Product MarkeTING: Everything you need to know
The knowledge of four essential ingredients i.e. Product, Marketing, Sales, and Copywriting, makes a product marketer.
In marketing, you are reaching the people and telling them about your business. In product marketing you are doing the same but for a particular product(Software/SaaS) that a business owns. This is a plain idea but there is a lot more to it.
What makes you buy the subscription to the product? Who makes you buy the subscription to the product?
Let’s deal with the first question i.e What makes you buy the subscription to the product?
There can be various reasons, some are:
- There is no other product on the market.
- There is no competitor for the product.
- Pricing is within the budget.
- You liked the offerings.
- The product is clearly explained.
There are other reasons as well but to keep this short, focus on the last point i.e the product is clearly explained but who explains the product? a copywriter? No, because he would not have in-depth knowledge of the product and it’s not just a copy that sells the product, it’s also about the placement of the messages on the product and much more.
The next point will explain to you more. Please continue!
The second question i.e. Who makes you buy the subscription of the product? Is it the sales team? Product management team? Digital Marketing team?
The answer is none of the above. It’s the product marketing team.
Because if the product management team is writing the copies(content/text) on the product then that team is no longer purely the product management team, they are touching the boundaries of the product marketing.
The product marketer skills= Product Manager+Growth Hacker+Digital marketer+Sales professional+Copywriter skills, and more.
Who can do this and some more:
- Understand the Potential and existing customers.
- Show the benefits(features are for you, for the customers those are benefits)of the product to the potential and the existing users.
- Write the right message, share it at the right time and at the right place.
- Grasp customer behavior such as when do they use the product and for how much time, etc.
- Know what subscription plan is the customer using and how can we make them buy the bigger plan.
- Collect user feedback and feed that back to the product management team to improve the product.
- Help the sales team and product team in deciding the subscription plans.
- Collect potential user’s feedback to test the clarity of the messages.
- Work with the marketing team and product team to have the same message tone across the product.
- Should be able to understand the market.
- Increase the signups and help in reducing the churn.
- Lead product launches
- Can perform competitor analysis.
- Manage product launches.
- Produce content and distribute content.
This list would go on forever but I think you have got the idea. The things mentioned above are not the job of a person who understands only one area around the product cycle. One needs to have multiple skills around the product cycle to become a product marketing expert.
Inbound and Outbound marketing both go hand in hand. These are marketing concepts but are also used in product marketing.
Outbound marketing is to attract strangers and bring them on the platform.
On the other hand, inbound marketing is to show your messages, benefits to strangers coming to your platform from outbound marketing. The same applies to product marketing.
Being a product marketer you can help the business in both the outbound marketing and the inbound marketing but truly speaking, your role will be more on the inbound marketing side.
These are some of the tools for product marketing:
- https://www.drift.com/
- https://www.trychameleon.com/home
- https://canny.io/
- https://segment.com/
- https://amplitude.com/
- https://heap.io/
- https://www.hubspot.com/
- https://www.spyfu.com/
- https://clearbit.com/
- https://www.kompyte.com/
Product marketing is a way to grow and that growth comes with a story. Write your own story.