Last century’s PC market shone with IBM’s concise slogan, “Think”. Its products conveyed a strong positioning: Professional. Work-oriented. Serious. That’s what a computer was.
Then, Apple turned it into a fun and inspiring device with its catchy “Think different”.
The right product marketing strategy results in your customer’s craving to buy at this very moment or miss a priceless opportunity. The parts, technical capabilities, or any product specifications don’t influence buying decisions as much as the right product strategy — you need it, whether you want to launch a new product or enter a new market with an existing one.
In this guide, we will discuss digital product marketing strategy, its benefits, and development steps, together with the KPIs you need to track to make sure it’s reaching the goals you set.
What is product marketing?
Simply put, product marketing is getting from point A (product concept) to point B (a buying decision). During this process, you shape the demand for your product, adjust your product due to documented client needs and expectations, and prove its value. It begins with market research, analysis of your niche and competitors, iterations, creating a sales strategy, and driving customers to engage with it.
This strategy helps you get valuable benefits:
Develop product features accurately,
Shape user understanding of your product
Establish a sharper positioning
Optimize retention and enhance sales support to drive revenues.
To bridge the product and marketing strategy, you need to understand how distinct it is.
How is product marketing different from the other types of marketing?
To get your product marketing right, and especially, build an efficient software marketing strategy, you need to mentally divide it from the other types of marketing efforts. Let’s start with how it differs from brand marketing.
What is the difference between product marketing vs brand marketing?
These two phenomena are closely related and share some goals — your product should express and confirm your brand’s positioning and values; otherwise, the disconnect will cause the loss of trust in your business. However, some aspects are very different:
Focus. Think of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, a great example of brand marketing building the unique company identity to set an emotional connection. Meanwhile, product marketing is focused on a product’s features, as if presenting Nike’s new sneakers’ features, showing benefits, and presenting unique value for runners.
Timeline. Let’s take Coca-Cola which has been creating a special brand history and image for years to get crowds of loyal fans only buying their drink for Christmas. Meanwhile, a typical product marketing’s cycle can be promoting a specific new taste, like cherry or vanilla, to boost sales and immediate revenue.
Messaging. Brand marketing shares values, mission, and personality, like Microsoft communicating their company as the one for “empowering every person and organization on the planet”, while for their product strategy for Teams, they communicate stability, with 30h-max meeting length possible with their product.
Audience. Let’s review Tesla’s positioning for the audience of modern eco-concious drivers, while their product marketing efforts for new EV focuses on the ability to cover 400-mile range, targeting the audience segment that need truly long rides.
Metrics for success. As defined by Journal of Business Research, brand marketing tracks brand sentiment, share of search, brand awareness, and long-term customer lifetime value. On the flip side, Pragmatic Institute sees these KPIs most important for product marketing: adoption rates, retention rates, churn rates, average selling price, close rates, and customer acquisition cost from specific campaigns or product launches.
Now that this distinction has been figured out, let’s focus on some other significant breakdown.
What is the difference between product marketing vs content marketing?
This question is also complex — to promote a product, you will need to use content marketing. However, there are also some points where they differ:
Purpose. Content marketing builds expertise and retention through information, like Salesforce's 2023’s effort to attract sales professionals with the new Salesblazer trail with great topical content that ended in 5 million unique page views and 15,000 more new Slack uses. Meanwhile, Salesforce's product marketing for the same Slack showcases specific platform capabilities and creates urgency to join the community.
Types of content. Here, the difference is huge. Content marketing experts craft guides, blogs, and varied assets that present business offerings and benefits. HubSpot's content marketing creates comprehensive guides, blog posts, and whitepapers about business growth, but HubSpot's product marketing develops case studies, product demos, and ROI calculators for their sales and marketing products to underline specific gains.
Sales focus. Adobe's content marketing says: no pressure, just read this to be more aware. It shares creative tutorials and design inspiration to engage creative community. Adobe's product marketing targets qualified prospects, highlighting Creative Cloud's specific features and subscription benefits.
Engagement strategy. As stated by 87% of marketers, it’s content marketing that drives engagement and awareness, with keyword optimization and SEO to be discovered among available options. In turn, product marketing helps reach qualified prospects via LinkedIn ads, like Atlassian did (and got 3.6x return on ad spend, by the way).
