How to Market a Product in 2024

VXC Express
May 12, 2024
Knowledge Base
0 Comments

Despite working in marketing for over a decade, I’m still puzzled by the idea of product marketing.

Whether your business offers a service (say, a cleaning company) or a commodity (like a toy manufacturer), you’re marketing a “product,” right?

Heck, in my recent job hunt, I interviewed for several product marketer jobs under the caveat that I hadn’t “done product marketing,” but I’d certainly marketed a product.

But the truth is those positions wouldn’t have worked out. Product marketing is a very specific branch of marketing that requires particular skills and has its own unique benefits.

As job titles like “product marketer” and “product marketing manager” become increasingly popular, you may find yourself asking, “What is product marketing, exactly?” How does it differ from other marketing strategies? And how do you market a product in 2024?

Let’s find out.

What is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the process of introducing a new offering to a specific market of buyers. It involves deeply understanding a product’s target audience, using messaging to explain how it can solve that audience’s problems, and strategically positioning the product to stand out from competitors.

Product Marketing vs. Conventional Marketing

Product management and product marketing may seem like buzzwords, but they’re actually specialties dating back to the 1930s, as noted in an 800-word memo written by Procter & Gamble advertiser Neil H. McElroy.

“As obvious as it sounds, product marketing is focused on marketing the PRODUCT,” explains Anthony Pierri, co-founder & partner of FletchPMM, a product marketing firm for early-stage B2B startups. It’s a sub-field of marketing focused on product adoption and demand, whereas “marketing” is more all-encompassing and concerned with buyers as well as communication with competitors, influencers, and the greater public.

I see it as the difference between me, a tenured marketer driving traffic, leads, and sales for a previous employer — and my colleague focused solely on driving demand and sales of the company’s online learning platform.

To get more granular, product marketing is about understanding a specific audience and its pain points, then positioning a product to attract that audience as buyers. It’s a cross-functional field that influences the launch and buildout of a product, as well as its sales and marketing strategy.

Marketing cares about buyers too, but it casts a much wider net.

Pierri details “The broader discipline of marketing has many interests … marketing the brand, marketing the culture, marketing the vision, and a host of other concerns. But at the end of the day, people are shopping for products. And product marketing helps explain how the product itself will solve their pain points.”

Of course, both marketing and product marketing help a company generate revenue, but while the former pulls many levers to make that happen, product marketing only has eyes for the product’s success. (How romantic.)

Product Marketing Goals

Moving right along, product marketing is usually implemented with six goals in mind:

1. To know your audience better than anyone.

A great product marketing strategy helps your target audience see the value of having your product in their lives. That said, one of the primary goals of product marketing is understanding your customer’s needs, wants, and interests and determining how your business can help.

People need to know you “get them,” and that’s product marketing’s job.

2. To effectively target your buyer persona(s).

Once product marketing understands your audience, they need to define your specific buyer persona(s) and refine your marketing tactics accordingly.

This detailed understanding of your target audience and how they interact with your product is what can make product marketing critical to scaling your product and ensuring its longevity, but more on that later.

3. To understand and outdo your competitors.

Bringing a new product to market is like trying to be a thought leader on LinkedIn — crowded. You will have competition, and if you want to rise above it, you have to know what you’re up against.

What are your competitor’s key features and benefits? What ideas haven’t they explored? What does their product offer that yours doesn’t?

Let’s say I take off my writer hat for a minute and magically become a product marketer for HubSpot. Salesforce would be an obvious competitor for me to research. I might identify that HubSpot allows me to nurture leads without manual maintenance, whereas Salesforce is not designed to nurture leads.

This insight should be incorporated into your product marketing strategy to give you an extra edge.

4. To differentiate your product in the market.

Sneakers are a dime a dozen today, so how has Nike managed to rise to the top? Differentiation.

To stand out in your market, you must be loud about your differentiators. You need to offer something unique that forces consumers to pay attention. This might be quality, a fun personality, or something to aspire to (like Nike’s elite athletes).

Product marketers are in charge of finding and drilling into those differentiators.

5. To get marketing, product, and sales teams on the same page.

If you go into a car dealership and one salesperson tells you car A is rated the highest in safety, but then another tells you car B is, you’ll be confused. You probably won’t want to buy your new car from salesperson A or B because you don’t know who or what to believe. Consistency is important.

That’s why, once positioning is nailed down, product marketing must drive the adoption of that positioning to your company’s internal teams.

Marketing, product, and sales teams regularly communicate about your product; they must be aligned on what to say.

This means defining, documenting, and communicating talking points around your product’s:

6. To boost revenue and improve sales.

This may seem obvious, but product marketing is ultimately working to boost revenue and improve sales. All other goals roll up to this.

So, how do these goals translate into specific tasks and responsibilities?

