The 6 Elements of a Powerful Product Marketing Strategy

Companies put a lot of effort into marketing their brands.

They design fancy logos, set up email marketing automation programs, and roll out amazing websites, among other efforts. But without a strong product, your brand means nothing.

But why? Well, failure could be due to several factors:

• Lack of understanding of the market
• Lack of understanding of the buyer
• Lack of communication
• Ineffective product marketing strategy

With so many people involved and so much time and money invested in your new product, it’s important to get it right. You don’t want to spend all your time and energy focused on building your brand only to have your first product fail.

Successful products require successful product marketing strategies. That means you need to ensure the product meets customers’ needs, position it in the market appropriately, and have the plan to get the word out.

Elements of a product marketing strategy

There are six essential elements of a strong product marketing strategy: 

1. Product

The first step to developing a strong product marketing strategy is ensuring you have a strong product. Before developing your strategy, you must ensure the product is created with the customer in mind and aligns with their needs.

People don’t want to buy things; they want to solve their problems. So, ask yourself what problem your product solves for the customer. How will it make their lives better? Answering these questions will help you determine the right messaging for promotion down the road.

The value your product provides is more important than its capabilities. In other words, you should focus more on the benefits of your product rather than its features. Each feature should be developed for a purpose and provide some benefit to the customer. You should have an innovative product or at least one that solves a common business challenge.

2. Audience

Just like your product needs to be created with your audience in mind, your strategy should also be created with your audience in mind. To do that, you need to truly understand the individuals in your audience and know everything you can about them, aka investing in behavioral marketing.

Better yet, interview your customers. Set up phone calls or meetings and ask them about their preferences. Listen to how they talk and the language they use. This can help form your narrative.

 Any information can help uncover your audience’s preferences and how best to market your product to those individuals. Once you have all your information gathered, start building buyer personas.

In your research, you’ll probably discover some patterns among your audience. These commonalities can be grouped to create buyer personas or an archetype of your ideal customer's appearance and behavior. This way, you can focus on marketing to one buyer persona at a time rather than your entire audience.

3. Messaging

It’s not enough to think about your audience through product development - you need to communicate with them. Consumers feel trust when they’re emotionally connected to a brand; that emotional connection is built through your messaging.

Your product messaging should be built around a narrative. Narratives are the easiest way to get your audience to connect with your product because they are relatable and will resonate with your audience.

You must identify your product’s unique selling proposition to craft an effective story. What is the main value for the user? Hone in on one key message that will drive your narrative. But don't stop once you think you've found it – testing is key. Consider an A/B testing tool to help you hone your messaging even more. 

4. People

Developing and promoting a product requires a multi-team effort. However, keeping multiple teams on the same page is no easy task. Product marketers need to be the bridge between sales, marketing, engineering, and development. They must bring the teams together and ensure everyone is on the same page.

The product marketer is responsible for educating and informing the entire team and organization to ensure everyone knows their part.

With so many people working on one project, it’s easy for miscommunication and disorganization to derail your progress. A product roadmap can bring all the teams and internal stakeholders into alignment.

The product roadmap summarizes the entire product marketing plan and guides the team on what will happen at each process step. With this document, you can maintain visibility throughout the entire project and ensure all involved know what’s happening.

5. Promotion

Having a great product and a well-thought-out strategy isn’t where the work stops. You can’t expect your audience to flock to purchase your product if they know nothing about it.

Your promotion plan needs to get your message in front of the right audience at the right time. If you’ve researched and built your buyer personas, you should have no problem identifying the right audience.

But timing is also important. Besides researching your audience, you should also research the market overall. You must ensure a strong product-market fit and that your launch is timed well to be the most effective.

Communicating through the right channels is also important. Look where your audience spends time, and include a mix to reach different user segments. 

You should promote your product through the channels that make the most sense for your brand and audience. Make sure you plan your promotion to ensure everything runs smoothly once you’re ready to launch the product.

6. Analysis

Your product marketing strategy needs to be just that – strategic. You can’t expect your strategy to have perfect results; you need to track those results to learn from them.

Once you’ve implemented your promotion plan and your product has gone to market, you need to watch and listen to find out how successful you are. Focus on key performance indicators to track, such as email clicks, website form submissions, reach, voice share, and conversions.

Look at both what did well and where you went wrong. If possible, adjust your strategy as you go along, using the lessons you learn to guide your product marketing strategies in the future.

Eyes on the product

Investing in the product from the get-go is the first step toward ensuring your customers' voice is at the core of the business. Implementing product marketing strategies is key to learning and understanding what customers want and how your product solves their problems.

Say yes to product marketing for stronger product positioning and effective product value communication for better conversions and increased market presence!

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