Bringing a new product to market is nerve-wracking. It’s all the more daunting when you know that around 85% of all new products fail. How do you push your product into the successful 15% in a market that’s more crowded than ever?
The key is in product marketing.
Strong product marketing drives sales and brand loyalty not by promoting features or gimmicks, but by bridging product benefits to consumer needs. When done right, potential customers become familiar with your brand’s values and offerings.
Product marketing is a powerful tool, yet few businesses leverage its full potential. That’s why we’re dishing out everything you need to know about strategic product marketing.
Table of Contents
- What is Product Marketing?
- The Role of Product Marketing in Today’s Buyer Journey
- The Blueprint for Successful Product Marketing
First Things First: What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing refers to all activities related to promoting a product as it's brought to market and maintaining its success once it’s there, spanning development to launch and beyond. It’s a marketing and sales strategy that applies whether your “product” is an item, software, service, or otherwise.
What separates effective product marketing from the rest is how well it matches your unique selling points (USPs) with customer demands. In other words, it should showcase the desirability and effectiveness of your product to the people it will help the most.
Now, wait a minute. All brands sell goods or services. So isn’t all marketing product marketing?
Not exactly.
Some campaigns and strategies exist solely to promote the brand. Others sell a company’s values or expertise.
Product marketing falls under the broader umbrella of conventional marketing but is specialized in that it puts the product’s impact front and center.
What is Product-Led Marketing?
Above, we describe product marketing as a subcategory of traditional marketing strategy. Product-led marketing is one step deeper in nuance, but worth understanding for business owners with truly unique or user-centric products.
Simply put, product-led marketing is a strategy where you allow the product to promote itself.
For example’s sake, let’s say you run a food truck:
- If you put out a sign with a picture of your signature dish, that’s product marketing
- If you hand out bite-sized free samples, that’s product-led marketing
Though there’s often a freebie involved to get your product in the hands (or mouths) of potential customers, it’s not a requirement if your product speaks for itself.
Whenever Apple launches a new iPhone, you can expect to see ads showcasing the latest features and updates. There’s no try-it-free offer, but the sharp focus on the phone instead of brand values, incentives, or guarantees defines these campaigns as product-led.
However, low- or no-obligation free trials are a powerful way to build trust and lower the perceived cost of trying your product.
The Role of Product Marketing in Today’s Buyer Journey
Product marketers turn customer wants into business wins. They listen first. Then they guide every step that changes an idea into revenue. Think of them as the bridge between what buyers need and what your team builds.
Product Marketers Act as the Voice of the Customer
Before anyone writes code, designs packaging, or trains sales, a product marketer digs for answers. Who will buy? Why will they care? How can we make their choice easy?
Their job is to champion those insights so your whole team solves real-world problems, not assumptions.
Product Marketers Act as the Voice of the Customer
- Pre-launch – Market research that evaluates likely customers and competition. Clear insights here prevent costly wrong turns later.
- Launch – Craft a go-to-market (GTM) plan and set pricing. Then create simple messages your sales team can deliver with confidence. A focused launch cuts through noise and speeds up first sales.
- Post-launch – Gather feedback, watch adoption trends, and spot upsell opportunities. Quick tweaks keep early buyers happy. They also turn them into repeat customers who spread the word for you.
By owning all three stages, product marketers keep their offer aligned with buyer needs. This alignment lowers risk, shortens sales cycles, and fuels long-term growth.
The Blueprint for Successful Product Marketing
Whether you’re B2B, brick-and-mortar, or solely ecommerce, you can leverage product marketing to sell more.
How? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to expand your audience and increase revenue with product marketing.
1. Understand the Market and How Your Products Fit In
The product marketing journey begins with research. Because product marketing aims to position your product as the ultimate choice for customers, you first need to understand the choices you’re up against.
Start by investigating demand for your product and the competitive landscape in general. You’ll also want to analyze other brands and products in your niche by looking at their:
- Features
- Benefits
- Drawbacks
- Marketing strategies
When you understand the market, you can better identify your product’s place within it. And that information is crucial for the next step:
Defining Your Product’s USPs
A unique selling point is a specific feature of your product or service that sets it apart from competitors within the same space. In other words, it’s what makes your stuff worth buying. Ideally, you should be able to identify a handful of USPs—that’s the mark of an excellent product.
Take care not to confuse your unique selling points with the concept of unique value propositions (UVPs). A UVP defines your brand’s overall value to consumers.
