What is product marketing? The complete guide

“If you build it, they will come."

This famous tagline is often used as shorthand for a great entrepreneurial misunderstanding: that a really cool new product will sell itself. To be sure, an excellent product doesn’t hurt. 

But successful entrepreneurs know that without rock-solid marketing, even the best products won’t live up to their full potential.

This is where product marketing comes in.

What is product marketing?

Product marketing simply refers to all the steps it takes to bring a new product to market, create effective messaging around that product, and position it with the right target audience. This includes reaching potential customers through a variety of marketing channels. Traditional “analog” channels such as print advertising, trade shows, and paper press used to be critical to product marketing. Today, digital marketing is the focus of most product marketing campaigns.

A good product marketing campaign has many different parts.  For instance, it may include:

• Market research: Focus groups, case studies, market data all provide product marketing research

• Messaging: The way you talk about your product for the best possible positioning in the market

• Content marketing: Digital content such as blog posts, guest articles, ebooks, and more

• Social media marketing:  Using various social media channels with both organic (unpaid) posts and paid advertising 

• Influencer marketing: Working with popular social influencers who can reach more people than you could on your own

• Sales enablement: Putting together a professional sales team to help you reach customers

What product marketing isn’t

New product marketing is only one aspect of ongoing product management. But it’s often used as a catch-all term for anything that has to do with promoting a product over its lifecycle. 

Product marketing vs. product management

Product management means handling every aspect of product planning, from product creation to pricing to marketing. At each stage of the product life cycle, product management plays a critical role. Product managers must understand the big picture—and usually all the little details, too. 

Product marketing, on the other hand, is specifically focused on marketing and positioning the product when it’s brand new—otherwise known as a product launch.

New product marketing vs. traditional marketing

Traditional marketing covers all marketing efforts for a company’s many products, and it can include various aspects of products over the course of those products’ lifetimes. This means print marketing, press releases, sponsorship, billboards, direct mail campaigns, ongoing social media efforts, and more.

Meanwhile, product marketing is more focused on positioning a new product, or a newly tweaked product. Sure, it can include some of the same activities as traditional marketing. But it’s often highly focused on digital marketing campaigns and includes researching product/market fit and creating initial messaging that will help position a product in front of potential buyers. 

In other words, product marketing is a focused effort with somewhat narrow goals: increase awareness and sales of your product as quickly as possible. 

Tips for implementing your product marketing 

As soon as a product is launched, plenty of people will have opinions about it. (And many have opinions before a launch.) A meticulously planned, well-executed product launch can have a big impact on long-term success. 

If you’re creating a product marketing plan, use the following steps as a guide:

1. Research product-market fit 

2. Develop buyer personas and product stories 

3. Set standards for the success of your product marketing

4. Develop a comprehensive product marketing strategy

Step 1: Research product-market fit

A good idea becomes a great idea when you fully understand how it fits into a target market and can communicate its value to your target audience. To determine “product market fit,” entrepreneurs typically conduct formal, intensive research. In fact, you may have already undertaken this step before you began product development. If not, now is the time.

Your goal? To find out exactly what the market needs are, as well as where your product fits in the market. Ask yourself questions like:

1. What problem does my product solve?

2. How is this product better than competitor products?

3. Who has this problem, and where are they?

How to get there: Before launching any big new initiative or product, you should lead focus groups, conduct competitor analytics, and create case studies.

The tool to use: To fully understand market needs and product market fit, you’ll need a single source of truth to record your findings, compare them, and share that data. You’ll likely have stakeholders from different departments weighing in, so use a tool that makes sharing and collaborating easy. 

Download Airtable’s SWOT analysis template to analyze strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as you bring your product to market

Step 2: Develop buyer personas and product stories 

Consumers aren’t just potential buyers of your product—they’re human beings who respond to stories, not pitches. But what kind of stories should you tell? Developing buyer personas can help you determine just that. 

Your goal: Envision a typical customer, so that you know who to market to and the right messaging to use for your product launch. (This will also help you develop product testimonials.)

