Effective Product Marketing: Bridging the Gap Between Products and Customers

Your Ultimate Guide to Engaging and Retaining Customers

13 min readFeb 5, 2025

To market a product properly, one must know the right set of people to sell it to and how to reach them. In marketing campaigns, focusing on the demographic that has the highest interest helps with elevating the sale targets. But for product marketing: Potential customers are reached, and candidates are briefed on how their problems can be solved. Marketing also includes competition analysis in which products of similar nature are already offered.

High-quality product marketing makes sure that the product functions at a satisfactory level, can be clearly differentiated from others in the market, and can be refined and adjusted based on user input.

With my experience, the key components that are important for creating the perfect product marketing strategy revolves around setting clear objectives and targets: If everything is clearly defined, then who the target customers are, competitors, achievable goals, and effective selling channels can be easily determined, thus increasing the succes rate of the campaign and helping build around a proper foundation for a successful launch.

Once a product is launched, the focus switches to collecting feedback and improving upon bugs and issues that have been raised to ensure that users continue engaging and utilizing the product. Keeping customers informed about updates and improvements that have been made, engaging with user communities, and providing instructor led sessions and educational content serve as the best practices for ensuring the success of the products.

There is an internal communication element that is also very critical in product marketing. Product marketers ensure that everyone within the organization is aligned on who the target customers are and the key strengths of the product.

Why is product marketing important?

You can’t successfully create and launch a product without effective product marketing. To achieve this, you need to understand what to build and who your target audience is.

Take Juicero as an example.

Additionally, to have any chance of succeeding in the market, you must know how to effectively position and communicate your product’s value to generate demand among your intended audience.

All of these aspects are connected to product marketing. So, if you’re considering becoming a product marketer or hiring one, what does that role actually involve? Let’s explore that as well.

What does a product marketer do?

Here are some key areas of a product marketer’s role:

What, and Why

Market research

Among others:
-Understanding customers’ needs and wants
-Identifying opportunities in the market
-Understanding the competition

Go-to-market strategy

Identifying what will be offered, to what market, at what price, how it will be offered, and what is required operationally to launch the product

Positioning and messaging

-Determining the benefits that the product should be identified with
-Determining how to catch the attention of the target audience and educate them about the product

Product communication (external and internal)

-Externally: creating demand for the product by communicating its features and benefits
-Internally: product education and making sure external communication is consistent

Marketing collateral

Creating the collection of media used to support the sales of the product (e.g., sales brochures, knowledge base articles, data sheets, demos)

Gathering user feedback

-Understanding how satisfied users are with the product
-Suggesting improvements in the product and how it’s delivered to the market

Product analytics

Understanding how users engage with the product, e.g., feature usage, points of friction, user retention

New feature launches

Delivering new features to the market and driving their adoption

Reputation management

-Replying to reviews
-Fact-checking 3rd-party publishers to make sure data/screenshots are up to date

It’s important to recognize that a product marketer isn’t required to handle all of these responsibilities. These tasks can be shared among various marketers, potentially across different roles.

At Ahrefs, a significant portion of our marketing efforts focuses on product marketing. However, only a small number of team members are involved with the product to the extent that they can be called “product marketers.”

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

Some items on that list aren’t solely the responsibility of a product marketer within our marketing team. For instance, many of us participate in developing product-led content. However, the unique combination of those tasks makes it well-suited for a specialization in product marketing.

Further reading

How is product marketing different from other marketing roles (and sales)?

Product marketing is a specific branch of marketing. It involves strategies and activities aimed at ensuring a product’s success in the marketplace. This focus on product-related efforts has been integral to marketing since the introduction of the four Ps: product, price, place, and promotion.

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

Having a more direct influence on the product.
Doing a lot of market research.
Focusing on outbound marketing tools.
Their KPIs are mostly short term.

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:

How to do product marketing

Here are the main steps that product marketers typically follow to bring products to market. I’ll outline how to market a product in chronological order: before the product launch and after the product launch.

Pre-launch stage

This stage can be summarized by one key concept: the go-to-market strategy (GTM strategy). A GTM strategy is essentially a company’s plan for introducing a new product or service to the market. Generally, product marketers are responsible for these strategies.

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

Identify your market (and your competitors) — This represents the product’s “environment” for growth. What opportunities exist? Who will you be competing against?

