What Does Product Marketing Do? – Complete Guide with FAQs, Tips, Advice, & More   

Product marketing can be a bit difficult to define if you’ve just started a new business and want to get it off the ground. 

The fact of the matter is that product marketing sits at the heart of most successful businesses. 

If you want your brand to be successful, it’s crucial that you understand how it works and how you can implement it successfully.

What is Product Marketing? 

Product marketing can be described as the process through which a new or existing product is advertised in the market. This includes the introduction of the product to the market, the launch of the product, and the messaging involved to communicate the need for it. 

The product marketing process also involves making sure that all salespeople involved in the selling process fully understand what the product is all about. This is important because you want your salespeople to be knowledgeable and well-informed about the product. 

If a customer feels that the salesperson representing your product is incompetent or doesn’t know enough about the product, it could cost you a sale. 

The main aim of product marketing is to increase the sales, usage, and prevalence of a product. 

Many people wrongfully believe that product marketing only deals with the launch of a product into the market. This, however, is not the case. If that were the case, product marketers that work exclusively for a single product wouldn’t have much to do after it’s launched. 

Once the product is launched, product marketers work to maintain the relevance of the product within the market. They also work to ensure that the people who would be interested in the product are made aware of it. 

This could be through digital marketing campaigns, awareness programs, and other techniques. 

Product marketers also work to listen to the feedback provided by customers that already own the product. They can then use this feedback to provide insight on how the product could be improved in the future. 

It’s a good idea to implement inbound marketing strategies into your overall marketing strategy, to begin with, product marketing. Inbound marketing focuses on trying to reach the correct audience that would be interested in the type of product that you have. 

Once that target demographic is successfully reached and converted by your product marketing team, further efforts are made to ensure they remain loyal customers. It’s the go-to-market strategy for many large corporations.

Loyal customers are crucial for the longevity and relevance of your brand since they can be strong advocates for your product(s). That’s why you have to always strive for customer success.

Now that we’ve defined what product marketing is let’s take a closer look at the responsibilities and tasks that a product marketing manager typically performs.

Tasks of a Product Marketing Manager

Simply said the goal of a product marketing manager is to market the products and their features to their company’s target audience. Basically, they have to communicate the value of your products to potential customers. 

You can expect a product marketing manager to: 

• Become familiar with the products your brand has to offer.
• Identify and highlight the key features of your products.
• Develop a message that will help your brand to communicate these key features to your target audience.
• Develop detailed marketing campaigns to tap into new as well as existing audience segments.

Some specific duties that a product marketing manager may take care of include: 

• Developing content plans for future marketing campaigns.
• Determining the distribution channels that will be utilized for said marketing campaigns.
• Sitting down with content creators for your brand and determining what type of content they will create. Product marketing managers will ensure the message sent with the content reflects your brand’s image and identity. 
• Developing a content publishing schedule and ensuring that all tasks are completed according to it. 

These are just some tasks that product marketing managers have to deal with but this is not an exhaustive list. Naturally, there can be many other tasks that product marketing managers have to deal with. 

However, all of them are typically related to how the value of your product(s) can be communicated to the masses.

Now, let’s look at what the efforts of product marketers actually look like. In the next section, we will analyze what a typical product marketing cycle involves. It’s the job of product marketers to ensure this cycle yields fruitful results. 

How Does Product Marketing Work? 

The first thing you must understand as a product marketer is that product marketing is a process that is solely aimed at potential and/or existing customers. That’s why anything you do as part of the product marketing process, it has to be done with the customers in mind. 

Product marketing can be a great tool for sales enablement but only when done properly.

A great product or service won’t benefit you at all if the people who would be interested in them are not aware of it. 

That’s pretty much why product marketing and marketing in general exists: To make the customer aware of the problem they have and communicate how your product can solve that problem. 

So the first step for product marketers is to figure out who their target audience is. 

Look at your product and think about the type of person that would be interested in it. You and your product marketing team don’t have to think of one person. It’s a good idea to create different groups and audience segments.

• How old would they be? 
• What would be their gender? 
• What kind of job would they do? 
• What would their typical income be? 
• What would their geographical location be? 
• What type of online channels and social media platforms would they use? 

These are just some questions you can ask yourself to identify the type of people you want to send your message to. However, we encourage you to take some time to define some more characteristics of the people within your target audience. 