Final goal. Long-term relationships and thought leadership are the ultimate signs that your content marketing is successful. Meanwhile, product marketing roles involve moving prospects through the sales funnel to the final purchase.
Same with the next comparison — sharing some channels and principles, but having some notable distinctions.
What is the difference between product marketing vs digital marketing?
For modern marketing, especially for software product marketing, this is a tricky topic. With no physical asset to purchase, most of the promotional efforts you do will be digital. But there are still some aspects to note:
Channel strategy. Digital marketing might use a wild mix of channels, but product marketing can even exceed it with physical ones. For instance, by Digital Marketing Institute, Netflix's digital marketers use SEO for content discovery, social media for engagement, and email for personalized recommendations. Well, Netflix's product marketing includes both digital campaigns and offline partnerships, maintaining a consistent $2 billion marketing budget split between brand and individual title promotion.
Scope. Digital marketing is in fact, focused on executing digital campaigns on digital channels (yes, the three “digital” were a deliberate pun), while the scope of product marketing includes pricing, positioning, and efforts to promote it for sales. Let’s take Spotify’s social media advertising generating 82 billion TikTok views for viral content, and Spotify’s family plan pricing promoted with data from 1 million beta users who helped drive initial growth. Different scope, equally great focus - you can see the results.
Expertise. It takes a varied expertise to be a digital marketer. Platform algorithms, ad targeting, and channel optimization are a large part of this knowledge. However, it’s different for product marketing, as it requires an understanding of customer research, competitive positioning, and sales enablement.
Approach. Digital marketing optimizes performance on individual channels. LinkedIn's digital marketing takes a platform-specific approach, running micro-campaigns, reducing costs while improving tracking and visibility. LinkedIn's product marketing takes an integrated approach, combining Sponsored Content with Sponsored InMail.
Responsibility. Digital marketing owns campaign orchestration and channel performance , and product marketing retains control over the overall product story from market research to sales pitch development.
To get product marketing and sales through varied channels to work for you, you need to weave it closely with product management. They are similar, but still have a lot to differentiate.
Understanding product marketing vs product management distinctions
To break this down in a matter-of-fact way, let’s look at these roles and define the differences in their responsibilities and expectations.
Product marketing manager vs. product manager — what are the differences between these roles?
Let’s admit — these experts’ work runs in parallel. However, the functions and results of their processes are different.
Daily focus. “A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat,” says Deep Nishar. It’s true - tracking development boards, managing engineering teams, and defining product requirements are the day-to-day duties of a product manager. Meanwhile, product marketing responsibilities focus on campaign performance measurement, sales enablement, and go-to-market strategy execution - an equally important but different scope.
Stakeholders. Product managers communicate primarily with internal groups like developers, designers, and user researchers. Product marketing managers communicate extensively with external groups like sales teams, customers, and market analysts.
Main deliverables. Product managers focus on what products should be and create respective documents, such as product requirement documents (PRDs), feature specification sheets, and roadmaps for development. Product marketing management involves creating messaging frameworks, launch plans, and sales enablement materials.
KPIs. Product managers measure success with product performance metrics, user satisfaction scores, and feature adoption percentages. The metrics for a product marketing manager are different. For instance, Hotjar provides 6 main KPIs, from product and pricing page traffic to conversion rates and customer churn.
No matter how different these roles are, these two stakeholders should sit together and create a very important document — a product vision statement.
Product vision statement
At the first step, the product manager and product marketing manager roles are involved in creating a shared deliverable: a vision statement. It provides the essence and the global purpose of a product or a family of products and establishes directions for product development and marketing activities.
The product vision statement is supposed to answer three basic questions to shape the future product planning strategy:
Who will use it? — Identifying your target users and key users.
What are the issues that the product solves? — Describing the primary pain points your product solves.
How is a product's success determined? — Creating objective success criteria and results.
Since we focus on software product marketing, let’s take, for instance, a project management software for remote teams, and try to understand what a product vision statement will look like.
This product is intended to simplify collaboration, task management, and tracking of progress for distributed teams whose coordination is hindered by different time zones and locations.
