Facts you need to know about product marketing!
There is a lot of demand for product marketers in the past few years and with time. Their role got more specified and goal-oriented. Every business or start-up on a small or big scale needs product marketing services to reach its potential customers.
We all know product marketing is done to bring a product to market, create new leads, and keep your existing customers to do repurchases or use or service consistently.
“The ultimate role of a PMM is to liaise between the product engineers and the end-user. PMMs should be an expert on the user and their needs. Great PMMs champion the voices of all users and celebrate and elevate diverse perspectives. During the go-to-market process, PMMs should own the launch plan, working to make the product a reality for all users.”
– Marvin Chow, Vice President, Global Marketing at Google
Why Product marketing is Important?
Product marketing is important because of the following reasons-
- It helps a brand to reach its potential customers through inbound marketing and content creation. They create as well as distribute marketing content.
- Inbound marketing is promoted by product marketers a lot. Creating and monitoring the online presence of their product is necessary. Websites, social media platforms are good ways to create brand awareness.
- They work closely with sales and listen to customer queries attentively. It creates a better brand-customer experience.
- Product marketing strategy needs 3 tools to work properly-
- Attract Tools- These tools help them to connect with the audience through ads, video, blogging, content marketing, etc. It is the first step towards marketing.
- Engagement Tools- These tools are essential for interacting with existing customers. Email marketing, Lead management, chatbots did with the help of marketing automation helps to achieve steady lead flow. Marketing automation means the software used to do repetitive marketing works.
- Delight Tools- Delight tools act as a report for all your marketing activities. It consists of a data-driven attribution report showing the progress of your marketing campaigns.
Important details to focus on as a PMM-
Dynamic content – It is a new way to bring personalized content to different customers with different interests. You can use appropriate keywords in your website along with dynamic content for lead conversions. Do you know what that means? You can easily target your customer and your content will seem like a solution to their problem and there will be purchases.
Taking the queries or complaints of your customers is mandatory. Nowadays, people share their views about the brand directly through social media. As a result, the brand gets a lot of queries or complaints regarding the product in their inbox. Conversation inboxes are a better way to solve those queries.
- Creating a balanced budget for all marketing activities and managing it is a big task. Brand awareness with high profits can occur through cost minimum and efficient budget.
- They work closely with other departments like sales, marketing, content creators, product managers for creating a better brand image.
- We need them at every step so even after lead generations, a product marketer needs to keep eye on their competitors. The positioning changes, features or new product, pricing strategy, and choose their way of efficient marketing.
Types of Research-
Research is an integral part of product marketing strategy where 4 factors are necessary to keep in mind, i.e.
- Persona Research- Firstly, Persona may be real-life interviewed customers or fictional characters, that represents different user types based on their experience. Secondly, it is all based on data or research done by interviewing individuals.
- Market Research – It is a crucial step to analyze the potential of your product before launching it. Firstly, focus on the size and value of the market. Secondly, know your competitor’s growth and products. Finally, value data and use stats to analyze the behavior of the customer pre-hand.
- Win/loss Interviews- No one can guarantee success based on any one marketing aspect. Therefore, it is better to conduct interviews to know the win or loss of your sales opportunity.
- Case study interviews – It is a way to make better business decisions by discussing critical marketing scenarios. The implementations depend on observations, interviews, data, and past marketing experiences.
Do you know the process involved in product marketing?
There is no definite number of processes as each business requires marketing differently. But the basic fundamental phases are the same for each one. Those five phases are –
1. Discovery-
It is the stage that requires research, data, stats, and documents to know where your product will stand in the market before launching it.
Before the product launch, product marketers work with the product manager and developers. It helps to know its usage and capacity. Lastly, the product has to go through a beta test before getting a green signal from the product marketer.
The most important step is to analyze your competitor’s growth, pricing strategy, positioning, and messaging. The reason is you always need to present an audience with a better deal than your competitor.
2. Content and website-
First, the basic question associated with a brand is- Why the audience should buy their products? Second, How the products solve consumer problems in a way that their competitors can’t?
Third, after getting the answer to these questions, form product-focused content that will depict your product in the form of marketing copies, blogs, case studies, interviews, customer experiences, etc. You need to work with content creators or writers at this stage.
A good product marketing strategy ensures that the user should always be aware of the brand and its features. The website should mention up-to-date details and demonstrations of new features or products. Optimization is the key. Create a user-friendly website and dynamic content to attract more users.
3. Pre- and Post-launch responsibilities-
A proper strategy should be present for the Pre- and post-launch of the product. Sales strategy should be monitored before, after, and during the business plan with the sales department.
