Product marketing is a critical component of any business. How you talk about, present, and highlight the value of your products matters. Your audience needs to understand how your product will solve their issues. That story originates from product marketers who then collaborate with content marketers to deliver content that attracts and converts target buyers.
In this post, we’ll explain what product marketing is, how it intersects with content marketing, and the latest trends.
What Is Product Marketing?
Product marketing describes the alignment of product positioning with customer needs. The goal is to ensure customers will buy your product because its benefits and features align with their needs. A product marketer defines how it will go to market to communicate the features, benefits and needs alignment.
Product marketers have these responsibilities:
- Understand buyer needs and challenges
- Define the value proposition of the product and develop messaging on this
- Launch new products or features
- Interview customers
- Provide content marketing and sales with insights
All these tasks drive toward marketing and selling the product more effectively. The top objective of most product managers is revenue generation.
Why Is Product Marketing Important?
A product marketer works with many departments, including marketing, sales, customer success, and product. They are often the liaison in these situations, dispersing information and strategic recommendations to each group. These are the best-case scenarios, but many companies face challenges in optimizing the marketing of their products.
Without product marketers steering the way and providing foundational messaging, a product’s story could get convoluted and fragmented. So, content collaboration is key. Product marketers spend the most time working with product and marketing teams.
Because of these close ties, product marketers support a lot of sales enablement content creation. In a survey, nearly 74 percent said they spend a lot of time doing this. It’s easy to see why product and content marketing teams must have a close relationship.
Product Marketing and Content Marketing Collaboration
Product marketing builds the foundation and pillars of product messaging. They define its value prop and the benefits and features that deliver said value. Your content team can rely on this as they work on content planning.
Product marketers should also relay product roadmaps so that content teams can plan campaigns around new releases, revised positioning, introductions to new audiences, and more. Product marketers will need the support of content distribution and amplification for each launch.
So, what does planning for such a launch include?
First, product and content marketing must develop a strategy for the launch based on its type and goals. From there, product marketing would deliver the messaging matrix. Next, the group would define what content the campaign needs, which could include:
- New sales sheets
- Announcement blogs
- Social media posts
- Press releases or media alerts
- Paid campaigns (e.g., display ads, ads in industry publications, social media-boosted posts)
- Email campaigns for existing customers and prospects
- Product web page refreshes or development
Since a campaign has so many content deliverables, using a content calendar to manage these keeps everybody on track because launches often have hard due dates. Product and content marketers would work together on these pieces, either in co-writing or reviewing.
As a content marketing team, your staff’s job is to understand the product in the way the product marketer positions it. That will be your guide during a launch campaign and beyond. Think of what a product marketer gives you as the seed, and your content creators water and feed it so it blooms.
This type of tight collaboration requires technology to support it. With a dynamic content calendar, all users can view the status of a project. The teams can work together within a platform to review and approve content, which is much more efficient than back-and-forth emails.
So, what does the ideal collaboration look like for product marketers and all the teams they touch?
Collaboration Best Practices
Organizations with strong product marketing and collaboration among all the groups they touch often include these attributes.
- Putting the customer first in positioning the product with benefit-led statements, not features.
- Easy to understand product value for the audience; they intuitively know the product is relevant to them.
- Campaigns are integrated and make use of all channels for distribution and amplification.
- Focusing on product innovation and differentiators with bold and creative angles.
Product marketing must also be flexible, as trends impact strategies and messaging. Here are some of the current trends shaping this area.
Product Marketing Trends
In the year ahead, these trends could inspire new campaigns and content.
- Influencer marketing will continue to grow, but product marketers should be choosy about the influencers they select. It’s better to have someone respected in your industry versus a social media star or celebrity.
- Creating more interactive digital experiences for product demos. In-person events are back, but there’s still a demand for virtual experiences. If you can make them more interactive, audiences will enjoy the experience more.
- Video is a top way to entertain and inform (a.k.a. “infotainment”) and is essential for marketing products. Many buyers want to learn in this way. According to research, 96 percent of people watched an explainer video to learn about a product. Another 88 percent said they purchased a product after watching a brand video. Product and content teams should ramp up video marketing efforts. Need an example? Get ready to LOL.
- Building communities of users is another trend. Product and content teams will develop these together as a place for feedback and to find answers. It can be a place where users connect, and you’ll get great feedback to improve the product and marketing.
Build Synergy Within a Central Tool
Product and content marketing teams rely on one another to increase the visibility of a product and generate sales. This collaboration is constant, so you need tools to make this possible. A content marketing platform can do just that. Request a demo today to see how it can work for your company.