With a huge amount of resources and time, a product development can get successful only through proper marketing strategy. But, it isn’t a one stop solution.
The perfect timing and strategy of which channel and method of marketing to choose for each step is the key to successful product launch. With either content or product marketing, you can play with both of them to predict the best marketing model for your product launch – before, at, and after.
Whether it’s content marketing or product marketing, they have specific abilities of marketing, and can also do wonders together. That’s why you need to understand the correct marketing mix for making your product launch phase successful. Content marketing allows for building strong prospects through brand authority building, whereas product marketing goes a step further than that. It pulls outbound leads through sales, emails, PPC, ads, etc. targeting methods.
Along with this, product marketing creates more impact but for short-term through coupon codes, campaigns, etc., while content marketing builds your brand value with content publishing.
Let’s understand each of their roles and responsibilities before, at, and after the product launch.
Product Marketing vs Content Marketing: Before Product Launch
Product marketing goes ahead of content marketing by convincing the leads for purchasing the product, which demands dedicated consumer research than any content marketing strategy.
Before product launch, content marketing UAE is important to leverage industry conversations and build website authority through popular and relevant keywords for answering customer queries. And product marketing prepares your team to address customer issues which they can’t search online, and you can create more user personas by conducting live interviews with in-depth market research.
For creating a successful product marketing campaign, a strong product positioning statement can be created through answering these questions:
- Who all can be your target customers?
- What customer jobs does your product solve?
- How does your product create a different experience than your competitors?
- Why will your target customer purchase your product and not other ones?
With proper answers to these customer questions you can help in devising workable product messaging, which includes customer-focused content ideas for future phases.
Product Marketing vs Content Marketing: At Product Launch
During product launch, you need quick customer attention for generating higher visibility in the market, which is not possible through content marketing. As it requires months of dedication to generate awareness through content strategies online, engagement and branding build-up on search results pages. Your sales team can use different product marketing tactics at product launch – targeted ads, social media promotions, offline customer touch points, etc., for creating a good product launch buzz.
If your target is to generate individual leads, content marketing efforts can use data from the sales outreach team, and it can help create a warm customer connection for better conversions. Your customers can search Google for many questions, and it would be a waste of time to address those queries offline. Sales teams need sales enablement data which is relevant for customers wanting to deal with problems which can’t be dealt online.
For content marketing efforts, it is imperative to strategize your tools for high-quality content, including relevant customer-focused queries, and it shouldn’t be included in sales material.
Product Marketing vs Content Marketing: After Product Launch
After product launch, product marketing plays a lesser role than content marketing. Though it can be different for different niches, this phase starts after product purchase by the customers. This audience is different from the previous ones, as it allows them to test the product performance, and provide valuable feedback, which can be retrieved mostly through online channels.
Now you can play with content marketing, and SEO comes handy to build authority of your website from online customers. You can set-up onboarding outreach emails, and also in-app text messages for improving the customer experience by addressing customer problems. When your customer includes your product’s services into their workflows, communications can be reduced rather than dropping it off completely. As you need to update them with new information regarding features and updates, which increases their trust towards brand value.
After bringing innovation to your product marketing strategies, you can conduct customer surveys online, also you can monitor customer messages through different channels and onboarding processes. With this, you can include testimonials in the product evaluation phase, where improvements in the current model should be updated through content strategy.
Moreover, you must remember to not reduce your customer onboarding by dropping them off slowly. Thus, with proper product marketing efforts you can highlight product features for your user’s jobs to be done such as, sale discounts, outreach, in-app messages, coupon offers, etc., which is helpful for winning brand recognition.
Conclusion
With these steps for a successful product launch – before, at, and after launch, you can easily monitor your marketing channels.
The content marketing efforts measure the top-of-funnel customers, while product marketing is aimed towards the bottom-funnel users, which makes it easy to use them together for the best product launch plan. To balance it out, don’t over do on the top-funnel content as it may overwhelm the sales and bottom-funnel campaigns, which should help customers navigate towards why your product is a good fit as their solution.
While product marketing and content marketing can be used together as part of a larger marketing strategy, they serve different purposes and have different goals. Product marketing is focused on the promotion of a specific product, while content marketing is focused on building relationships with the target audience through valuable content.
