What’s product marketing? And why does the success of your company rely on it?

Here’s a good definition by HubSpot.

Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This includes deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product.

Product marketing lives in that special space between product magic and consumer insights, ensuring that your company’s efforts are driven by market needs and that your offering finds the right audience.

The product marketing function requires ongoing collaboration with stakeholders across your entire organization, from product to operations, customer support, data science, and wider marketing disciplines.

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Whether you’re working for a high growth tech company or a one-person startup, 90% of our success is defined by product marketing. You need to structure the way you go about it for 2 reasons:

1. First, to make sure that you not only drive user acquisition and growth but demand for and usage of your product over time.
2. Second, to make sure that everyone is aligned on messaging, positioning, launch plans and key company objectives.

Before and After Go-to-Market

While product marketing is responsible for go-to-market, it also plays a key role in the ongoing improvement of your existing offering — working with all your teams to strengthen your brand and accelerate your growth.

Before Your Product Launch

Product marketers own the positioning, messaging, and go-to-market plans for product launches and feature updates. They work with, and coordinate, the entire marketing team to ensure consistency across all channels. They develop product education assets to help consumers maximise their experience and internal teams to deliver the right messaging.

After Your Product Launch

Product marketers partner with the consumer insights & data science teams to ensure product development stays connected with your audience. They are obsessed with success and how to measure it. They work on creating dashboards to track adoption, retention, growth. They create surveys and talk to customers to understand both pain points and strong suits.

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Product marketing is about giving your company the best chances to have a successful launch and then making sure that your product stays relevant. It requires a fundamental change in the way marketing is traditionally defined.

From Channels to Objectives

Legacy marketing is dead. Long live product marketing.

If your company isn’t thinking in terms of product marketing yet, you should reconsider the entire function. Old structures hire a Head of Marketing. That person then says: I need someone for social media, someone for content, a designer, a bunch of executives and maybe an agency for good measure.

It doesn’t work.

Product marketing redefines the marketing function by shifting the focus from marketing channels to business objectives.

A social media person is only successful if you can tie that person’s work to business KPIs — otherwise, they’re only pushing images and texts with no strategic impact.

A successful product marketer will craft holistic plans coordinating all your marketing channels: from CRM to social media, press relations, long-form content, paid advertising, and so on. This isn’t to say that a Head of Marketing cannot be product marketing focused, but it’s gotta be instilled.

This is why more and more organisations hire objective-based roles. Their titles can be Head of Revenue, Head of Acquisition, Head of Engagement — but they’re all product marketing functions tied to key business objectives.

This gives incredible clarity within the organisation, and a real sense of what success looks like for the business. It also highlights the need for collaboration between multiple teams, from product to data science, customer success, operations, partnerships, and so on.

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10 Questions for Successful Go-to-Market

If your company isn’t thinking in terms of product marketing yet and you want to lead the way, start with your next product launch. Answer these 10 questions and see how much of a difference it makes.

1. What is the strategic importance of this feature/product launch?

How does it fit into your company’s vision and mission? If you’re a one-product company, this should be straightforward. But if you’re a fintech, it also helps with roadmap management and prioritisation.

2. What benefit does this feature/product deliver for our customer?

How does it benefit your users? What problem are you solving for them? Make the link between your company’s vision and mission, and the real-world issues or needs that you’re tackling with your product.

3. Where does this product sit in the competitive landscape?

What have other players done in the market? Where do you stand against them? How are you different? List down as many competitors as possible, look at their pricing, positioning, messaging.

4. What’s the customer experience?

What’s the first point of contact for our users? What does it look like? If your company is app- or web-based, show the entire experience. How does it flow?

5. What questions will our customers have?

If you were a customer, what questions would you ask? If you have a customer-facing team, whether it’s customer support or sales, ask them to chime in. Talk to prospects, tell them about your product, listen to them.

6. What are the key messages we want to deliver to our users?

Think in terms of taglines for social media images, EDM headers, out-of-home advertising… Short, comprehensive, punchy.

7. What would your product launch email look like?

This is a key aspect of product marketing and often the first time your users hear about a new feature. What should you tell them to get them excited and interested? What do they need to know in order to have a good experience? This is where you draft the actual email you’re going to send.

8. Write the headline: what do we want the press to say about this product?

A press headline should be the essence of what you want your customers to know, encapsulated in a single sentence. If a journalist heard about your product launch, what title would you want them to write?

9. How will we launch this feature across marketing channels?

This is where you coordinate all your marketing channels. Invite the rest of your marketing team and discuss how you’re going to launch your product across paid, owned and earned channels.

10. What are the business objectives we hope to achieve?

Assess where you’re currently at, and what you hope to achieve. Give a timeline. Try to be as precise and data-driven as possible: if you don’t have numbers, you can’t measure success.

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Some practical advice:

• You don’t need to answer these chronologically. Go through the questions in the order that makes the most sense for you. Draft bullet points with your initial thoughts and then come back to the doc to refine it.
• Ask for opinions and advice from your colleagues. Get different teams involved, tell them about your initial thoughts, walk them through the entire thing. Make it bulletproof by sharing it early.
• Once you’ve got 90% of the document filled in, share it with your management. Schedule time to go through it together. Explain your rationale. Get their feedback, but most importantly their buy-in.