- Product Marketing
Product marketing: Everything you need to know
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What is product marketing?
Product rollout is always an exciting and dynamic time for any company. However, between the intricacies of product development and the flurry of marketing campaigns to promote a new offering, businesses may skip an integral stage, one that impacts the launch and build out of a product, and the sales and marketing strategy applied to it.
That stage is where the product launch marketing plan happens.
Product marketing definition
Product marketing is the process of introducing a new product to your target buyer market in a way that ensures its sustained success. A subset of marketing, it focuses on product adoption so both your new and existing customers can discover your new offering, find it useful or valuable, purchase it, and start using it.
The goal of product marketing is to convert people into users of your latest product. This entails having a deep understanding of your target buyers, including their pain points as consumers. This becomes the basis of how you position your offering and differentiate it from its competition. It also guides the messaging regarding the solutions your product provides to the audience.
In essence, product marketing bridges the gap between a business and its market. Its position gives it a two-fold function: inbound and outbound activities.
Inbound and outbound activities
Studying the target market, defining its different segments, studying consumer trends, creating a persona of the target customer, identifying their needs, and analyzing the competition all belong to inbound activities, geared toward providing the company with sufficient market intelligence to properly strategize their product development.
Outbound activities, on the other hand, are geared toward market activation. Before a new product gets launched, marketers must lock in on a key message for its branding and apply it when creating marketing materials. Outbound activities also include formulating the right sales approach, developing lead generation plans, and strengthening customer support services throughout the company’s various sales channels.
Another part of the outbound activities is developing assets that communicate the product’s unique value and positioning while remaining aligned with the company’s overall branding.
A company as big as Restore Hyper Wellness, for example, which has more than 220 studios across the United States, would require consistent outbound marketing asset creation to promote its healthcare products and services while maintaining a strong branding. To avoid bottlenecks in the design process, the business relied on Canva Enterprise(opens in a new tab or window) to scale and streamline its content production(opens in a new tab or window). With a centralized design platform, Restore reduced the need to hire freelancers and saved thousands of dollars in marketing content production.
Smaller businesses would do well to follow this model since it would simplify creative processes required in market activation.
Why is product marketing important?
According to a 2024 report(opens in a new tab or window) released by Product Marketing Alliance, a little over a third, or 35.6% of the product marketing executives and managers who took part in the study didn’t allot a budget specifically for product marketing. This indicates that funding from other departmental budgets or projects that are low on the corporate priority list gets funneled instead into conducting product marketing activities — signaling a lack of understanding among company stakeholders about the necessity of the process.
Whether your company is in a niche industry or works in a field saturated with competitors, you need to develop a product marketing strategy every time you plan to introduce a new offering to your buyers. This will give you a leg up against your competitors who may not yet be investing in their product marketing.
Having a marketing strategy for your new product:
- Will guide the way for a quicker and smoother user adoption
- Will better equip you to demonstrate why it’s the most useful and viable one among the many options in the market
- Will advance your brand storytelling — it ties it directly to what you’re selling and expresses your brand story in a way that makes sense for consumers in search of solutions
The role of the product marketer
Because of the amount of market research and analysis proper product marketing requires, every marketing department must have not just an allotted budget but also a dedicated person who will fulfill an important product marketing job — your department must have a product marketer (or in some cases, a team of product marketers).
But what does a product marketing manager(opens in a new tab or window) do? Their main role is to gather and consolidate information that would be relevant to the business’s latest product, and then communicate it in a way that the public understands.
Just as product marketing management has dual activities, a product marketing specialist’s responsibilities are also dual in nature. First, they conduct the inbound activities needed to build market intelligence, which would then be applied in product development. Once the end product is ready for launch, product marketers step in once again to create a product launch marketing plan and ensure successful product adoption.
Core elements of product marketing
There may be a ton of tasks involved when doing product-led marketing, but these are all anchored on a few essential components. Understanding each one’s role and how they relate to each other makes the development of a product marketing strategy smoother.
Product positioning is crucial in market activation because it’ll make your product stand out in a competitive consumer landscape. It’s the element that informs customers of the benefits they can enjoy should they buy what you’re offering.
Product positioning is effective if it clearly states a product’s valuable features that can make consumers’ lives easier. But communicating this in a way that entices the target audience to make a purchase is the function of product messaging. In its essence, it is product storytelling that uses the language, format, and marketing channels easily accessed and understood by customers.
Because the outbound activities involved in product marketing rely heavily on knowing how to reach and convince the target audience, doing market research and gathering customer insights create the bedrock of any marketing strategy for a new product.
Companies may think they already have a good idea of their target customer, but market research uncovers a lot of customer insights they can further draw on. It reveals current and upcoming shifts that could affect their behaviors and tastes, which can help you spot or predict the gaps in your competitors’ product adoption, as well as your target audience’s purchase triggers.
A go-to-market strategy is an action plan for reaching target consumers designed to help a company navigate a challenging and competitive landscape. Since launching a new offering always carries the risk of low product adoption, a well-developed go-to-market strategy can optimize market factors that are favorable or offer potential success, thus minimizing or offsetting potential failure.
