Product Marketing Strategy: Definition, Steps, and Examples
Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market, and a well-curated product marketing strategy is key to understanding customer needs and driving adoption.
In this article, we explore the key steps product managers follow to create a successful product marketing strategy, including some successful real-world examples. Let’s dive in!
What is a product marketing strategy?
A product marketing strategy is a roadmap for how a new product will be positioned, priced, marketed, and launched.
It is a merger between product development and sales to ensure a product satisfies specific customer needs and business goals.
Product marketing vs. product management
Although they’re often intertwined, product marketing and product management serve different roles.
Product management focuses on product development. It is concerned with identifying customer needs, defining the product vision and roadmap, and ensuring accurate and timely delivery of the product.
Conversely, product marketing focuses on getting the product into the hands of the right users. It’s concerned with the product’s positioning and messaging, pricing strategy, and go-to-market strategy.
Thus, the goal of product managers is to build the right product and get it ready for launch, while a product marketing manager aims to launch the product successfully and make it into a revenue-generating asset.
Product marketing begins where product management ends.
How to create a successful product marketing strategy
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all product marketing strategy template, the steps below can guide your process.
1. Set SMART product marketing goals
Setting goals for your efforts will guide your strategy and keep you on track.
Of course, goals for different businesses will vary. It’s important, however, that your goals are always SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example, rather than just setting a vague goal of “increasing revenue,” you can set a SMART goal of “increasing the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by 20% over the next quarter.
This goal is specific and measurable (20% increase in MRR). It is also realistic and achievable (depending on your business) and bound by a defined timeframe (a quarter).
2. Conduct market research
With your goals firmly in mind, it’s time to begin your research. First, you want to understand your competitors and the business landscape you’re coming into.
Conduct in-depth research into your competitor’s products, marketing strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Your research should answer questions like:
- How do customers perceive their product?
- What customer needs have they failed to meet?
- How do they communicate their messaging?
- What are their pricing strategies and how are they perceived?
Known as landscape research, this should help you identify market opportunities, assess market potential (including its overall size and growth potential), and mitigate risks (such as changing regulations).
3. Define your target audience and user personas
Once you understand the overall market and competition, you can enter phase two of your market research: your potential customers. Your goal for this phase is to identify your target market and user/buyer personas.
A user persona highlights the profile(s) of the ideal person who will use your product, while a buyer persona highlights the profile(s) of your product’s ideal buyer.
Depending on your product, these may not be the same persons. However, both can serve the same purpose of defining your marketing direction.
If your product has more than one “ideal” group of users, create a persona for each. Each persona should highlight the user’s unique needs, challenges, and pain points.
Understanding your customers and creating a specific profile for them will help ensure that all aspects of your product marketing strategy resonate with your target audience.
4. Solidify your product positioning and messaging
Finally, you can turn your attention to your product. For this step, you need to answer questions like:
- What challenges does our product solve?
- What sets it apart from the competition?
- Which key features address customers’ needs?
- Why should customers trust the product?
The answers to these questions will help you identify your product’s differentiators and define its positioning. This positioning defines where your product fits in the market and its unique value proposition (UVP).
Sum up these points in a product positioning statement. This concise document highlights your target customers, problems solved, and UVP.
Armed with this, you can then craft your product’s messaging. Unlike the positioning statement, your messaging is external-facing. It builds on the positioning statement using taglines, slogans, and other messages that can be tailored to specific customer needs.
5. Decide on your pricing strategy
So, you’ve completed your analysis, positioned your product, and defined your personas. Next up is your pricing strategy – a crucial aspect of any successful product marketing strategy.
A very high price may cost out customers, while a meager price could be considered low quality. To help you get it right, you can choose from several pricing strategies, including:
- Competitor-based pricing: Also known as “competitive pricing,” this strategy involves setting your prices based on what your competitors charge for similar products.
- Cost-plus pricing: This strategy involves summing up the total production cost (materials, overhead, and labor) and adding a markup (percentage profit) to determine your selling price.
- Value-based pricing: Value-based pricing is based on what customers are willing to pay, rather than the cost of production. It, therefore, depends on the product’s perceived value to the customer.
- Penetration pricing: This strategy involves setting a low initial price to penetrate the market, which is increased once a significant market share is established.
- Price skimming: The opposite of penetration pricing, this strategy involves setting a high initial price to capture early adopters willing to pay a premium. The price is then lowered over time to attract more customers.
6. Create a product launch plan
The product launch plan is the most important part of any product marketing strategy. Known also as the go-to-market strategy, it provides an exhaustive plan for the internal and external aspects of the launch.
The internal aspect covers the roles of your product, marketing, and sales teams during the launch. It should also outline the timelines for different launch activities and the launch budget.
Your sales and marketing teams will then come together to define the external aspects of the launch. This involves answering questions like:
- Will you be deploying social media marketing – and how?
- What other marketing channels do you need?
- Which promotional materials do you need (website landing pages, blog articles, demo videos, etc.)?
- Should there be a big public launch event?
7. Launch the product
This part of your strategy covers the execution of your product launch plan. This is also the time to organize all the materials needed for the launch.
For instance, you may choose to launch in-app to reach your existing customers. In this case, you’ll need an in-app messaging platform to convey your message and a copy that encourages engagement.
You may also want to reach a wider audience using external platforms. SaaS products, for example, can especially benefit from launching to the tech community on ProductHunt.
Again, you’ll need a concise copy announcing the product’s features. You can also provide a demo video and images to boost interaction.
8. Measure product performance to identify gaps
Following the launch, product marketers need to track the product’s success and identify gaps. This means monitoring metrics like adoption rates, sign-ups, engagement, etc.
If you settled for a free trial pricing model, for example, you can compare the number of free trial sign-ups to the number of users that convert to paying customers.