UVPs shape your brand’s identity, as well as your voice and content. However, when it comes to product marketing, USPs are your guiding lights as they specifically concern the product.
A designer shoe company might have a brand UVP of “inspiring self-expression through functionally artistic shoe design,” but the product USPs would be the original style and any special features (e.g., cushioned sole support, durable laces).
2. Identify and Communicate With Your Target Audience
As is the case for most marketing strategies, defining your target audience is a crucial early step. With product marketing, a fundamental understanding of who you’re selling to is more important than ever.
If you’re unveiling a new product, you may not have any intel on who’s currently buying (though your market research will give you some clues). If you’re retargeting toward a new audience, you can leverage your sales data to inform your product marketing.
Either way, you’ll want to create an ideal customer profile (ICP).
An ICP answers the question: “Who is the perfect customer for my business?” In other words, it helps you determine what kind of companies or consumers you want to sell to.
From there, you can develop a buyer persona (or three) to hone in on the specifics. Buyer personas represent fictional customers that would benefit from your product, and they cover all kinds of attributes, including:
- Pain points
- Demographics
- Behavior patterns
- Goals
Once you know the target audience for your product, you can craft intentional messaging that resonates with them.
For example, if you’re hoping to sell to healthcare companies, you might lean into compassionate language that talks about supporting patient care and making a difference. You’d know to use medical terminology in your ad copy, and you may center your product story around the heroics of healthcare workers.
Regardless of what you’re selling and who you’re trying to reach, knowing how to appeal to them is key.
3. Strategically Position Your Products and Pricing
Here’s where your market research pays off. When you know how your competitors position themselves, you can easily find the niche where your product fits comfortably into the picture, or which niche you want to disrupt.
Think about the qualities of your product and how your audience will perceive it. Is it luxury or affordable? Is it revolutionary or based on long-standing trends?
Wherever you land, your USPs should support your positioning. This positioning then informs your pricing. Stronger USPs allow you to position your product and pricing higher in the market.
Proper product pricing is a delicate dance. Go too high, and you risk driving customers toward more affordable or familiar options. Too low, and you sell yourself short.
When doing your pricing analysis, make sure that any calculations account for:
- Your production costs
- Market demand
- Your ideal customer’s budget
- Competitor prices
Above all, make sure you can justify your price. If you can’t, your product marketing journey will be an uphill battle.
4. Launch and Promote Your Products
With the preliminary details ironed out, it’s time to put your product into the world.
However, you should never go in cold. Instead, prime the market for your launch. The ideal product marketing strategy involves months of pre-launch marketing to hype your audience and proactively build recognition. Depending on your industry, that could mean press releases, early influencer reviews, or paid awareness campaigns.
No matter which avenue you take, your goal is to create and promote a hard-to-resist offer for when you finally launch.
In product marketing, a stellar offer starts with asserting the customer problem your product or service can solve.
But it doesn’t stop there. To quickly establish a market presence, consider offering:
- Online promotions and discounts
- Expert guidance and resources
- Live product demos
- Free trials or sample packs
Every ad should also lead to a high-converting product page that gives the buyer even more reasons to click “Purchase Now.”
5. Take Advantage of Data Analytics
Your final (and ongoing) task as a product marketer is to continue analyzing and improving. Thanks to the data analytics available through your CRM, social media accounts, and other dashboards, you can measure your product’s performance in real time.
And if you’re not 100% satisfied with your performance, you can use those data insights to inform your changes. Some of the ecommerce key performance indicators (KPIs) most relevant to product marketing are:
- Conversion rates: The percentage of website visitors who make a purchase.
- Win rates: The percentage of high-intent actions (like add-to-cart) that result in a completed sale.
- Velocity metrics: The speed at which products sell and inventory turns over within a given period.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The average cost of acquiring one paying customer through marketing and advertising efforts.
Use insights from these metrics to fine-tune your product marketing strategy, collaborating with product, marketing and sales teams to improve the numbers and watch your product take off.
Activate the Right Marketing Channels with Human
Whatever your brand sells, you can benefit from product marketing. It’s a fundamental strategy used by countless companies to propel their products to new heights.
That said, it takes expertise to pull off high-performance product marketing. One of the most common challenges is identifying the proper channels and how to navigate them.
Human can help you activate the right channels to join that 15% product success rate. Our ecommerce marketing services are designed for growing brands looking to turn their latest product into their greatest achievement.
Get in touch with our team; our top performance metric is your success.
