Your guide to product marketing in 2022

In today’s competitive market, it’s not enough to create a good product. For a small business to capture the attention and patronage of its target customers, it also needs to have a sound product marketing strategy.

Product marketing is essentially the process of bringing a product to market. However, it is much more layered than simply introducing a good or service to the public. Regardless of the size of your company, whether it is a one-person team or a global conglomerate, marketing products calls for the intersection of product branding or positioning, marketing, and sales. This is so businesses can better understand their target market, including the best ways to interact with them, thus increasing sales.

Given the three different departments involved in product marketing, let’s start with the first one: product.

How you market your product will first depend on how well you understand what you’re offering. This means having the product research team collaborate with the product development team to do an exhaustive study: What solutions will the product offer consumers? What are similar items already available in the market? What pain points do customers still encounter even with these choices? The answers to these questions will be valuable to the product development process and how you market the product.

Imagine who would want to buy your product and the benefits it offers. Fill in as many details as possible, from their age to their social and economic demographics. Understanding your target customer is crucial in generating marketingproduct ideas⁠(opens in a new tab or window). It guides you in determining your product’s branding and positioning so that it is visible and accessible to them and they realize it's necessary for their lives.

Of course, every company wants to boost its sales and profits at the end of the day. But if you have just started your small business, you can set progressive targets first to make them more manageable to achieve. For example, you may want to focus primarily on boosting brand recognition when launching a new product. Next would be attracting customers from your competitors and eventually increasing your market share. As you work to engage more customers, you can set your sights on achieving a sizable revenue target. By developing a product marketing strategy based on a specific goal, you’ll be able to measure its effectiveness and make changes to it when necessary.

This involves two aspects: an internal launch of the product within the company and an external launch in the market.

The internal launch strives to get the teams within the company on the same page. Provide them with relevant product information, from its benefits to its market positioning to its pricing. This way, there will be consistent and accurate information shared with customers and the general public no matter who in the company gets asked about it. Those in charge of marketing and sales can help with this by designing product presentations⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and sample sales kits. Think of it as a soft launch for the product and your overall product marketing.

For the wider external launch, it’s best to select the channels and platforms where you want to concentrate your product marketing efforts and resources. That way, you can tailor your approach based on the audience these channels and platforms reach. Social media is very popular because of its wide reach. Learn the ins and outs of this platform with our article on social media marketing⁠(opens in a new tab or window), as well as our specific guides for marketing on Facebook⁠(opens in a new tab or window), Twitter⁠(opens in a new tab or window), and Instagram⁠(opens in a new tab or window).

Other channels you can use for your external product launch plan are in-store and product launch events, exclusive product previews, and online and/or offline campaigns. You can also make website landing pages⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and dedicated blogs for your product.

While your product launch may be a modest event, you can expand your product marketing reach by using a variety of channels or by product listing optimization⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Apply well-designed marketing materials across different platforms as long as you remember to customize them enough to fit each platform’s tone and audience.

Flyers⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and posters⁠(opens in a new tab or window) are classic marketing materials for offline distribution, such as advertising spots in public areas like walkways and store displays. Grab people’s attention with a dynamic design you’ve made with the help of Canva’s marketing flyer designs⁠(opens in a new tab or window) and poster templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window). In addition to our easy-to-use design tools, you can rely on Canva Print to publish high-quality copies of your designs.

For digital distribution, social media graphic templates⁠(opens in a new tab or window) from Canva conveniently come in dimension specifications required by the most popular platforms. This makes content easy to cross-post to strengthen your product’s digital branding. You can customize templates and even create animated marketing materials for channels that cater to the younger crowd, should they be your target audience.

Speaking of animation, videos are now one of the most effective marketing tools out there. Try your hand at producing one to market your product online effectively. Our free online video editor⁠(opens in a new tab or window) can help you create a compelling marketing clip out of raw footage no matter where you plan to upload it.

While you want to maintain brand cohesion, inputs from different audiences can help refine your brand positioning as you continue to promote your product. Their opinions can also spark insights on how to do better marketing.

This would be the ultimate basis for whether you’ve developed a sound product marketing plan. If you missed your mark, it’s not the end of the world. Closely reviewing your strategy will reveal to you which aspects can be improved and built on and which ones can be repeated.

After walking you through the different aspects of product marketing, hopefully, you have a clearer idea of why it is necessary, and you can achieve the following objectives:

1. Position your brand based on a good understanding of customers so your business can target them better
2. Position the brand effectively through a good understanding of the competition
3. Boosting sales and profit

While these may sound like high targets for a product marketer, we’ve also emphasized how good product marketing calls for the collaboration between product research and development, marketing, and sales. Get everyone in your business on the same page so you can develop cool product marketing ideas that can smash these high-impact goals.