How to create a brilliant product marketing strategy in 5 steps

Even the most life-changing product won’t sell if no one knows about it. To get the word out, you need a product marketing strategy—a research-backed plan that presents your product to current or potential customers. 

Developing a strategy seems more complex than it really is. You just need to take it one step at a time, focusing on the value your product offers, its place in the vast market landscape, and how it meets your customers’ needs.

This guide shows you how to craft a product marketing plan that positions your product for success, boosts visibility, and drives sales—across every stage of its lifecycle. And the best part? It only takes 5 simple steps.

1. Research your customers

Whether your goal is a new product launch or longevity in the marketplace, your first step is research. Pinpoint who your ideal customer is, including their demographics, wants, needs, and behaviors. 

This research informs the rest of your product marketing strategy and ensures that you maintain an empathetic, customer-centric mindset. 

Some tried-and-tested user research approaches for product marketers include

• Launching surveys to gather your target audience’s demographic data and pain points quickly

• Conducting user interviews and focus groups to understand user needs and opinions more deeply

• Delving into website analytics to see who comes to your site and from where

• Using heatmaps to see which parts of your website or web app people engage with or ignore

• Watching session recordings to observe how users interact with your product and learn what user experience (UX) issues they face

Gathering this information helps you create accurate buyer personas—profiles of your ideal customer personas (ICPs)—ensuring that your strategy is spot-on and user-centric.

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Interviews tool to connect with your ICP and gather valuable insights for your product marketing strategy. 

Watch users interact with your product in real time, and ask follow-up questions to learn what they like and dislike. Then, use these insights to develop targeted messaging—and share them with your product team, so they can make design improvements. It’s a win-win-win!

Use Contentsquare’s Interviews tool to recruit users from a pool of 200,000+ and find those who best match your ICP

2. Conduct competitive intelligence

Once you have a thorough understanding of your customers, it’s time to analyze the competitive landscape and understand how your product fits in the marketplace. 

Conducting competitive intelligence ensures you

• Price your product correctly 

• Find market gaps and position your product accordingly

• Anticipate market trends that might affect how you promote your product

Competitive intelligence sounds a bit like secret spy work, but it’s all above board. 🕵️ It simply involves widening your research lens to

• Pull up your competitors’ profiles on industry databases

• Study similar brands’ websites and product landing pages

• Keep tabs on competitors’ press releases about new offerings

• Monitor their social media accounts to understand customer sentiment

• Run a SWOT analysis to unpack your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from competitors 

By keeping an eye on your competitors’ product marketing strategy, you learn how to position your own. For example, you might learn that customers love another scheduling software’s features and integrations, but don’t enjoy its UX. Your own product’s effortless UX could become a major selling point.

💡 Pro tip: gather quick info on how your users view your competitors with a market research survey. Contentsquare’s free template lets you discover

• The challenges your users face

• Their existing tech tools

• The features they value 

• Their pain points

This helps you see who your competitors are—and where they may fall short—so you can market your product accordingly.

Contentsquare’s customizable market research survey template lets you gather user insights on your competitors in seconds

3. Develop product positioning and messaging

Product positioning is the process of defining where your product fits in the marketplace and how you want your audience to feel about it. 

A key step in this process is determining your product’s unique selling proposition (USP), the characteristics that set it apart from competitors’ products to make it desirable.

For example, online graphic design tool Canva’s USP is to empower everyone to design anything and publish anywhere. It puts formerly intimidating professional design tools in the hands of anyone who wants to use them.

To position your product and develop your USP, ask yourself questions like

• What makes our product different? 

• Why is it perfect for our target customer?

• What unique value does it provide to them? 

Your USP is the cornerstone of your messaging strategy—the way you communicate your product’s value with customers. It also gives all of your company’s teams, from public relations to sales, a cohesive way to talk about your product.

