If you’ve eaten at a restaurant with daily specials, you already understand the importance of product marketing. A chef can come up with the most incredible new dish, but if your server doesn’t make it sound delicious, you aren’t going to order it.
In tech and consumer packaged goods, the responsibility of communicating the benefits of a product falls to a product marketer or product marketing manager.
Developing a new product is like cooking up a new dish, says Roxana Ontiveros, product marketing lead at Topicals. Roxana worked in beauty product development for three years before bringing her category expertise to Topicals, a skin care company working to treat and normalize chronic skin care conditions like eczema and hyperpigmentation.
If product development is akin to creating a new dish, product marketing is “being able to sell it on the menu,” Roxana says.
“Having a really good description, making sure it’s appetizing and making sure the customer knows what they’re getting when the plate comes.”
Learn more about how product marketing works and how to use it to launch and promote your products, increasing sales.
What is product marketing?
Product marketing is the process of identifying a product’s unique value and communicating that value to its target audience.
“It’s really about highlighting the value of the product and being able to tell a story around the product benefits and extracting the best out of that product,” Roxana says.
At Topicals, the product marketing process starts with ideation—creating something new that’s needed in the market. During product development, Roxana is responsible for ensuring the product concept is competitive and validating benefits claims.
When it’s time to launch the product, she works with Topicals’ sales and digital teams to craft messaging that speaks to the product’s unique benefits.
Product marketing vs. brand marketing
Brand marketing involves building a story around your brand to establish an emotional connection between your brand and your customers. Product marketing, on the other hand, focuses on how your product meets a specific need.
“Product marketing is a lot more product claims, benefits, and position, as opposed to brand marketing, which is more based on the visual story and emotional appeal,” Roxana says.
Sometimes, especially at smaller companies, marketing managers will be responsible for both product marketing and brand marketing. Marketing campaigns may include elements of both. Even on larger teams, product and brand marketers often work together to ensure alignment.
Product marketing vs. product management
Product management or development is the process of creating a product and ensuring it functions optimally for customers. Product marketing involves positioning the product in the market and communicating its benefits to your target audience.
“Product development is really about bringing a product to life,” Roxana says. “It’s almost more tangible than product marketing, which is less about the logistics of bringing a product to life and more about highlighting the value of the product and really being able to tell a story around the product benefits.”
Without product marketers, product managers wouldn’t have the insight they need to create an effective product roadmap, including ideas for new products or feedback for improving existing products. Without product managers, product marketers wouldn’t have a functioning product to sell to customers. These symbiotic roles are usually performed by different members of the product team working collaboratively.
What do product marketers do?
Product marketers, sometimes called product marketing managers (PMMs), are involved in every step of bringing a product to market. Some of their main responsibilities include:
Product positioning
Product positioning involves identifying a product’s unique value and is a core component of product marketing. Product marketers conduct market research to predict the need their product will fill. They then validate their positioning to ensure the target audience feels the same way.
“You know you’ve positioned the product correctly when (users) can clearly identify the problem you’ve solved without even stating the problem,” Roxana says.
For example, when launching Topicals’ Slick Salve lip balm, Roxana sent samples to her coworkers for feedback. Their responses—“it’s very moisturizing, it’s very slick on the lips”—assured Roxana that how she envisions the product and the way that she describes it resonates with what users experience when they apply it.
Other ways of validating your positioning include A/B testing different versions of your marketing copy, consumer perception studies, and customer surveys.
Product messaging
Product messaging is the language you use to talk about your product. To create effective messaging, Roxana says a product marketer needs excellent writing skills—and a basic understanding of human psychology.
“Certain words will trigger different feelings,” Roxana says. “One word can cause a customer to adopt the product versus another.”
For example, with Topicals’ acne scar primer, Sealed, Roxana found that the word “pockmark,” while technically correct, did not resonate with Topicals’ target audience.
“Some people don’t identify with having pockmarks,” says Roxana. “So they might be the right customer for (Sealed), but maybe we didn’t use the right language.”
According to Roxana, messaging is about answering a key question with the consumer in mind.
“How do we use words to make the journey to our product really simple and also make sure they can identify that we’ve provided a solution to their challenge?,” she says.
It doesn’t matter if your internal positioning is correct if your external messaging is off. In the case of Sealed, if people are not Googling “pockmarks,” they’re not going to find the product.
So instead of “pockmarks,” Topicals uses terms like “pitted acne scars” and “indented acne scars.”
After receiving buy-in on product messaging (which can involve lots of writing and rewriting), product marketers create marketing guidelines and launch assets using the agreed-upon messaging.
Product ideation
Product marketers don’t just promote existing products—they come up with ideas for products that will launch years from today.
“A lot of product marketing and capturing new audiences is almost intuiting what’s going to come next,” Roxana says.
At Topicals, product ideation involves a combination of social listening and industry learnings from Topicals’ lab partners, research publications, and conferences to predict future needs.
As a product marketer, Roxana’s job is to figure out what’s missing in the current market and then work with the product development team to deliver a product customers may not know they need yet. She also provides feedback on products in development.
