5 Steps To Create The Perfect Product Marketing Strategy
Cecily Giancaterino
Feb 13, 2023
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16 min read
Marketing
Here are some key takeaways about this topic:
- A product marketing strategy establishes and manages the branding, pricing, promotion, and positioning of your product.
- An effective product marketing plan will tell you which features of your product are more significant to your target market than others.
- Understanding your target audience and developing messaging that resonates with your prospects is the main goal of product marketing.
- A thorough product marketing plan can increase awareness about your product and drive sales and revenue.
- FiveCRM can help you realize your product marketing goals and allow you to collect and analyze customer data at different touchpoints.
As a business owner, you can’t just launch a new product and wait for sales to roll in. You need to consider how you will promote, position, brand, and deliver your market for the most successful outcomes. Understanding your target demographic, adopting intelligent messaging, finding a strategy, and implementing marketing tactics to increase revenue are all part of product marketing.
So, what's the secret to persuading customers to purchase your company's newest product? Quite simply, there is no secret. Marketing new products is challenging and takes time and resources. However, a new product marketing strategy is required to generate revenue and build a solid consumer base. Creating a strategy is an excellent way to attract new customers while also grabbing the interest of current ones.
Discover the seven essential steps to putting a new product marketing strategy into action below.
What Is a Product Marketing Strategy?
Like a company marketing plan, a product marketing strategy establishes and manages the branding, pricing, promotion, and positioning of your most recent product. In most situations, product managers devise this strategy and align it with their company’s objectives and values.
How you get your product to the market and differentiate yourself from other brands are all aspects of a successful product marketing strategy. In its most basic form, this method refers to the most effective advertising techniques to use before and after your product launch.
Your product marketing campaign will help you create a more triumphant product that satisfies customer needs. The goal of a solid product marketing strategy is to help support your sales team, boost lead generation, increase revenue, and meet KPIs and any other metrics and business goals you've established.
Say you want to launch a new shoe line to the world. A project manager will meet with their company’s marketing team and discuss the different ways to promote, position, and deliver that product to an audience. The manager will then create a product marketing strategy that lists all the steps the marketing team will take to launch the project. A product marketing strategy might also include the technologies marketers will use to achieve their goals.
Why Do Businesses Need To Create a Product Marketing Strategy?
A good product marketing strategy will tell you which elements of your product are more or less important to your target market. This process is crucial because it will help you create a winning solution that solves real-world client problems and generates revenue. Second, having a solid marketing strategy can help you break into new markets.
Right now, you might have the best product in your target market, but how about tomorrow? Is it possible for your company to develop a product that will enable it to reach new markets?
This is where a product manager and marketing team come in. They will create a good product marketing strategy for your upcoming launch, helping you to increase sales and grow your business. In addition, the marketing team will then be able to communicate with other departments inside your organization.
If your company has a robust product marketing plan in place, it can avoid costly blunders and departmental misunderstandings. Some companies, for example, treat marketing as if it were a separate department when it should be considered an integral element of every division. Following that, you'll be able to craft a consistent message for your target market.
Last but not least, and maybe most significantly, a product marketing strategy maintains consistency. The more consistent your marketing messages are, the better they are. Customers are less likely to pay attention to companies that are inconsistent with their messaging. Disorganized and confusing product marketing can alienate a target audience and prevent them from purchasing a new product.
How To Create a Product Marketing Strategy
Because it allows you to reach your maximum potential, product marketing is an essential part of your company's long-term marketing strategy. The key goal of product marketing is to understand your target audience and develop messaging that resonates with them. The launch and execution of the product and the methods for delivering it are all part of a comprehensive product marketing plan.
Your product marketing strategy should align with your overall marketing goals as a small business or larger enterprise and really focus on key market segments that can help you generate revenue. Your company's strategy will act as a roadmap for positioning, pricing, and marketing your product.
Here are seven steps to help you create the best product marketing strategy for your business:
1. Determine Your Target Audience
You must choose the correct target audience for your product because different products have different target customers. Review available market research when creating your ideal customer as it can guide your message and lead to more conversions. You can find ways to incorporate your product into the market and position it so that it gives value to customers. Understanding the wants and pain points of your audience will help you create your product marketing plan.
One of the best ways to determine your target audiences is by creating buyer personas. These fictional representations of your ideal customers help you determine how to market your products to the right prospects. You might have multiple personas for different customer segments, with each one including information about what motivates potential customers to purchase your product.
