You're launching a new product. How do you make the marketing team see its value for successful promotion?

Let's get the marketing team on board with our exciting new product launch! To truly champion its success, we need to showcase its value proposition. First, highlight how the product solves a specific customer pain point they already understand. Then, translate its features into clear benefits that resonate with the target audience. Emphasize how it stands out from competitors, and provide compelling data or testimonials to back up its potential. By framing the product as a solution that delivers significant value, we'll ignite the marketing team's passion to craft a winning promotional strategy.

In my opinion, the most important things are: a. Ensure the marketing team is aware and invested in the project right from the beginning (say, in the weekly update etc.). I have myself seen how marketing teams have got a strong sense of inspiration just by being a witness to difficult product launch journeys and done justice as they have been passed the baton. b. Be there at every step with the marketing team in the initial marketing days. While these sound generic, in my experience, following these two things have helped ensure one gets the maximum output from their marketing efforts.

It is essential to have a deep understanding of your product; however, it is also important to show the ability to facilitate a seamless transition from the current platform to the new product. This serves as a selling point and addresses a significant concern for customers. Many product managers tend to focus solely on features and overlook the importance of the transition process and potential downtime, both of which carry substantial weight in decision-making processes for customers.

Deeply understand the features, benefits, and the unique selling points of your product. Be prepared to explain its advantages over competitors and how it solves problems for users. Your thorough understanding will be crucial in convincing the marketing team of its value.

Conducting customer development and deep-dive product interviews can reveal valuable insights into user needs and pain points. These interviews help paint a vivid picture of your target customers. But do not forget to analyse interviews properly with tagging and without bias.

1. Your product development process should be product centric while the marketing process should be user centric. This switch in the approach while communicating with the marketing team is essential for conveying the desired message to the end user. 2. Also, user centric approach helps to accentuate tiny but important features in your product. Example 1 - Your product team may have developed a feature within a very short period, but users may find this feature super useful. Such features get highlighted when you follow a user centric approach while marketing. Example 2 - You may realize that a feature that took months to develop does not appear to be enticing the current market. Such features need not be highlighted till the time is right.

As a product manager, when communicating the value of your product to the marketing team, demonstrate genuine empathy for target customers and their pain points. Present the product's user value through straightforward user stories and articulate how the product benefits not only a few customers but the entire target customer segment. Also, plan and provide a structure for a customer success story in advance to get product marketing on board with launch promotion.

Start by identifying the core emotional benefits the product provides, such as improving users' lives or solving significant pain points. Develop compelling narratives and customer stories that highlight these emotional aspects. Pair these stories with concrete data, such as market research, customer testimonials, and competitive analysis, to demonstrate the product's unique value proposition. Use visual aids like infographics and videos to make the information engaging. Conduct workshops and collaborative sessions to align the marketing team with the product vision, ensuring they feel invested and equipped to convey both the emotional and factual benefits to the target audience.

Understanding the new customer’s pain points while using your product is the most important analytics before marketing. You might have built a long list of features but making your core features easy to navigate, user friendly and easily discoverable is something that really pays off in building customer’s loyalty and trust.

Put yourself in the shoes of the marketing team and be articulate about how your product contributes to the bigger goal and objectives of the company and what it means for them. Help them see your lens and identify first followers to build advocacy.

Honestly, the biggest driver for collaboration along with communication is driving the vision with partner teams. While I ensure communication is regular and open, I also ensure to listen to their ideas to let them know and believe that it is a shared vision that helps everyone. I maintain a quip (a shared space) between marketing, engineering, and key stakeholders which has a feature to let everyone contribute while ensuring others get notified and topics are picked up in our next meeting.

Collaboration between product management and marketing is essential for a successful product launch. Organize regular meetings to align on goals, messaging, and campaign strategies. Encourage open dialogue and feedback, ensuring that every team member feels invested in the product's success. This collaborative approach helps the marketing team internalize the product's value and translate it into effective promotional activities.

Maintain open lines of communication with the marketing team through regular meetings and discussions. This ensures alignment on goals and strategies and helps to integrate product and marketing efforts seamlessly.

Regular meetings and open dialogue between product management and marketing are crucial for aligning strategies and ensuring a successful product launch. A lifehack for effective collaboration: create a shared project space using tools like Trello or Asana. This keeps everyone updated, encourages real-time feedback, and ensures both teams stay aligned on goals and progress.

Please share the Product Requirements Document (PRD), prototype (loom), and beta access for the product. Additionally, please provide a detailed explanation of how the product solves the user's problem and the impact it will have on the user experience.

Organize training sessions and workshops to ensure the marketing team is well-versed in the product. Create easy-to-understand guides, FAQs, and key talking points. The goal is to make the marketing team as knowledgeable and passionate about the product as you are.

Education is power. Conduct training sessions to ensure the marketing team fully understands the product. Create engaging presentations, FAQs, and demo videos. During one launch, we hosted a “Product Bootcamp” where marketers could ask questions and test the product themselves. This hands-on experience boosted their confidence and enthusiasm. Use tools like Loom for creating easy-to-share video content. And humor: “Educating your team is like teaching someone to fish—give them the tools, and they’ll reel in the customers.”

