What Is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market and ensuring its overall success. The core focus of product marketing is to highlight the benefits of using a product and also implement the product launch strategy
Why Is Product Marketing Important?
Product marketing is an essential part of a go-to-market strategy.
As mentioned earlier, the core focus of product marketing is to highlight the benefits of a product.
Without product marketing, your product won’t do well because the benefits of using the product won’t be communicated to target customers.
Secondly, you won’t know who your target market is and how best to market to them.
Lastly, you won’t know your competitors, what their products and marketing tactics are and how best to compete with them.
Product Marketing Steps
Here’s a simple 4-step process to product marketing:
1. Identify Your Ideal Customer
The first step of product marketing is to identify who your ideal customer or audience is. You should know clearly who you’re selling to.
Most companies make the mistake of thinking everyone is their customer. They try to sell to everyone and end up selling to no one.
Product marketing helps you avoid this mistake by researching who your ideal customer is and understanding their needs, challenges, and problems. It’s helpful at this stage to draft up a buyer persona.
This way, you’ll be able to craft copy that resonates with them.
2. Research Your Competitors
The next step of product marketing is knowing your competitors. You’re most likely to have competitors in your target market regardless of the market.
By knowing your competitors, their products and marketing strategies, you’re in a much better position to compete with them.
There are a couple of ways you can dig up information about your competitors. You can start by checking out their websites and social media pages.
You can also check third-party marketplaces, customer product reviews, and media coverage if they have any.
By the end of your research, you’ll gain a lot of insight into pricing, working marketing strategies, positioning, and messaging.
This will be incredibly useful for launching your product.
3. Define Your Marketing Strategy
Armed with information about your ideal customer and your competitors, you can begin crafting your marketing strategy.
Your marketing strategy will define the marketing tactics, tools, and channels you’ll use to reach your target audience.
It will also guide you to set the right goals for your product launch.
Luckily, you’ll have a leg up here because your competitor research will give you insights as to what is already working for your competitors.
You can use this as a starting point.
4. Launch Your Product
Now, you’re ready to launch your product. The launch is the most exciting and most important aspect of all the steps.
Your marketing strategy should already cover everything you need to launch your product onto the market.
A product launch isn’t the end of product marketing. It is the responsibility of a product marketer to ensure the long-term success of the product on the market.
How Can We Help?
Are you looking for a product marketer for your team? Or do you just need a nudge in the right direction? Contact us today to see what we can do for you - with a free strategy session we could solidify your plans. If you like what you see then we could just help you out long term.
If you already have a team, why not send them over to our bespoke courses? We’ve got everything there from beginners courses to more advanced techniques that we ourselves use at Grow Hack Scale.