The Complete Product Marketing Guide

Product marketing promotes your company’s products and aims to convince potential customers that what you’re selling fits their needs and is worth buying.

Product marketers spend their time understanding customer needs, promoting product benefits, and finding ways to showcase how their offerings stand out from the competition.

If you’re in product marketing, your main priorities include:

• Researching what customers want and need.
• Identifying how your product benefits customers and solves their problems.
• Developing messaging, positioning, and content to educate and excite potential buyers.
• Determining the right personas, audiences, and channels to reach them.
• Convincing customers to choose your product over alternatives.

Effective product marketing is a mix of analytics, communication, good old-fashioned persuasion, and lots of collaboration.

Over 88.3% of product marketers collaborate with other organizational teams, including sales, designers, developers, and more.

That’s because while sales teams concentrate on closing deals, product marketers lay the groundwork for how sellers and the rest of the organization talk about your product, who they should talk to, and attract new customers with the right messaging to feed the funnel. They’re also often a conduit between customers and product design teams, providing invaluable insight into customer feedback and needs.

Product marketing is crucial to brand success. It drives interest, desire, and conversions. Without it, even the most impressive products struggle to find a solid audience.

Here’s a closer look at why it matters.

Gets the word out

With so much competition in the marketplace, potential customers are unlikely to discover your product by accident. Product marketing raises awareness through consistent messaging that cuts through the noise.

Connects benefits to features

Talking to prospects about your product features isn’t enough. Savvy product marketers focus on customer benefits and talk about your product in the context of a specific user’s needs and the pain points it addresses.

Positions value

There are always alternatives to your product—and good product marketers don’t overlook this fact. Instead, they ensure messaging and content directly compare your solution to competitors.

By positioning your value, you showcase why customers should buy your product over other options.

Informs and educates

Your demand generation teams create temptation and intrigue. However, product marketing uses helpful education and storytelling about your product’s use cases to seal the deal—is it right for the user? How does it help them?

Content such as demos, trials, data sheets, and use case guides equips customers to make sound buying decisions.

So, how do you know if your product marketing team’s creative messaging and content are really working?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics help you see what content is performing well and what needs revisiting.

You can then use the numbers to fine-tune your efforts and bring accountability and precision to your campaigns, enhancing your future marketing return on investment (ROI). You’ll be able to confidently invest more in the channels and tactics that pay off.

Let’s examine top metrics for gauging product marketing success.

Content engagement

Downloads, social shares, comments, clicks, and reactions help quantify how well your content resonates with your audience. These signs tell you which audiences find your information most relevant, opening the doors for future nurturing.

Lead generation

Beyond general site traffic, marketers want to see specific user interest and engagement. Demo sign-ups, content downloads, and email newsletter registrations are good signs that you’ve piqued someone’s interest.

Website traffic

If marketing content isn’t driving site visitors, it needs reworking. Page views, unique visitors, campaign referrals, and average time on your site can indicate how your marketing assets are performing.

Revenue impact

If your revenue increases, your marketing tactics are likely working. Tie your campaign elements to closed sales to optimize the effectiveness of themes and specific channels.

Look at the cost of customer acquisition, too—it’s no use spending to attract customers if they don’t convert or become repeat buyers.

Clear product marketing goals enable you to prioritize your content, campaign, and product strategies.

With a laser focus on audience, achievability, and relevant metrics, these tips help you turn high-level ideas into actionable product roadmaps.

Here’s how to define goals that deliver excellent results.

Align to company objectives

Make sure your marketing goals map to key company targets for growth, market expansion, and revenue. This helps tie your aims directly to crucial business outcomes.

Clarify who your buyers are

When setting objectives, consider your buyers’ specific needs and preferences, outline your target demographics, and create an ideal customer profile (ICP).

With one in five products reportedly failing to meet customer needs, understanding who your buyers are and delivering what they want is critical.

Use measurable metrics

Each goal should include defined metrics, such as website visits, conversion rates, and content downloads. Quantifiable targets are essential for tracking progress.

Set a realistic scope

Balance your ambition with practicality. Look at your resources and your team's capacity. It’s better to nail three robust goals than struggle with ten unrealistic ones.

Revisit and refresh

The best product marketing teams don’t leave goals static for too long because they can lose relevance and become too easy to achieve or unfeasible. Good marketers reevaluate their progress and refresh goal metrics regularly, usually quarterly or bi-annually.

It takes products roughly 196 days to reach their highest distribution point after launch, so it’s sensible to assess and check in with your objectives after this point.

A solid strategy is vital for product marketing success. One of the biggest reasons product launches fail is a “lack of preparation.”

Most plans involve a handful of core elements. These steps help better connect your product with the audiences who need it most.

1. Define your target audience

Understand who you want to reach and outline your audience.

If you sell to businesses, look at buyers’ roles, industry, company size, and location. For direct-to-consumer (D2C) products, you may analyze buyers’ age, location, other interests, and more.

Go deeper to paint a picture of your perfect buyer persona, including details like pain points and likes. This core profile helps guide your strategy and messaging.

2. Get to know your competitors

Research your competitors' offerings, messaging, and content. What tones or approaches do they use? How are they using different channels to engage buyers?

Auditing your competitive landscape helps clarify your positioning to catch buyers’ eyes. It also reveals gaps where your marketing could better address your audience’s needs than your rivals.

3. Choose your marketing channels

Knowing your buyer profiles and competitors enables you to select which channels to concentrate on for the best reach and response.

Include owned channels, like your website and blog, and paid channels, such as social ads and search marketing. Connect your choices to goals for multi-touch attribution.

4. Set your goals

As mentioned, goals help keep you in check and on the right path.

Attach specific metrics to your goals, such as website conversions, demo requests, and lead nurturing rates.

For better alignment, share these goals with your broader marketing, sales, and product teams—plus anyone else who should be involved.

5. Plan your product launch

Now for the fun part—launching your product!

Make a coordinated plan to introduce your product to the world, showcasing it in the best way possible.

Look at the different launch phases, including pre-launch content teasers that help drive buzz to post-launch engagement with deeper education.

Time your major content assets and campaigns carefully to sustain interest before, during, and after the launch. Going viral is great, but you also want to ensure your product sticks around for the long haul.

Product marketing success depends on equal parts data and creativity—that’s where a digital analytics platform like Amplitude comes in.

Tracking all user actions with your apps, websites, and marketing channels reveals granular details of engagement, conversions, and churn risk.

With Ampltidue, product marketers gain ultimate visibility into:

• Behavior flows: See the sequences that drive conversions and points where users typically abandon their journey.

• User segmentation: Divide audiences into custom groups by activity, loyalty, and other behavioral attributes.

• Feature adoption: Determine what features get low, medium, and high engagement, spotting underused and under-promoted areas.

• Conversion funnels: Pinpoint how users move through sign-ups, trials, purchases, and beyond to optimize your funnel.

These insights and intuitive analyses make it easier for marketers to enhance performance based on actual buyer behaviors—not guesswork or intuition.

Amplify your product marketing results at every turn. Reveal opportunities to strengthen your messaging and engage, convert, and retain target audiences across your channels.

Competitive differentiation has never been clearer or more actionable. Contact our sales team today to see how Amplitude can help you harness your data.