- By: Mark Jakobsen
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Successfully integrate product marketing into your company
Regardless if you have a physical product, a service, or an IT solution (SaaS), if you are struggling to get the sales you need, then product marketing could be your answer. Let’s start with a question, have you considered integrating marketing into your product from the get-go? As in, before you launch it?
If you have traditionally just left it to the moment you launch, you are missing a massive opportunity. You see marketing, specifically product marketing, needs to be there throughout the entire life-cycle of a product. It has far more benefits than just social media posts, google adverts, or whatever other activity you wish to take.
Product marketing starts before more traditional marketing techniques and will continue until the product is discontinued. It truly is a fully immersive marketing function. And because it is involved sooner, it will have a greater impact on the potential success of any one product.
But, to achieve this success, it needs to be the linchpin of your organisation, bringing together your sales, product, marketing, and customer services teams.
To help frame this, let’s look at the stages of a product and how product marketing helps.
Developing your product
Long before your product is even ready to go-to-market, your product marketing function needs to be kicking into gear. It is all about setting the groundwork for later. This is accomplished by conducting research and analysis to understand:
- the target market
- creating customer personas for clear and concise messaging
- understanding the competitive landscape to see how it will fit into it.
It’s important to develop your value proposition here, using all the data and insights you gather to ensure it is on point and speaks to the benefits and values it will bring to your customers.
Bringing your product to market
This stage starts with developing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy that outlines how you will launch and promote your offering to the market. Utilising the research and foundations from the previous step, you will be able to refine the target market and set the right pricing strategies, distribution channels, and promotional tactics.
With the plan outlined, it is time to create the necessary marketing assets. But to ensure the consistency of messaging, it is imperative to place your value proposition at the heart. This will ensure you craft compelling messaging that resonates with the target audience.
Now you can move on to creating the marketing campaigns that will generate the leads, drive product awareness, and support your sales team. Ensure you have your value proposition at the heart of each campaign to ensure consistency of messaging.
It is also the point for you to sit down with your sales team to develop the necessary tools they need (brochures, product guides, competitive analysis, and training materials) to help them do their job.
Finally, once all of the above is completed, it is time to launch your product. A successful launch will involve the collaboration of product marketing with product management to plan and execute the successful launch to drive excitement and engagement.
Ongoing marketing support
Product marketing continues long after the launch and will only stop when the product reaches its end-of-life. It needs to continue to refine and promote the product. It achieves this through ongoing analysis of customer feedback and competitor analysis.
Through customer feedback, you will understand how it is being viewed by the marketplace, but also what features are going down well, and which aren’t, and also get an idea of where the product needs to improve. This information needs to be shared with the product management team to improve the roadmap and focus on the improvements that have been highlighted.
Competitive analysis will continue here as well. A close eye will be kept on the competitor products and strategies to help identify opportunities for differentiation. It will also give you insights into how they are performing, what activities they are doing, and if there are gaps in the market that you can exploit.
By keeping abreast of how the marketplace is evolving, and incorporating customer feedback, product marketing will continue to develop your marketing strategy to ensure it is finely tuned to the environment you are playing in.
A very large toolbox
After covering all the above, it is a little scary to think about the complete skill set a product marketer needs to fulfil their duty. Where a social media manager, website guru, or content creator will only have one discipline to worry about, product marketers cover the entire spectrum.
To achieve this, product marketing needs to be a strategic function within your organisation that focuses on developing, positioning, and promoting your product or service to the target market. And because it involves understanding the market dynamics, identifying customer needs, and developing effective marketing strategies to drive awareness, adoption, and sales, it needs to have strong relationships with all the other departments it touches upon.
A lot of it comes down to efficient working practices and clear communication between departments. By having your product marketing as the linchpin between your sales, marketing, product, and customer services teams you will have the foundations for a strong and successful product marketing function.
To learn more about product marketing, download our whitepaper on it.
Alternatively, reach out and we will be happy to talk through how to maximise its impact within your organisation.