In most cases, the more specific your target audience is, the higher the chance that you will be able to convert them. 

It’s a good idea at this stage to create a few buyer personas for your brand. 

A buyer persona can be described as a fictional character that could serve as a template for the typical customer that would be interested in your product(s). You would outline their characteristics including their hobbies, interests, job title, income, etc. 

We recommend that you create at least 2 – 3 buyer personas before you actually implement any product marketing strategies. 

The different buyer personas that you create might be quite different from each other. As a result, you can create different marketing campaigns for each of them. 

Each campaign’s messaging might be different and personalized to one specific persona. Remember that the more personalized your messaging and communication is, the higher the chances that you’ll convert a person from that specific audience segment. 

We always recommend our readers to perform segmentation whenever they come up with target demographics and buyer personas for their brand. 

It’s also important that you don’t do all of this in a vacuum. Have your team on board and communicate with personnel within the marketing as well as the sales team(s). This is to ensure that every person involved in the campaigns is on the same page. 

You don’t want the customer receiving different types of messages from different personnel within your company. 

Once you have a fair idea of what type of people would be interested in your product(s), you can begin to plan the product marketing process. 

Here are some steps that a product marketer will typically take before, during, and after the product’s launch: 

Step 1: Research the Product

You may think that as a product marketer, your job starts once the product is ready to be sold. However, that’s definitely not the case. 

To be an effective product marketer, you need to understand the product inside out. You must know how it works, what its different features and components are, and where it shines. 

To develop an understanding of the product, you need to work closely with product developers during the stage at which it’s being developed. Communicate with the developers and have them give you insights into the product as it goes through prototypes and testing stages. 

You won’t be able to send an informed message as part of your marketing campaign unless you have a thorough understanding of how the product works. 

Step 2: Develop a Story for the Product 

If you’re a B2C company (Business to Consumer), then it’s important that you compose a message that is emotion-based rather than data-driven. 

Some statistics and data here and there help, but the focus should be to deliver a message that communicates a problem and how the product solves that problem. 

The goal is to identify what the product does best and what unmet needs it can meet for your target audience. Once that’s identified, you have to work to compose a message that effectively communicates it. 

In many cases, your customer may not realize that they have a problem that your product solves. Here, you’ll have to highlight the problem first and then explain how the product solves it. 

You can also study your competitors at this stage to identify what your product does better than them. Once you identify a feature that works better in your product than your competitors, you can include it in your marketing message. 

When you highlight aspects of your product that work better than your competitors, it’ll obviously give you a significant edge amongst customers within the market. 

Step 3: Decide the Type of Content That Will be Made and How It Will be Distributed

At this stage, you have three things to work with: 

1. You know who your target audience is. 
2. You know what the product you want to promote is along with its key features.
3. You know the story you want to tell with the marketing campaigns for the product.

Now, you are ready to meet with content creators and decide what type of content will be made for the brand to communicate the message you’ve crafted. 

It’s important to stay in touch with content creators and communicate your message effectively and consistently to all of them. This will ensure that all of the content made for the product matches your brand identity and messaging. 

Along with the tone of the messaging, you must also decide which type of distribution channels will be used to distribute the content that will be made. 

Again, the distribution channels you choose will depend on who your target audience is. You’ll have to figure out that based on the typical hobbies of your target audience, which platforms would they most frequent? 

Once the content has been developed, it’s a good idea to perform some A/B testing to see what works best. 

A/B testing refers to when you create two varying versions of the same content. Then, you test it out amongst a small audience segment to see how both of them perform. The version that performs better is what will be used in the actual marketing campaign. 

One thing we’ve always told our readers is to have their messaging be as concise and to the point as possible. This is especially important if you use social media platforms like Twitter, where the character count for every tweet is quite limited. 

In this case, your messaging has to be short and sweet. It can become difficult to do so when you have to include a link to your landing page or store page. To overcome this issue, you can use a link shortener.  

To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register an account for yourself and log in.

Step 1: After you log in, you will be greeted with the dashboard page. Here, you can look at analytics for previously shortened links. 

This is something that can come in handy when you want to analyze the results of your marketing campaign(s). 

You also have access to the URL shortener box which is present at the top of the page. 

Step 2: To receive a shortened URL to the link you want to use within your marketing campaign(s), copy it and paste it into the URL shortener box as shown below. 

