Product Marketing simplified
Product Marketing is marketing that fully spins around the product and its users. It covers product market research, product referrals, and everything in between. Let me here note that, when I say “product” I refer to tech products.
Product Marketer is not a Product Manager. If the Product Manager’s job is to bring the product to life, then the Product Marketer’s role is to prolong its lifespan and make it resonate with its audience’s needs and preferences.
Let’s quickly touch a couple of subjects that every Product Marketer needs to know.
Product Market Research
Product market research is a crucial step in product marketing. Usability testing, A/B testing, surveying, interviewing, expert reviews are the most common techniques of product market research.
The product marketers ought to understand the types of people who represent the market, how and where they should be messaged. Marketing Persona is exactly what you need here! Based on demographic, geographic, and psychographic you might prepare a few personas that represent your target segments. Apart from marketing personas, you might want to create Product Personas as well. They are similar but not the same. Since they are created taking in mind user-product interactions, the product personas are great for informing development roadmap.
The Product Lifecycle
Every single product has a lifespan. It starts and it ends. What matters is how long and how successfully it will last. The Product Life Cycle consists of 4 stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline and every single stage have to be addressed separately with respective marketing techniques.
Technology Adoption Lifecycle
This theory explains how and at what rate new ideas & technology spread. Everett Rogers, a professor of communication studies, popularized this theory in his book “Diffusion of Innovations” in 1962. Based on this theory there are five adopter groups that differ in their value orientations and their motives for adopting or resisting the new product: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.
Read more about both the Product and Technology Adoption Lifecycles here.
Product-Market Fit
When you have a product that matches the needs of the market that you’re targeting, you have a product-market fit. The crucial factor here is that the consumer wants your product. The rest is manageable. If the customers aren’t quite understanding the product or not spreading the “word of mouth” you have a problem. And probably this is a message-customer fit problem. Otherwise, money must be coming in faster than you can spend it.
Value Proposition
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, communicated, and acknowledged. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. It’s neither a slogan nor a positioning statement. Even not a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) which people often confuse with. A compelling value proposition has to be short, clear, specific, direct, and straight to the point. It avoids buzzwords and it can be read & understood in 5 seconds. And again, it has to speak in your customer’s language!
Read more about Value Proposition.
Product Positioning
What is the place of your product in the market? And what is the place of your product in the minds of your customers?
In order to visualize your product’s perception and its position against your competitors, you can use the Perceptual Map. A perceptual map consists of X and Y axes which represent the two values you want to be known for being the best.
Developing a positioning strategy takes a profound knowledge about the targeted segment’s purchasing habits, behaviors of buyer personas, sensitivity about price, design, and many other important considerations.
Read more about Positioning.
Go-to-market Plan
The go-to-market (GTM) plan is a mini version of the marketing plan and is built to address how to execute a specific growth strategy for a specific product(s). A go-to-market plan is needed if you are looking for expansion into new markets or launch new products.
GTM consists of all the main components of product marketing, from positioning to messaging and it is the way how you bring new products and solutions into the spotlight to our audiences. A good GTM has a problem statement, solution statement, clear OKRs, personas, positioning and messaging strategies, creative outline, and defined marketing channels.
