What is Vendor Risk Management: A Complete Guide + Examples
Building a new product for the market is an exciting time for any business.
But the journey to market success is fraught with challenges and having a great product is not enough. The hard part is getting the product to the market and ensuring its longevity.
Surprisingly, a recent study revealed that 95% of new products fail to make a mark each year. And experts say it’s all down to poor product-market fit, incorrect positioning and unclear messaging.
This staggering statistic not only shows how crucial a top-notch product marketing strategy is but also highlights the significant impact it can have on a company’s success.
Product marketers play a key role in bridging this gap to ensure that the right product reaches the target audience with the right message.
This comprehensive guide will give you the knowledge and tools needed to navigate the complexities of product marketing and drive successful product launches.
From understanding your audience to setting realistic goals and continuously optimizing after launch, we will walk you through each step.
Let's dive into how to make your product stand out in a crowded market and captivate your target consumers efficiently.
Just in case you prefer to learn by watching, here’s a video walkthrough of our ultimate product marketing blueprint you can use in your next marketing campaign to grow your business.
Product marketing is the process of introducing a product to the market, spreading the word and getting people excited to buy them. This process includes understanding who your potential customers are, explaining why your product is great and ensuring it meets their needs.
To market the product and reach your target audience, you create messages and campaigns that show how your product solves a problem or enhances the customer's experience. Then, you work on delivering this message to the right people through advertising, social media and other channels.
Product marketing isn't just about launching a product; it's a strategic role that connects different parts of a company:
This makes product marketing essential for providing a product's success from development to customer satisfaction.
In addition, product marketing managers play a pivotal role as advocates for customers within the company. They collect customer feedback and insights to improve the product. This helps them strategically position the product and create a value proposition that meets customers’ needs.
Then, they help your business convey this value through various channels to boost sales, encourage customers to adopt the product and increase customer loyalty.
Ultimately, their work is vital for ensuring the product's market success and building strong relationships with customers.
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As we have already discussed, product marketing focuses on bringing a product to market and ensuring people know about it. This includes crafting messages that show off the product's features and benefits and deciding the best ways to tell potential customers about it.
Growth marketing aims to attract more users and increase sales over time. It involves testing new ideas, such as different types of promotions or ads, to see what works best to attract more customers and keep them coming back.
Product management, on the other hand, is more behind-the-scenes. It involves deciding what products to make and what features they should have. Product managers keep an eye on the whole process, from the first idea to the final product, ensuring everything goes smoothly and meets customers' needs.
If you want to know more key differences between product management vs product marketing vs. growth marketing, check out this quick video below:
As a business owner, you understand the importance of product marketing for your business. But how important is it really? Let's delve into that.
Product marketing is instrumental in generating demand for a product. When you highlight a product's features, advantages, and how it solves problems, it grabs the attention of potential customers.
For example, product marketing strategies like demonstrations, free trials and engaging advertisements highlight how a product stands out. This initial interest is essential for moving customers from simply knowing the product to actively wanting it.
Once there is demand, good product marketing translates this into actual sales. Marketing efforts convert interest into sales by engaging potential customers with compelling promotional messages and persuasive calls to action. Effective campaigns reach a wide audience and resonate with them to significantly improve your sales numbers.
Up to 88% of customers say an excellent customer experience from a company makes them return to buy more products and services.
Effective product marketing ensures that customers know exactly what they're buying, which increases customer satisfaction. By clearly communicating product details, benefits and proper usage, customers have appropriate expectations and learn how to use the product properly.
Product marketing shows what makes a product different and better than the alternatives. It informs potential customers about the product's unique value proposition, helping it stand out in a competitive market.
Product marketing doesn't stop with selling; it also plays a critical role in improving the product. Feedback gathered from marketing efforts can highlight what customers love and what they don't. This information is like gold for product development teams, and it helps them adjust and improve the product to meet customer needs.
Before a product even hits the market, product marketing managers dive deep into research. They explore what potential customers need, what issues they face and how these needs and issues change over time. This isn't just busy work. This research ensures that when a product is finally designed and launched, there will be demand for it and people will buy it.
