Why marketing your solution needs to start with product marketing
By implementing product marketing strategies into your marketing plan, you can make an impactful first impression, market to the right people, and create messaging that resonates with customers.
Marketing a new product can be intimidating and complicated. You want to bring awareness to a new solution your organization is offering - but where do you even start?
You might think of building a website, creating a LinkedIn page, or running some ads - but before you even get to that point, have you thought about how you will position the product and what messaging you will use to convey the value of what you’ve built?
This is where product marketing comes in. Product marketing should be the first step to marketing your product, solution, application, or whatever it is you do.
What is Product Marketing and Why is it important?
You might not even be aware but when you are thinking about your product launch, the value of your solution, or how to help sales sell more effectively, you are already dabbling in product marketing.
At Olivine Marketing, our consultants see product marketing sitting at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales. It is the sum of all efforts in research, framing the message, and promoting a new product to ensure it resonates with the target customer. Product marketers have a wide range of responsibilities that involve close collaboration with product teams and other marketing functions.
The mistake that far too many companies make early on in their marketing efforts is investing very little time on refining their positioning, messaging, and brand story - and instead focus too much of their time and budget on marketing tactics such as social media marketing, paid marketing, or content marketing. These are all good tactics to do, but without a clear direction, they do very little to drive revenue. Skipping the foundational work of product marketing results in inconsistent marketing messages, fragmented communication internally, and confusion in what you are offering to customers.
You may be familiar with the term “the customer is always right”, which prioritizes the customer’s voice and opinions. You need to think the same way when it comes to messaging your product. How are customers thinking about your product?
Here are some questions to think about:
How do customers describe your product?
What are the benefits they get from your solution?
How do they use your product?
Although the customer isn’t always right (in our minds), they know how they feel about your product and what they say will resonate with other customers who are having similar pain points and are looking for a solution.
Thorough research on customer’s challenges and the value provided by your solution is critical. Without doing this properly, growth will be a never-ending struggle. This is why product marketing is so critical in the beginning efforts of your go-to-market efforts. With strong product marketing strategies in place, it can bring product, marketing, and sales together to elevate the strategy and cross-functional alignment.
Making an impactful first impression
For marketers, it helps to make a splash in the market with a good first impression, but that’s proven to be more difficult over the years with all the “marketing” noise out there. Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day.
This bombarding of consumers reveals the importance of thinking about your positioning, a key strategy within product marketing. Understanding your target audience, relevant competitors in or near your market, and your key differentiated value will help you identify and craft the right position to stand out and acquire loyal customers.
Marketing to the right people
A common mistake I often see marketing teams make is marketing to the wrong audience. You may think you have a good grasp of your audience, just because you’ve spent time understanding a market problem and how your solution can fix it. But the reality is that unless you have customers already engaged with your product, it can be difficult to understand who you need to sell to, and why they might want it.
This is where product marketing can help, through persona development. With personas, you are ensuring that you cover all potential buyers by creating fictional characters based on research that represents segments of your market. This is important because if you sell your solution in only one way, you could be missing out on buyers who could benefit from your product. Let’s use Apple’s Macbook Pro as an example. Although MacBook Pro works well for businesses, Apple also identified several groups of different buyers that could benefit from specific features and aspects of their laptops like video editors, photographers, and designers.
Through the use of personas, product marketing provides more context about a potential customer. This vital context can include a customer’s motivations, interests, and concerns. Product marketing is empathetic marketing that allows you to understand the psychology behind customers and their purchase intent.
Product marketing also equips your team with the tools they need to effectively market your product to specific audiences in a way that resonates with them, targets their pain points, and increases conversions.
Understanding the values of your solution
As the head of marketing, it is critical to have a thorough understanding of your solution, the benefits it provides, and the different use cases. Although you may see your product a certain way and made for a specific task, that doesn’t always mean your customers will use it in the same way. Product marketing can help provide insight into all the value points of your product.
Let’s take milkshakes as an example. You might see a milkshake as a dessert or snack, but others may see it as a breakfast meal replacement. McDonald’s was able to discover this finding by running the Jobs To Be Done framework and observed/noticed some customers purchased milkshakes before 8:30 am. They then interviewed those customers to understand this behavior and found out that customers were buying milkshakes to drink for an easy breakfast during their commute. To this group of customers, a shake offered convenience and cleanliness over a breakfast sandwich. The result of them doing this research and positioning milkshakes as a breakfast meal replacement increased sales by 700%. This case study demonstrates that it pays to listen to your customer’s voice, to get a better grasp of the specific value(s) and solution(s) your product provides to them.
Product marketing helps you explore and discover the benefits of your solution from the customers’ perspective, and gives you the ability to create messaging in a way that resonates deeply with your target audience.
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, understood this connection well. At the end of the day, there are few technical differences between Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft computers; however, Jobs understood a key concept: the value and outcome customers would get when using a computer, smartphone, or tablet. It wasn’t about the technical specs but what people could do with the product and because of this, his position and messaging changed how we view Apple products today.
Setting up your company for success
By implementing product marketing early in the planning process, you will set your company in a unique position that stands out in the market. You will also have a clear understanding of your audience - who they are, and what they really need. You will also help your team align on clear and consistent messaging and communication.
If you are interested in learning more about positioning your product, identifying your target audience, or crafting messaging that resonates with your audience, get in touch with our product marketing consultants.
