Product marketing is all about demonstrating the value of your product to prospective customers and building a relationship with them to stand out from the competition. That said, a successful product marketer needs a complete product marketing strategy so that customers can connect with the product.
A good product marketing strategy ensures that the product is aligned to customer needs, is well-positioned in the market and that there’s a marketing communication plan in place to spread the word.
The following are the five essential elements of a successful product marketing strategy:1
Researching Your Target Audience
Getting to know your target audience is essential. Your product is created with an audience in mind, and likewise, your product marketing strategy should be too. For a successful product marketing strategy, you need to find out more about your prospective customers by interviewing them, asking them about their preferences and behavioral patterns. This helps you form your narrative.
The information gathered also helps you build buyer personas and how best to market your product to these personas. According to Cintell,2 high-performing companies are 2 to 3 times more likely to research their customers’ drivers and motivations.
Creating Messages with a Narrative
Communication with your target audience is an important element in your product marketing strategy. This involves the style and content of the messaging you use.
According to Customer Thermometer,3 57% of customers trust brands when they’re emotionally connected to them. This emotional connect is built mainly through your messaging. The messaging around your product needs to have a narrative that is relatable and resonates with your audience.
You need to identify your product’s unique selling proposition for your target audience to craft the best story, with the focus on one key message to drive your narrative. A good narrative is one of the easiest ways to get your audience to connect with your product.
Ensuring All Teams are in Sync
A product rollout is a multi-team effort and involves coordination between sales, marketing and product development teams in an organization. But we all know that keeping multiple teams in sync is easier said than done. That’s where a product marketer comes in. Product marketers need to have an effective strategy to bring teams together and ensure they are all on the same page.
With multiple people working on one project, there’s always the danger of miscommunication and disorganization derailing your plans. But a proper product marketing strategy and roadmap can bring all the teams and internal stakeholders into alignment and provide them with guidance about what will happen at each step of the process. This helps maintain visibility throughout the project.
Strategically Promoting Your Product with the Right Mix of Channels
Now that you’ve got a great product and go-to strategy, you need to promote that product to your target audience. Brands always invest in promotion of some sort to ensure prospective customers are made aware of their presence. You don’t want your product lost among the thousands of others.
Strategic promotion with a strong product-market fit is the need of the hour if you want customers to flock to your product. Your promotion plan needs to ensure that your messages are in front of the right audience at the right time. The timing of your product's launch should also consider overall market conditions to be effective.
The mix of channels that you’re going to use to reach out is critical. Your promotion plan could include channels like online advertising, social media, social media advertising, emailers, TV advertising, direct mailers, etc. The product marketer has to pick only those channels that make the most sense for the particular brand and target audience.
Tracking Metrics to Analyze Performance
After all of this, you need to analyze how your product marketing strategy is panning out by tracking results and metrics. Once your promotion plan is implemented and your product is out there in the market, getting feedback in terms of its success (or lack of it) is essential. The Chartered Institute of Marketing has highlighted in a report4 that only 48% of marketers consistently measure brand, customer-related and other non-financial metrics of success. If product marketers don’t follow-up and measure, it would be almost impossible for them to work on the right areas for improvement.
Some of the key metrics that need to be tracked are the number of clicks online, reach, share of voice and conversions. Once you have this data, you can adjust your strategy based on what seems to be working and what’s not. The aim, after all, is to constantly improve your product and the marketing strategy associated with it to ensure success.
Product marketers are directly involved with the five essential elements listed above. However, they could also provide extra inputs during the product development phase to ensure the product’s attributes cater to the audience being targeted.
References:
https://learn.g2crowd.com/product-marketing-strategy
https://www.cintell.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/1699113-0-BenchmarkStudyUnderstandingBuy.pdf
https://www.customerthermometer.com/customer-retention-ideas/brand-loyalty-statistics-2017/
https://exchange.cim.co.uk/infographic/brand-experience-statistics/
