It's a constant struggle to explain the product benefits and features to your customers, and it feels like no matter how hard you try, you're not getting anywhere.
The problem exists in your approach. You need to stop thinking about the product and start thinking about your customer's problems.
Product marketing can turn things around for you. A solid product marketing strategy can help you get your product off the ground and flying – and help you build up an audience of loyal customers who are passionate about your brand.
But how can you create a solid strategy? How should you proceed?
We need to get a little more technical to answer these questions. So let's take a step back and discuss product marketing and how it works in this article.
Let's create!
What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is about introducing a product to customers, convincing them that they need it, and then helping them use it. It's a continual process that involves understanding the product's target audience and using strategic positioning and messaging to boost revenue and demand for the product.
Once the product is on the market, product marketing doesn't stop. You still need to ensure that the target market knows the product and that users know how to get the best out of it. And finally, you have to ensure that you're getting feedback from them so you can keep improving.
In a nutshell, product marketing is all about the product and the sales funnel. It's not just about driving brand awareness or acquiring marketing qualified leads. Instead, product marketing focuses on customers' potential journey as they learn about, consider, and purchase a product.
Importance of Product Marketing
Product marketing is like a coach for your product. Its goals are to ensure that your development achieves its maximum potential and resonates well with your target audience.
To achieve these goals, product marketing must clearly understand your product and your target audience's needs and wants. Once it has this information, it can develop strategies and plans to help your product succeed.
Let's look at the goals and outcomes of product marketing to understand its importance better.
1. Understanding your audience better
When you create a product marketing strategy, you show your target audience how the product can fill a need or want in their lives. You can learn about how many people are likely to be interested in your product by conducting customer research.
With these data at your fingertips, you can create a product marketing strategy to help you reach your audience and sell the product.
2. Builds brand awareness
Product marketing is the first step in building your brand. As a new product or service, you want to ensure that potential customers know you exist and understand why they should care about your offering. Product marketing is a great way to accomplish this.
Once you've built brand awareness, you can begin to focus on building an audience and communicating with them. This is where product marketing becomes an integral part of the puzzle.
3. Proper competitive analysis
A proper competitive analysis allows you to spot potential threats and opportunities by studying your competitors' products, strengths, and weaknesses. You can also find out whether they are doing something different than you or whether they are targeting the same audience as you.
You can further analyze their marketing strategy and customer service department to know what works for them regarding customer satisfaction. When you have a clear picture of this, you can better tailor your product marketing strategy to help you stand out in the market and generate more sales in the floating market.
4. Understanding market trends
When you're creating a marketing strategy for your product, it's important that the branding and messaging resonate with target audiences. To do this, consider asking yourself these kinds of questions:
- How will this product make my customers' lives better?
- What problem does it solve?
- How is it different from the competition?
- What are the current market trends?
- How can these trends be leveraged to increase sales revenue and market share?
- What kind of messaging will resonate with consumers?
In product marketing, you need to understand the market trends and how it affects your product. When you do, you can keep your head ahead in this competitive market.
5. Boosts your revenue
The sweetest part of any business is more sales. And to achieve this, you need a solid strategy that breaks your competitors and gets you ahead.
To ensure your product is a success, ask yourself these questions.
- What is the problem that your product solves?
- How does it solve that problem better than what's currently on the market?
- How is this different from other solutions out there?
- Are you launching a product that people actually want?
- Do you have a unique value proposition that separates your brand from the competition?
The more you know about your customers and their pain points, the better able you will be to create solutions that address those needs.
Product Marketing vs. Conventional Marketing
The product marketing strategy stands independently, while conventional marketing is a much broader strategy.
Product marketing is a vital piece of the puzzle when it comes to marketing as a whole. It focuses on ensuring customers know a product and that it meets their needs. Product marketers need in-depth knowledge about their product's target audience to craft the perfect marketing strategy.
This work encompasses everything from creating campaigns to launching and executing the product. Product marketing sits at the heart of a company's marketing, sales, and product teams, which is why it's so important.