The target audience includes distributed teams, project managers, and remote teams.
The issues it addresses are the loopholes in communication, transparency of tasks, deadlines management, and coordination issues among teams.
The metrics for success will be how productivity will increase per project, how much collaboration between teams improves, and how much lower the project delay rate is.
With these findings on board, a product manager and a product marketing manager can define the next product vision statement:
"To be the market-leading platform for cross-team project management that allows stakeholders and departments to communicate easily, reach all project timeline goals, and defy any issue in time zones and global collaboration.”
With this vision statement established, both product marketing and product management teams now share a north star to guide their decisions. Product managers choose which features to invest in that maximize remote collaboration, and product marketing managers craft messaging that resonates with distributed teams that are afflicted by coordination problems.
With this foundation shared, they can both make their strategy and delivery consistent.
7 steps to build a marketing strategy for software development companies
We understand that even knowing the key differences between marketing roles and the basics of product development isn’t enough to come up with a workable roadmap to promote your product. This is why, using 15 years of moving digital solutions from the discovery phase to marketing, we have compiled this guide on marketing software products.
Market analysis
Market research, as the first step for an end to end marketing strategy, should always start with a strategic planning because it shows opportunities for profit, threats to the business, and the competitive realities any market is facing. By understanding the current market, you can identify gaps, validate demand for your product, and execute your value proposition strategy.
To create an easy to customize product marketing strategy template, let’s take a look at an example of a SaaS AI-based chatbot software for client support and execute a theoretical primary and secondary market research.
For the primary research, you could start by surveying support reps of SaaS products and discover pain points with the solutions they use. For the client user side, interview the companies that are already using chatbot software. During interviews, try to see implementation pain points and requests for the most urgent feature sets.
Within secondary research, study credible industry reports. They will show you the percentages of SaaS businesses that are planning on increasing the budget for customer support automation to help you see the market share you aim at. Then, remember to analyze case studies of your direct competitors, as well as reviews from the users to identify shared needs and things that are missing.
Although the market research includes some elements of competitor analysis, the next step is to conduct a more thorough analysis of your product’s rivals — this won’t just inform your feature development, but will direct you to the right pricing and promotion strategies. For our SaaS customer example, let’s break down competitive research strategies:
For direct competitors analysis, review existing competitors (you can take Intercom or Zendesk Chat as examples), and look at their pricing/feature sets and customer reviews. Review their messaging, product benefits, and try to spot gaps in their product based marketing strategy.
To study your indirect competitors, collect information on the substitute products (such as help desk software, live chat software, and custom internal systems) that your potential client companies may adopt instead of the specialized chatbot software you build.
The steps you’ve made to this point feed insights into your SWOT analysis that you should perform as your next step. Here’s what every letter of SWOT may mean for our SaaS case:
Strengths. Improved AI capabilities, easy-to-implement SaaS integrations, and a firm commitment to the pricing model.
Weaknesses. Less brand recognition than competitors who have been in the market for longer, and a lack of dedicated customer support staff to assist with customer inquiries.
Opportunities. Increased interest in automating customer service; more companies accepting the fact that AI can be used in the application provided to end users.
Threats. Market saturation with only a few established competitors, and an economic downturn that could cut software expenditure budgets.
After the market research is finished and the basis for the further digital product marketing strategy roadmap is formed, let’s move on to the next step using the same product example.
Target audience definition
Knowing your target customers, their needs, pains, and forming comprehensive profiles based on this data enables you to tailor your messaging, product features, and the overall marketing strategy for software product you are aiming to promote. Once you understand who your target audience is, you can use your resources on the most likely prospects to close sales and successfully deliver your products.
Let’s define the most important TA analysis points for our product example:
The target customers for this SaaS product would be the Directors of Customer Support for mid-market SaaS Companies, who are currently feeling pressure from the overwhelming volume of support tickets, with a growing need to reduce response times and costs for support. These directors typically have $50K to $200K budgets for support tools, and are typically measured on customer satisfaction scores, the number of tickets closed, and the overall efficiency of their support team.
Unique Selling Proposition (UVP) for such a product could be "The only chatbot software that learns from your existing support tickets and provides instant, accurate answers while turning over complex issues to human agents."
