What Is Product Marketing? Everything You Need to Know

For small business leaders ready to elevate their marketing strategy, product marketing might be the next thing to explore. If you're struggling to identify your target audience, speak directly to their pain points, and highlight your key product differentiators, it could be the perfect time to prioritize product-centric marketing. Especially for high-growth technology startups, product marketing has risen in popularity, thanks to the need for marketing initiatives that highlight unique platform differentiators and speak directly to customers' biggest pain points.

As per Gartner research, the main priority for product marketing in tech growth companies is to drive revenue growth. [1] It plays a pivotal role in a company's overall strategy and growth, and when its roles and responsibilities are properly outlined and designed within the larger marketing organization, product marketing is both "highly strategic and operationally excellent."

In this article, we'll explain how small to midsize businesses are leveraging product marketing, why it's important, common mistakes made when implementing this effective strategy, and how to measure its performance.

Product marketing is a skill set that bridges the gap between your product and its marketing, driving product adoption and revenue through a deep understanding of the customer's pain points. It typically encompasses four core areas, including market opportunity, product direction, pipeline development, and revenue generation.

For small businesses, product marketing supports visibility and awareness, especially with new products. Product marketing drives a competitive edge against other small businesses and builds trust and credibility within a target audience. Product marketing not only helps establish a strong market presence but also leads initiatives that drive sustainable growth and customer retention.

Depending on the exact size of your company, industry, and stage of growth, product marketing can significantly contribute to business strategies such as revenue growth, customer retention, market visibility, and more.

Excellent product marketing can make a world of difference in allowing your business to stand out in a competitive market. Especially in the initial stages of launching, product marketing is vital in clearly explaining the company's product and platform and how customers can benefit.

A defined competitive edge

Strong product marketing should create a narrative that tells a potential customer why your product is different and better than other options. Product marketers carefully research the target audience and establish their pain points and objectives. With this information in hand, they can create a clear and engaging product story that resonates with potential customers.

Stronger demand generation

Demand generation improves when product marketing crafts a compelling story, creates strong buyer personas, and builds clear value propositions and feature-benefit statements for different industries or buyers. This refined messaging resonates across advertising initiatives, leading to higher conversions, more in-pipeline business, and, ultimately, more revenue. Demand generation teams and growth marketers can confidently spend paid budgets knowing they have the right messaging and calls-to-action in hand.

Properly prioritized product roadmap

Unsurprisingly, product marketing plays a key role in developing and prioritizing the product roadmap. Product marketing brings qualitative and quantitative customer and market research back to the product team, informing them of key needs and opportunities to differentiate from competitors. Product marketing also supports the previewing of the roadmap to customers, ensuring clients know what is in development.

Depending on the company size, industry, stage of growth, product, and more, product marketing can look vastly different across organizations. For example, a product marketer might be more involved in content development and strategy at a smaller organization. In a midsize business, a product marketer might hone in on sales enablement. Take a look at the key responsibilities of a product marketer below.

Positioning and messaging

Carving out a solid niche within a market is one of the main responsibilities of a product manager. It should create a distinct and compelling impression with both customers and prospects.

Go-to-market strategy

Product marketers should be launch experts, leading cross-functional teams in bringing a new feature or product to your target customer. This includes planning timelines and strategy, creating deliverables such as blog posts or sales collateral, and then reporting on key performance indicators after the release. Product launches might involve unveiling new products, releasing new features, announcing new offerings or services, or expanding into a different market.

Sales enablement

Product marketers equip the sales team with not only collateral and assets to share with prospects but also industry trends, new feature releases, objection-handling materials, and more.

Competitive analysis

To create solid messaging and a strong go-to-market strategy, product marketers should have a deep understanding of the competitive landscape. This also involves creating battle cards, one-pagers, training materials, and more to keep the larger organization aware of competitor developments.

Product adoption

Product marketers should support product adoption, whether that is through email drip series, in-product guides, notifications, or equipping customer success teams with the right knowledge. Ultimately, retaining and upselling customers means they have to be using the product, and product marketing can support a stronger customer journey.

Product marketing is critical across all stages of the product lifecycle, but its responsibilities and focus will be different depending on the company's stage of growth. Take a look at how product marketing supports different company stages.

Introduction

In seed-stage tech companies or products without a customer base, launching and introducing the product to your target market is the biggest focus. This includes establishing market size and segmentation, giving your sales team an ideal customer profile (ICP) to target as well as sophisticated buyer personas.

Sophisticated buyer personas are fictional characters created through a blend of customer interviews, quantitative surveys, and other research. Product marketers can create buyer personas that include demographics and psychographics such as job title, location, income, education, interests, behavioral characteristics, and motivations.