Say you are launching a new running sneaker. Your buyer persona might describe a fictional person most likely to purchase this product. You can include the person’s age, location, purchasing habits, and motivations in your buyer persona so you can target your product to similar people in the real world. In this use case, your buyer persona could be someone in their 30s who runs at the weekend and wants a shoe that provides foot support and enhances performance.
2. Define Your Messaging
Defining your messaging can help you achieve your marketing efforts.
Once you've created buyer personas, you can start thinking about how you might position yourself in the market with the correct messaging. First, define your messaging to underline the value your product adds to the market and aid customers in resolving pain points.
The right messaging lets you stand out from competitors who may offer comparable services, especially if you use the appropriate placement and language. In addition, messaging should help clients understand the main aspects of your product and answer any queries they might have.
For more successful messaging, consider how your product differs from others, why it is suitable for potential customers, why they should trust you, and how it provides a solution to your target audience. Turn your responses into convincing justifications for your marketing campaigns once you've figured out your answers.
Here are some tips for creating product messaging:
- Use action words, features, benefits, and your brand's tone and image in your messaging. People who come across your messaging copy need to understand what your product does and how it reflects your company’s values and objectives.
- Carry out competitive analysis to understand how your rivals use product messaging. You’ll notice how competitors use specific phrasing and tone of language to convey product benefits and capture audiences.
- Utilize a variety of digital marketing platforms and marketing channels to get your message out, including social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, email marketing, and SEO-driven campaigns.
- Use data analytical tools like Google Analytics to determine how well your messaging copy performs on search engines. You’ll learn how prospective customers respond to your messaging and how many people visit your website after learning about your product in meta descriptions and paid ads. These tools provide in-depth real-time insights about your product marketing strategy.
3. Set Goals
Based on your company's product marketing strategy, create goals that help achieve your strategy over time. For example, increased revenue, market share, customer engagement, brand awareness, and so on are typical milestones and objectives that demonstrate successful product marketing. Select the milestones and objectives that are relevant to your product and business. Then, depending on your demands, focus on a single aim or combine goals to streamline your strategy.
Using the footwear example, your goal might be to generate revenue from sneaker sales or increase brand awareness. You can create a timeline with milestones for achieving your goal.
4. Think About Pricing
It is critical to price your product correctly to ensure that it is well-positioned in the market compared to other businesses offering similar products. Two strategies for deciding pricing are competitive product pricing and value-based product pricing.
Competitive product pricing is straightforward because it helps you set your product's pricing based on what your competitors charge. This strategy works well when your product is similar to others on the market. If you believe your product has more features than your rival’s product, you may choose to raise its price. You can investigate financial records and industry patterns over time before increasing the price of your product.
Value-based product pricing refers to setting the price of your product based on the value it provides to customers rather than what the market dictates. Although it is the more time-consuming choice, it can yield more returns. It's perfect for companies launching a new product with really fantastic and unique features.
Alternatively, you might want to carry out market research or surveys and learn how much prospective customers are willing to pay for your product. You can then create a pricing strategy that generates a steady return over time.
Pricing can be one of the most difficult elements of your product marketing strategy. If you price your product too low, you won’t generate enough of a return to cover production and marketing costs. If you price your product too high, you might alienate prospective customers. While you might want to decrease the price of your product in this scenario, doing so can devalue your product and make customers skeptical of your pricing strategies.
5. Launch Your Product in the Market
The market launch is the most exciting and vital component of any product marketing strategy. There are two parts to a launch: internal and external. The internal aspect relates to procedures within your company such as sales enablement and product positioning. The external aspect refers to interactions with customers, target audiences, and others that take place outside of your company.
Internally, it's vital that everyone on the team is familiar with and understands the product from beginning to end. You may give your marketing, sales, and product teams presentations, knowledge base resources, and sales enablement kits. That can help your marketers position your product correctly at launch events.
Externally, the main goal is to raise awareness and interest in your product among your target audience. This can be done in-person or online via social media websites, blogs, landing pages, in-store promotions, product previews, and other methods.
The internal aspect of a new sneaker line launch might include educating marketers about how to communicate product benefits to an audience at an in-store promotional event. The external aspect might involve carrying out a product demonstration and taking questions from prospective customers who attended the promotional event.