A high conversion rate indicates your product’s acceptance among your target audience. If the rate is low, however, you’ll need to dig further (through surveys, interviews, etc.) to understand why.
9. Continuously Iterate and refine your product marketing strategy
The final part of your post-launch strategy should highlight what you can do to improve your product’s adoption. This involves creating plans for data-driven adjustments to your product marketing strategy.
When you identify a gap, for instance, you can conduct A/B tests to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.
For example, if the response to your new feature announcement is low, you can experiment with its placement, copy, media, or CTA to better encourage engagement.
13 Best product marketing strategies to implement
Now that you know how to create a product marketing strategy, let’s explore some strategies that can inspire your own.
1. Create product-led content to attract potential customers
The content marketing strategy focuses on creating content around your product’s features, benefits, and use cases. The goal is to educate potential customers and establish your product as a valuable solution.
For example, you can develop blog posts highlighting how your product solves specific customer pain points while implementing SEO best practices to optimize your content for search engines.
Userpilot, for instance, creates content around topics like user onboarding to address the needs of its target audience – product marketers.
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2. Implement growth loops for your SaaS products
Growth loops are self-sustaining cycles that drive user acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue. A growth loop depends on certain key user actions to trigger growth.
For instance, you can include features encouraging users to invite others, such as collaboration tools or social sharing options. This increases your market share while reducing your customer acquisition costs.
Calendly does this by making its tool into one huge promotional material. Upon sharing your Calendly link with someone, a small banner notifies the viewer that the service is provided by Calendly.
3. Provide free trials to showcase product value
Offering a free trial allows potential customers to experience your product firsthand. During the free trial, customers can test your product’s features and see how it solves their problems.
It, thus, enables you to showcase the product’s value and increase the likelihood of conversion.
This free trial approach is central to the product marketing strategy of the social media management platform, Later. As soon as you reach their landing page, you’re invited to sign up for a free trial.
4. Conduct webinars to engage users
As a product marketing strategy, webinars enable you to educate, engage, and build a relationship with your audience.
Their video-based nature, storytelling capability, and interactive features make them well-suited to driving user engagement and improving retention.
Userpilot takes advantage of this to the fullest, incorporating webinars addressing pertinent industry topics or showcasing product features into its marketing strategy.
5. Provide personalized experiences to your customers
For SaaS products, a good customer experience is one of your greatest marketing assets. By tracking user behavior, you can tailor their experience to better suit their needs, enhancing customer satisfaction.
For example, you can make product recommendations based on user behavior. You can also target specific user groups with surveys, onboarding tutorials, etc., that improve their experience.
6. Announce new features in-app to existing customers
While you may aim to attract new customers with new feature announcements, do not neglect your already existing customers. In-app announcements generate excitement and aid feature discovery.
It also ensures that users who need the feature or may have requested it know of its existence. This improves user satisfaction, boosts adoption and engagement rates, and reduces churn.
7. Create efficient lead magnets to attract customers
Lead magnets are a trade-by-barter approach to marketing. You offer a potential customer some valuable information, and they share their contact in exchange.
Lead magnets can take different shapes, including:
- Templates.
- Industry reports.
- Industry reports
- Checklists, etc.
For example, Userpilot conducts an extensive annual study to determine the product metric averages for different SaaS products and industries.
This valuable resource helps product marketers examine how their product is faring within their industry and is only offered for the “price” of an email address.
8. Leverage referral programs to attract prospective customers
Referral marketing aims to turn your customers into your biggest marketers by offering them certain incentives. These incentives could come in the form of useful loyalty points, discounts, or other rewards.
Dropbox, for example, offers 500MB of free space for customer referrals. Customers can earn up to 16GB of free storage through referrals, making it an attractive “side quest” for them.
9. Use contextual emails to reengage inactive users
Send targeted emails based on user behavior to remind them of the product’s value and encourage them to return.
To be successful, your re-engagement email should highlight your product’s benefits, be tailored to their needs, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).
For example, this email from Grammarly aims to create a nostalgic feeling around their product while providing a huge CTA button.
10. Share case studies from successful customers
Sharing your product’s success stories as case studies taps into the human need for social proof to build trust and credibility. A good case study should highlight your product’s success and how it was used.
For example, this case study explains how Attention Insight – an AI-powered tool offering heatmap analysis – improved its user activation rate by 47% within 6 months of using Userpilot.
11. Showcase your SaaS product through strategic video marketing
Videos are powerful tools for demonstrating your product features, telling your brand story, and connecting with your audience.
Ahrefs uses them to good effect, providing a huge catalog of videos on YouTube. These videos offer free education on SEO basics and best practices while positioning Ahrefs as the user’s best SEO support tool.
12. Partner with other companies to reach a wider target market
Collaborating with complementary businesses can expand your reach and introduce your product to a new audience.
One of the simplest ways to do this is by identifying complementary businesses and creating co-marketing campaigns, such as joint webinars or content collaborations.
You can also offer integrations with other tools to make it easier for users to use your product. This is what Bonjoro, a video engagement platform, did when it integrated ActiveCampaign, tripling its user base in the process.
13. Prompt upgrades with contextual in-app messages
Tracking your user’s in-app behaviors enables you to identify opportunities for upsell or cross-sell. You can offer them premium features or additional products that fit their contextual need.
For example, Loom offers only 5 minutes of recording time to freemium users. When a user hits the 5-minute mark, a contextual prompt informs them they can record for longer with a premium upgrade.
Conclusion
There are many different approaches to product marketing. By combining some of the strategies above, you can create a comprehensive plan that drives customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.
From segmentation to contextual messaging, in-app analytics, and more, Userpilot provides valuable tools for executing your strategy. Book a demo to learn more!
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