There is a nuance here: the digital marketing strategy for new product launch would be different at this step compared to the marketing efforts to make when you are promoting the same product for a new market or to the same market after specific product upgrades. For new markets, you should consider geo-based profiles of the stakeholders from the new country or region, and for the updated existing product, consider analyzing the leads you currently have for their purchase needs and intents in regards to the features and integrations you are adding.
Positioning and messaging
Effective positioning helps differentiate the product you market. At the same time, your messaging communicates that exact positioning in clear terms that your target audience understands. Together, they form a compelling message, clearly articulating your ideal customer's needs and motivations.
Let’s now enrich our software product strategy for the SaaS client support product with the proper positioning and messaging together:
Our positioning statement could sound like "For customer support teams at scaling SaaS businesses who are struggling to keep up with quality support as the volume of tickets increases, our chatbot software is an intelligent automation platform that learns from your existing knowledge base to provide accurate instant answers while retaining the human element for complicated problems."
The key messages in this case would be aimed at speaking to support directors' real pain points, while showing off the product's ability to learn and integrate into their environment.
Efficiency: "Reduce response time from hours to seconds while your team focuses on complicated customer challenges."
Intelligence: "Our AI learns from the actual conversations taking place in your support department, not predefined training data."
Integration: "Works seamlessly with what your team already uses — no change to your existing tools and workflows."
Positioning, as one of the main product marketing deliverables, should also reflect your brand values and be closely aligned with them. The same concerns the next step of building your strategy — you will see why.
Pricing strategy definition
Pricing should balance customer value perception versus business profit goals. Your pricing strategy should reflect your positioning, target market budget expectations, and competitive forces. You are limited by all these factors: if your brand image is a cost-efficient friendly helper tools creator, your product pricing cannot be premium (and your typical user won’t appreciate it either), but if you set your margins too low, the ROI won’t justify the investment.
As we defined the target market and formed the positioning in a certain way, let’s now define the related pricing product strategies components for our SaaS product. The pricing model, as defined best by the competitor insights, would be a subscription fee with several gradual tiers by conversation volume per month and any additional features. Let’s take Intercom product as an example:
A starter plan could cost $29 per seat per month and would offer an AI agent at $0.99 per resolution, Messenger, shared inbox and ticketing system, and pre-built reports.
A professional plan would offer multiple team inboxes, workflows automation builder, and private and multilingual help center for $85 per seat per month with 20 free seats.
An enterprise plan would cost a premium $132 per seat per month for SSO & identity management, service level agreements (SLAs), and multibrand Messenger/Help Center and 50 free seats.
A custom plan would offer a convenient calculator for every company to define the cost based on the number of conversations and necessary integrations.
Now that you have pricing tiers defined, it’s time to finally launch your product (but first, plan it as well).
Product launch planning
Probably, the best motto for the software marketing plan for a successful launch is “be at the right place, at the right time”. For an efficient launch, your task is to create a unique momentum and expectation, timing strategically, doing an outreach to the right target groups with clear and working messages, and using campaign performance data for improvements.
Considering the previous steps, here’s what the launch strategy for our customer support chatbot can be, divided into 3 steps:
Pre-launch. Develop a beta program with the chosen existing customers, create a content library with demo videos and case studies, and grow segmented email lists through webinar series how AI chatbots like yours improve client support operations. These steps will show your expertise, educate on the product features and benefits, and heat up purchase intent.
Launch. Launch on Product Hunt, write insightful product marketing blogs on customer support-related resources, and execute sales outreach to warm leads identified through the market research phase.
Post-launch. Launch a content marketing campaign using customer success stories, attend applicable SaaS conferences, roll out referral programs, and optimize conversion funnel based on early user behavior data.
Again, this is more of a new product marketing strategy for launch. For new markets, consider the new target audience research and adjust your launch strategy using the appropriate channels and communicating the benefits prone for this market’s needs.
Promotion strategy
If positioning shapes your message, promotion delivers it through the right channels, driving conversions along the way. There are various channels to show your product, communicate its value, create urgency, and test which one generates the best quality leads, how they behave, and use their behavioral data and sentiment to inform the next campaigns.