Conventional marketing is focused on acquiring and converting new leads and customers. It's about promoting the company and brand, including the products sold. These marketers make sure there's a consistent, on-brand message behind all of the company's content.
Conventional marketing aims to get people to buy products and services. It's about ensuring they stick around long enough to become repeat buyers.
Product Marketing Strategies (How to do Successful Product Marketing in 2023)
There's no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to product marketing strategy. But there are some key steps you can take to ensure that your strategy is optimized for success. Here are a few of them:
1. Define your target audience and buyer persona
A successful product marketing strategy requires a clear understanding of the target audience and their pain points.
It's important to note that it is not only about selling your products but also about helping customers solve problems. So, before jumping to the strategies, it is essential to have a clear picture of your target audience and their pain points.
When you know your customers like the back of your hands, you can better tailor your strategies that slide into their minds.
To create your buyer persona, ask these questions to yourself and build your buyer persona,
- Who are my customers?
- What kind of customers do I want? (Demographics and psychographics)
- Where do they hang out online?
- What problems do they have?
- How can my product solve their problems?
- What is the stage of their buying journey?
Once you have a buyer persona, it's essential to keep it updated. As your business evolves and changes over time, so should your buyer personas.
2. Research your competitors
You may know all about your own brand, but how well do you know the competition?
The first step in developing a product marketing strategy is to research the direct and indirect competition. Having a solid understanding of the market helps you develop an effective plan to help your business stand out from the pack.
A good product marketing strategy should include analyzing how similar products are being marketed and sold so that you can learn from their successes and failures.
This will help you create an effective marketing plan that stands out from the crowd while still fitting within industry trends and standards — not to mention saving money by avoiding costly mistakes other companies have already made!
3. Define how you will position your product
Once you are done with the steps mentioned above, it's time to find a way to position your product in a way that convinces people that it's going to solve their problems.
Positioning is the process of determining why someone should buy your product, what makes it unique among similar products on the market, and how you will communicate these things to potential customers.
Ask these questions as a part of your positioning strategy;
- What is the problem that my product solves?
- Who are you solving it for? (You can even write down their demographics.)
- How does your product solve this problem better than any other solution out there?
- How will this benefit my potential customers?
- Why should someone buy this product instead of similar products on the market?
- What makes this product unique from others in its category?
- How will we communicate these reasons and make them stick in the minds of potential customers?
When you have all the questions answered, compile it and convert it to a strong marketing message that sits in the minds of your users.
You can do this by using the following strategies:
- Focus on a specific problem and make sure your product is the best solution for it.
- Identify what people want from your product and then position yourself as the solution to that need.
- Go where your customers are and make sure they know you're there.
- Focus on how your product solves people's problems, not just what it does.
Doing this can position your company in line with what your customer desires.
4. Set goals
After you have your product, the next logical step is to set some goals for it. Achieving these will depend on various factors, such as the product, the company you work for, and any marketing goals you may have.
However, here are some goals that many product marketers tend to achieve:
- Increase brand awareness and recognition.
- Generate leads for sales teams or inbound marketing campaigns
- Improve conversion rates (sales, signups, etc.)
- Increase sales of your product
- Increase the overall market share of your company's product line
- Grow loyalty among customers
It's not necessary to stick with a single goal. You can even focus on multiple goals, but make sure you have a meaningful and measurable plan.
5. Create a marketing mix that reflects your goals
A marketing mix (also known as the 4Ps) combines four elements businesses use to promote and sell products or services. These four elements are product, price, place, and promotion.
Here is what these 4Ps are and how they work:
Product – The actual item or service that you are selling. Product may also refer to the features of your product.
Price – How much money you will charge for your product or service? Consider factors like costs, market trends, competitors' prices, and more when deciding on a price point.
Place – Where you will sell your product or service. You need to consider the size of your audience, the accessibility of your location, and how it fits with your marketing plan.