Product marketing is the sales team's best friend. It equips salespeople with everything they need to seal the deal. From detailed product guides to snappy sales pitches, product marketing ensures the sales team isn't just shooting in the dark. Instead, they hit the mark each time by understanding the product's best features and how to communicate them to customers.
The responsibilities and deliverables for product marketing vary significantly based on the business type, industry and company size.
Smaller companies have product marketing managers who often wear multiple hats, handling tasks ranging from content creation to distribution due to resource constraints and limited budgets. As the company grows, the product marketing job becomes more specialized.
In bigger companies, product marketing managers work with a team that performs many basic operational tasks like content creation, event coordination and customer communication. This helps them focus on critical things aspects like strategic planning, product ideation, product feedback and feature requests.
However, there are some common responsibilities that product marketing teams typically follow when operating independently. Here are some of them:
As a product marketer, it's your responsibility to create detailed buyer and user personas. These personas represent typical buyers, including their needs, habits and what they want from a product. This helps guide how to market a product in a way that speaks directly to real customers.
You can use Visme's customer persona templates to easily develop your own.
Here’s a persona template from our library that you can use.
Additionally, read our comprehensive guide to creating your own buyer personas using Visme.
To stay competitive, you must continuously research and monitor the target market. This means you must study market trends, understand what your competitors are doing and learn how consumers behave and what they like.
By staying informed about what's happening outside your business, you can quickly change your plans, find chances to make new and better products and keep your product important and wanted by the people you want to sell it to.
Product marketers need to make sure that their products meet customer needs. So, you need to understand what your customers really want and ensure the product features match those needs. By doing this, you can create truly useful and appealing products to the target audience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
According to Olha, the key to aligning your product with user needs is gathering both qualitative and quantitative data.
When you think of cold drinks, you probably think of Coca-Cola or Pepsi. And when it comes to smartphones, Apple and Samsung may come to mind. This is because these brands have created a strong association in the minds of customers.
Marketers decide how they want people to see a product. They consider what makes the product unique and use this information to show how it's different from others. This step is like telling the product's story in a way that explains why it's the best choice.
As a product marketer, you need to find the best way to describe the product so that when people think about a certain need, they immediately think of your product.
“You know you’ve positioned the product correctly when customers are happy with the product. It’s evident in the word of mouth, ratings, overall customer satisfaction and ultimately, conversions. If it's working, then you're positioned correctly; if it's not working, you're not positioned correctly at the end of the day” - Olha says.
Product marketing managers play a pivotal role in the development and success of a product. Like nurturing a plant from seed to flower, they collaborate with product developers from the start, sharing insights about what customers really want.
They're part of the brainstorming sessions, suggesting features based on market trends and feedback, ensuring the product in development is aligned with customer needs and marketplace opportunities. This involvement helps create innovative, highly marketable products and likely to satisfy user demands.
When developing a go-to-market strategy, marketers are planning how to introduce the product to the world. They pick the right time for the launch, decide on the price and figure out how to talk about the product so people will listen. It's about making a great first impression that makes people excited about the product.
This plan helps ensure that the product makes a splash and grabs people's attention right from the start, setting up the product for success.
You can use Visme’s go-to-market strategy templates to create your own. Here’s an example go-to-market strategy template for you.
Read this article to learn how to create a go-to-market strategy and access more templates to get you started.
Product marketing managers don't just stop working once a product is launched. They continue to ensure the product stays relevant and competitive as the market changes. They do this by staying engaged with the market and customer feedback, which helps them identify any needed updates or improvements.
Their ongoing involvement in coming up with ideas for the product and helping to develop it means the product not only meets the current needs of the market but can also be adapted for future needs. This helps to keep the product in a good position in the market and extends its life by keeping up with what customers want and new technology.