Often, you should hire a conversion optimization specialist to evaluate user behavior to identify friction points in their journey, and implement data-driven methodologies to optimize sales, ultimately enhancing ROI and ensuring your product strategy marketing approach drives action.
Here’s what a promotion can look like for our AI support chatbot:
For content marketing, publish blogs on automated customer support regularly, create and present whitepapers that can be downloaded (giving you filled forms and better leads), and urge industry experts and clients to share their success stories.
For digital marketing, use LinkedIn content to customer support directors at SaaS companies; Google Ads for search terms "customer support automation" and "chatbot for SaaS";as well as retargeting website visitors with product demo promotions.
For partnership marketing, create integration partnerships with leading help desk software solutions, co-market with customer success consultants; sponsorship of customer support industry events and conferences.
Refine your content constantly and update it with every review and successful case from your customers — it builds trust that lowers the cost of acquiring new customers.
Measuring product success
Measuring the right numbers yields insights into market performance and informs strategic realignments. Periodic measurement indicates what is succeeding, what is failing, and where to place emphasis in the future.
Analyzing the success of your product, take into account several factors — specific KPIs and metrics that you regularly measure, and the customer feedback showing before and after of your product implementation. Here is how a product marketing strategist would define the key metrics and KPIs to track:
Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Measure total marketing and sales costs divided by new customers gained. If you acquired 65 new customers in a month and your budget for an advertising campaign was $12,000, your CAC is $200. Compare it with your planned CAC to determine the success rate.
Customer lifetime value (CLV). Divide average monthly value of subscription by average lifetime of customer. If your average customer pays $150 monthly and stays for 24 months, your CLV is $3,600. This metric is very important, as it determines how much you can spend on acquisition while maintaining profitability.
Conversion rate. Throughout all the acquisition channels you use, calculate trial-to-paid conversion rate. Throughout all the acquisition channels you use, calculate trial-to-paid conversion rate. If 500 users start free trials and 75 become paying customers, your conversion rate is 15%, which is considered very high.
Net Promoter score (NPS). Survey customers quarterly about the experience using your product. Target NPS are usually 50+. Survey customers quarterly about the experience using your product. Target NPS are usually 50+. If 60% of respondents are promoters and 10% are detractors, your NPS is 50.
Churn rate. Track monthly subscription cancels to identify areas of retention problems. If you start with 1,000 customers and lose 50 in a month, your churn rate is 5%, which is the threshold you shouldn’t exceed for sustainable growth.
Revenue growth: Monitor month-over-month recurring revenue growth and expansion revenue from existing customers increasing plans. If last month's revenue was $100,000 and this month is $108,000, you have 8% growth.
Product usage metrics. Track daily active conversations, feature adoption rates, and new customer time-to-value. If 2,000 of your 3,000 customers use the product daily, your daily active user rate is 67% (and anything above 50% is considered great).
Customer feedback is another critical source to identify areas for improvement of your product and inform your next software development marketing efforts. By the way, this data can be taken from varied sources:
Monitor the ratings and comments your clients leave on software review platforms like G2, TrustRadius, or Capterra, follow your product mentions on social media, Quora, and Reddit.
Conduct monthly customer interviews where you collect feedback on feature requests, pains your users face, and successful cases of usage.
Review customer support requests to discover common implementation problems and product gaps to understand what functionality should be improved.
Analyze in-product behavior patterns to see what features are driving retention and what features are leading to confusion and customer churn.
TrustRadius
This ends our list of the steps for a successful digital product strategy — but in reality, it never ends this simply. Like any type of marketing, promoting your product goes in iterative cycles, where each step informs the other, and requires agile development — otherwise, you can face some typical mistakes.
5 common mistakes in digital product marketing strategy
There’s both science and art to successful software product marketing, and even established companies and experienced specialists can misstep. Let’s review the most typical product marketing mistakes with the examples of real companies, and even a breakdown of COAX’s own product failure.
Mistake 1. Confusing product naming and value proposition
When you name several different products similarly (often when you want to use existing brand equity by merging successful product names with new ones), it often leads to confusion and causes customers to go an extra mile to understand what they're buying.
