Product marketing

From ArticleWorld

Marketing being a judicious mix of the golden P’s - Product, Pricing, Placement and promotion. The most important being the first P – the Product. Product Marketing and is concerned with the outbound marketing tasks such as the marketing of the product to prospects, customers, and others. This differs from product management which handles things such as product development.

Product marketing questions

There are four major questions that are addressed by product marketing in businesses. These are:

• What products will be offered? – This question addresses the types of products that will be offered
• Who will be the target customers? – This identifies the boundaries between the customers being targeted and those that fall outside of the market segments.
• How will the products reach the target customers? – This handles the distribution schemes to be used in getting the products to the customers.
• Why will customers choose this product in preference to others? – This identifies the properties or qualities of the product that make it different and better than the competitors products.

Role of the product marketing manager

The product marketing manager is required in most instances to create a marketing requirements document (MRD), which is used by product managers to create the more complete product requirements document (PRD). In cases where the product manager compiles both documents the marketing manager has more outbound tasks such as product demonstrations and the creation of marketing collateral. These include documents such as hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets and case studies.

The skills required by the product marketing manager therefore include market research, technical writing and other business activities such as conducting ROI and NPV analyses. These analyses give vital information regarding technology investments and strategies into changing the decision criteria of the customers into choosing the company's product versus the competitor's product.