.

Crafting a product marketing strategy that captures and creates demand

Developing a strong product marketing strategy is essential in today's dynamic business environment to both stand out from the competition and to generate demand in a market that is changing quickly. As products compete for consumers' attention, a clear marketing plan is essential for success. Precise preparation, innovative thinking, and a deep comprehension of the target audience's needs are required for this process to work.

In the current day of information overload, the difficulty is not only in presenting a product's features but also in developing a story that speaks to the needs and wants of the buyers. To achieve efficient product marketing, organizations must skillfully combine strategic planning with creativity, aiming to both forecast and foresee customer demand. In this section, we get into the complexities of creating a product marketing strategy that not only grabs attention but also creates a demand that aligns with the market's always-changing expectations.

Step 1: Analyze the Market

For developing a strong product marketing strategy, a comprehensive market analysis is the first and most important phase. This approach entails a thorough analysis of the external environment, which includes competitors, customer behavior, and market trends. Businesses may find opportunities, foresee obstacles, and obtain important insights into the existing situation by performing a thorough market study.

a.) Market Research

Performing market research will validate the demand for your product and. provide insight into customer needs. There can be two types of research: Qualitative and Quantitative. You would most likely end up doing both when planning a product launch.

• Qualitative research involves activities like conducting customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.

• Quantitative research involves analyzing cohorts of customer and audience data from internal sources like a CRM and external sources like audience intelligence tools, journals, industry studies, etc.

b.) Discover Product Viability

• Start by examining the customer's information that is available to you. What information about typical sales, customer types, regions, and price can you learn from your sales data? Financial data can shed light on the kinds of products that yield higher profits.
• Look into competition and their  social media to find out who they are and how they market themselves as well as their products.

c.) Focus on Primary Research

Obtaining information that gives you a clear, personal grasp of your intended audience, competitors, and overall market dynamics is essential. Unlike secondary research, which depends on pre-existing knowledge, primary research entails gathering data directly from sources. These are important facts to keep in mind. As a part of primary research you can conduct in-depth industry interviews, beta testing and prototyping, pricing sensitivity analysis, social media listening, and more.

Step 2: Define the Target Audience

By defining your target audience, you may have a basic grasp of your ideal customers, including their preferences and expectations. It's the greatest option because it provides you with insights about how to sell your products and to whom.

Using information from your qualitative research, create distinct customer personas which focus on:

• Behavioral drivers: The objectives, aspirations, and path taken by customers to find your company;
• Obstacles: Reluctance and worries held by potential customers. How do people perceive your offering, and how will this affect the details that they need to buy?
• Mindset: Preconceived conceptions that customers have about the purchasing process. Are they searching for a deal, or do they want a customized experience?

Envisioning who the customer is will make marketing a product much simpler. Persona #3 is far less relatable than Josh, 38, who enjoys spending time with himself and is constantly searching for far-off places to visit.

How to create a customer persona

Come back for Part 2 where you will learn how to create a customer persona and the next in line steps for creating a product marketing strategy!