What is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the practice of taking a company’s product or service into the market through a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. A few key elements within a product strategy include the following:

• Differentiated product messaging
• Building thought-leadership
• Increasing brand awareness
• Demand-generation support
• Sales enablement

The number of new startups and product launches continues to grow, which means markets are becoming more saturated. Hence, it’s increasingly important to differentiate your product or service offering from your competitors.

If you have a great product to introduce to consumers, that’s awesome.

But a great product by itself isn’t enough. It has to be plainly obvious why it’s better than the other alternative solutions that exist.

Why hire a Product Marketer?

To show why you're the best available option in the market, you’ll need to communicate the product features effectively to your audience.

A product marketer does exactly that by showcasing your solution in a way that pinpoints your target market’s needs. In other words, by speaking their language, addressing their pain points, and making yourself distinguishable from the competition.

Most importantly, they can help you achieve a product-market fit as they’ll have in-depth knowledge on your ideal customer's best interests.

By understanding who they are inside and out, it means you can serve them better.

And knowing how to serve them better leads to finding opportunities where you can fit in.

What does a Product Marketer do? 

They’re tasked with supplementing effective marketing strategies to reach your audience and get more inbound leads.

To be precise, there are 4 key areas they’re focused on:

• Product positioning: how your product is perceived by target customers.
• Product development: going from an idea to an established product in the market.
• Product messaging: how you communicate what your product has to offer.
• Product promotion: marketing your solution to a wide range of potential buyers.

Product marketers understand your product values, how it works, and the benefits derived from its key features.

But right now, we’re talking jargon.

Speaking in this language of tech isn’t going to have the same profound impact on consumers compared to being simple, direct, and concise. This is where some of the essential skills of a product marketer come into play. 

Product Marketer responsibilities

The responsibilities in a product marketing role are important for developing a successful product roadmap, improving the customer experience, and optimising the customer journey. 

Here’s what a product marketer from Passionfruit can do for you:

• Lead and manage product launches
• Develop a powerful sales collateral
• Thorough customer, competitor, and market research
• Translate your product values into a compelling unique value proposition 
• Collaborate with the sales department, engineering department, and marketing department 
• Share input on the variables affecting your pricing model
• Outline buyer personas to tailor market strategies for potential customers
• Use analytics tools to influence product decisions
• Analyse internal feedback to provide a better user experience 
• Partake in content creation, e.g. writing a blog post or customer case studies 

Product Marketer Vs Product Manager

Product managers focus on the creation and development of a product so that it fulfils a need in the marketplace. They’re proactively involved in product management to ensure internal teams stay on top of the overall mission.

In contrast, product marketing managers are focused on advertising the product. They help the product team by using customer feedback to devise engaging marketing campaigns. One priority is product growth, meaning that one of the main driving forces behind a company’s scalability is because of the product itself. 

Unlike how product managers oversee the operational procedures, the primary goal of product marketing managers is to craft a product story and share its message with relevant audiences.

Measuring the success of your Product Marketing team

The success of your product marketing strategy is measurable through key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Before that though, you should have a few SMART goals set such as:

• Increase the number of monthly users by 30%
• Increase the number of website visitors by 50%
• Increase the number of paying customers by 70% 

In this instance, the relevant KPIs to track could be the following: 

• User signup rates 
• Organic search traffic
• Sales revenue

Other important metrics may include: 

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer churn rate
• User retention rate 
• Product usage