Promotion – How you plan to get people interested in what you are selling. How you advertise and market your product or service. Consider how people will find out about it, how much you can afford to spend on promotion, and what marketing tactics will be most effective for your business.
Align these 4Ps to your marketing strategy and ensure they work together. If a particular element is not aligned with the rest of your business, then it may be worth reconsidering how you approach it.
6. Launch your product
Once you are done with the product marketing process, it's time to accelerate toward your product launch.
There are several channels and places you can focus your product marketing efforts. It all depends on your needs, goals, and resources. Some examples include:
- Product landing pages and sales pages
- Social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
- Email marketing campaigns to current customers, prospects, and influencers
- Product launch event
No matter where you market your product launch, prospects and customers need to know the key details. This means focusing on your product's positioning and messaging. By doing this, you'll give people the chance to learn everything they need to know about your product and why they should want it.
The best way to showcase your product in a way that interacts with your audience is product demo. Interactive product demo videos are a great way to show how your product works and what it can do for the user.
When people know all the ins and outs of the product, they are more likely to buy it. The best way for them to do so is by creating an interactive demo that allows the user to navigate through the features of your product with ease.
With the availability of interactive product demo software like Storylane, you can convince your customers to make a buying decision.
Best Examples of Product Marketing
1. Mailchimp
MailChimp is more than just an email marketing tool - it's an all-in-one marketing suite that can help businesses grow. That's why most of their product marketing campaigns focus on the tool's ability to help small businesses grow.
Their "Growing Businesses" landing page is an excellent example of this, focusing on how customers can use MailChimp's features to their advantage.
MailChimp successfully appealed to its customers by emphasizing how the features could be used.
This is an example of how to write copy that sells your product. The MailChimp team knew that if they could highlight the benefits of each new feature, then their customers would be more likely to use it and love it.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a software suite for marketing teams with many valuable tools concerning keyword research, link building, comparative analysis, site audit reports, rank tracking, etc.
Fundamentally, Ahrefs helps teams research to see the performance of specific content.
Ahrefs has placed a product demo on their home page as a marketing strategy that shows how their product works in real-time.
This allows the user to explore all the features before submitting their information to use the product. And with this, Ahrefs helps the user to make informed decisions and pulls high-quality leads into their funnel.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot pulls high-quality leads interested in their CRM software with multiple lead magnets like free tools and freebies. One such effective tool that they are using is a product demo.
Once you land on their home page, you can see a compelling copy with a CTA.
When you click through it, you will end up with two options. One is to use the product directly, and another is to watch a demo. In this place, Hubspot is capturing every click that touches the CTA.
To watch the product demo, you must submit your details, and to use the product, you must do the same. So whenever a user watches a demo and exits without signing up for the tool, the lead nurturing sequence starts.
This is how a marketing plan should be solid enough to capture most of the clicks that touch the CTA. And you can replicate the same lead capturing system with the help of Storylane.
Benefits of Product Marketing
Product marketing is essential for any business. It helps by creating product awareness, increasing demand, and ensuring a steady stream of new customers.
Let's look at some of the benefits of product marketing to understand its importance.
1. Improved conversion rates
One of the most apparent benefits of product marketing is increased customer satisfaction. When you're able to create a brand that resonates with your audience and provides them with what they want, they'll be more likely to become loyal customers. Your brand will increase customer lifetime value, leading to higher sales overall.
2. Competitive advantage
You can see your market from the perspective of your customers, which gives you a competitive advantage. By knowing what your customers want and need, you can create solutions for them that meet those needs. You'll also be better able to anticipate new trends in the market (and adapt accordingly).
In addition, having this knowledge gives you an edge over competitors who don't focus on their customers' needs as much as they should.
3. Hone in on your perfect customer
Product marketing lets you better understand your customer. You must know who they are, what they want, and how they behave. If you don't know your target consumer, developing a strategy that resonates with them will be challenging.