Identify your customer — Who are you aiming to sell to? How will your product improve people’s lives?

Define product positioning and price — How should your product be viewed by the target audience? Are you providing more benefits at a lower price, or perhaps more benefits at a higher price?

Define product messaging and core marketing tactics — What message do you convey to potential customers to sell your product? What marketing channels can you utilize to reach them?

Define product distribution — How will users access your product? Directly, or through distributors?

Sync marketing, sales, and support — What do sales, support, and other marketing team members require from you to ensure the product’s success? And what do you need from them?

Determine the budget, time frame, and resources needed — Time, resources, and money: How much will the product launch require?

Define your success metrics — How will you determine if you have achieved product-market fit? How will you track growth?

If you’re interested in learning more about GTM strategies, check out this guide.

Post-launch stage

After the product launch, product marketers will engage in several ongoing activities, which may not necessarily occur in a specific order.

Internal and external product communication — A product marketer aims for two main objectives here: generating demand and fostering product adoption. The first focuses on drawing visitors to the product, while the latter involves assisting users in utilizing product features to achieve their goals.

Product analytics — Product marketers can accurately understand user engagement with the product by utilizing analytics software (e.g., Mixpanel, Heap), eliminating the need for guesswork.

Gathering user feedback — This is a crucial aspect of a product marketer’s role as a customer advocate. Identifying which feedback to prioritize and which to set aside is a skill in itself, but it can lead to significant enhancements in the product.

Feature launches — Product marketers plan communication strategies and coordinate feature launches across various marketing channels.

That covers the fundamental concepts of product marketing. Now, let’s explore some examples of how these principles can be applied in real-world scenarios.

Seven examples of effective product marketing

Here are seven effective strategies to promote a product and boost its adoption.

Before diving in, it’s crucial to remember a key principle of product marketing: ensure you have achieved product-market fit before dedicating time and resources to promotion. Marketing a product that lacks demand or is out of reach financially is a futile effort.

1. Blogging with product-led content

Blogging and SEO can be powerful tools for product marketers. By creating blog posts, you can demonstrate how your product addresses real issues and connect with individuals searching for solutions on Google.

This type of content not only boosts product demand but also encourages product adoption; it drives traffic to your website while simultaneously educating users on how to utilize the product.

To effectively use this strategy, you need to identify topics with traffic potential and establish a scoring system to prioritize those topics that allow for a natural integration of your product. We’ll guide you on how to discover these topics in our beginner’s guide to keyword research, and for the scoring system, you’re welcome to utilize our business potential scoring.

The scoring system is designed to prioritize topics that have a business potential (BP) score of at least “1.” This means that the BP scale indicates how effectively we can incorporate Ahrefs into the content in a natural way.

For instance, to demonstrate how individuals can discover organic keywords that are typically concealed in Google Analytics, we highlighted Ahrefs Webmaster Tools as one of the available 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.

2. Product feature launches

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).

I love how quickly @ahrefs pushes good product updates. 👏
This is 🔥 https://t.co/T9YlZpUa1j
— Andrew Charlton (@bertiecharlton) September 13, 2021

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:

Product blog
Social media
Product newsletter
Ads
Facebook Insider group (exclusive for our customers)
PR (for bigger announcements)
Inside the product (example below)

With the latest keyword data update, our users can feel confident that they are accessing the most comprehensive U.S. keyword data available in the industry. This knowledge empowers them to make more informed SEO choices.

As we engage with our target audience across various channels, it’s essential to effectively coordinate tasks among multiple team members. Consequently, each product update essentially turns into its own product marketing campaign.

Of course, rolling out new features also necessitates some internal communication. We maintain a dedicated Slack channel for every new feature or update. This approach ensures that everyone stays informed and has a space to discuss the latest releases.

3. Community engagement

Certain products tend to create a community of enthusiasts. When this occurs, brands must engage in the dialogue — whether it’s through a community manager, product marketer, social media manager, or another role — since this is also a crucial aspect of product marketing.

The aim in this scenario is to boost product demand.

Or driving product adoption:

Or just answering a question:

Pretty simple methodology. For every keyword in the database we see a page ranking for, we take the search volume and estimated CTR data to calculate the traffic coming from that term. It typically undercounts because we may not have some really long tail or unpopular terms.
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) January 6, 2022

These are all examples of product marketing taking place within a community. Such communities can often thrive on their own, but they still need support.