Validating product claims
Product marketers are responsible for verifying any claims made about their product’s benefits.
In the skin care industry, backing up your product claims involves conducting clinical studies and consumer perception studies. For example, a clinical study of Topicals’ Sealed product found that 97% of participants noticed a decrease in the look of their indented acne scars. Sharing this research in marketing campaigns helps Topicals’ customers feel confident that the product will actually work.
You may support product claims by writing case studies—documents showcasing real customers’ success with your product.
Developing go-to-market strategy
Product marketers help develop the go-to-market (GTM) strategy for every new product launch. A GTM strategy is a plan for introducing a new product to the market.
“It’s almost as if you’re doing PR (public relations) for a product,” Roxana says. “It’s really focused on product positioning, being at a competitive price point, and also knowing that you’ve identified a key target audience that needs a solution that you’re providing.”
Marketing existing products
A product marketer does not stop working on a product after launch. It’s also their job to ensure existing products remain competitive.
“We always want to refresh and stay consistent with language that’s competitive and really hot right now,” Roxana says. At Topicals, this might mean updating claims testing, repackaging, or optimizing product detail pages.
Product marketing journey
Product marketers are involved in the entire product journey, from ideating new products to supporting existing products. Here’s how the product marketing journey might look for a hypothetical body wash spray product:
1. Market research
The product marketing journey starts with market research. Understanding what your competitors are doing and identifying gaps in the market is how you achieve product-market fit.
You also want to stay up to date on trends in your industry—such as new technology, ingredients, or form factors—in order to create innovative new products. For example, Roxana suggests that a beauty brand might take a successful product, like a body wash, and convert it into another form, like a spray.
To determine whether a sprayable body wash is worth the investment, a product marketer might note the growing popularity of cleansing facial sprays—and the lack of an equivalent body product on the market. They may conduct social listening to determine whether their target audience has expressed a desire for more spray-on products, which could indicate an existing, untapped market for a new product.
2. Product development
Product marketers help screen ideas early in the development process to ensure they align with business objectives, such as gaining new customers or generating new revenue from existing customers. A product marketing team also shares learnings from research with product developers and consults along the development process to make sure a product addresses consumer needs.
In the case of the hypothetical body wash spray, a product marketer might test sample formulations on themselves or coworkers. They may arrange for larger-scale testing and clinical studies to assure the safety and effectiveness of the product and suggest trending ingredients to try in the formulation.
3. Positioning and messaging
As the product development stage nears its end, product marketers get to craft positioning and messaging: how the company will share its product story with its audience. In the body wash spray example, positioning will involve solidifying the product’s key audiences and benefits.
Maybe the target audience for the body wash spray is busy urban professionals who like to exercise, but don’t have time to go home and shower between a workout class and their next appointment. In that case, you might want to emphasize the spray’s deodorizing ingredients and perhaps include a clinical claim about preventing body acne.
4. Product launch
The product launch is a dynamic and multichannel endeavor that requires product marketers to collaborate closely with other teams.
For example, if you’re getting ready to launch a body wash spray, you might:
- Work with product development to create a launch schedule based on how long it will take to create the spray formulation and packaging
- Create assets for sales teams and retailers to leverage the messaging that resonates with the target market of busy urban professionals
- Align with digital and creative teams to ensure consistent product messaging across the company’s website, social media, email, and blog
5. Post-launch
Product marketing strategy doesn’t end when the product hits the market. Product marketers will monitor sales and engagement. The goal is to learn which channels and messages are the most effective, and make decisions about turning down underperforming strategies and turning up winning ones.
For example, you might find that post-launch, your body wash spray has found surprising success among professional athletes, even though your original positioning and messaging focused on a different audience. You might decide to reposition the spray by showcasing its popularity with well-known athletes as social proof.
Product marketers will also collaborate with support and customer success teams to conduct surveys and analyze customer feedback. This ensures a product remains competitive throughout its product lifestyle.
If you’re marketing an innovative product, you may need to educate users on how to take advantage of new features. A product marketer may create content to facilitate user onboarding or increase feature adoption, ultimately cementing the product’s position in the market even further.
Product marketing FAQ
What is an example of product marketing?
An example of product marketing is skin care brand Topicals’ marketing for its lip balm, Slick Salve. The company’s product marketing lead ensured that the way the product is positioned aligns with consumer needs and the product’s specific benefits—emphasizing its moisturizing qualities and slick feel.
What do product marketers do?
A product marketer’s main responsibility is to identify and communicate a product’s unique value. They use market and product value to ensure both the actual product and its messaging resonate with target audiences.
Why is product marketing important?
Product marketing ensures brands are creating products their target audience needs and effectively highlighting those products’ value, all with the goal of driving product success and business growth.
How do I start product marketing?
If you’re interested in product marketing as a career, Topicals product marketing lead Roxana Ontiveros recommends searching for a school with a product marketing program. She also recommends finding another way to build relationships in your field, whether it’s tech or CPG. Once you build relationships, Roxana suggests finding an entry-level position in your industry to learn as much as possible so you can become a subject matter expert.
