Product Marketing Strategy: How to Create a Marketing Plan for a New Product in 2024

This guide will help you develop comprehensive product marketing strategies for new product in 2024. 

What is a Product Marketing Strategy?

Simply put, it is the marketing strategy for the product. Good products and companies fall to bad product marketing strategies or no growth marketing strategy at all. Bad products still succeed because of good product marketing strategies. As a matter of history, Betamax was a better product than VHS. Still, Betamax failed while VHS succeeded.

Why is Product Marketing Important?

A product marketing strategy is vital for building a brand and driving sales and revenue. Customers need to know about your product and where to buy it. That’s called product awareness. Sometimes, marketing is even more important than the product itself.

Examples of Product Marketing

This article is one example of an effective product marketing tactic. It works by providing valuable content that educates you. That way, you’ll see why a marketing strategy is essential and how a marketing strategy agency can help you achieve your product goals. You should understand why product marketing responsibilities are demanding and why you need a Full-Service Marketing Agency like NinjaPromo. Content marketing is an excellent product marketing tactic.

How to Create a Successful Product Marketing Strategy in 2024

That’s why you’re here. You need a product marketing plan.

Defining the Target Audience

You should be able to define your target customers and demographics. However, you shouldn’t feel constrained by market segmentation. There is a fan theory that boys were the demo target for Teen Titans’ product marketing strategy. Fans say the executives canceled the show because girls like it. Of course, it may be due to the show running to the end of the product life cycle. Still, it is product bad marketing and bad PR that the fan theory is plausible. That is a tip for decision-makers and product marketing managers (PMMs).

Competitor Analysis

Competition is the foundation of capitalism. Competition drives innovation and makes you do better for society than a monopoly. Don’t be afraid of your competitors and focus on their product marketing campaign. Do learn from them and what they are doing differently to be successful. Learn from their mistakes and copy or, better yet, improve on what they are doing right. Pay attention to how they price their products, which determines their product positioning.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Sometimes, this is called a unique value proposition (UVP). Others may call it your unfair advantage. It is your answer to the question, “Why should I buy your product?”. It is better if your USP is something your competitors can’t replicate. If your product is not that unique, that’s ok. Get creative!

In the episode of Mad Men, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” Don Draper pitches the slogan “It’s toasted” to Lucky Strikes. He explains that all the other cigarettes are poison, but Lucky Strikes are toasted. Don Draper creatively found a way to make them different through product marketing. He created an entire product marketing campaign to stand out.

Market Positioning of the Product

This is your product’s place in the world. A product sold in a store has a specific place on a shelf. It has a specific price point in relation to other products in the same store. Popular, well-promoted products get a better place, or they get locked up in a display unit. Less popular products get pushed out of sight. They also don’t get locked up because people don’t want them. They might get discounted to clear the unwanted inventory. 

It is important to know your competitor’s price point. It is a larger decision than you may realize to innovate on a lower price point that may start a “price war” you can’t win. 

Price determines your product’s market position. A premium price for a premium product will make your product more desirable. People are willing to pay more for “the best.” Other times, you want to provide the biggest bang for the buck. 

Arizona Tea set their prices low a long time ago. They do everything they can to keep their product at the same price. They don’t sacrifice the quality of the tea for that low price.  They maintain their place in the market by staying at the same price despite inflation. 

Search engine companies like Google determine your product positioning online. If your website is not high on the first page of search results, it may not exist. If you sell on Amazon, its algorithms also determine your product positioning.

Crafting Compelling Messaging

What is your message? We live in a world of clever product marketers and advertising competing for our attention. You want to stand out from the crowd and hold your audience’s attention. To do this, you need to have a compelling message.  A message that compels people to act and buy your product or service:

• Transform customers into enthusiasts.
• Convert products into passions.
• Empower employees to be ambassadors.
• Elevate brands to the status of religions.

Don’t copy Apple’s anti-consumer ways. Do copy the way Apple has built a brand that is practically a religion. Customers are obsessed with their branding. They won’t even think of buying a product that doesn’t have that Apple logo.

Don’t copy shady multi-level marketing (MLM) illegitimate practices. Do copy the way that MLM builds a cult of employees. Do that by making employees feel part of something bigger than themselves. Let them feel like they are part of an elite product team who are winners in life. Then, empower them to succeed and reward them when they do.

Don’t copy the anti-consumer and anti-labor ways of triple A game developers. Do copy the products that people love to obsess over. If you do that, you will become a company people love to work for and buy products from. 