To effectively convey the value of the new product to the marketing team, it is essential to share quantifiable success metrics that highlight its potential impact. For instance, consider Apple's launch of the iPhone. Apple shared projections around market penetration by estimating the number of units expected to be sold within the first quarter, revenue generation forecasts based on different market segments, and customer satisfaction targets by leveraging their Net Promoter Score (NPS). By setting clear and measurable goals, the marketing team gains a concrete understanding of the product's strategic importance. This approach not only aligns the team's efforts but also motivates them by providing clear benchmarks for success.

Establece objetivos de marketing claros y medibles: ¿Qué quieres lograr con tu campaña de marketing? ¿Aumentar el conocimiento de la marca, generar leads, impulsar las ventas o fomentar la lealtad del cliente? Define objetivos específicos, medibles, alcanzables, relevantes y con un plazo determinado (SMART). Utiliza las métricas adecuadas para medir tu progreso. Esto puede incluir impresiones de anuncios, clics en el sitio web, tasas de conversión y ventas. 1. Conocimiento de la marca 2. Generación de leads 3. Tráfico web 4. Tasas de conversión 6. ROI

Quantifiable success metrics are invaluable in showcasing the impact of product enhancements to internal teams. By setting clear projections and goals for metrics such as user engagement, conversion rates, and customer feedback scores, you provide tangible benchmarks for teams to strive toward. Celebrate small wins along the way, such as achieving incremental improvements in user retention or exceeding revenue targets for a specific segment. These celebrations not only boost team morale but also reinforce the connection between daily efforts and overarching business objectives. By highlighting these achievements, you instill a culture of continuous improvement and success, motivating teams to exceed expectations and drive sustained growth.

Start early in your collaboration with marketing team to start building the marketing/Sales pitch deck, collateral and positioning decks as you are writing your PRDs and in the process of building the feature. That will allow you think about how the feature will land with the customers, get Marketing feedback and even better your sales feedback into the development process. With this collaboration you will already have building blocks for your final marketing and sales enablement content. You will have a positioning that marketing has contributed to and hence will be more bought into. Your PMMs will have a deeper understanding of your product hypothesis and the target customers as they have been on the journey with you.

As a product manager, collaborating closely with product marketing can enhance how customers perceive your product positively. Equipping marketing with comprehensive materials and visual aids can effectively support your product launch. - Providing data-driven market segment analysis can help product marketing with deeper insights. - It is a best practice to start compiling a running FAQ from the alpha stage of your product to ensure thorough answers to users' product usage questions. Product marketing can leverage this FAQ to enhance their understanding of your product and make it more useful for users by refining it. - Creating concise one-minute user flow videos for users can also significantly boost product adoption.

Product managers make a mistake of sharing everything that is available with them to marketing team in raw form and they hope that the team will interpret it in the way they expect. Go ahead and provide as many resources that they require but tailor them to the needs to of marketing and remove the irrelevant part, this will save time of marketing team in understanding information and they will be able spend the saved time in creative thinking.

Leverage customer reviews and user-generated content to bolster the marketing efforts. Encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences through reviews, testimonials, and social media posts. By showcasing authentic feedback and real-life success stories, the marketing team can effectively illustrate the product's value and benefits to prospective customers. This user-generated content serves as powerful social proof, building credibility and trust in the product among the target audience. In the process, a community can emerge around your product that would be very valuable as they become fans.

Creating incentive programs is crucial for motivating the marketing team to achieve targets. Offer rewards such as bonuses, recognition, additional perks, or even work-from-home options for meeting or exceeding goals. These incentives should be clearly defined, attainable, and aligned with the product’s launch objectives. Recognizing and celebrating the team’s efforts boosts morale and reinforces their investment in promoting the product effectively.

Any new product development is usually inititiated to differentiate offering but importantly to explore emerging opportunities and address deeper customer needs. The entire marketing plan depends on the magnitude of the potential to drive awareness local, regional or even global.

"What is the story?" you want to land with you marketing campaign. Strong story boarding mixed with effective messaging connecting well to the target should be the focus for any product marketing plan.

Consider ongoing support and feedback loops. Launching a product is not a one-time event but a continuous process. Set up regular check-ins to gather feedback from the marketing team and adjust strategies as needed. Encourage an open-door policy where they can reach out with questions or concerns anytime. Also, celebrate milestones and successes together—recognition fuels motivation. And remember, laughter can be a great motivator too: “Think of ongoing support as the sequel to a great movie—keeps the story exciting and everyone engaged.”

Destaca la propuesta de valor única (PUV): Identifica qué hace que tu producto sea diferente y superior a la competencia. ¿Qué características o beneficios exclusivos ofrece? ¿Por qué los clientes deberían elegir tu producto en lugar de otro? Comunica tu PUV de manera clara y diferenciada. Asegúrate de que tu mensaje clave resalte lo que hace que tu producto sea especial y por qué es la mejor opción para los clientes. Refuerza tu PUV en todas tus comunicaciones de marketing. Esto incluye tu sitio web, materiales de marketing, redes sociales y presentaciones de ventas.