Your go-to-market planning must identify not just your target audience but also your competitors. It must position your latest product clearly, showcasing its unique value positioning, and it needs to present a marketing plan that outlines the sales and distribution channels you’ll be tapping to reach your desired customers.
Because product marketing bridges two different phases, collaboration between teams(opens in a new tab or window) is inevitable. Constant communication and transparency are required for a product marketing strategy to work. There must be a conscious effort from all those involved to keep each other up to date about the developments in their areas of responsibility. Information must also be shared in a way that is easy for other teams to understand and take action on.
Using a centralized platform like Canva makes collaboration and alignment easier. This is what Australian hairdressing business Just Cuts did when it introduced its global rebrand(opens in a new tab or window) to the public. It may not be a new product offering, but a brand refresh meant that the company had to ensure a smooth rollout just the same across three different countries. Using Canva Teams(opens in a new tab or window), the company empowered franchise owners to market their respective branches creatively while remaining on brand. It also expanded its Brand Templates so franchises can scale content creation without sacrificing quality.
It’s understandable to focus on achieving a successful product adoption rate when coming up with outbound activities. However, businesses would do well to consider using an educational approach instead to get customers to buy and use what they are selling.
Instead of making immediate profit the bottom line of your product marketing strategy, customer enablement and education might be better to achieve long-term goals. This approach is more empathetic and centered on the consumer, which forms a solid foundation for a seller-buyer relationship. An educational product launch marketing plan offers insights that empower customers in their decision-making, cultivating consumer trust and loyalty. It also provides the additional benefit of lending credibility and authority to a business.
Product marketing examples
Some of the most successful marketing campaigns are built on great product marketing strategies. One of the most popular ones include the “Shot on iPhone(opens in a new tab or window)” campaign and Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” strategy.
Apple’s “Shot in iPhone” campaign
This campaign was launched by tech giant Apple in 2015 to promote its signature smartphone amid a highly competitive market. Given the options available to consumers, Apple set out to differentiate itself by studying its target audience: users who like taking photos and videos to create content, and are thus looking for phones with quality, yet still user-friendly cameras.
To go with their user-focused product marketing, Apple didn’t go the usual route of advertising the technical specs of the new iPhone camera. Instead, they launched a marketing campaign that showcased user-generated content. By featuring the pictures and clips taken by everyday iPhone users and running a Shot on iPhone Challenge, the tech company fostered authentic brand engagement among its target audience.
The campaign also allowed Apple to tap their customer base directly, creating a greater sense of community across different international markets.
Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” product marketing campaign also showed longevity. It used multiple marketing channels, from traditional advertising to social media, with the latter being the domain of the company’s target audience. It also encouraged innovation in film, with directors creating movies shot partly or entirely with iPhone cameras(opens in a new tab or window). “Shot on iPhone” cemented Apple’s position as a leader of innovation in the smartphone industry and further associated its branding with cutting-edge design and premium user experience.
“Don’t Buy This Jacket” by Patagonia
Another noteworthy example is Patagonia’s sustainability-driven product marketing plan. As an eco-conscious outdoor apparel brand, the label launched a campaign in 2011 that initially seemed to discourage profits in favor of its environmental advocacy. “Don’t Buy This Jacket(opens in a new tab or window)” was an advertising initiative that encouraged customers to buy less and seriously consider every purchase they make — even ones from Patagonia itself. Instead, the brand told customers to get their old Patagonia items repaired, reused, or traded in for store credit through its Worn Wear program.
Not only was the campaign bold and innovative but it also lent Patagonia even more credibility as a brand committed to sustainability and environmental well-being. This resounded well among the company’s core audience, increasing not just customer loyalty but also revenue. Per Investopedia, Patagonia saw its revenue shoot up by 30%(opens in a new tab or window) the year it launched the campaign.
“Don’t Buy This Jacket” demonstrated the label’s deep understanding of its target audience. It was a purpose-driven product marketing campaign that aligned with Patagonia’s advocacy, deepening the consumers’ trust in the brand’s authenticity.
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How to create a product marketing strategy?
There is both depth and breadth involved in strategizing your product marketing. The focus is solely on the new product, but all the aspects that touch on its incubation and eventual introduction to the market must also be covered. It’s not an impossible task though, thanks to Canva’s how-to guide in marketing a product below.
As crucial as it is to know the purpose of the product you are developing, it’s equally important to understand the market you want to market it to. Identify your target audience and create a persona(opens in a new tab or window) for them; if you’re targeting customers from varying segments, define a persona for each one. This helps you gain clearer ideas of what they need, their pain points as consumers, and the gaps your product can fill.
Conducting surveys, interviews, and data analysis is helpful in defining who your target customers are. The information these yield can pinpoint their behaviors, wants, and needs, as well as the factors that could possibly cause them to change. With this knowledge, your product development team can refine your next product to meet what your target audience is looking for.
