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 keep your product off this growing list of lemons? How can your business survive—or even thrive—in a more-crowded-than-ever landscape?
The key lies in product marketing.
Good product marketing drives sales and brand loyalty by consistently and transparently communicating the benefits of your product to your target market. In doing so, it helps solidify your brand and its offerings as valuable.
However, while product marketing is a powerful tool, few businesses wield it to its full potential. That’s why we’re dishing out everything you need to know about strategic product marketing.
Table of Contents
First Things First: What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing refers to all the activities related to promoting and selling a particular product or service—from development to launch and beyond. It’s a product-centric marketing and sales strategy that showcases the desirability and effectiveness of a 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 is unique because it puts the product and its impact front and center. It falls under the larger umbrella of conventional marketing, but it’s more specialized and nuanced.
And the results are equally special.
The Blueprint for Successful Product Marketing
Whether you’re B2C or B2B, brick-and-mortar or solely ecommerce, you can leverage product marketing to sell more.
How do you do that? 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 market 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.
With that in mind, 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 of the process: Defining your product’s unique selling points (USPs).
Your Product’s Unique Selling Points (USPs)
A USP is a particular feature or aspect 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.
Now, a UVP is undoubtedly vital to marketing a product. UVPs shape your brand’s identity, as well as your brand voice and content. However, when it comes to product marketing, your USPs are your guiding lights as they specifically concern the product.
2. Identify and Communicate with Your Target Audience
As is the case for practically any marketing strategy, 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.
Because 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). As such, 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 local communities 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 essential.
3. Strategically Position Your Products and Pricing
Here’s where your market research really pays off. When you know how your competitors are positioning themselves, you can easily figure out where your product can comfortably fit 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 entry-level? Is it revolutionary or based on long-standing trends?
Wherever you land, your USPs should support your positioning. More effective USPs allow you to position your product higher in the market. This positioning then informs your pricing.
Proper product pricing is a delicate dance. Go too high, and you risk driving customers toward more affordable or tried-and-true options. Too low, and you sell yourself short—you still want to impress your audience with your product’s quality and value.
While we don’t have time to dissect pricing strategies here, 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 all the preliminary details ironed out, it’s time to put your product into the world.
However, you should never go in cold. Instead, you want to prime the market for your launch. The ideal product marketing strategy involves months of pre-launch marketing and hype-building. Depending on your industry, that could mean press releases, early influencer reviews, or out-of-home 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 that your product or service can solve the customer’s problem. But it doesn’t stop there. To push your product, you could offer:
- Online promotions and discounts
- Free trials
- Expert guidance and resources
- One-on-one product demos
Every ad and review 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
As you might have guessed, product marketing doesn’t end once you launch your product. Your final (and ongoing) task as a product marketer is to continue iterating and improving. Thanks to the data analytics available through your CRM (customer relationship manager), social media accounts and other dashboards, you can measure your product’s performance.
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
- Win rates
- Velocity metrics
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
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 product or service your brand sells, you can benefit from product marketing. It’s a strategy that has paid off for countless companies by propelling their products to new heights.
That said, it takes some expertise to pull off high-performance product marketing. One of the most common challenges is navigating the proper channels. After all, product marketing differs from its conventional counterpart.
Human can help you activate the right channels and avoid being lumped in with the mounds of other products. Our ecommerce marketing services are designed for growing brands looking to turn their latest product into the next big thing.
To find out more, get in touch with our team. Together, we can make sure your product succeeds.
