Table of Contents
Introduction
Before going deep into the topic, let’s first understand what is Product Marketing? Product marketing is among the most common topics and you can learn about it anywhere. When you will search, you will find many different talks from experts on the topic. Product marketing is everywhere, in every industry where there is a product to sell. So, in simple definition, we can say that product marketing is nothing but the marketing which a sales team does of any company to drive demand for the product among existing customers. Product marketing is generally spreading awareness about your product by creating campaigns and other things so that know about it and buy it.
However, most of the companies comprise a product marketing team. The team of product marketers is solely responsible to build out customer personas and targets. They are the people who do the extensive and necessary research about the market to know what makes people adopt their products. They also monitor the competition, and determine if the product that they are selling needs any changes or features to increase adoption. There is a lot of work and research behind a product marketing. This is done to ensure that the product which is being sold matches the market, and turns out to be the best for the audiences who need it.
A take on…
Have you ever thought in a way why does a thing like Product Marketing even exist? If there is a need to build a product marketing plan for 2021? Product marketing is on a verge of evolving constantly. It is a necessity for the campaign marketers to pursuit channels of communication, adopt new content mediums by content marketers; and why should we think that the phenomenon of change isn’t unique to product marketing? However, the changes which are made by product marketers are more foundational. Product marketing is a discipline that is multi-faceted and it has interaction with every other department of an organization. Moreover, product marketing it is also impacted by the shifts which happen in an organization for launching new products to the market.
Let dig in and understand what the mandates of Product Marketing are:
Understanding of the market: This means to know who your buyers, your competitors are and what are the marketplace trends.
Building the content: Developing a content that is challenging. By understanding the market and your buyers, you will get to know what the buyer’s journey looks like. For this you may need you need to have different type of messaging and challenging content.
Enabling of the messenger: This means allowing the direct channel partners, sales force, and influencers to play a role of analysts and other thought leaders.
You will be surprised to know that product-based marketing has been here from decades now, whereas most other marketing techniques have come and go and have evolve with the technology and shifting of consumer behaviors.
Most of the people and even businesses assume that most cost-effective and high-impact marketing strategies present today are totally digital. And, this is certainly not true. Yes, digitalization has helped in a much great way but still there are things which sometimes provide to be more effective than digital marketing. In order to make your product marketing successful, you have to follow both, digital and conventional marketing strategies. You will be able to gain perfect product marketing, by taking conventional steps and making promotional items which have a high impact on target audience.
Product Marketing vs. Conventional Marketing
Now that we have raised a topic above about product marketing and conventional marketing, let’s just know what exactly it is. To be honest, these both are similar but still have plenty of differences which are important to understand. The thing with product marketing is that you have to target your existing customer base, however, the in the traditional marketing it is aimed at converting new customers. If we see overall, product marketing is just a part of conventional marketing strategy. You can also think about the product marketing as the process when a vendor comes in and give training to the staff on how to use the system. This is how they can help with change management, and again take follow ups for ensuring everyone is happy with how the product is performing.
Importance of Product Marketing
Now that we have talked pretty much everything about the product marketing. Let’s look into its importance. Product marketing is a crucial part of marketing strategy of any business. We are sure, you will definitely agree to it. Without a complete product marketing strategy, you are not able to gain its supreme potential among the potential audience.
So, here are few things, which will get a better idea of what product marketing does.
- It will help you on boosting your revenue and improve sales.
- It will position your product appropriately in the market.
- It understands your customers in a better way.
- It will ensure that the product, marketing, and sales teams working smoothly.
- It can target your buyers effectively.
- It will help you in learning about your competitors.
As a product marketer, there are also certain questions which you should ask yourself and these must reflect on the product. These set of questions will help you in ensuring that your product is a hit among our potential customers.
- Is this product any different from similar products of competitor?
- Can I get a way to differentiate this product further from that of competitor’s?
- Are my products suitable for today’s market?
- Is there a product that we have sold in the past but wouldn’t market it ever again? Why not?
- Are these products appropriate for today’s customers?
So, with these set of questions, few things must have been cleared in your mind that product marketing is something which needs you to look from a strategic perspective at your products so as to ensure that they are demanded among your customers in current market.
Now, as a product marketer or product marketing manager, you have some particular responsibilities, let’s have a look at them. Honestly, the responsibilities of product marketer or a product manager varies slightly depending on the company, products, industry, and company size and resources. So, the responsibilities of a product marketer grows as the business grows.
Here are some of the strategies and trends of product marketing to follow in 2021:
1. Demand generation
Product Marketing means actually generating the demand for the product. And the demand generation happens with the content generation. Under this, there is need for specifically informative and educational content for your target audience. It is among the most widespread demand generation tactics, and it will continue to have an indisputable place in the product marketing strategy. Some of the examples are Shopify, Hubspot, and Mailchimp which are one of the best sources to create great content so as to help their customers to better use their products.
What you have to do is to create content around the questions and problems of your target market. This might include products as part of their solutions as this will authentically push their products in an informative way. The practice which you have to adopt is to generate the content on the biggest questions and problems of your target audience as well as upcoming trends. Make sure to write from an informative and helpful one and make sure it is truly of value.
Most of that, you have to choose from the best places to share the content. Adopt good SEO strategy and make sure to have more than own blog’s subscribers so that your content ranks well.
2. Enabling the messengers
For disseminating your story, it is important to enable your messengers. These messengers are partners, direct sales team, influencers who can help. Product marketing works exactly like a football team, where you have many players on the field. Each of the player has different position, and different tactics. The thing is nobody is sure who has the ball, or who has what skills and where they are. All you have to do is to reach the goal. The only thing to reach the goal is with valuable content.
Below mentioned are some of the key recommendations for Product marketers:
- Curate and innovate (not proliferate)
- Learn and adopt new technology when possible
The sales enable content needs to be:
- Short
- On-demand
- Easy to be found
- Curated with analytics
- Task-based to overcome objections
- Focused for business results
So if you want to enable the messengers with your targeting on customer insights, make sure you are enabling your sales relevantly to channels. What is important here is to create, and innovate the effective ways to enable the messengers.
3. Personalization will be pivotal
This is something you know and there is nothing new in it. However, in the year 2021 the key will be taking into the existing best practices and amplifying them. Consumers are used to having emails, so you have to be better than the others. They can easily ignore a generic email or an advertisement from a mile off. And, what is required here is the personalisation and it must not be limited to just name. Move ahead, go against all those unnecessary talks which customer don’t want to hear. Stop doing the stalking on browser – online and offline. What you need to understand is that buyers need know what this product is.
Buyers actually need to know what they are interested in into and what they have bought. You must answer yourself to few questions like what buyer they need and why they need it? And, what you need to do is to ensure that whatever you’re sending to a customer is relevant. Consumers don’t have time to entertain content which is just based on a specific point. You content must say more than that and must hit the nail on the head or get out of the way. As a product marketer you need to be sure to data, analysis, research and granular segmentation.
Conclusion
We have let you understand the concept and few of the strategies and trends in the product marketing. Know that it is a wide field and no one thing will work. All you need to get into mind that the product you are offering has been tailored according to the marketing strategy that you have adopted around your target audience.
Here is what we think of an astonishing promotional item:
- It must turn customers into legitimate brand advocates
- It must be a thing that your customer is interested in
- It must be of high-quality and durable in nature
- It must be something that they’ll actually use
- It must fit into broader marketing strategy
Try to come up with an idea which can fit all of the above mentioned criteria. This is all that we need to say.
Tell us your product marketing strategy or what we have missed here.
