Product Marketing Connects Products to Customers (Guide)

Before launching a product, product marketers do several important things. They figure out who might buy the product and who the competitors are, decide who the product is for, create clear messages about the product, plan how and where it will be sold, and set goals to measure success. This way, everything is carefully planned and ready for a successful launch.

Moreover, if you want to stand any chance of success in the market, you need to know how to efficiently position and communicate your product's value to create demand among your target audience.

All the things mentioned above relate to product marketing. So if you were to become a product marketer, or hire one, what would the role entail? Let’s answer that too.

It may sound obvious, but it's worth knowing that a product marketer doesn’t need to do all of those things. Those tasks can be divided among multiple marketers, even different roles. 

At Ahrefs, much of what our marketing department does is product marketing. Yet only a handful of team members are engaged with the product enough to be known as “product marketers.”

To make things a bit clearer, this is what we (a company with over 100 people) expect from a product marketer:

Product marketing is essentially a subdivision of marketing. Doing product marketing is basically doing marketing that’s focused on everything directly related to making a product successful in the market. And that responsibility has been a part of marketing since the conception of the four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion).

Roughly speaking, product marketers differ from other marketing roles by:

The next closest marketing function is growth marketing (but growth marketing is another word for “everything” especially in startups). Here’s a quick comparison between product marketing and some common marketing roles:

Here are the main steps product marketers usually take to bring products to the market. I'll explain how to market a product chronologically: before the product launch and after the product launch.

This stage can be summed up with one concept: go-to-market strategy (GTM strategy). A GTM strategy is basically a company’s plan to introduce a new product or service to the market. Typically, product marketers own these strategies.

Here are the eight steps in the GTM process, along with the vital questions they help to answer:

If you’d like to read more on the topic of GTM strategies, head over to this guide.

After the product launch, product marketers will be involved in the following activities. (Note that they are ongoing activities and not necessarily performed in this order.)

That’s about it when it comes to basic theory on marketing a product. Let’s see some examples of how all these can be put into practice.  

Here are seven tried and tested ideas on how to promote a product and increase product adoption. 

But before we go any further, here's an important rule about product marketing: make sure you achieve product-market fit before investing time and money in promoting it. Promoting a product nobody wants or can afford is a losing game. 

Blogging and SEO can be great allies for product marketers. You can use blog posts to show how your product solves real problems  and reach people looking for solutions on Google. 

This kind of content drives both product demand and product adoption; it generates traffic to your website and shows people how to use the product at the same time. 

To implement this tactic you need topics with traffic potential and a scoring system to prioritize topics that allow you to feature your product naturally. We're explaining how to find these topics in our beginner's guide to keyword research and as for the scoring system, feel free to use our business potential scoring.

The scoring system works like this: prioritize topics that score at least “1” on the business potential (BP) scale. In other words, the BP scale expresses our ability to feature Ahrefs inside the content naturally. 

So in our example, to show how people can uncover organic keywords otherwise hidden in Google Analytics, we’ve featured Ahrefs Webmaster Tools as one of the solutions.

We use the same tactic in video content creation. Here’s the same principle but in the context of a different topic and a different part of our product offer.

We’re constantly working on making our product even better. This means launching new features and data updates quite often (over 130 product updates in 2023).

[embed]https://twitter.com/bertiecharlton/status/1437338706768183296[/embed]

In this area of marketing a product, we try to make sure our announcements are as visible as they can be. In order to do that, we communicate the product through various channels:

As we communicate with our target audience through so many channels, we also need to coordinate tasks appropriately with multiple team members. And so each product update becomes more or less a product marketing campaign on its own.

Naturally, launching new features requires some internal communication too. We have a Slack channel for each newly introduced feature or update. This way, we keep everybody informed and provide a place to discuss new releases.

Some products gather a community around them. When that happens, brands need to take part in the conversation—whether through a community manager, product marketer, social media manager, or some other role—because that’s also an area of product marketing.