Now, let’s discuss the goals you would have as a product marketer. There are five goals, in general, that you implement in product marketing:
To make any marketing strategy work, you must first know who you're talking to. This isn't just about demographics like age or location but also about understanding what your potential customers need, their challenges and how your product fits into their lives.
Often, a product’s success isn't just about its features but whether it meets the actual needs of your customers. The better you understand your audience, the more effectively you can communicate how your product can make a difference for them.
Once you have a buyer persona, use it to shape how and where you reach out to potential customers. This means focusing your marketing messages on the places where your ideal customers are most likely to see them.
Whether through social media, email campaigns, or online ads, targeting your buyer persona ensures your message resonates with the right people. It's like knowing exactly which bait to use for the fish you want to catch. By targeting your buyer persona, you can attract the people who are most likely to buy from you, making your marketing efforts more successful and cost-effective.
Another important goal is to know what your competitors are doing and find ways to do it better.
Offer something they don’t. This could be a special feature of your product, a better price or even better service. Craft compelling messaging that not only lets your customers find the product but also understand what makes it unique.
Getting your marketing, product, and sales teams to work together toward the same goal is crucial. Marketing creates awareness and desire for the product, the product team ensures it delivers on the promise and sales close the deal. When these teams align, the company can provide a seamless and satisfying experience to the customer, which ultimately drives success.
Ultimately, all your marketing aims to sell more products and make more money. This means not just attracting new customers but also keeping existing ones coming back. It involves strategies like improving the product based on customer feedback, using targeted marketing to reach the right audience and providing exceptional customer service to build loyalty.
With the advancement of technology, there are countless ways to market a product. However, we can't cover all of them here.
So, let's explain a few of the most effective ways to help you market your product. These strategies are used by successful businesses, and we'll provide examples.
When telling people about your product, focus on how it can improve their lives rather than just listing what it does. Think of Apple's iPod. Instead of just saying it had a big storage space, they shared the idea of carrying "1,000 songs in your pocket." This simple phrase helped people imagine having their entire music collection with them anywhere, easily. It's about showing the real-world value the product brings to the customer's life.
One effective way to share more information about your product is by writing blogs.
For instance, at Visme, we write blogs about various topics, such as creating presentations, designing infographics, and using AI to generate images to promote our services and provide valuable tips and information.
This approach helps to showcase our expertise and build trust with our audience. Readers who find our blogs helpful will likely become interested in trying Visme to create their own visuals.
Product Marketing Manager at Visme
In addition to writing blogs, you must create product videos to show your product in action.
Watching a video of your product will allow your customers to experience it in the closest possible form. This is a critical reason that makes video content more effective in converting prospects into customers.
A study revealed that 84% of people bought a product after watching a video of it.
Olha tells us why videos are incredibly effective for product marketing.
"People love video and the numbers prove it. Videos come with visual aids that are just easier to digest—you don’t need to be glued to your screen. You can walk around while listening to the video. Plus, not everyone finds it easy to process information that’s audio. The fact you can use video across all digital channels—blog, email, landing pages, websites, case studies, social media, in-app walkthroughs, and support pages—is what amplifies its impact." says Olha.
There are various types of videos you can create for your product, including:
Visme always stays ahead in creating product videos. In fact, Visme is one of the most popular channels in its category in terms of views and subscribers.
You can use our online video maker to create all these videos.
Visme offers templates for explainer videos, product videos, video testimonials and other video types. Just choose a template, customize it using the drag-and-drop editor and create your video. Check out this example template for product videos from Visme's library.
About 78% of B2B marketers say that referral programs generate excellent leads.
The stats show word-of-mouth marketing is still the most effective marketing method compared to any other marketing message.
Keeping that in mind, you can create referral programs to promote your product. Ask your satisfied customers to recommend your product to their friends and family, and in exchange, they will earn a commission or discount.
For example, Dropbox effectively utilizes a referral program to attract more users. When existing users invite their friends to join Dropbox, they both receive additional storage space for free.
When it comes to ROI, with $40 for every dollar spent, no other marketing even comes close to email marketing. One company even reported a $72 ROI in the US.