The problem can further escalate with products that are named the same, yet have different capabilities, price structures, and audiences. It shifts understanding of product differences to the customer, creating friction in the purchase process and decreasing conversion rates.
Microsoft's Copilot is an example. Microsoft released multiple products named "Copilot" with different capabilities and price structures. Microsoft Copilot Chat is a free offering that provides the simplest responses. Microsoft 365 Copilot runs $30 per user monthly and integrates enterprise data. Then, there’s Copilot Studio, which allows businesses to build their custom AI agents. The question is, do these products’ names make any logical difference to you?
Lessons learned:
Use distinct names for products with different capabilities and pricing.
Test product names with target customers before launch.
Consider the long-term confusion costs of similar naming schemes.
There are some product marketing tools to help you avoid this issue — for instance, Qualtrics will analyze market sentiment to define the best names for your brand and products.
Mistake 2. Inadequate market research and target audience validation
This error happens during the product development marketing strategy when companies assume, based on limited data, that the market they operate in, they focus on the most traditional competitors, or miss out on emerging segments in the market. This leads companies to spend significant amounts of money developing products and services that aren't real market needs, they have little more than a poor product market fit, and they've wasted their time, efforts, and money (and only notice when they have to start anew months after).
Yes, this is what happened to COAX when we were developing Hosty, a hospitality management software.
There have been numerous issues to what we did: flawed market research and target audience validation, concentrating on large hotel chains, and overlooking the vacation rental market that represented a significant opportunity. Our user research was limited to a handful of interviews with hotel managers, ignoring small property owners, vacation rental managers, and boutique hotel operators. Our questions were vague, and we didn’t go deep into the actual workflows. To make it worse, we focused on a desktop version, failing to realise that property managers and owners use a phone on the go and need mobile functionality. And yes, we did start anew — and made it right with all the lessons learned.
Conduct a comprehensive market analysis that includes emerging trends and diverse segments.
Diversify research samples to include various types of potential customers.
Ask specific, targeted questions focused on user pain points and workflows.
Stay updated on industry trends and technological shifts that affect user behavior.
We share this story proudly and openly now, as we never hide our mistakes, and know how to learn from them. Do similar with your product marketing strategy framework — keep it adaptable, and make every piece of data you learn (even of declining KPIs and negative reviews) feed into your future improvements.
Mistake 3. Lack of content strategy documentation
When teams create content without clear tech product marketing strategy documentation, they create redundant content that confuses search engines. When there is no content governance in place, different departments create their content in silos. Most of the time, they are not even aware that they are targeting the same keywords, promoting overlapping topics, with content that then competes for the same topic internally, ending in mixed messaging and declining search rankings and visibility.
Such a content problem happened to HubSpot, whose teams had creating multiple pieces of content targeting the same keywords like "how to learn SEO" for years, with different contributors creating content without proper documentation. Expectedly, it blew down rankings and created content debt.
Lessons learned:
Document your content strategy in an accessible, shared location.
Create a content audit process to identify and eliminate duplicate content.
Establish clear content ownership and approval processes.
Regularly review and update your content inventory.
Fixing this issue requires a difficult and costly process. At COAX, we have vast experience feeding our organic search engine optimization services to promote your products for search engines and AI-based systems like LLM SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). For instance, by improving page loading speed from 6-8 to 0.5 seconds for our antique marketplace client, we boosted their core vitals from below 20 to 90+, increasing their website traffic and optimizing SEO to help them restore and even enhance their positions.
Mistake 4. Aggressive link building and SEO manipulation
When companies prefer to try to obtain quick SEO wins through manipulation, they start actively buying links from low-quality sites and using private blog networks to create false popularity signals. In most cases, this poorly constructed popularity signal can only be understood through long-term technical manipulations.
With such a product marketing plan, companies are putting themselves at risk of losing years of organic growth and damaging the authority of their domain through penalties.
To illustrate this point, let's refer again to HubSpot. Recently, HubSpot's blog saw its SEO traffic decrease by more than 80%. They partnered with a couple of link-building agencies and began accumulating a staggering number of backlinks, especially compared to their organic traffic signals. When Google considered their backlinks number to against their organic traffic and authority, the artificiality in HubSpot's link profile was clear, leading to the traffic damage.