The goal here can be driving product demand:

Or driving product adoption:

Or just answering a question:

All these are examples of product marketing done within a community. Communities like these are often self-sustaining but shouldn’t be left alone.

Product marketing’s role in this scope is to make sure the community gets accurate information and is aware of new product developments.

As a “by-product” of that, people get better at using the product. Hence, they’ll likely use it more and will be more likely to recommend it to others.

User onboarding (aka product onboarding) is a stage within the product adoption process. It’s when a user is actively introduced to the features of the product. It’s an important stage of the process.

This is because the messaging that made the user sign up for the product won’t be enough to make them know how to use the product. And only users who know how to use the product (but not necessarily all of its features) can become satisfied customers. 

User onboarding typically refers to the first steps users take “inside” the product—a sort of “showing the user around.”

For product adoption to be successful, users need to understand the value of the product as soon as possible.

So the goal of the product marketer is to get users to the so-called “aha-moment” quickly and smoothly.

A tried and tested technique of user onboarding is to send automated email workflows, which are triggered immediately after the user signs up for the product.

There are different “styles” of doing this. We try to keep it short with only three messages and include the most important information inside the first.

This email above shows the user that we’ve got their back and have prepared more than enough educational materials to show them how they can become more successful, thanks to our product.

Since our product can be quite intimidating to newcomers (lots of data), we also include contextual help in the form of tooltips. These tooltips explain how to use the different reports and the meanings of the metrics inside them.

Beyond user onboarding, we have “regular” product education and support.

For us, it’s a stage where product adoption blends with generating demand because nearly all of our content is product-led.

This means the same materials used for user education in one channel can be, at the same time, the materials that drive visitors to us through organic search.

For example, a paying customer looks for a step-by-step tutorial on how to build links to their site and finds this article on our blog. Yet, everyone else can access the same article through a search engine like Google.

This brings us to our knowledge base, another outcome of marketing a product. They don't need a special introduction; with it, we aim to maximize product adoption as other companies do.

On a side note, it’s likely no product-led content marketing can substitute the good ol’ knowledge base.

That said, product education for a set of tools like Ahrefs requires something more than letting users discover educational content through search. It needs an organized curriculum. This is why we built the Ahrefs Academy. It’s packed with helpful video tutorials and is completely free.

No matter how visionary your product is, you can't ignore user feedback. In fact, there is a popular notion that you should ship your product fast (even if it’s not perfect) just to learn if you’ve got a product that shows enough potential (see value hypothesis).

At Ahrefs, we gather feedback on our product in three ways:

Let’s take a quick look at the first two methods.

For the first method, we use Canny. It’s an open platform that lets users share their ideas on improving Ahrefs, comment on those ideas, and vote on them. So not only can we learn about others’ ideas, but we can also know how many people share those views.

For the second method, we usually ask our community at Ahrefs Insider. Unlike Canny, this is a group (currently on Facebook) available to only paying users. We get important feedback through that channel, and we do listen to it:

On top of that, every two years (on the same day), we ask this question openly on Reddit:

Last but not least, let’s look at Ahrefs’ product messaging on the homepage.

Creating a homepage that shapes brand and product communication is tough, and it's also part of a product marketer's job. It’s supposed to educate, entertain, and convert at the same time. 

Let me give the floor to Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo, who made a video to explain how we created Ahrefs’ current homepage. It talks about:

Marketing a product can’t be done without product marketing. It even sounds quite self-explanatory. If you’re doing a good job at marketing, you’re probably also doing a good job at product marketing.

I have a feeling that some 30 years ago, product marketing would be called just “marketing.” It’s just that in recent years this set of marketing activities has been extracted from a bigger set and given an identity of its own. And it’s no wonder. Marketing has been burgeoning with specializations for years.

Does every marketing team need a product marketer? Sooner or later, probably yes. But does every marketing team need product marketing? Definitely.

Got questions or comments? Ping me on X or LinkedIn.