This is where product marketing comes in. It gives you a better idea of what your customer wants and how they behave, allowing you to develop strategies that resonate with them. The more satisfied customers you have and the more people that recommend your brand, the better off your business will be.
4. Educates your customers about your product
Product marketing is the process of educating your customers about your product and its value. This can include:
- What does it do?
- Why would someone want to buy this product?
- Who should buy this product, as well as other important information you want to communicate with customers (e.g., how it works).
Product marketing is also an excellent tool for communicating with existing customers.
If you want to be able to provide support and customer service, you need to know what your customers want from their experience with your product. It allows you to improve your product based on feedback from users.
Best Tools for Product Marketers
1. Hotjar: To understand your customers
Hotjar is a tool that provides heatmaps, surveys, polls, form analysis, and session recordings. With Hotjar, you can see how visitors use your site.
Using it, you can see where visitors click, which buttons they click the most, and how far they scroll down. This is an excellent tool for knowing more about your website visitors.
2. Heap Analytics: To track user behavior
Tracking the customer journey is essential for many organizations, and there are plenty of tools to help with this. Heap Analytics is one such tool that can provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey, from initial visit to purchase completion.
Whenever a customer interacts with your website or app, you can see which pages they bounce from, the path they take through your platform, and all their actions. This makes Heap Analytics an excellent choice for Product Marketing Managers who want to make data-driven decisions based on customer behavior.
3. Storylane: To generate more leads
Storylane is an easy-to-use demo software that enables you to create high-quality interactive videos. Storylane makes it easier for customers to understand your product by allowing them to interact with the video storyboard as if they were using your actual product!
It also lets you create a lead capture system that converts your traffic to leads via an opt-in.
Moreover, it provides a simple automation tool that pulls your user's contact information from your CRM system and personalizes the demo before sending it to your lead. The dashboard is a simple way to see how users interact with your demo, including which areas they spend the most time on. You can also track when people were actively using it and determine how often it's been viewed.
Based on these insights, you can use Storylane to tailor your demo and increase conversions by aligning with user expectations.
4. Crayon: To keep track of your competitors
Crayon is an excellent tool for product marketing teams to gather insights from publicly available resources. It enables them to track what their competitors are doing and sends notifications when the competitor websites change.
The side-by-side comparisons of websites before and after edits are beneficial in understanding how to update your marketing strategy. While much can be done with the software, it excels at gathering competitor data relevant to your business.
5. Hubspot: To enhance your marketing efforts
HubSpot is an all-in-one platform with everything you need to streamline your marketing and sales efforts. With the built-in CRM, you can manage lead generation and customer communication for sales, marketing, and customer service all in one place.
- The Marketing Hub has powerful features for acquiring and converting leads, like landing pages, forms, popups, and CTAs.
- The Sales Hub has features to help you analyze and interact with customers throughout their lifecycle.
- The Service Hub provides valuable insights into what your customers need and want so you can provide them with the best possible experience.
And with the built-in dashboards feature, you can have all of your valuable data and insights in one place for easy reference.
Overall, HubSpot is an excellent choice for Product Marketing Managers who want to collaborate with other teams and manage everything in one place.
Perfect strategy helps you nail the game
A strategy is essential for all SaaS companies to increase sales, improve team cohesion, and better understand customers. Setting specific goals for your company also helps increase sales and create a better work environment between teams.
It's not just about making a fantastic product but also about how to sell it. You must find ways to showcase your product and ensure that people understand what they get from buying from you.
The perfect way to showcase your product and its feature are by creating an interactive product demo. It allows the user to see what they would get if they buy your product. You can use this to show off what makes your product unique or different from others in the market.
The best one-stop shop to create your product demo is Storylane. It's a platform that allows you to create an interactive product demo, which can be used on your website or social media. It's easy to use and has many features that allow you to customize the look and feel of your demo.
If you're looking for a way to show off your product and grow your revenue, we can give you the best to achieve this. Want to know how it caters to you and your audience? Schedule a demo now!
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