How to get there: Research and imagination, mostly. Using your own knowledge of your product plus any new customer insights, you’ll create fictional descriptions of your ideal customers, plus other potential groups you’re looking to attract. Conduct interviews and/or surveys to fill in gaps. Consider usability testing and customer interviews to probe for how people actually use your product. (Don’t forget to share any feedback with your product teams.)

The tool to use: Look for a platform that allows you to capture findings from multiple interview panels. You’ll want the ability to record significant amounts of text as you write descriptions and customer stories, to easily sort through data and surface patterns, and to sync all of your research into other parts of your operations—such as product development.

Download Airtable’s User Research template to record and map information from user testing, customer interviews, brainstorms, research findings, and more

Step 3: Set standards for the success of your product marketing

Your goal: You won’t know if your product launch is successful unless you have something to measure it against. You need quantifiable goals. For instance:

• Sign up 10K new users in the first week

• Sell 1,000 widgets in the first month

• Gain 5,000 new social media followers

How to get there: There are different ways to think about product marketing goals and different methodologies for measuring them. Two of the most common are OKRs and KPIs.

• OKR stands for “objectives and key results.” It’s a framework that splits each product marketing goal into these two parts.

• KPI stands for “key performance indicators” and is another way to measure progress toward an intended result.

The tool to use: Track and record your goals and objectives in a relational database that makes it easy to map individual projects and tasks to your goals, helps you quickly visualize progress, and integrates with your analytics so you can see your work and results in the same place.

• Learn more about OKR planning on Airtable

Step 4: Develop a comprehensive product marketing strategy

Your goal: Build on all the work you’ve done by creating a comprehensive product marketing strategy. This is the most detailed element of your new product launch, and will include planning things such as:

• Initial pricing

• A marketing budget

• Website design and launch

• Social media 

• Paid digital marketing efforts

• Traditional print marketing campaigns

• Influencer marketing

• Public relations 

Any of these elements on its own requires multiple steps, potentially involving a crowd of internal team members and outside stakeholders. 

How to get there: As you’re developing a marketing strategy to promote your new product, you’ll want to map your plan to the customer journey to ensure you’ve covered every stage. 

While every business has its own customer journey, most will follow some version of this cycle:

• Awareness: Before your customers are aware of your product or offering, you’ll need to attract their attention and bring them into your orbit. At this stage, marketers typically focus on bringing a high volume of prospects into their funnel, and making them aware of problems your product can solve.

• Consideration: If your earlier campaigns resonate with your audience, they may start to consider your product or service as a solution. At this stage, aren’t just competing with competitors—your prospects may also be considering doing nothing, or postponing the solution indefinitely. Materials like case studies and customer stories, which illustrate the value of your product for other customers, can help inspire action.

• Decision: At this stage, your prospects decide whether or not to use your product. Collateral that helps them justify the cost, assuage concerns about onboarding and implementation, or outline your product’s unique value, can help seal the deal.

• Adoption: Depending on your product, a purchase may not be the same as true adoption. If that’s the case for your product, support them with educational and support materials to make sure implementation is a success.

• Retention: Retaining customers means something different at every business—you might measure retention based on repeat purchases, subscriptions, renewals, or continued activation in the product.

The tool to use: Creating a product marketing strategy involves input and accountability from many other stakeholders. This can make it difficult to use one document for the entire marketing strategy. 

If you’re working in a relational database like Airtable,  multiple people can access your product marketing documentation simultaneously in the cloud. Bits and pieces of information can be used in different contexts: in the calendar schedule of events, in a list of trackable goals, under a particular project owner’s domain of to-do’s. 

How Airtable can help with a new product launch

If you build a great product—and people hear about it—then yes, they will come. 

Airtable is a relational database that gives you a single source of truth for all of the data you need, customized to your team’s exact needs, Airtable enables multiple product marketing team members to work together in the cloud as a new product launch unfolds.

Your product marketing team can use Airtable to manage the tasks, owners, deadlines, and budgets associated with your product marketing then integrate the tool with all the other technology solutions you already use, such as Slack, Mailchimp, Twitter, Gmail, Google Docs, Basecamp, Asana, Dropbox, and more. 

Ready to get started? Check out Airtable’s product launch template.