What are the parts of product marketing?

While traditional marketing generally focuses on lead generation, product marketing is a distinct business function focused on advertising a product and bringing it to market.

In a nutshell, product marketing can be summarized as understanding the market and customers, bringing a product to market with the right message, empowering the sales team and driving adoption and retention.

Growing product awareness and brand loyalty, driving demand and establishing a clear differentiation from competitors can be considered its main objectives.

Three key concepts can help explain how a product is presented to its audience:

• Targeting can refer to identifying the customer groups a product aims to reach.
• Positioning usually defines where the product stands in the market and what its unique characteristics are.
• Messaging can put that position into words, explaining the product’s value in terms that matter to the intended audience.

Across the product life cycle, savvy brands can leverage those concepts to achieve the desired result, whether it is raising awareness during launch, growing market share in the initial expansion, differentiating from competitors during maturity, or finding ways to extend the product life during decline.

As the foundational pillar of product marketing, market intelligence generally focuses on research to guide any subsequent steps during a product’s life. It means gathering insights into the market, customer needs and preferences, and the competition to better understand and adapt to the landscape in which the product would be launched. Market intelligence tends to be an ongoing process in which sales and customer retention data is used to improve the product.

Research can combine several methods because each can inform different product strategies.

Qualitative research can help marketing teams understand customers’ needs and motivations. In-depth interviews, video questions and focus groups can fall into this category, as they allow researchers to engage directly with customers and understand the nuances of their behavior and reasoning. This information allows marketers to improve products, create new ones or develop better communication strategies to engage their clients.

Quantitative approaches such as questionnaires and surveys may be used to gather structured information. They can then be analyzed statistically to establish causal links and market trends. Marketers may leverage the tools to sharpen customer segmentation or product testing.

Competitive mapping, which allows brands to evaluate competitors and their strengths, can incorporate both research methods. For instance, tracking revenue might be performed using quantitative methods, and brand awareness might require the support of qualitative analysis.

A SWOT analysis can be considered an example of competitive mapping. It can help to paint a clear picture of a brand’s competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to inform decision-making.

All the information gathered through research can then help a marketing team create the so-called buyer persona, a fictional character that embodies the real characteristics of a product’s ideal customer. Buyer personas can help companies better understand their audience and develop strategies that highlight how a product addresses customers’ specific needs, challenges and preferences.

Once the target client has been defined, product marketing typically focuses on defining how to position the product.

Positioning can be considered a process of exclusion. Departments within a company usually come together to define how the product can serve clients, what sets it apart from competitors and its exclusive advantage. Their work usually culminates in a unique value proposition within an overall brand identity.

Various frameworks can help organizations get to their specific statement, such as:

• Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement, which answers the questions: Who is it for? What is their problem? What is your product? What benefit does it offer? Who are the competitors? How do you differentiate from them?
• The Value Proposition Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder, which matches a customer’s profile, with particular tasks to perform, pains and expectations, with the brand value map and its product, potential gains and pain relievers.
• Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas, an actionable one-page living diagram that swaps certain elements of Osterwalder’s work to focus on key metrics, issues and solutions.

Messaging can turn a company’s strategic position into language customers can understand and act on. The “need, feature, and benefit” messaging framework can be an example of this type of product marketing strategy. It can lay the foundation for what people understand about a product and their perception of it.

Messaging can occur across various traditional and digital marketing channels such as the company website, social media, advertisements, webinars and product design.

To make sure it yields the desired results, marketers can test and continually refine the messaging. A/B testing and other types of customer feedback can help craft appealing messages.

Once research and positioning are complete, the next step in the product marketing process is generally to develop a go-to-market (GTM) plan in collaboration with other key departments to take the product to its desired target audience in the most time- and resource-efficient way.

The strategy typically maps out specific actions for each of the five marketing pillars (product, price, place, promotion and people). It can define the ideal customer, competitive positioning, distribution channel mix, types of promotion to use, and price tactics. While GTMs can vary, they are frequently based on one of the following frameworks:

This is the classic, top-down strategy in which sales usually take place through the awareness, consideration and conversion stages. Marketing typically grabs people’s attention at the top, while sales take over the bottom. Leads generally move step-by-step from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs) and final deals.

This approach is circular and growth-focused, with the customer positioned directly in the middle. Instead of letting customers exist at the end of a transaction, the model sees marketing, sales and customer success work together to transform happy users into brand evangelists that fuel business growth.

Product-led growth puts the actual product front and center as the main engine for attracting, maintaining and growing the customer base. It frequently leverages self-serve options or freemium trials.

Selected high-value target accounts or prospective organizations are targeted like individual markets in this model. As a result, sales and marketing efforts tend to deliver highly personalized campaigns.

Once a launch plan is in place, internal alignment between departments and sales can be very important for marketing a product.

Savvy companies typically aim to be consistent when sharing their product message. To do so, product marketing is typically responsible for sales enablement — the process of equipping sales reps with the necessary product knowledge and practical tools to close deals.

Sales enablement should not be confused with sales training, which teaches specific sales skills. Empowering sales staff can go a long way. Greater confidence can often lead to stronger customer relationships and overall better performance. Better performance by sales reps also typically leads to lower churn, which can be tied to higher company profitability.

A product marketing team’s job doesn’t typically end at launch. That is when measuring performance starts. Understanding how a product was and continues to be received by its target audience is important for defining subsequent marketing efforts.

Organizations might use various types of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts:

• Win/loss ratios can help assess whether positioning and messaging resonate with customers.
• Adoption rate typically tries to capture, at regular intervals, how many users effectively use the product, and whether its value was communicated properly.
• Sales confidence when pitching products can be tracked with surveys to understand if sales enablement materials might need improvement. Cohort analysis can help teams identify behavioral patterns among specific customer groups and understand how performance changes over time.

After tracking product performance, brands can then decide what further steps they want to take for their product and company to grow further.

If you’re hoping to build on your product marketing knowledge or learn about related marketing topics, University of Phoenix offers business programs including:

• Bachelor of Science in Business with a Marketing Certificate
• Marketing Certificate (Undergraduate)

For more information, contact University of Phoenix.