Lessons learned:
Build domain authority through legitimate PR and co-marketing campaigns.
Focus on creating valuable content that naturally attracts quality backlinks.
Avoid linking to spammy sites or publishing low-quality guest posts.
Monitor your backlink profile for quality versus quantity ratios.
The idea is simple: the more transparent and fair your product marketing design and decisions are, the better.
Mistake 5. Overpromising on product capabilities
Don’t be a part of the software development joke about marketing products with features that don't exist or aren't ready. Of course, the rival pressure or the goal to bring your software marketing strategy into execution faster may push you to do it, but you are risking your audience’s trust when they fail to try the new capabilities they bought your product for.
As an example, Amazon announced a great new generative AI-powered Alexa in September 2023, showing off conversational abilities that seemed to rival ChatGPT. However, the release of such an update never happened, and former employees revealed the demo was just a prototype showcase, as there was never the technological background to implement it.
Lessons learned:
Ensure product capabilities match marketing claims before public announcements.
Clearly communicate timelines and availability when demoing future features.
Build product readiness before launching marketing campaigns.
Have backup plans when technical challenges delay product delivery.
Showing off imaginary features should live in anecdotes, not in real product marketing for technology companies.
How COAX powers your product marketing
At COAX, we have a unique mix of expertise: product development for our clients strengthened our knowledge of discovery techniques, and crafting and marketing our company products gave us priceless experience. This is why our digital marketing strategy services are based on the unique insights from creating and promoting products in travel, logistics, e-commerce, healthcare, financial services, and other fields.
Our team of experienced marketers, conversion rate optimization specialists, and content writers will use proven techniques to conduct a deep market and competitive analysis, define your target audience and compelling messaging, and then develop a product marketing content strategy for precisely defined groups and channels. Throughout the whole process, we monitor your campaign performance and tune it accordingly using flexible Agile methodologies.
With us, you get a strategy that leads to increased sales and competitive advantage with accurately calculated efforts.
FAQ
What is product strategy in marketing?
As described in the “Analysis of Marketing Strategies for New Products” research, a product strategy in marketing represents a full plan that describes how the product will be priced, positioned, and promoted in order to achieve a set of business goals while satisfying the needs of the target consumer. It is essentially a blueprint that defines all future marketing actions for the product.
How do marketers use data to develop product strategies?
Marketers use data analytics to provide valuable insights into customer behavior, market conditions, competitors, and product metrics, which inform their decisions on positioning, pricing, and target audience. The benefit is that they can prove their assumptions, find new opportunities in the market, and adapt their messaging for different segments. You can find more information in “Market Segmentation Analysis”by Sara Dolnicar, or “Marketing Analytics” by Mike Grigsby.
What are the two steps in developing a marketing strategy?
The so-called two-step direct response marketing, as used by the Digital School of Marketing, consists of thorough market research and analysis so that the firm understands its target audience, competitive environment, market size, and customer wants/needs. This deep understanding serves as the platform for maturing strategic decisions. The second step is formulating the strategic framework, including value propositions, marketing objectives, target segments, and the tactical marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion).
What are the common types of product marketing strategy?
According to a research published in the American Journal of Economic and Management Business, some popular strategies for product marketing include the differentiation strategy that highlights your product's unique features or benefits, the cost leadership strategy that is all about competition based on price and value, the niche or focus strategy that targets specific market segments, and the penetration strategy that focuses on gaining market share through aggressive pricing or promotion. Other options are a premium positioning strategy, focused on high-end markets, that delivers superior quality; a competitive strategy that directly competes with competitors; and an innovation strategy that is based on your product's latest technology.
What are the benefits of outsourcing product marketing for software companies?
Outsourcing a product's marketing allows software companies to gain access to expert knowledge and proven practices that guarantee faster time to market and better marketing strategies. Outsourcing provides companies the ultimate flexibility to expand or contract the marketing efforts, lead segments, and channels based on the stage of the product life cycle and the competitive landscape, ending in up to 30% reduction on marketing costs, according to 2024 Deloitte survey. When working with providers like COAX, you get years of proven experience working to promote your product and drive immediate sales and sustained growth.
