How to Build a Product Marketing Strategy for a Software Solution?

Learn how to build a product marketing strategy to effectively launch, sell and scale your software solution to the right market.

The purpose of a Product Marketing Strategy is to move a product or service from conception to consumer. During the process, you learn how to identify the current market demand, shape your product accordingly, how to present it as a problem solver, and communicate its value to the end user.

Your product marketing strategies define your brand tone and message, which helps you to distinguish your brand from its contemporaries. Product marketing lies at the intersection of sales, traditional marketing, and product management processes.

Do not confuse Product marketing Strategy with traditional marketing practices. Digital Marketing Strategy involves taking care of a broad spectrum of promotional activities that establish your company as a whole in the market. Unlike traditional marketing practices, product marketing has a narrower focus on promoting or highlighting a specific product or service. Product marketing strategy is headed by a product marketing manager, along with substantial participation from the sales team.

During the process of product marketing strategizing, creating a product vision statement is essential as it helps you define your brand message clearly. Your product vision statement must be able to answer the following three critical questions:

• How will you measure the success of a product?
• How will your product be a problem solver?
• Who will use it?

With a clear vision statement in hand, let’s discuss which product marketing strategies are best suitable for your Software Solution:

Lead generation activities:

• Organic Search results
• website leads
• email campaigns
• social networks
• other websites
• paid search

Understand and Analyze Your Market

The market analysis aims to identify the leading competitors and current market trends. Along with its key deliverables, we research your target audiences and conduct a SWOT analysis. 

The base for your product development, marketing strategy, and brand positioning should be ideally based on thorough market research. There are two main types of marketing research you need competitive research and primary & secondary research.

• Primary and Secondary Market Research

Market research is an integral part of the product marketing stage that allows a business to comprehend what customers want and need and which products they are already using.

During the primary research step, you can set your research based on data extracted from personal interviews, group surveys, and focus groups with your prospect or present client base. Formulate a questionnaire to get answers about the market demand or the absence of thereof; products consumers are already using, etc.

While developing the secondary market research, you use the data that is already with you in the statistical databases, journals, and over the internet. This research is based on facts and figures from current and previous market behavior. The numbers you accumulated, keeping product development in mind, will help you in deciding if creating this product is viable at all.

• Competitive Research 

As the name suggests, competitive research focuses on analyzing similar products and providers in your industry. It clearly defines your immediate competitors and contemporaries who are dealing with homogenous products and services. Another reason to conduct competitive research could be that you are able to find out the current market leaders and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own product or service. 

There are broadly two ways in which you can collect data for competitive market research, one is to use readily available research reports by industry, and secondly, you could explore the information manually by taking advantage of credible social media platforms and search engine results. 

Competitive market research helps you collect comparable data wherein you to make a structured list of all your competitors’ products, compare their trends, and website, and analyze their social media channels. 

You Can Also Divide Your Competitors into Categories, Let’s take a look:

• Primary competitors 
• Secondary competitors
• Tertiary competitors

Once you have sorted all the information, you will be able to see what needs to be added or subtracted from your product and how to place it in the market space.

• SWOT Analysis 

SWOT analysis stands for identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your or your competitor’s product and service. The usual presentation of SWOT analysis is done in a grid-like format. This tool highlights your internal and external business environment and helps you discover

• How to utilize strengths to take opportunities 
• How to reduce errors to minimize weaknesses 
• What opportunities will support you reduce threats 
• What errors will lead you to the found threats

After you have identified the above-mentioned activities at this stage, you can envision a product’s fate in the market.

Define Your Target Audience

Once you collect the results of your market research activity, the next step will be to create a buyer persona. This is a representation of an average consumer who is willing to purchase your product. To create a buyer persona, you can conduct a series of interviews with the existing consumer list and also research for potential consumers, like CTOs, and CEOs of reputed companies in your industry. As an outcome, you could quickly complete the profiles with the help of characteristics like gender, age, location, income level, work profile, challenges, and personality traits.

