The motivation behind placing and keeping products on the market is product marketing. Product marketers are the primary customer voices, messaging experts, sales enablers, and adoption boosters.
PMMs manage a variety of deliverables and are crucial to a product’s lifecycle.
Some of the world’s most skilled plate-spinners are the brains behind making product features appealing to the senses through email marketing, webinars, or other marketing initiatives. They play a vital role in providing products that satisfy the company’s target customers.
What does product marketing mean?
The product market is where finished goods supply and demand converge. Companies take on the role of suppliers by making their goods available to potential customers at prices based on supply and demand dynamics. Governments and other organizations frequently intervene to monitor market activity, and depending on the degree of regulation put in place; the market may be categorized as free or restricted.
The retail market is an example of a free market because there aren’t many restrictions, and people can freely interact. On the other hand, the demand for nuclear energy is restricted because of the product’s danger and the need for strict regulation to prevent unfavorable outcomes that might endanger society. Good markets are also influenced by non-governmental organizations that defend consumer rights or the environment.
How to be successful in product marketing?
There are many ways to achieve product-market fit. You can expand the market for your core product, locate a significant market need, repurpose or reorganize previous concepts, follow the money, or even create an entirely new service.
Fit is not a binary concept, and this must always be kept in mind. Customer retention curves and product-market fit do not look the same from company to company. However, some tried-and-true procedures can help you accomplish it as you create a prototype of a minimally viable product.
What is a Product Marketing Framework?
All prosperous businesses are built on the foundation, crossroads, and core of product marketing. PMMs collaborate closely with meaningful marketing, sales, and customer success teams to support the company’s goals.
Although essential and exciting, it can also be challenging, which is where the Product Marketing Framework comes in:
Discover
This stage involves gathering the knowledge and understanding required to transform your presumptions into an educated hypothesis. Just two of the crucial components—both of which are product marketing gold—involve customer feedback and competitor research.
Plan
Effective product marketing is always accompanied by a plan, whether it be for product-market fit, your GTM strategy, or your pricing.
Define
Defining your personas and using the information you learned during the discovery stage to mold the customer journey and communications is what you do in this step.
Get ready
To guarantee that your team is prepared to seize the GTM by the horns and run with it, capitalize on your prior efforts through training, sales enablement sessions, and marketing campaigns.
Grow
To make sure that your product keeps flourishing and developing in the market, this is where your post-launch process comes into play.
Examples of Product Marketing
Some businesses have done such an excellent job of developing market-fit products that their successes can be used as models before launching your product, within your product process, or in your customer development efforts.
Netflix
In the early 2000s, the entertainment media company rose to prominence. People were sick of paying late fees at traditional DVD rental stores. As a result, Netflix mailed them DVDs as part of their subscription service, allowing them to keep discs for an extended period.
On the other hand, Netflix would have faded out along with DVD players if it had stayed a DVD-by-mail service. Relatively, Netflix positioned itself as a more convenient, less expensive alternative to whatever the entertainment market currently dominates: in-store rentals, DVDs, or traditional television. When market demand changes, Netflix updates its product.
The success of Netflix is a timely reminder to stay flexible in ever-changing markets and to keep an eye on the future.
Many other search engines used to compete with Google for market share. They generated revenue by providing ad spaces next to search results, just like the other players in their market. But in 2003, they surpassed the competition by launching a novel idea called AdSense.
Google executives decided to create AdSense after realizing that companies would pay to display their ads elsewhere besides the search results page. AdSense used new technology to display relevant ads after scanning web pages automatically. For instance, if you sold luggage, you could automatically pay AdSense to display your ads on travel websites.
By 2017, the 11 million users of Google AdSense were shelling out $95 billion annually. Google identified a need not being met by any other search engine and filled it.
You can employ Google AdSense in your company as well. Find things your rivals aren’t doing and adapt to meet unmet needs to set yourself apart from the competition.
Slack
Instant messaging service Slack, which is well-liked in the office, started as an entirely different business idea. The founders hastily constructed Slack as a team’s internal communication tool while they were working on a role-playing video game at the time.
The team quickly realized that while the market was flooded with role-playing games, there was nothing quite like Slack. As a result, they shifted their emphasis away from game development. Ten million people now use the product.
Slack’s quick turnaround demonstrates that shifting your focus to a better product-market fit is worthwhile. Don’t be afraid to leave your original idea when you see a better opportunity.
Wrapping Up
We recommend shadowing some of their work and gaining as much hands-on experience as possible if you want to transition into product marketing and work for a company that already has the integrated function. It would be sufficient if you also read up on some industry resources.