After you copy it, you will automatically get redirected to the next page. If you don’t get redirected, simply click on the “Shorten” box. 

Step 3: Once you’re on the next page, you’ll receive the shortened URL you can use. Simply copy it and use it wherever you like within your marketing campaign(s).

Remember that you can always return to the dashboard for analytics on the shortened URL, such as impressions, clicks, and more.

The types of content you can have are limitless such as 

• Blog content 
• Short-form videos 
• Long-form videos 
• Infographics 
• Images 
• Live streams 
• Stories (on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram) 
• Podcasts 
• Landing pages

And much more. 

Step 4: Develop the Product Launch Plan 

As the content for your marketing campaign(s) is being made, you should work to develop the product launch plan. 

The product launch plan will have all the details of the product marketing process that will occur leading up to as well as after the product is launched. 

It’s your responsibility as a product marketer to lay out all the responsibilities that everyone in the team has during every stage of the product marketing process. It’s a good idea to be as thorough as possible so that nobody’s confused about their roles and duties. 

The more detail-oriented you are, the smoother the product launch will be. 

Step 5: Attend the Product Launch Meeting 

This goes without saying but it’s paramount that you have a meeting on the day of the product launch. The purpose of the product launch meeting is to finalize what everyone’s responsibilities are. 

Ensure that you as well as everybody else on your team, perfectly know what their duties and responsibilities are so that nothing goes wrong during marketing. 

Step 6: Engage With Your Target Audience and Community 

As your product is launched and all of the marketing campaigns you planned to go into effect, it’s natural for a buzz about your product to be created within the industry. 

 During this stage, it’s important that you amplify the buzz by further engaging with the community and interacting with them. 

As people start to buy your product, they may run into issues or have questions about it. It’s important that you have a customer satisfaction team dedicated to this. Do not leave your audience alone out there once you’ve sold your product to them. 

Answer their questions thoroughly and with care. This will show them that you’re a brand that truly cares about them, and as a result, they may become loyal customers. Loyal customers are a great asset to have because they’ll be advocates for your product and brand. 

Not only that but every time you launch a new product in the future, there’s a high chance that they’ll buy that product from you. 

If you ignore your customers immediately after you launch your product, you’ll fail to secure any loyal customers. Even the customers that bought from you once might be turned off by the lack of care and communication you have with your customer base. 

Hence, make sure that you make an effort to engage and be a prominent presence within the community after you launch your product. 

Another thing you can do is to reach out to other influencers, content creators, and existing customers for feedback and commentary. 

Step 7: Ensure That You and the Sales Team are on the Same Page 

This is something that you constantly have to make sure of before, during, and after the product launch. 

It’s important for the marketing team to be in constant communication with the sales team to ensure that the messaging for the product is consistent. 

There’s nothing that can throw off a customer more than inconsistencies between the marketing for a product and what a salesperson says on a sales call. 

How Do I Measure the Success of Product Marketing Campaigns?

After each product marketing campaign comes to an end and also while a marketing campaign is running, it’s important to analyze the results you receive. 

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the results and analytics while a marketing campaign is running. This is because if you are not getting the results you expected, you can make adjustments in real-time. 

After a marketing campaign ends, it’s crucial that you analyze the results so that you can understand which tactics worked and which ones didn’t. This can help you make better decisions in future campaigns. 

However, the question remains: How exactly do you measure how successful a marketing campaign is? 

Thankfully, in today’s digital age, tools and software exist that take note of a wide variety of metrics that you can look at to measure success. 

Some metrics you can take a look at to measure the success of your marketing campaigns include: 

• Number of sign-ups 
• Number of sales 
• Revenue generated 
• Number of impressions on online marketing posts across social media platforms 
• Number of clicks on links to landing pages 
• Number of paid activations 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) 
• Cost per acquisition 
• Customer lifetime value 
• Active product usage

Wrapping Things Up… 

So that’s all about product marketing. 

As you can probably tell, it’s a crucial part of any brand that hopes to successfully market a product to its potential audiences. Many new entrepreneurs put a lot of emphasis on research and development but not enough on marketing. 

Don’t be one of those entrepreneurs. Take a step back and really assess how many resources you should provide to your product marketers. When you provide them with the appropriate resources, you’re bound to see the results. 

For more information and answers to any questions, you may have, please reach out to us in the comments section below.