THE ROLE OF PRODUCT MARKETING IN BUSINESS
Product marketing focuses on understanding the market and market needs, but with an emphasis on understanding the buyer of the company’s products and services. Product marketing is responsible for developing positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and enabling the sales and marketing teams to ensure they’re aligned so they can work efficiently to generate and close opportunities. Product marketing is strategic marketing of the product or product-line level. Product marketing, as an overall function, is in fact a part of the overall function of product management.
Product marketing is the function of understanding the target customer’s needs and promoting and selling the product to the target customer. In many organizations, this is a different function from product management, which is responsible for defining the product that the company will build. Obviously, the two functions must interact closely, but each has a different primary focus.
HOW TO IMPLEMENT PRODUCT MARKETING IN YOUR COMPANY
It is more important than ever to have a team solely dedicated to understanding market and buyer needs, so they can use that knowledge to execute compelling marketing and sales strategies.
Along with developing an understanding of the buyer, product marketers need to utilize knowledge of the market, product, product strategy, and competition in order for marketing and sales organizations to be effective. From a deliverables perspective, what this usually means is developing documents defining positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and ensuring senior management is aligned with these.
The strategic work positioning, messaging and understanding the buyer and market dynamics is the foundation for virtually all other activities. Once defined, it can support other groups such as corporate marketing in creating consistent, highly effective collateral.
THE ROLE OF PRODUCT MARKETING
The role of product marketing has expanded exponentially. You are not just working on product pitches and discussing product value and positioning, you set strategy, oversee revenue drivers, and above all, you are masters and evangelists of your market and the customers you serve. In partnership with product management, you inform what products to build, and whom to build them for, based on time spent in the market and with customer-facing teams. You also determine how to price those products in partnership with finance and leadership. Finally, you work with sales and marketing to determine how to sell them. There are three key pillars of product marketing. The first is research:
Industry research, Competitor research, Customer research, market landscape, win/loss, etc.
Messaging Positioning and Pricing
Product launch and Product life Cycle Management
Research helps you understand the market in which you operate, as well as the customers you serve and their needs, and it also forms a long-term strategy. The second is messaging, positioning, and pricing. Once you know what to build or what is actually built, it is your duty to decide how to talk about it, articulate the value to buyers, and price it. Lastly, the final key pillar is Product launches and product lifecycle management. It is all about architecting go-to-market strategies, making a splash with the perfect product launch, and optimizing the performance, consumption, and profitability of the product over time.
STRUGZ is a Public Relations, Legal Business Management, Training, and Consulting firm, with a passion to help you build a great team, our strategy is to train your product managers to communicate the value of your products to the right audience.
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