Whatever practice you are a passionate follower, don’t go alone. Do ask a product marketing agency to help you achieve your goals.

Selecting the Right Marketing Mix

This is where having actionable information from good data analytics is essential. Based on the data you collect, you can play to your strengths and change what is not working. 

You might find that hiring someone to write great content works for you, and it becomes an important part of your mix. Whatever you find, you can select the right marketing mix by paying attention to the right data.

Building a Sales Enablement Plan

Marketing needs sales. That means you need a product marketing plan to make sales, process payments, and fulfill orders.  Sales increase your revenue and make you profit. That’s the whole point, right?

Sales is always a stressful position. You should have a plan in place to support your sales team, train them, and provide continued training. Develop and document successful processes and best practices. Listen to your sales team. They are on the front line of contact with your customers. They know your customers. They are in the best position to get customer feedback. They are in the best position to take a chance to improve a customer’s negative experience.

You should always reward your best salespeople. You should also support your less successful salespeople. Coach or comfort them. Find out what they need to succeed and give it to them. If you stand out as an employer and show them loyalty, they will be loyal to you. By enabling them to succeed, you enable your own success.

Implementing Customer Feedback Mechanisms

Responding to negative feedback after it is public is more challenging. By then, it may be too late. They already hurt your product marketing campaign. That’s why you need to build an extra chance. You should give them a way to provide you with actionable information. You need five-star reviews. This increases your credibility and sales online. Less than five stars can damage your reputation permanently. Of course, it is hard to have those reviews at the product launch.

Iterative Optimization of the Strategy

When your product marketing plan meets reality, it is pressure tested. Pressure has a way of changing things and showing you flaws. You will find things you need to change as you use your product marketing strategy. 

You can systematically do this. Making new changes and improved iterations over time. The goal is optimization. It is a process of improving your product marketing strategy using science.  You can think of it as learning from your mistakes and your successes.

Stages of Developing a Marketing Strategy

Market Research and Consumer Demand

Market research is key.  You also need to understand consumer demand. Businesses focus on meeting one kind of consumer demand. They measure it by customers and how much they spend on products. 

There are also hidden consumer demands. For example, long ago, everyone didn’t need a smartphone or home internet connection. Now, those products have been on the market for years, and you can’t live without them. That was hidden consumer demand revealed when those products hit the market. 

Another kind of hidden consumer demand is when customers want or even desperately need a product, but they don’t have the dollars. A broken person still needs to consume. That consumer demand is hidden because they can’t buy it. They have no buying power to “demand” anything. Broke is a temporary condition, but there are a lot of people with a broken consumer demand. 

If you can help them when they are broken, they’ll have product awareness when they have the possibility to buy it. You can make customers for life that way. 

For example, instead of wasting food you can’t sell on time, try giving it to those in need.  Broken people still see the label on a package from a food bank. They remember it and buy it when they can afford it. If it tastes good, it stands out. They will feel grateful and recognize your product as the most preferable one. 

They’ll associate those feelings with the product. That’s why they’ll buy it when they aren’t broken. That’s how you ethically turn the desperate into future lifetime customers. You can’t buy better product awareness.

Dumpsters full of food guarded so the starving poor can’t take it out of the trash are bad marketing. Free samples are great product marketing. Charity is a great PR strategy. Every company that sells food can cut food waste and have the ultimate product marketing at the same time.

Setting Goals and KPIs

Setting goals and identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial. Using KPIs allows you to make informed decisions. They provide evidence of the impact your product marketing strategy is having on sales.

KPIs offer specific, quantifiable metrics to assess progress. They enable you to define and measure success. That allows you to make timely, achievable product goals. Goals provide a clear direction, while KPIs offer a means to assess performance. This is one way you use your market research.

Choosing Marketing Channels

Online Channels (Social Media, Email, SEO, Content Marketing)

Online channels are the focus of this article. This includes social media, email, search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing. This article is an example of content marketing and SEO writing. It also includes every other place your customers go online and how you can reach them online.

The online landscape and culture is constantly changing. It often means being at the mercy of tech giants like Google, Amazon, or Facebook. SEO is like the dark arts because Google isn’t sharing how to do it. They change the rules when they please. Content is written for algorithms and not only humans. Appealing to both is a skill and an art that AI can’t yet replicate. 

