Your success with new solutions in the market depends on your product management and product marketing prowess. Be sure you address these three product marketing steps before you hit the product launch button. For many organizations, revenue from new innovations is critical to their growth strategy. The success of new products requires both Product Management and Product Marketing capabilities. These roles in the new product plan and their workflows vary considerably from company to company. In many instances, Product Management and Product Marketing are used interchangeably but their roles are different.

Regardless of whether you have these roles combined or separated, solid Product Management and Marketing capabilities drive growth within your organization. Most people accept that “Product Management” is a term used to describe the sum of diverse activities performed in the interest of delivering a particular solution to the market. The two main disciplines in the product management domain are product planning and product marketing, which are very different from each other.

Even though the disciplines of product planning and product marketing are inextricably linked because they work together to ensure your offer is of value to the buyer, we contend it is a mistake to perceive them as one discipline.

Product Management and Product Marketing: Yin and Yang

To clarify. Product planning is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product’s feature set. The product planner’s mission is to identify market needs so as to deliver winning solutions that help a company become a market leader, market follower, or innovator.

Product marketing is an outbound activity aimed at generating product awareness differentiation, and demand. The strategic mission of the product marketer primarily involves evaluating market opportunities and developing and implementing strategies, plans, and programs that address those opportunities.

The primary responsibility of the Product Marketer is to analyze customer-oriented business opportunities, formulate plans that evaluate those business opportunities, and plan and guide the subsequent Marketing efforts. For example, the product marketer prepares the product business case and following approval, develops the go-to-marketing strategy.

Gathering market and customer requirements and converting these into market-worthy and ready products you successfully bring to market are both the beauty and challenge of the product marketing role. from market assessment and segmentation to validation and launch, from product positioning and pricing strategies to pipeline engineering and everything in between, Product Marketing ensures the company can adapt to changing customer buying behaviors and craft a product portfolio that drives business growth.

Buy Your Best-Practices Workbook

Drive Growth with Better Product Marketing

Your Product Marketing is responsible for the strategy and process of actually marketing the new product or service. Hopefully, your company has a new product development process, perhaps you are using the Stage-Gate process. As a result, you’ve completed the following as part of developing your new product:

• Validated the market’s need and desire for your new product or service
• Established a pricing and channel strategy
• Identified and prioritized the target market
• Developed a beta or pilot program to test the product, logistics, support, deployment

A key role of Product Marketing is to understand the market and market needs, with an emphasis on understanding the buyer of the company’s products and services. Product Marketing develops the positioning, messaging, and competitive differentiation, and enables the Sales and Marketing teams to ensure they are aligned and work efficiently to generate and close opportunities.

Stellar product marketers have at least these 6 skills. If you need help, follow the links to learn more about how we can take you to the next level.

1. market and customer requirements gathering
2. creating a competitive advantage
3. market and customer segmentation
4.  product and market validation
5. developing go-to-market strategies and demand generation initiatives
6.  marketing and sales alignment and enablement

When it comes to bringing the product to market, these three steps are just as important to ensure the product will be a market success and fall within the domain of

Product Marketing.

1. Positioning. Develop a strategic positioning statement that articulates the true value and benefit of the product within a competitive frame of reference. This will mean that the positioning cannot be developed from an inside-out perspective alone. A complete analysis of the competition’s positioning and messaging will be required to compete.
2. Messaging: Create and produce meaningful and compelling key messages and incorporate these into appropriate collateral, technical documentation, and sell sheets. Develop a message map to keep everyone on the same page.
3. Customer Support and Success: Develop your service and support strategies prior to a product beta so that you can also test your support strategies, documentation, training, and supportability. Be clear about how calls are going to be handled and how inquiries are going to be received, tracked, and resolved.

Ready to launch? Learn more about how we can help you successfully bring your product to market.

Comments are closed.