To make the most of email marketing, consider running a targeted email campaign for your product, such as a series of emails (drip campaign). You can attract current and potential customers by offering special promotions to sign up to your email list.
Here’s an example of product marketing through emails from Starbucks.
If you're having trouble getting people to sign up for your emails, the issue might be your email sign-up form. This has been a longstanding problem, but now there's a solution: Visme’s form builder.
Visme helps you create engaging, animated email sign-up forms that can increase your sign-ups by 207%, improve form engagement by 205% and reduce form abandonment rates by 67%. And the best part? You don’t need any prior design or coding experience to create these forms.
Imagine you sell a new kind of snack. By partnering with well-known people on Instagram or YouTube who try your snack and share it with their followers, you can get the word out quickly. These followers trust the influencer's choices, so when they see them enjoying your snack, they're more likely to try it themselves.
Take a look at Glossier, the makeup brand that skyrocketed to fame by gifting products to influencers. These influencers raved about the products, and their enthusiastic endorsements persuaded their followers to give them a try as well. It's a clever strategy for getting your product recognized and adored by a larger audience.
@daniellemarcan full face of Glossier #cleangirl #makeup #beauty ♬ original sound - DANIELLE
If you want to make your content more engaging, consider creating interactive content. This kind of content allows people to click, answer questions, or play with it rather than just passively reading or watching. For example, if you have a website selling gym equipment, you could include a quiz to help visitors find the right workout gear for their fitness level and goals instead of just showing products.
Making their visit more enjoyable and personalized can make them more likely to remember and trust your brand.
Buzzfeed is known for its fun quizzes and polls that keep users coming back for more. By doing something similar, you can attract more attention to your products in an entertaining and interactive way.
Visme enables you to create interactive content easily. With its animation and interactive features, you can add quizzes, polls, hotspots, and menus without needing any design or coding experience. Just drag and drop the elements onto your document and customize them.
One way to attract new customers is to offer discounts when they sign up for your email list. This gives them an instant benefit and lets you keep in touch. It encourages people to buy something they like at a lower price and helps you grow the list of potential customers you can market.
Wrangler, an American clothing company, offers a 15% discount when you sign up for their email. Aside from creating an email list, you can also easily track how many customers are coming from this source and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
A media kit is like a resume for your product that shows off its best qualities. It includes information about what your product does, high-quality images and perhaps success stories or testimonials. You can send this kit to bloggers, journalists or influencers who might feature your product in articles, blogs or social media, giving you free or cost-effective publicity.
Entrepreneur Magazine provides an excellent example of an effective media kit. Their media kit is not just a collection of advertising rates; it's a powerful tool showcasing their audience reach, editorial calendar, special advertising opportunities and success stories.
Use Visme's media kit maker to easily create one for your company. Choose a media kit template from our library and customize it using the drag-and-drop editor.
Here's an example template that you can use:
More and more customers today are drawn to eco-friendly and sustainable products. You can attract this growing market by incorporating green practices into your product's lifecycle. Whether using recyclable materials, minimizing packaging, or supporting environmental causes, sustainability can be a strong marketing point.
TOMS Shoes has set an impressive example of how embracing sustainable practices can not only benefit the environment but also enhance a brand's market appeal. By committing to donate one-third of their profits for grassroots efforts, like providing shoes, sight, water, and impact grants, TOMS has built a loyal customer base motivated by altruism and product quality.
To learn more about sustainable business practices, you can explore our article on ethical branding. It includes the major sustainable development goals called the "UN Global Compact" set by the United Nations and some real businesses practicing them.
Creating a product marketing strategy is about more than just promoting the product. It also involves positioning and pricing. The strategy takes you from developing the product to launching it and reaching it to the hands of your ideal customers. We will explore this in the following section.
A good product marketing strategy starts with deeply understanding your target audience. If you have already defined a buyer persona, then understand their pain points, expectations and requirements.
Understand where they come from, their challenges, why they need your product and even their typical income. The more information you gather, the stronger your product marketing strategy will be.