Product Marketing Responsibilities

Researching and monitoring your target audience.
Ensuring your product meets the needs of your target audience.
Determining your product’s positioning in the market.
Creating, managing, and carrying out your product marketing strategy.
Enabling sales to attract the right customers for your new product.
Influencing marketing strategy and product development.
Keeping your product relevant over time.

Like many things in business, product marketing responsibilities may vary based on your industry, company, products, company size, and resources.

If you’re working as a product marketer at a startup, for example, you may also find yourself creating content for the broader marketing team due to limited resources and budget. I encountered this a lot with agency clients who came to us with big dreams and small budgets. As they grew, product marketing began to play a separate, equally important role.

When companies reach this point, the goals I mentioned earlier lend themselves to seven common product marketing responsibilities. Let’s run through them:

1. Researching and monitoring your target audience.

As a product marketer, your primary focus is on your target audience and narrowing it down to specific buyer personas.

This means researching them thoroughly and staying apprised of any changes in their behaviors, wants, or needs. These insights are key to addressing your audience’s challenges in your messaging and helping your product team iterate to stay relevant.

Pro tip: Use templates to create buyer personas for your business. A formal document about whom you’re catering to can help align different teams in your business.

2. Ensuring your product meets the needs of your target audience.

If your audience does not want or need your product, no amount of marketing will sell it. As a product marketer, it’s your responsibility to make sure there’s a fit.

Your buyer persona and target audience research will uncover the pain points and challenges your product should solve. If your product doesn’t meet these, buyers will have no reason to make the purchase or choose your product over others.

In product marketing, you must understand “why” your buyer needs your product. If that’s unclear, a larger product-market fit issue may be at play.

3. Determining your product’s positioning in the market.

Are you the most affordable option? The most reliable? The most user-friendly? Think of product positioning as telling your product’s story. As a product marketer, you should craft a story around the value of your product that will resonate with your buyers; a story they’ll want to be a part of.

So, what does this look like?

Good product positioning typically tells an audience three things:

1. What your product brings to the market

2. How it compares to others (aka your competitors)

3. How it should be viewed by customers

One of the most well-known examples of product positioning can be seen in Apple’s iconic “Get a Mac” campaign from the early 2000s.

In this campaign, Apple directly compared its Mac computers to PCs by giving them both real-life human personas.

How did this campaign check all of the boxes above? Well, in each spot, the brand:

1. Highlighted different features and benefits of a Mac

2. Directly compared Mac to PC (its biggest competitor) in those areas

Personified how Apple wanted Macs to be perceived by buyers with human characters — i.e., Mac was young, playful, and casual in a hoodie, while PC was older, serious, and literally “buttoned up” in a suit and tie.

We’ll dive deeper into how you can successfully position your product when we talk strategy in a bit.

4. Creating, managing, and carrying out your product marketing strategy.

Speaking of strategy, a product marketing strategy is what allows you to create, build, and deploy content and campaigns to drive sales. It guides the steps that will lead your buyer personas to engage with your product and eventually make a purchase — and product marketers own it.

5. Enabling sales to attract and close customers for your new product.

Product marketing also maintains a direct relationship with sales.

As a product marketer, you’ll work with sales to identify and attract the right customers and provide sales enablement materials to help close them.

This way, all teams are on the same page with what should be communicated to customers, allowing you to provide a consistent, on-brand experience for anyone who comes in contact with your product.

6. Influencing marketing strategy and product development.

As a product marketer, you’re in the unique position of being able to influence both marketing and product development. In other words, you have an impact on how a product gets marketed to its target audience, but also if existing products get updated or new ones are developed.

You must keep your finger on the pulse of what’s changing with your audience and competitors and how your current products are performing to offer actionable advice on next steps.

7. Keeping your product relevant over time.

A customer is only as good as their lifetime value, and keeping your product relevant is the best way to increase that value and avoid churn.

As needs, expectations, and challenges evolve, it’s your job to keep your product marketing strategy (and the products themselves) relevant to customers.

This is one place where product marketing can shine.

Why is product marketing important?

Product marketing focuses on changes in your audience’s needs and behaviors, and it enables your company to adapt quickly in ways general marketing does not. It can be the difference between staying relevant and becoming obsolete, so it’s critical companies don’t forget it.

Take this real-world example of successful product marketing from German automobile manufacturer Volkswagen.

During the 1950s, Volkswagen introduced a vehicle you may know as the “VW bus.” The microbus was a hit and remained an icon for the car company with its signature look for decades.

Fast forward to 2017 and Volkswagen announced the ID.Buzz — a new VW bus that’s electric, full of modern features, and puts a fresh spin on the classic microbus design. The company’s product marketing was colorful and youthful, complementing the original “hippie” vibe the brand was once known for.