The role of product marketing here is to ensure that the community receives accurate information and stays updated on new product developments.

As a result, users become more proficient with the product, which increases their likelihood of using it more frequently and recommending it to others.

4. User onboarding

User onboarding, also known as product onboarding, is a crucial phase in the product adoption journey. It involves actively introducing users to the product’s features, making it a vital part of the overall process.

This stage is essential because the initial messaging that encouraged users to sign up isn’t sufficient for them to understand how to effectively use the product. Only those users who grasp how to navigate the product — regardless of whether they know all its features — can become satisfied customers.

Typically, user onboarding encompasses the initial steps users take within the product, essentially giving them a guided tour.

For successful product adoption, it’s important for users to quickly recognize the product’s value.
Thus, the product marketer’s objective is to lead users to their “aha-moment” as efficiently and seamlessly as possible.
One effective method for user onboarding is to implement automated email workflows that are triggered right after a user registers for the product.

There are various approaches to this, but we aim to keep it concise with just three messages, ensuring that the most critical information is included in the first one.

This email demonstrates to the user that we are here to support them and have provided ample educational resources to help them succeed with our product.

Recognizing that our product can be overwhelming for newcomers due to the abundance of data, we also offer contextual assistance through tooltips. These tooltips clarify how to navigate the various reports and interpret the metrics they contain.

5. Product education

In addition to user onboarding, we also provide ongoing product education and support.

This phase is where product adoption intersects with demand generation, as most of our content is centered around the product. Essentially, the same resources used for educating users in one channel can simultaneously attract visitors through organic search.

For instance, a paying customer might search for a detailed tutorial on building links to their site and come across this article on our blog. Meanwhile, anyone else can find the same article via a search engine like Google.

Our guide to link building for SEO attracts around 5.4K organic visits each month, according to data from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

This leads us to our knowledge base, which is another result of marketing a product. It doesn’t require a special introduction; our goal with it is to enhance product adoption, just like other companies do.

On a related note, it seems that no product-led content marketing can truly replace the value of a solid knowledge base.

Did someone mention historical SERPs in Ahrefs? Absolutely, here’s the scoop.

However, educating users about a suite of tools like Ahrefs goes beyond simply allowing them to find educational content via search. It necessitates a structured curriculum. That’s why we created the Ahrefs Academy. It’s filled with valuable video tutorials and is entirely free.

One of the courses from the Ahrefs Academy. Everybody can learn how to use Ahrefs in a step-by-step, self-paced course.

6. Gathering user feedback

No matter how innovative your product may be, user feedback is essential. There’s a common belief that you should launch your product quickly (even if it’s not flawless) to determine if it has enough potential (refer to the value hypothesis).

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

- An always-on customer feedback management platform

- Agile, bite-sized surveys

- Occasional interviews with customers

Let’s briefly explore the first two methods.

For the first method, we utilize Canny. It’s an open platform that allows users to share their suggestions for improving Ahrefs, comment on those suggestions, and vote on them. This way, we not only gain insights into others’ ideas but also understand how many people resonate with those thoughts.

For the second method, we typically reach out to our community at Ahrefs Insider. This is a group (currently on Facebook) that is exclusive to paying users. We receive valuable feedback through this channel, and we make sure to pay attention to it.

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

7. Homepage design

Now, let’s take a closer look at the messaging on Ahrefs’ homepage.

Designing a homepage that effectively communicates the brand and product is a challenging task, and it falls under the responsibilities of a product marketer. The goal is to inform, engage, and convert visitors all at once.

I’d like to share insights from Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo, who created a video detailing the process behind the current homepage. He discusses:

- The reasons for broadening our communication to reach a “problem-aware” audience.

- Our approach to introducing Ahrefs to new users.

- The rationale behind intentionally extending the customer journey at times.

Final thoughts

Marketing a product is inherently tied to product marketing; it’s almost a given. If you’re effectively marketing, chances are you’re also excelling in product marketing.

I suspect that around 30 years ago, what we now refer to as product marketing was simply known as “marketing.” Recently, however, this specific area of marketing has been distinguished from the broader field and given its own identity. This shift makes sense, as marketing has seen a rise in various specializations over the years.

Does every marketing team require a product marketer? Eventually, the answer is likely yes. But does every marketing team need product marketing? Absolutely.