Pre-launch activities-
Overall, writing a proper launch plan like sales, product, customer success, finance, engineering, and discussing it with other departments is the first task. Then performing beta tests, messaging, and following a Go-To-Market plan comes into play.
Sales collateral-
Sales collateral is a crucial part, where we create a layout of the launch activities. A feature update of your product needs fewer sales collateral arrangements in comparison to a new product launch. It helps customers to know your product. Furthermore, a proper interaction through tutorial videos, animation, and presentation is done.
Post-launch activities-
Post-launch activities include sales enablement, demand management, adoption, etc. Your integrated marketing plan and GTM plan should align together with product marketing at this stage. And finally, a product marketer keeps its existing customers always happy to evolve in the market.
A recent survey in 2020 shows crucial tasks done by PMM based on its priority. It shows product positioning and messaging (93%), product launches (85%), creating sales collateral (74%), customer and marketing research (71%) accordingly.
4. Success Report-
Your product marketing report will show the success rate of your marketing campaigns. You can see insights on the number of active users on a daily or monthly basis. It will help in analyzing revenue collection, win rates, product repurchases, give sales ratings, and identify sales confidence.
Marketing qualified teams can transfer details of potential customers to sales-qualified teams. Data insights of potential consumers can be transferred within the department.
- Product roadmap- It is a plan of actions that will be taken from time to time. It ensures the progress of the product over time. Organizational short- and long-term goals are achieved through this process. With a proper vision, many tasks and launch plans can be timely created.
- Onboarding customers- A better first impression is the initial step for onboarding customers. They are new and are looking for more purchasing from your brand. A better strategy holds new customers to stay loyal to you.
A product marketer has to give better deals to new customers for their next re-purchase. Unlike the product-based company, B2B SaaS models have different products. Hence, instead of re-purchases, you get add-ons.
For example, Netflix- A SaaS company that has both B2B and B2C models. Thus, its experience with onboarding customers is different. Netflix work on subscriptions. Therefore, they create amazing video content for people to take subscriptions over time.
At the same time, the large number of subscribed users will help them to create more B2B profits.
5. Diversification-
Many companies diversify their product based on their product value in the market. It occurs when you want to try a new niche or you suffered from a low success rate of your business.
There are 4 types of diversification techniques-
- Related- It means you introduce or buy products related to your domain to provide multiple options to consumers. Apple Inc. is a perfect example of the related diversification model.
- Unrelated– It states you introduce products that are opposite or unrelated to your domain. Nowadays, every big company has diversified its business in an unrelated domain to get future benefits. We know Reliance because of Jio as it is the fastest-growing telecom firm in India but 48% of its revenue gets generated from the refining and marketing industry. Digital service by Jio generates 8% revenue only. Overall, It has diversified its products in multiple unrelated industries.
- Horizontal –Horizontal diversification means buying a competitor’s company having the same level in an industry. It helps to reduce competition and allow to get existing customers of your competitor’s company. In 2019, Walt Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox was finalized. Eventually, they started expanding their reach and increasing the level of content.
- Vertical-When a company takes over the production process, distributers, and suppliers of a company or develops their channels is known as vertical diversification. It helps a company to reduce the production cost, get upstream and downstream profits. As an example, you can take Netflix, which produces its content from 2013 leading to more revenues in comparison to distributed content by other businesses.
what mistakes to avoid during product marketing?
A single mistake in your product marketing strategy will not allow gaining business profits both on the long- and short-term basis. Some of the reasons for unsuccessful product marketing strategy are –
- Product launch fails- Product launch fails when a product marketer enters the team at the last stage of product launch. Then, they have to focus more on marketing without having enough research on the product and customers. This creates a difference leading to product launch fails.
- Complex products – Products are tested at controlled beta conditions to know the strength or capacity of the product. These tests should be done accurately. Any error reported at this stage can be corrected before the product launch date to avoid any fails. User-friendly products are the demand of this era so avoid unnecessary complications.
- Competitors Bypass strategy- Don’t give your competitors a chance to find a better way to sell the same level of product as yours at a better deal. This is a major challenge and will make the company suffer in the long term.
Summary
Product marketing is a big role with responsibilities emerging from day 1 of product development. There must be good communication between product marketers and other departments like engineering, developers, sales, etc.
There should be proper research on the product and consumer need at a better deal from your competitor. The strategy includes creating and managing the product launch activities.
The basic aim is to hold on to your existing customers. Use various marketing tools to monitor campaigns. Involve high-quality keywords to bring successful leads.
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