Ensure consistency by creating an internal product messaging hub that contains

• A product vision that captures what your product is, who uses it, and why it matters

• A positioning statement that shows what differentiates it from the competition

• A value proposition that sums up its benefits to customers 

• A one-liner or elevator pitch, a short description of your product that captures why it’s great

• Key phrases to use with different audience segments 

• Notes on tone and voice, which align with your brand’s overall messaging strategy

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare to understand how your users feel about your messaging. Ask them directly with tools such as Interviews or Surveys, or gather data indirectly with Heatmaps and Session Replay.

• Heatmaps show you users’ click, scroll, and move patterns, highlighting copy and content that catches users’ attention

• Session replays show you how individual users interact with key elements on marketing assets like your landing page. Pay close attention to where they linger on the page and what they skip.

An example of a Contentsquare session replay

4. Create a pricing strategy

Even with perfect positioning and messaging, you need a smart pricing strategy to keep your product afloat in the marketplace. Pricing your offer too high halts sales, but underpricing could create an impression that your product is low quality.

It’s not just a numbers game, either. You also need to understand buyer psychology and motivations—whether people value scoring a deal or feeling like they’re investing in a top-of-the-line item. 

Luckily, you don’t need to create a pricing strategy from scratch. Start with a model that makes sense for your industry and product. For example, Contentsquare’s pricing page includes several options for users to choose from, including a free forever plan with up to 20k monthly sessions and unlimited heatmaps.

• Competitor-based pricing focuses solely on the price of competing products instead of production costs, and is particularly useful in a saturated industry

• Value-based pricing is common among one-of-a-kind or highly sought-after products, and is based on a customer’s perception of a product’s value

• Cost-plus pricing, also called markup pricing, calculates the item’s production cost and then adds extra on the top for profit. While less common in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, it’s popular among grocers and other retailers.

• Dynamic pricing works well for industries that experience frequent shifts in demand, such as hotels or airlines

• Price skimming prices a product high to begin with and gradually lowers the price to maximize profit short-term

• Penetration pricing starts a product at a low price and gradually increases it once they have a solid customer base, with the intent of maximizing profits long-term

💡 Pro tip: stay flexible with your pricing strategy throughout your product’s lifecycle, remaining ready to pivot or adapt as the market changes. 

Use our pricing plan feedback survey to gather feedback about unclear wording or ways to improve your packages.

Use Contentsquare’s free template as a pop-up on your pricing page to learn what visitors think of your plans

5. Develop a promotional plan

You’re in the home stretch. To ensure your product gets in front of the right people—whether that’s brand-new leads or established customers who might be interested in a newly released feature—you need a promotional strategy. 

Start by setting measurable goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, so you can gauge whether your promotional strategy is successful down the road. 

Consider which channels your target audience frequents and the types of content they prefer, such as video, blogs, or graphics. Then, choose tactics to promote your product, such as 

• Creating landing pages to highlight product features and benefits

• Planning targeted social media campaigns on 1–3 channels

• Investing in email marketing 

• Creating an ad campaign for television, radio, or social media

• Drawing on influencer marketing 

• Seeking brand partnerships to promote each other’s products—Contentsquare’s Partner Program lets you earn a revenue share of up to 20% for referrals

• Developing content marketing plans for blogs or case studies 

• Tapping into search engine optimization (SEO) to attract more web traffic to your site

💡 Pro tip: gather digital experience insights to see how real users use your marketing assets, and then optimize your promotion plan.

• Run A/B testing on 2 different landing pages to compare how they perform

• Use Contentsquare Heatmaps to better understand how users experience each variant. See how far the typical visitor scrolls, what catches their attention, and what they miss entirely.

Once you know what floats users’ boats—say, how-to videos for easy onboarding—tweak your promotional strategy to tout that benefit.

Supercharge your A/B testing with Contentsquare Heatmaps and find out which variant your users like best

Find lasting product success with user insights

For long-term success, continue to analyze your data to find new ways to improve your product marketing strategy. By optimizing and iterating your plan—and assets like landing pages, blog content, and ads—you continue to attract new customers and keep your existing customers happy and coming back for more.

FAQs about product marketing strategy