6. Use a CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is one of the most critical technologies for your product marketing strategy. A CRM collects information about customers during every interaction with your business, such as phone numbers, addresses, purchasing habits, and customer motivations. That can help you determine which product marketing strategies to use when targeting specific customer groups and move these prospects through your sales and marketing funnels.
More advanced CRMs include analytical tools that generate real-time intelligence about different customer interactions, which can also guide your product marketing plan. The best CRMs provide key metrics, sales efficiency analysis, website tracking, and customer engagement insights that help you decide when to implement product marketing strategies and market your product to audiences.
Not all analytical CRMs are the same. Choose one with a simple learning curve to avoid spending too much money on implementation and training. Also, pick a CRM that can help you track engagement with customers over the phone. A telemarketing CRM integrates with telephony technology to automate many outbound sales tasks, allowing agents to focus on collecting information for product marketing rather than wasting time on manual jobs.
7. Create Buzz About Your New Product
Creating excitement around your new product is one of the best product marketing strategies. You can use different marketing channels to engage with prospective customers and tell them why your product provides a solution to their problems. Building buzz over time will increase the chances of a successful product launch when the time comes and improve sales. Here are some tips for creating excitement around your new product:
Offer Exclusive Previews
A preview of your product teaches customers what it does and why it’s different from similar products on the marketplace. While previewing a physical product isn’t always possible, encouraging prospects to download a free trial or product demo of a software tool, for example, can increase engagement and loyalty. Previews can also help you fine-tune your product before it launches. You can ask users about what product features they like and don’t like and ask your product development team to implement changes after negative feedback.
Hold Giveaways/Competitions
Giveaways and competitions on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter can increase excitement around your product. For example, you can give free products to the first 10 social media users who reply to a post. Alternatively, ask your audience to create short videos about why they deserve a free product and give your offerings to those who submitted the best content.
Invest in Traditional Marketing
Traditional or offline marketing methods like TV ads and print media can be effective for building buzz about your product. The best analytics tools let you measure the effectiveness of these campaigns and help you create a more successful product launch. For example, you might want to advertise your new product on TV and invest in digital marketing techniques like paid ads and email marketing. This omnichannel strategy will increase product awareness and drive sales.
Ask Customers to Leave You Positive Feedback Online
Post-product launch, ask customers who purchased your product to write a review online. Positive feedback will encourage other people to invest in your offerings, which can increase sales.
Final Word
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to product marketing, but depending on your company's stage of development, some strategies work better than others. Whether you're a start-up or a well-established firm with a successful brand, knowing the basics of product marketing can make all the difference.
Successful product marketing keeps your marketers on their toes and your existing customer base coming back for more and helps you generate a continual stream of new customers, which improves your bottom line. After reading the steps above, you're ready to design your product marketing strategy and put it into action!
How FiveCRM Can Help With Your Product Marketing Strategy
As previously mentioned, the industry’s leading marketing tools will let you execute your product marketing strategy and deliver more successful results. With over 30 years of experience, FiveCRM has created a CRM built for telemarketing that supports product marketing objectives pre- and post-product launch. It lets companies that carry out outbound sales processes collect information from customers that can drive product marketing objectives. In addition, real-time analytics help you generate insights about customer interactions for more successful product marketing.
FiveCRM also helps users comply with data governance regulations when collecting data for product marketing, quickly dial phone numbers with its auto dialing features, double call rates, manage callbacks, offer more successful telephone services, and store customer information in a secure environment.
Other benefits of FiveCRM include:
- Improve sales efficiency for outbound sales with reduced call transition times and workflow automation. Agents spend less time on manual call tasks and more time collecting information for product marketing campaigns.
- Grow your call center with up to 999 separate databases and unlimited data storage. Now you can focus your efforts on product marketing without worrying about data management.
- Track operational performance and capture sales leads with specialized performance and marketing tools. You can find the most lucrative prospects in sales pipelines interested in your products.
- Customize lead scoring tools to sales pipelines and generate more leads interested in your products.
- Monitor and track real-time data about performance across different departments and utilize metrics for sales growth.
You can also use FiveCRM to build native apps, wrap up calls, switch between contacts, and gamify marketing tasks. This all-in-one CRM suits both B2B and B2C environments.
Sign up for a FiveCRM demo now and transform the way you carry out product marketing in your organization. Email hello@fivecrm.com, or get FiveCRM now.
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