What is product marketing

Product Marketing, much like digital and traditional marketing, involves getting the product to market and making sure it reaches the right customers. You might have chosen a completely different phone to the one you have now.

You might have a different favorite brand of coffee, or be working for a completely different company! Marketing tells the story of a product, and helps communicate what the brand stands for.

People use the products they buy as a way to tell a story about themselves. You might also be interested in: Understanding Product-Market Fit. A Product Marketing Manager owns the positioning, messaging, and branding of a product.

They will also gather and process customer feedback, and manage some aspects of customer relations after launch. Essentially they work on moving customers through a funnel that converts them from a general audience, into loyal fans. A Product Marketing Manager will constantly be working on different tasks for customers at these three levels of the funnel. A common misconception of Product Marketing is that it focuses mainly on acquisition. Marketing works to nurture customers throughout their journey with a product in order to keep churn rates down.

A product marketer might not necessarily be performing outward-facing marketing — they might not be creating promotional content or even speaking to consumers. Instead, their efforts are focused on guiding the strategy internally.

Similar to the way marketing enables sales , product marketing enables all the other marketing activities. In addition to helping deliver the product to users initially, product marketing also helps create a feedback loop to help improve the product over time.

When a consumer buys your product, they understand the problem they have and why your product can help, but they might not know how to actually use your product to solve that problem.

Therefore, product marketers want to ensure a smooth transition from sales to service. They help develop and execute an onboarding process that provides value to the user and enables adoption of the product. With complex SaaS products like HubSpot , managed services channel partners like New Breed can do majority of the product marketing.

We help users gain value from HubSpot and ensure their product actually helps users grow their business. Understanding the way that users actually engage with your product is a key component of improving it.

Often it was really still Customer Support , although there was a growing appreciation of the value that a true Success role brought. A common source of confusion was how Product Marketers differed from other types of marketers, and caused PMMs to be under or mis-leveraged. Product Managers are amongst the most guilty of this, especially troublesome due to the close collaboration required between both roles. In most cases, Product Marketing suffers from being loosely defined, having limited executive ownership, few decisive KPIs, and almost no software budget.

So why is it suddenly becoming so important? In the past, technology products were sold through executive relationships and field sales teams. Sales were King and every function supported it, including Product Marketing. Now Product is Queen, and customers value it more than relationships, services, or reputations. Building the right product, and delivering it effectively is more important than ever before.

We cannot rely on sales teams with inferior products, but we also cannot stop at just building great products. Agile is now normal, and continuous development and delivery is the new standard. Product is changing and updating as fast as ever, but people find it difficult to keep up. The new challenge in achieving PM fit and business success is driving adoption. Product Marketing is the key that can unlock this, and accordingly, the role is changing.

Responsibilities for product marketing managers are extending beyond launching, towards adoption, and there are questions on whether the function should continue to report to Marketing, or to Product or Growth.

Sometimes we see teams treat their Product Marketers as an extension of their SaaS Marketing or Demand Generation teams, so here are some of the key differences. Marketing is a broader function responsible for communicating value to prospects. This includes content marketing , performance marketing, brand marketing, etc. Product Marketing specializes in helping your product get adopted by the market, and of course, helping shape the product.

Product marketers should be a core component of the product development process and should work closely with Product and Growth teams within an organization. Product Marketing Managers can more efficiently do some of the tasks that Product Managers currently do on the side. Firstly, PMMs should bring the voice of the customer to the product team, who should then be responsible for translating it into user stories and features.

Secondly, PMMs should own product adoption. In organizations that have created Product-Led Growth teams, there is often a mix of product management , product marketing, and design skills to help create and run experiments inside the product to drive adoption. Sales enablement is crucial in B2B organizations to equip the sales teams with the necessary resources and sales pitches to succeed.

Within sales-led organizations, product marketers will do a lot of sales enablement, whereas, in product-led organizations, they will do more product growth work. Although Customer Success teams also care about driving product usage and helping customers extract value from the software, one key difference is that Product Marketing teams will care about new features, new customers, and new revenue vs.

Nevertheless, there are some overlaps here e. Traditionally, we see product marketing using more traditional marketing channels to do this e. Product Marketing connects the dots between the product and the market, in both directions. Marketing Hub Marketing automation software. Service Hub Customer service software. CMS Hub Content management system software.

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Start free or get a demo. Marketing 3 min read. Lindsay also recommends HubSpot's product marketing kit. Download for Free. Pop quiz: If you had to define product marketing right now, what would you say?