After the results of the above activities, understanding what your target audience needs and wants, what to keep and what to avoid, you can place your product as a problem solver that distinguishes it from its contemporaries who offer similar solutions.

Develop Product Positioning and Messaging

It is essential to define the outstanding features of your product and convey the same to your consumers. You now know the market and your competitors, so the next step would be to create a positioning statement for you that defines the future of your product in the marketplace and spread a clear and concise message to your audience.

Let’s look at the suggested positioning statement, which should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who is this product for?
• What does the product offer?
• What’s unique about the product?

In the process of developing a positioning statement, you need to document the needs and problems of your target audience and the product features that meet them. This step helps you form how your potential consumers will perceive the available product.

• The Product Messages

Develop a product message that defines the core values of your solution and communicates the issues/problems that it solves for its target audience. The message will be utilized in promotional activities for your product in the form of campaigns for digital marketing Strategy.

Take a look at the suggested checklist ideas for your product message:

• Make your message short, crisp, and interactive
• Highlight the benefits rather than features
• Keep the language simple and include terminologies that relate to the industry you serve
• Use a tone that defines your brand well and is not confusing for its audience.

A clear message and product positioning make a perfect combination for success. Developing a message around your target audience, you can choose how to place the product for a diverse set of audiences or distribution forums. Product placement messages and information influence a promotional strategy that is integral to the sales guide.

Define A Clear Pricing Strategy

You must have noticed a situation where there are two similar products with similar features in the market, but they are priced differently; one is priced much higher than the other. It basically depends on the software business models and marketing strategies that the organizations implement when setting the prices of their products and services.

Let’s explore types of pricing methodologies.

• Competitive Pricing

It is one of the easiest ways to set the price of your product and service. This type of pricing means sticking to the same price as your immediate competitors for similar products. You can accordingly set your price higher in case your product features are unique from the already existing ones.

• Value-Based Pricing

This type of pricing is a bit more complicated than competitive pricing but is definitely more efficient. This method allows you to maximize the profit. In this method, you decide the price according to the value of your product, perceived or calculated, instead of its actual cost. The value relies on product quality, identity, and your existing plan, and other aspects.

In a value-based pricing model, you determine the price based on the actual value of your product rather than on its real cost or price.

5 Develop a Strategic Product Launch 

At this stage, you are finally stepping into the market, and you need a launch plan. It is somewhat similar to creating your product roadmap as the launch plan also consists of elements like the date & time of external and internal activities and campaigns of the product management team.

Several tools and software allow you to create it with ease automatically. It is advisable that you come up with a rough idea of all your product launch activity for easy alterations in the future if needed.

It is essential to set milestones, checkpoints, and regular team hurdles with the entire team after every plan is implemented.

The goal of developing a product launch plan is to facilitate communication. You need to set timelines for the sales team. It is the responsibility of the product manager to create structured training modules and sales guides for the sales team.

6 Develop a Promotional Strategy for Your Software Solutions

Inform your target audience about your product and facilitate demand. It depicts the process of consumer persuasion. Consumers tend to go through several stages of a sales funnel before making a purchase. A consumer begins with developing an understanding of your product and service, becomes curious, makes a decision, and eventually takes action.

To assemble a promotion strategy, you must convey all the forums and processes your team will utilize to make your brand message reach the target audience. Tactics of a promotion strategy incorporate advertising, sales, events, email marketing, content marketing, and social media.

To Wrap It up

A structured online marketing strategy results in higher sales levels. Like any part of a successful business, product marketing strategies must be concentrated on the customer. Understanding your target audience, learning about your competitors, and promoting are three important components of a successful marketing strategy for your software solution. Aligning your sales team to a well-prepared plan of action will lead to successful product management, distribution, and ultimately higher sales.

Read More: – The Ultimate Guide to Product Marketing in 2022