Offline Channels (Print, Events, Partnerships)

Offline channels exist and stand for the physical world. For example, product marketers should know print media like books, comic books, magazines, newspapers, billboards along the road, broadcast radio and television advertising. Displays in stores where people can interact with and buy products are also offline channels. Even product placement in popular media like music, TV shows, movies and video games is still a popular offline way of marketing. There are also things like “junk mail” and printed catalogs and flyers. Product marketers should think of every way you can send your message to your customers offline.

Also, popular events and trade shows are valuable opportunities. Most conventions and other events have vendors with tables and booths that will pay to be there. They pay to be there because they know they can find their target customers. Everyone is having fun and is more likely to have money they are willing to spend. During the pandemic, people have learned that they like going out and miss it. 2024 will be great for those who can get out and attend popular events. This works excellently with marketing strategies for new products.

Partnerships with retailers and other businesses in the physical world can be very powerful. Your target audience is still living human beings who exist in the real world. Your product marketers should be there, too.

Integrating Omnichannel Strategies

Omnichannel strategies are for when you feel like you are everywhere at once.  You have to have a way to follow and interact seamlessly with your customers. They may journey from one website and channel to another as they convert to a sale. It doesn’t work so well when it is not coordinated and seamless.

First, it needs to be seamless for your customer. Equally important is integrating different channels with each other. Also, you need to unify the data you gather as you follow customer behavior everywhere online. It might seem “creepy,” but it is also effective, and society is getting used to it.

You should also unify your brand messaging across all channels. You should always appear like one hand knows what the other is doing with your brand. For example, the Matrix franchise achieved such historic popularity with a tremendous omnichannel marketing strategy. They did so well that people still use the terminology and metaphors of the Matrix. 

Developing a Marketing Budget

You can’t participate in capitalism without accumulating and investing capital.  You need to develop a product marketing budget and stick to it. A smaller product marketing budget doesn’t mean you will be ineffective. It means you have to be more creative.

Allocating Budget for Different Channels

Different marketing channels have different costs. You may want to minimize or maximize your product marketing budget. Budget minimizing is when you spend the least on experimenting and where you reach the least people. Instead, maximizing the product marketing budget means spending much on the most expensive channels. Those are the ones that reach the most people.

ROI Analysis and Budget Adjustments

You will need a way to know how your product marketing works and measure your ROI. Then, take action and adjust your budget. One way is to track conversions. How many people saw your product marketing and acted on it? How many clicked through an ad, visited your website, put a product in a cart and bought it? That’s one way to see if the product marketing you bought has a good ROI. Any positive ROI is good, but you want the most for your money. Also, you should reward success and stop doing the same product marketing strategy when it stops working.

Contingency Planning for Unexpected Expenses

Any good product marketing budget has some wiggle room. Some extra money should be set aside for hidden costs and to grow. One way plans can change when they meet reality is when you have unforeseen costs. Another way is when you have an unexpected success or opportunity. Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity. You can make your own luck or buy it with a large budget for contingencies.

Implementation and Execution of the Product Marketing Strategy

Cross-Functional Collaboration

All your employees are valuable and on the same product team. They sometimes have very different roles but have the same goals. They all want to do their jobs, earn a good living, and go home. They all want to succeed. You need to enable that by enabling them to all work together. Your success and theirs are joined together. Your fates depend on each other and sales. Everyone should be a part of your product marketing. Everyone should have a part in hard-earned success.

Aligning with Sales and Customer Support

Sales and Customer Support are two demanding, public-facing roles. The best salespeople also understand the product features and tech support. If they don’t, then they should know best how to work with customer support to find answers and resolve problems. Likewise, the best customer support personnel keep customers. They can use the customer’s contacting them as a product marketing opportunity. This works best when the customer’s original issue is resolved first. That’s key, as you can’t do any more product marketing or upselling until they have what they came for first.

Collaboration with Product Development Teams

Your product development team knows your product features best.  They can help keep your product marketing and advertising truthful. They can also help you determine what makes your product different, special, or unique. They can also think about making your product more appealing during product development. After all, a good product sells itself. Anyway, remember you still need good product marketing!

Coordinated Efforts with Marketing and PR Teams

Marketing and Public Relations should present a unified campaign. The two teams share similar goals. The main goal of marketing is to drive revenue and sales for the company. It involves creating demand, attracting customers, generating leads and converting leads into sales.