At this stage, product marketers are also planning well-executed go-to-market strategies, which might include a press release, ad campaign, social media posts, in-product guides, email drips, sales collateral, and more.

Growth

Product marketing is especially powerful in growth-stage companies. During this scaling stage, product marketing can create powerful, engaging campaigns to drive demand generation. This typically includes working cross-functionally with marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams to craft stand-out campaigns.

In growth-stage companies, product marketing supports market expansion, strong differentiation in a competitive landscape, increased customer acquisition, optimized sales processes and workflows, and consistent adaptation to customer needs. In this stage, product marketing can be highly flexible and innovative, adapting quickly to changing goals and needs.

Maturity

In mature businesses, product marketing is still highly responsible for creating a compelling, differentiated brand and product story. The market landscape might be maturing as well, with new players entering the field, mergers and acquisitions, increased funding to competitors, and more. Product marketing utilizes data-driven decision-making to enhance cross-selling and upselling, improve customer retention, and expand market share into different products, industries, or even locations.

Decline

When facing a declining market, product marketing can bring life back into an organization. Product marketers can solicit customer feedback, offering suggestions on how to improve the product. They can also work on pricing and packaging new and existing offers, creating more compelling opportunities for revenue growth. They can also lead a market analysis and repositioning, which might include analyzing the landscape and building a business case for a new product segment or expansion into a new market.

Product marketers should be compelling storytellers and experts at research, organizing data to execute clearly defined customer and buyer personas.

Extensive market research

Without a deep understanding of the target market, product marketers are flying blind. They should craft qualitative and quantitative feedback, speak regularly with customers and prospects, and survey the industry to see exactly what customers need.

Customer and buyer personas

These fictional characters are the baseline of all messaging and positioning across many teams. With strong personas in place, product marketers can clearly address the characteristics, behaviors, and preferences of target buyers.

Product launches

A well-executed product launch can generate engagement and sales for months at a time. Product marketers can create buzz around a new feature or product release through a well-planned launch, organizing all teams to go to market with the same message.

While the product marketing function can be highly effective, teams often misunderstand them, which can make it difficult for product marketers to specialize and focus on their specific roles.

Being misunderstood by leadership

Many product marketers have a marketing background, which sometimes forces them into a jack-of-all-trades role. As product marketing is a newer role, it's often misunderstood by leadership. This misalignment can lead to an overburden of the product marketing team, causing them to be ineffective and unproductive. Instead, product marketing initiatives should be clearly outlined, and roles between different departments should be clearly segmented so it doesn't lead to dozens of initiatives across many different teams.

Not understanding return on investment (ROI)

It's difficult to track the actual impact and ROI of many marketing investments, and product marketing is no exception. Many organizations don't understand how to accurately measure the success of product marketing. Product marketing influences and partners with so many different departments and teams that it is important to align their goals with everyone else's.

Unclear target audience

Without sufficient market research and a clearly defined target audience, everything else product marketers do—from customer adoption campaigns to sales collateral and launch processes—will struggle. Not having a clearly defined target market will make messaging and positioning confusing, and campaigns will fail to resonate.

One of the biggest questions regarding product marketing is how to measure the success of product marketing campaigns. As product marketing is often not clearly defined and differentiated from the rest of the marketing organization, it can be confusing to set clear key performance indicators and targets for product marketing teams. Here are a few different ways to track the success of product marketing campaigns.

Sales revenue

One way to track the impact of product marketing is to look at trends in sales revenue. For example, if product marketing has developed new marketing materials and sales subsequently improve, it can be inferred the materials helped win more business. Clearly defined tracking and reporting across various marketing and sales platforms are critical to understanding the success of product marketing efforts.

Customer retention

Product marketing works on both sides of the equation in bringing in new customers and helping retain the old ones. Product marketers should be closely tied to retention metrics as much of their work revolves around product adoption, upselling, and cross-selling.

Brand awareness and market share

As product marketers lead the charge on the product's positioning, you should see an increase in your overall brand awareness and market share. While this is a more difficult metric to measure, quantitative and qualitative market research studies can help capture how much of your target audience knows about your product. Market surveys can also help measure sentiment.

Product marketing can be a powerful tool for small businesses in any growth stage. Product marketing helps solve the business problems of revenue growth and customer retention, leveraging a deep understanding of the customer's pain points to bring messaging and positioning to life across customer and buyer journeys.

Next, assess if your business has the right support in place to allow product marketing to be successful. This includes a well-developed product team, demand generation leaders, and a sales team. Also, as product marketers juggle many initiatives cross-functionally, they explore product management software to maintain clear visibility and track progress. Check out the below resources to see what product management software works for you:

• Marketing Automation Software

• Best Product Management Software

• Customer Engagement Software