If you're starting fresh and have no customers yet, Olha says the easiest way to figure out your target audience is by checking out the market and your closest competitors.
But if you already have a product and customer base, plan from the very beginning to gather data about your users, like the reason they’re going to use your product, the type of customer (business or individual), industry, role, and what goals they are trying to achieve. It’s also a savvy move to collect data from the technical side, like country, language, and browser technology. “ Olha says.
Olha emphasizes understanding your target audience is really about gathering as much data as possible.
Product Marketing Manager at Visme
If you haven't yet created a detailed customer profile, you can use Visme's customer persona templates to create one. Gather and document as much information as possible to develop your customer persona.
"Data enrichment, AI tools and even Google Sheets come in handy when summarizing all this data and helping you to create a customer persona - Olha says"
After understanding your target audience, the next step is to dive deep into market research. Look at the other similar products out there, how your competitors promote them and what pricing strategy they use.
Also, don't forget to look into industry trends that could affect your product. The goal is to find a sweet spot where your product fits into the market and meets a need others might not fully address.
When conducting competitive intelligence and market research, Olha emphasizes the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize.
Product Marketing Manager at Visme
You can use online tools like Google Analytics and social media insights to see how often people search for products like yours and what they say about them.
"Brandwatch, SurveyMonkey, Google Trends, Playbook UX are some of the tools that Olha finds helpful for market research, surveys, and user testing. She also recommends reading reports from research companies like Ipsos and McKinsey & Company."
Here’s a presentation template that you can use to present the insights from your market research.
When you position your product, you decide how your target customers will see and feel about it. You need to figure out what makes your product unique and better for your customers than other options they might have.
Ask yourself: What does my product do that others don't? How can it make my customers' lives easier or better? Once you have those answers, use them to shape all your marketing messages.
For example, if your product saves time on a common task, your positioning could be all about giving people more free time. This clear focus helps your product stand out in a crowded market.
When defining your product's positioning, also consider how your messaging supports this perspective. Messaging is how you communicate your product's unique aspects to your audience. It's about changing the unique benefits you found through positioning into strong statements that connect with your customers.
Make sure the messages supporting your positioning are easy to understand and compelling so they stand out and create and impact.
Remember to set goals for your product marketing strategy. Your goals can include increasing brand awareness, improving customer satisfaction, or acquiring more users. The specific goals will guide your product marketing strategy and remind you of the purpose of your marketing efforts.
Your goals may vary depending on the product, type of business, and your larger marketing goals.
If you struggle to reach your goals, you might be setting them wrong. Make sure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Instead of setting generic goals like "Increase sales by 10%", set SMART goals like "Increase sales by 10% in the next quarter by implementing new strategies". SMART goals provide clear targets that guide your product marketing strategy.
Use Visme's SMART goal templates to set your goals more accurately and achieve them faster.
Read our comprehensive guide about how to set SMART goals to learn more about it.
Setting the right price for your product is important for attracting customers and meeting sales targets. When determining the price, consider how much it costs to make your product, as well as the prices of similar products. Also, think about what your target customers are willing to pay and how much they value the unique benefits of your product.
It's also important to consider your business goals. Do you want to position your product as a budget-friendly option or a premium brand? Regularly review and adjust your pricing strategy based on how the market responds and changes in costs or demand to keep it at its best.
After setting everything up, it's time to launch your product. However, your work doesn't stop there. After the launch, you need to monitor how things are going. Use tools to track sales, customer feedback and how well your marketing activities are performing.
Pay attention to what customers say about your product online and in reviews. This information is like gold because it can tell you what's working well and what isn't.
If something isn't going as planned, don't be afraid to make changes. Maybe you need to adjust your marketing messages, change the product slightly, or try different sales channels. The goal is to keep improving your approach so you can meet your sales goals and make your customers happy.
Remember, launching your product is just the beginning. To be successful, monitor how things are going and be ready to optimize your strategy at any time.