The main goal of PR is to build and maintain a positive reputation for the company. This includes managing communication during crises, enhancing brand image, and fostering positive relationships with the public. Sometimes, a bad marketing campaign ad or misstep can cause an unintended crisis that your PR team needs to recover from. Coordination between marketing and PR can help prevent that from happening in the first place.

 Monitoring and Analytics

The book Lean Analytics by Allistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz offers much information on doing analytics right. They teach how to focus on actionable metrics and avoid vanity metrics. Actionable metrics allow you to make informed business decisions. Vanity metrics are nice to have but not that important.

Real-time Analytics and KPI Tracking

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking is critical. It enables timely, informed decision-making and performance assessment. Of course, it is not always easy to identify your KPIs. Real-time analytics use systems that analyze data as soon as it is in a database. Websites often use it to track customer’s behaviors. Sometimes, the customers and the general public find this “creepy.” Yet it is wildly successful at increasing sales. When the website can also respond to customer’s behavior in real time, it can also manipulate that behavior in real time.

Amazon has proven that this works and can scale to drive sales and revenue into the billions of dollars. Social media companies such as Meta/Facebook use this for running experiments on their users. They’ve proven that this also works to keep users on a website longer.  

Real-time Analytics has other security applications, such as blocking illegitimate transactions. Social media also uses this to enforce their terms of service and censor user-generated content. It also enables you to adjust strategies on the fly. 

A/B Testing and Iterative Improvements

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of comparing two versions (A and B) of a product to determine which performs better. It is a scientific method used to conduct research experiments. It is also sometimes used by engineers during product development. 

Ideally, the experiment also separates two large and randomly selected groups to participate. Group A will see product A, and Group B will see product B. Sometimes, experiments will ask the same group to test both A and B to see which they like better. They won’t get to know what group is A and what one is B until the test is completed. A group could be yours, and B group – some other company’s.

Whichever did better advances. Let’s say product A advances. Next, you set up another experiment with the same A and a new B. You can keep running such experiments and improving your product over time. Each new A and B group is set for each new experiment as an iteration. 

The results can make great marketing. Consider the blind taste test:  “In a blind taste, test one billion writers who preferred our product Fiction! Cola to brand X! Fiction! Cola has 1000 times the caffeine and 100 percent of the real sugar writers crave!” That would be great marketing, if it weren’t fiction!   

 Customer Journey Mapping

Your customers go on a journey as they encounter your brand and have product awareness. It continues when they buy it and receive fulfillment. Still, their product marketing journey does not end there. It continues when they use the product and wherever they see it or interact with your brand. Customer journey mapping is a way of tracking their experience end-to-end. It is a way of visualizing the information. That way, you can see their story and change the narrative.

Adapting to Market Changes

The trend is your friend. Not what is “trendy” but the trends you find in data. Follow the trends and adapt to market changes or perish. This is vital in product-oriented marketing.

Agility in Response to Trends

Agility is the ability to correctly identify trends and act quickly in response. Giant companies are not known for their agility. Small companies and start-ups have to be more agile and reactive. Fortunately, their small size allows them to move quickly on new information. 

Reassessing and Adjusting the Strategy

As things change over time, it is imperative to change with them. You should reassess and adjust your strategy to suit the times you are in.

Crisis Management and Preparedness

It is vital to manage crises. CD Projekt Red had a very bad product launch when they released Cyberpunk 2077. They had great crisis product management, though. Over their time of crisis, they fixed their game with iterative patches. They had great product marketing. The Edge Runners anime success drove sales. By the time the first and only DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty, was released, it had become a story of redemption. They also benefited from the popularity of cyberpunk fiction and culture. They were prepared to weather their crisis, so they succeeded. Now they have a game of the year!

Metrics for Product Marketing Success

The most obvious metrics are sales and conversions. Then, there are vanity metrics like how many users visited your web page. Certainly, you should identify and watch your KPIs. Collecting and acting on data drives success. Besides, you want to know you got a good ROI.

Entrust the Development of Your Product Marketing Strategy to Professionals with NinjaPromo

You may have a great product, deliver great services, and already have a great company. You still need great digital product marketing.  All great marketing includes a call to action (CTA)! Don’t hesitate and act now! Contact NinjaPromo to develop your marketing strategy for the product before your competitors do!

Conclusion

Now you know and as you may have learned from the classic product marketing of GI Joe, “knowing is half the battle”. You should know that knowing is never enough. You have to act on what you know too. Market research is great, but you also need to use it to have great product marketing strategies.