For example, if your target audience is mostly internet users, you can choose to focus on digital product marketing, or if you’re catering to businesses, opt for a B2B product marketing framework.
With so many products marketed to your target customers, you must grab their attention and convince them to choose your offering. This is the point of having a go-to market component in your product marketing strategy.
Product adoption is hinged on having a positioning statement. This is a clear and concise description of your product that also explains the solution it provides to your target market. It articulates the unique value proposition of what you’re offering compared to those of your competitors. Having a positioning statement makes it easier to keep your messaging aligned throughout your marketing efforts.
There are many product launch activities you can do for your product rollout: launch events, influencer partnerships, social media contests, referral programs, sneak previews, pre-sales and pre-orders, interactive demos, webinars, partnership marketing, and more. Which activities would reach your target audience most effectively? Which ones would drive better product adoption? The kind of activities you can plan will depend on the insights you’ve gathered from doing market research.
Regardless of the kind of product launch you end up organizing, it’s best to create a product launch timeline. Breaking down the whole launch process into distinct stages makes everything more manageable and easier to track in terms of assigned tasks, expected deliverables, and deadlines. Product launches are typically divided into three phases:
- Pre-launch phase: This is where inbound activities like market research and defining customer personas happen.
- Launch phase: This is when all of your planned activities are finally executed, based on the strong foundation built during the pre-launch phase.
- Post-launch phase: Is when the company gathers information from customer feedback and adoption metrics. Based on these, they can determine if the marketing campaign has been successful, and if there’s been a positive reception to the product launch. It’s also when a post-mortem is done regarding technical issues that happened during the launch.
The last hurdle in getting a new product to the market and getting customers to buy it is sales enablement. This is the process of making your sales team capable of selling your latest offering. By providing them with the right skills, tools, and processes, the sales department is better equipped to talk to prospective clients and customers and convince them to make a purchase.
Sales enablement has five components: sales training, sales enablement assets or materials, sales enablement solutions or tools, strategy, and metrics. The assets or materials you have to develop will be based on the product you’ll be launching, the industry your business is in, and your target market. Common examples of sales enablement materials are:
- Battle cards or sales documents that give the sales team a clear understanding of your product, including its unique value propositions, as well as the competition’s strategy and key sales messages.
- Sales one-pagers that provide a concise overview of the latest product.
- A product sheet that the sales team can use as a reference when explaining the product’s technical features.
- A sales script that contains the relevant talking points and guidelines for when the sales team is talking to prospective customers.
Data-gathering is the main activity during the post-launch phase. By tracking the new product’s market performance, you can determine which aspects of the product marketing plan worked and which didn’t. Your business can thus develop new plans or tweak existing ones based on data-driven decisions so that, moving forward, they are more effective and have a greater impact on company profits.
Both quantitative and qualitative metrics must be measured and taken into consideration when making changes to a product marketing framework. Quantitative metrics are objective, numerical, and measurable results like sales figures, conversion rates, and market share percentages. Qualitative metrics, on the other hand, are less tangible. They cover customer perceptions, preferences, and experiences.
When reviewing and tracking the success of your product marketing strategy, key areas to look into are customer engagement and acquisition, product retention, revenue, financial performance, market and competition analysis, campaign performance, and product-specific performance. Leadership and team performance are also included.
Product marketing best practices
It can feel overwhelming to create a product marketing plan given the multitude of tasks that it would cover. To make the process less complicated, keep in mind the following tips so you can focus on what needs to be done and how to do it properly.
Align early with product and sales teams
Just as marketing a product bridges the development and market launch stages, product marketers or product marketing consultants also function as the intermediaries between the product and sales teams. Your product marketing department must take the initiative to ensure that both departments are in sync right from the beginning. Using a design and management platform like Canva Enterprise(opens in a new tab or window), which streamlines the storage and access to key documents across teams, makes this process smoother and easier.
The information yielded by your market research and customer insights will help the product team develop something that will resonate with your target audience. It will also aid the sales team in creating sales pitches that position the product well and make it a must-buy for customers. The alignment of both departments results in a stronger and better brand narrative, which will raise your product’s profile in a crowded market.
Keep your messaging simple and consistent
When it comes to outbound product marketing activities, remember that you are ultimately reaching out to customers. Craft a simple and consistent messaging that centers on understanding what they need, as well as explaining how your product will be able to provide it. This works better than lengthy and technical explanations about your new offering. Distill the insights revealed by your market research into easy-to-understand concepts and statements.
Use visuals to explain complex ideas
Part of keeping the messaging simple and consistent is making it short and succinct. Consumers are bombarded daily with advertisements and marketing messages. Make it easier for them to pay attention to your product and brand by presenting them with information in a way that’s easier to digest. Breaking down concepts into graphics, videos, and other visual materials gets your message across more quickly.
Drive product adoption and raise your bottom line
Product marketing is the essential process that bridges and also impacts the product development and market activation phases. Because of its importance, it requires a dedicated department and budget so that it can realize its end goal of accelerating product adoption and, thus, driving sales.
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