Now, we’ll share some real-life examples of product marketing that you can get inspired and learn from.
Nike's launch and continual promotion of the Air Jordan line is one of the most successful branding efforts in sports marketing history. It all started when Michael Jordan (a rising star at the time) signed with Nike, aligning the brand with excellence and aspiration.
Nike didn't just sell sports shoes; they created a whole sub-brand around Jordan that appeals to consumers' desire for prestige and high performance. The company used Michael Jordan's appeal to market these shoes as more than just sportswear, but symbols of success and style.
The Air Jordan brand keeps its shoes exclusive and in high demand by releasing limited editions and setting high prices. Nike also stays relevant by partnering with other popular brands and celebrities.
Spotify has attracted millions of users worldwide with its personalized music experience. Their standout feature, "Discover Weekly," crafts a unique playlist for each user, treating them to a delightful surprise every Monday. This makes users feel like Spotify really knows them and can introduce them to their next favorite song or artist. Their marketing revolves around the joy of discovering new music and the personal touch they bring to the listening experience.
HubSpot has effectively positioned itself as a leader in inbound marketing by creating an entire ecosystem of free educational resources for marketers, salespeople and business owners. Through an extensive collection of blogs, e-books, courses and certifications available on their HubSpot Academy, they provide immense value to their audience even before any purchase is made.
This strategy helps build trust and authority in the digital marketing space and exemplifies the inbound marketing methodology HubSpot preaches — attracting, engaging and delighting customers. This approach has played a significant role in HubSpot's growth and in fostering a community of users and advocates around their brand.
Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign is a prime example of a personalized marketing strategy that significantly boosted brand engagement and consumer interaction.
In this campaign, Coca-Cola replaced its iconic logo with common first names on bottles and cans. People started buying the drink more only to find their names on the bottle that they drank from. This simple yet innovative idea turned Coke bottles into personalized items, encouraging sharing and social interaction both in physical spaces and across social media platforms.
A product marketing manager is responsible for bringing a product to the market and driving demand for it. This involves developing marketing strategies, creating compelling messages and deciding the most effective ways to reach potential customers.
The 5 P's of product marketing are Product, Price, Place, Promotion and People. These elements help marketers ensure they have a comprehensive strategy that covers what they're selling, its cost, where it's sold, how it's promoted and who it's for.
The 5 C's of marketing are Company, Customers, Competitors, Collaborators, and Context. These factors help businesses understand their environment, audience and how to position themselves effectively.
Brand marketing focuses on building and promoting the company's brand identity and values, while product marketing concentrates on specific products, showcasing their features, benefits and why they're unique.
A typical day for a product marketer might include:
A marketer promotes and sells products or services, considering overall strategies for reaching the market. A product marketer focuses on generating interest and demand for specific products.
Brand marketing aims at building a company’s overall identity and reputation, whereas product marketing targets raising awareness and sales of specific products.
Brand marketing is about enhancing the company's identity and values and creating a long-term emotional connection with customers. Growth marketing focuses on finding strategies to acquire, engage and retain customers for business growth.
Product marketing promotes tangible goods, while service marketing promotes intangible offerings like consulting or software-as-a-service (SaaS).
As you've seen, product marketing is about more than just promoting a product. It's about understanding your audience, creating interesting stories and ensuring your product gets the right place in the market.
Each step is crucial to success, from aligning with customer needs to setting SMART goals and adapting data-based strategies.
However, creating engaging and informative content is the most critical step in your product marketing strategy. Compelling visuals, informative blog posts, engaging videos and interactive experiences capture attention and educate and persuade potential customers.
Visme helps product marketers create various visual content easily and efficiently. You don't need to be a design expert to use Visme. It's designed to streamline your content creation process so you can focus on crafting compelling visuals that resonate with your audience and drive your product's success.
From stunning presentations and infographics that showcase your product's features to eye-catching social media graphics that amplify your brand message, Visme provides a versatile toolkit to bring your marketing strategy to life.
Sign up for a free account and start your product marketing journey today.
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